Games Were Better Played When the Graphics Were Worse

Ad affirming something like this, it was not (only) me, but a series of statistical data processed by the University of Chicago and recently released by Consumer Reports, which as you know, and if you do not know I will tell you, is a very famous specialized magazine in the United States, which deals with surveys that cover very diverse fields and user bases: in the States it emerged that 14% of American gamers still play titles from the last millennium, but that is not the figure that made me jump out of my seat, no certainly not.

Il fatto è che they use the original systems themselves, produced, sold, and distributed over the last decades of the twentieth century, and that is indeed a significant fact; we are talking about more generations of gamers united, in 2025, by the same passion, a common, sacred ritual, which sees them inserting cartridges, cassettes, or CDs into the home entertainment devices for which they were designed from the very beginning!

On closer thought, numbers and data of this kind should not surprise us all that much, if we consider that the collecting market (I’m talking about video games, but in a few lines we will broaden the discussion) has never been as thriving as it has been in recent years: millions of enthusiasts who have carefully packed away boxes crammed full of Amiga, dusty retro consoles and that very rare E.T. cartridge for Atari 2600 that escaped the forced burial in the Nevada desert meet and compare every day on forums and dedicated platforms (and yes, our beloved The Games Market too) to reinforce what is not a mere passion, but a true ideological movement, worthy of respect.

Playing today titles from the Dreamcast, the PlayStation or the Intellivision means giving new vital lifeblood to games and systems that have given so much to the lives of those who, having become adults, spend time and money, to get them back again, with a more aware age regarding their actual value: the graphical side, today, may seem antediluvian, at times even laughable considering that even the second-tier cellphone we give to our elderly parents has a resolution worthy of the PlayStation 3, if not better, so it is not a question of graphical power, it never was.

And here is the explanation for the provocative title: when we played California Games on the Commodore 64 or fiddled around with the fury of a predator at Gradius something was established between us and the characters on the screen, the worlds of pixels and their lights and sounds, something that perhaps today we struggle to find again in the modern tools, that’s all. All things considered, this American survey strikes me, but does not surprise me, and I say that with a smile on my face.

Ci troviamo al cospetto di un ricettacolo di ricordi e meraviglie del passato che tornano a splendere. E a proposito di meraviglie da scoprire, e qui immaginatemi con la voce profonda e affascinante di Alberto Angela, lo sapete che il 49% degli utenti presi a campione ha utilizzato attivamente, nell’ultimo anno, DVD e Blu-Rays? E se vi dicessi che al 15%, di un punto sopra i videogiocatori vintage di cui vi ho accennato prima, troviamo una bella fetta di persone che continuano a godere dei film che tanto amano grazie alle care vecchie VHS del mitico videoregistratore? Personally, when I let my eyes scan this list, I was almost moved to tears: in a world where the next technology that will stage levitating cars and robots every year closer to Asimov’s sentient androids is being boosted, knowing that there exists a niche of millennium rebels from the past who have not abandoned the flicker of the cathode-ray tube and prefer to tackle the impossible levels of Metroid and Megaman with the original NES joypad on the original machine, well…