Gaming Appreciation 101

From thecrankyhermit

Welcome to Gaming Appreciation 101! This is a self-paced course of sorts intended for people who love games, and wish to learn an introduction to the history, development, and evolution of the medium. As a longtime gamer, I feel that games should be thought of as more than disposable entertainment, more than technology driven gimmicks that lose their worth as soon as the next big game comes in to replace it. Classic films such as The Godfather, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Psycho, Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Metropolis, and nearly everything by Charlie Chaplin are to this day watched by film enthusiasts and routinely make it into top 10 lists decades after their theatrical release. This respect and posterity is something that I believe gaming deserves too - there are numerous excellent games from years gone by, which are only waiting to be discovered by open-minded game enthusiasts.

The fact that these games were originally made for now-obsolete hardware was once a big barrier to entry, but no longer need be. With digital distribution platforms like Steam, Good Old Games, XBLA, Virtual Console, and even abandonware sites (as a last resort), acquiring most of these games is trivial. With emulators such as DOSBox, ScummVM, and Windows' incredible backwards compatibility, getting old games to work on new systems is trivial - perhaps intimidating to those who haven't done it before, but not actually difficult. In fact, some of these games can even be enhanced on modern hardware, making them better than they've ever been before.

This course will consist of 50 chapters, built around 50 games. Each of the 50 games is a title that I feel every gaming enthusiast should play and be familiar with. All of these games are very solid titles *and* are important to the history of gaming. Furthermore, I have favored games that are immediately accessible - classic games that a modern gamer's skills and preconceived notions about gameplay and design will translate well to. There are a few exceptions, but even these exceptions are far from impenetrable and are quite playable once you learn the ropes. Consider each game to be a homework assignment. You don't have to play all of them to completion, but I encourage you to spend at least six hours trying. Many can be finished much faster than that.

Most of these games are parts of series. I have tried to limit the course to one title per series. I will break the rule on occasion, when a series truly pushed gaming forwards more than once (and all of the games that did, also meet the criteria for inclusion). For the most part, every series I discuss will have only one game representing it, and I will usually select the earliest game in the series that fits the GA101 criteria.

The chapters will be in chronological order, by the release date of the first game discussed.

Now, just a few things this course is not. This is not a nostalgia trip. Nostalgia clouds objective appreciation of gaming, and can't introduce newcomers or sustain itself in the long run. Chess isn't regarded as a timeless game out of nostalgia - everyone who played it when it was new and might have ever had nostalgia for it has been dead for hundreds of years. More than half of these games are ones I've played for the first time within the past ten years. This is also not intended to cover the full breadth of the gaming medium - there are many genres that are niche or even extinct, and have had little to no influence on mainstream gaming as it exists today. This is not a list of the 50 best games of all time either, though there is a lot of overlap. There are many excellent games that did not make the cut simply because they are so weird that you can't really gauge their influence on the medium.

Now then, on to lesson one:

Index Super Mario Bros. Icon-arrow-right.png