The Gaming Industry Should Progress Backwards
There are hundreds of great video games lost in time because of the absolutely wild ways of the gaming industry, and we should stop screwing over consumers when the technology exists.
It is time for complete backwards-compatibility for the upcoming Playstation and XBox consoles.
Some of the greatest video games of all-time have been left in the dust because of the constantly changing technology of the gaming industry but also because it’s so cutthroat out there that some of these talented designers, writers, artists, and developers have to constantly change companies, change developers, as well as publishers. All this is happening while Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo upgrade their main console and upgrade their methods of presenting video games. As the black sheep, Nintendo has evolved their hardware multiple times since 1995, which would make their abilities for multi-generational backwards-compatibility a bit more difficult, even though their intense first-party lineup history enables them to constantly look towards the past without worrying about licensing issues.
But Sony and Microsoft have remained consistent with their disc-based methods, only lately relying much more on being digital and allowing downloads and Netflix-like services. But I feel as though in the year 2020, considering all the amazing things we’ve seen come from the world of technology, asking for the ability to play video games from 1995 shouldn’t be too much to ask. Take DVDs, which can play on blu-ray players. There are even blu-ray players that can play music CDs. So even if you purchased a Toy Story 2 DVD in 2001, it would more than likely work on a blu-ray player released in 2018---and to add to that even look a bit better.
Yes, it’s going to be different rendering a video game as opposed to a movie, but Sony themselves have developed machinery that can play discs that are two decades old while also connect to the internet and stream movies. Hell, the Playstation 2 used to play DVDs as well as video games. I’ll even go further back, remember when Sega created a way to place a newer character (Knuckles) into an older video game (Sonic 3)? Would it really be too much to ask 20 years after the Playstation 2 innovations for a machine that can play old video games from the late 1990s? And look at Microsoft’s incredible progress with computers and tablets, and you telling me they couldn’t make an XBox that plays games from 2004? They could easily read old software, its not like the discs weren’t built by them.
Streaming films over time has become much more successful and much more viable over the years because normally the distributor has kept the rights of the product throughout its entire history. Even a film like The Sound of Music has changed hands just once in the seven-plus decades of existence, when Disney purchased Fox. Aladdin released in 1992 has seen life in cinema, VHS, DVD, blu-ray, and even in the ways of a remake because Disney has always been able to hang on to the IP without any issues. Outside of the wacky world of Nintendo, how many franchises popular in the Sony/Microsoft circles can claim the same? And even if you own the IP and try to remake the video game from scratch, similar to what happened to 2019’s Aladdin, the results are usually inferior to the original product.
No skateboarding game can top the trifecta of Tony Hawk ProSkater 3, 4, and Underground. No arcade racing game has topped Burnout 3: Takedown. We have yet to see psychological horror match up to Eternal Darkness. NFL Blitz 2000 and NFL 2K5 are so good that to this day modern-day Madden games have yet to even come close to their quality. Want to know what all these games have in common besides 15+ years of age? The developers behind each of these projects are whether completely gone, have been merged to a larger development group, or don’t even have the rights to the IPs in the first place. This is why Tony Hawk nowadays doesn’t have the same edge as before, why Burnout still struggles to match its 2004 masterpiece, and why the NFL exclusivity license has ruined modern football video games eternally.
Even if you wanted to bring them all digitally or remake them for the next generation, too many hurdles prevents this from happening. So the best option should be: let these games, that people paid for over the years, actually be playable if they own the discs. Let some of these excellent games that cannot develop a second life as a remake or a remaster or even be allowed to re-enter the online marketplace of XBox and Playstation to be playable on upcoming hardware.
Let me play my Chrono Trigger from 1995, or Chrono Cross from 1999. Let me play my Burnout 3 from 2004. Let me play the original Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow from the original XBox. What about Jade Empire or the original Knights of the Old Republic? What about the Sly Cooper games in the PS2? Hell, Guitar Hero 3 on the XBox 360 is the best in the series, and there’s also the criminally underrated DJ Hero. There have been over 4,000 games made for the Playstation consoles leading up to the fifth, and each of these games should have the opportunity to be played on the new hardware. Likewise with the XBox, we’ve seen over 3,000 games grace the XBox hardware since 2002. Representing as a consumer who spent hundreds maybe thousands on video games over the years, it’s the right thing to do to allow the upcoming consoles to accept these games.
