Why? Easy. The kids who are now in their early 30s are feeling nostalgia for an institution that meant a lot to them, which is forever lost.
I felt the same way about Sierra adventure games from he 80s.
Fact is, gaming sucks these days because the audience has shifted to the younger equivalent to the millions if people who watch "NCIS: Kansas" on tv. In the 80s and 90s, the gaming market was this demographic slice that allowed for more creative risk in gaming. Now we have Medal of Honor 12 and whatever version Madden is up to, and the whole industry is imploding because they cannot sustain the movie-like budgets.
Let's not forget that they were awesomely written. The humor still holds up today.
The desire for these games is evident, between ScummVM, the indie scene (e.g. Gemini Rue) and possible comebacks of industry greats (e.g. Replay Games) there's obviously still a market for well written, beautifully crafted interactive novels of this form.
The industry switch to 3d killed off most of the adventure game makers and those efforts, but thankfully the industry is finally realizing that 2d is now just as valid a media for crafting games as is 3d.
They were well written because they were written by educated people for educated people. The thing that trashed video games the most is that gaming went mainstream and now the whole industry want to reach as large of an audience as possible and that brings down the level to crap.
Not everyone who's a fan of these games now was around to play them then.
I think it has more to do with the 'gamer' demographic growing larger. In my experience, niche stuff often has more emotion behind it, evident even when it's not your niche and not your emotion. Modern 'indie' games, which are often more focused than 'mainstream' fare, have something of the same feel about them.
I'm in my mid thirties now, and it's not nostalgia for me. If it was nostalgia I'd feel that way about all the games I liked back then. I still think that The Secret of Monkey Island, in particular, was/is something pretty special, yet I don't think this about 99% of the games I liked back then.
>Fact is, gaming sucks these days because the audience has shifted to the younger equivalent to the millions if people who watch "NCIS: Kansas" on tv.
I'm calling selective "get off my lawn" bullshit on this one. There are many, many, many brilliant, beautiful, incredibly well written and well executed games being released every year that will have the same effect in 20 years that these games have now. Saying that games today suck because "Now we have Medal of Honor 12 and whatever version Madden is up to" is ridiculously cynical and very selective.
Sure those games are being churned out as easy money making machines. But while you're complaining about them, you're forgetting games like Portal and Portal 2, two of the funniest games released in the past 15 years. Games like Shadow of the Colossus and Read Dead Redemption, both of which are regularly used as arguments for why games are art. Magnificent indie games like Braid and Fez and Limbo.
To say that gaming sucks these days is to ignore all the wonderful things being done and instead take a dried up, cynical view that is out of touch with reality.
You're wrong. It's not that current games suck overall; it's that the proportion of genres and styles has hugely changed to favour the lowest common denominator.
That lowest common denominator is: Sports; war; first-person shooter; music/singing/party (eg., Guitar Hero) games; fantasy RPGs; and various simplistic puzzle/physics games such as Bejeweled and Angry Birds. There is also a smattering of strategy such as Civilization and Starcraft II, but the golden age of real-time strategy (Command & Conquer, Age of Empires, Rise of Nations, Homeworld) is over; the last semi-classic, Age of Empires III, came out 8 years ago.
I am an adventure game enthusiast. LucasArts, Sierra and so on are some of my favourite games. Believe me when I tell you there is a huge hole in the current games market. During the last decade, my single great game experience has been Machinarium. Before then, the last classical point and click game I really liked was, I think, Silver in 1999.
There have been a few blips. The Syberiad games were decent. The Book of Unwritten Tales, a German game, was quite decent. Not great, just decent. I hear Vampyre Story was OK. I liked Hector from Telltale Games; it had that kind of rowdy, satiric tone that Sierra was famous for. I honestly did not very much like Telltale's other recent point and clicks, such as Back to the Future and Sam & Max and the new Monkey Island episodes. Overall, some OK games, but nothing great.
Games like these -- slow, difficult, fairly literary, full of dialogue, patience-demanding -- just do not sell well enough anymore. It's not that they don't sell, obviously there is a fairly large market for adventure games. Machinarium sold well, I think, but counted in thousands, not millions, of copies. That's not the sort of sales figures the games business is interested in.
Sure, Portal, Braid, Fez and Limbo are fine games. But they are platform puzzles; comparing them to the types of games that LucasArts produced is apples and oranges. Ron Gilbert, an ex-LucasArts genius, recently released The Cave, which disappointingly turned out to be yet another plattform puzzle game, and a fairly boring one at that. And actually, they are few and far apart. There are years between each game that is as good as Braid. A tiny game like Limbo took six years to create.
I think some of us lament the loss of certain genres. Turn based strategy, flight sims, space sims, turn based RPGS. I stopped playing games in the mid 2000. There haven't really been any games in my favourite genres since then.
Of those, XCOM is the only game that exists. Star Citizen, Project Infinity, Torment Tides and Wasteland 2 are all Kickstarter-funded games in development. Kerbal is available, but not finished, and as you say, not really a game.
Sure, there are some interesting games in development (I'd add the Elite remake and Double Fine's untitled adventure game to the list), but who knows what they will be like. We don't know if they will be "quality".
It's noteworthy indeed that a lot of these kinds of games are now out or upcoming, but it's equally notable that a year ago this conversation would have ended rather differently.
I felt the same way about Sierra adventure games from he 80s.
Fact is, gaming sucks these days because the audience has shifted to the younger equivalent to the millions if people who watch "NCIS: Kansas" on tv. In the 80s and 90s, the gaming market was this demographic slice that allowed for more creative risk in gaming. Now we have Medal of Honor 12 and whatever version Madden is up to, and the whole industry is imploding because they cannot sustain the movie-like budgets.