Now, from a capitalist standpoint, it wouldn’t make sense for Microsoft or Sony to devote time and energy to implement such a feature. They would rather pick and choose which games to port over (usually those they have all the rights to), sell digitally, and collect profits that way. They would rather make new games, sell them at $60-$70 before microtransactions, rather than give a gamer the ability to spend the first month or two months on the upcoming XBox playing games in the past to relive some nice memories. The fear is, if I give the option to play PSX, PS2, PS3, AND PS4 games, why would I buy PS5 games? Would my software sales actually decrease upon opening the floodgates and allowing my past to compete with my present?
As a matter of fact, places like used game stores, Amazon, and Gamestop would benefit much more from massive backwards compatibility compared to Microsoft themselves. Imagine the second hand market explosion upon the news of PS5 going the Smash Ultimate route and unveiling that “everyone is here.” This would save Gamespot (or in my local example, Hudson’s Video Games), this would help flea markets, yard sales, and game collectors. But since the assumption that it won’t enhance the pockets of the hardware creators, Sony and Microsoft, the idea to allow all games to be played remains a giant pipe dream.
The other argument that can and will be made towards my pleas for nearly 10,000 games released in the last 25 years to be playable is that technically you can find other ways to play some of these classics, unknowns, or games forever lost in time because of licensing restrictions. Downloading, third-party software, mobile gaming, which all are viable options---except you are still risking quality. Just like when you illegally download a movie, just like a bad MP3 rendering of a good song, downloading old video games without the proper funding or resources from the source just creates a half-assed experience similar to the half-assed efforts of backwards-compatibility that we’ve been seeing from gaming in general.
It is possible to stream Star Wars: Episode One as well as purchase the blu-ray. It is possible to play Led Zeppelin IV on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Music without much sacrifice of quality. But Breath of Fire IV on the PSX? Soul Calibur 2 on the PS2? Earthworm Jim 2 on the PSX? It’s hard to be able to re-create these quality experiences without the proper controller, without the proper emulation, without the proper tools---and then without the proper permission. Even then, emulation couldn’t really accomplish recreating the game properly on a purist standpoint.
Playstation and XBox have been very consistent in terms of hardware, from the controllers to format of the games they play. Giving the ability to play games from the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth generations should be a possibility, it should not be viewed as a tall order. The gaming industry has secretly been screwing over consumers on certain aspects by making it harder to play games you bought years ago even though you continue your support for the same company.
Love or hate Nintendo, they definitely know how to move their classics and older games from generation to generation and overcoming the obvious hardware issues. The WiiU and the Wii were backwards-compatible, but can’t go that far back because they didn’t use discs until 2001 with the Gamecube, and then went back to cartridges with the Nintendo Switch. But PS5 and XBox Scarlett will also be using discs, for the fifth generation in a row. And for the third generation in a row, Sony and Microsoft will refuse to be fully backwards-compatible despite the technology definitely existing to accomplish such a thing.
But in a market of entertainment that sees dozens of companies go down or become bought per year, sees microtransactions forcing gamers to pay extra money unlock content in the disc they already have, forces gamers to sometimes pay extra money just to play online, and generation after generation tries to block out as many previous games from replayability as possible, this comes as no surprise as to what we are going to see in the near future from Sony and Microsoft. PS5 will probably accept select PS$ and PS3 titles, while Scarlett will accept XBox One and random XBox 360 games to be playable. Gamers spend much more money than music lovers and cinephiles because of everything that comes with gaming---memory cards, memberships, microtransactions, accessories, etc. After decades of support, we deserve the reward of brand new hardware that can easily play old games. We deserve the chance to go into used game stores and purchase old games we’ve never played before, without having to fork over extra money for limited and outdated hardware.
Time to stop getting ripped off. Let us be able to play everything again.