Super Nerd Sundays Presents: 16 Bit Love!

There’s a generation of gamers who came of age in the 16 bit era, a generation rapidly emerging into cultural relevance now. We’re starting families, starting careers and starting to make a difference in the world in a way that would’ve been considered outlandish two decades ago, when the world was a much bigger, much less connected place. But these gamers have, for the most part, moved on to other things: we’ve either progressed towards more conventional forms of literature, writing books or films or comics or whatever, or we’ve shifted totally towards making games, games that have, for the most part, abandoned what made the 16 bit era special. Modern games (I use the term in its shudderworthy application of mass produced dross, not to denigrate contemporary games in general) that have none of the wonderment or exploration or punishing willingness to allow players to run up against walls while still iteratively making progress in the game.

It’s a strange bit of connective tissue within our community, to be sure. And it’s a deeply personal bit as well. I’m sure I’m misrepresenting it for many people, who might’ve seen 16 bit games as a frustratingly difficult stepping stone in gaming history. But to me they represented a sort of perfect balance of styles, approaches and philosophies that didn’t necessarily require improving upon. I’m speaking primarily about 16 bit RPGs here, but I think the same can be said for 16 bit platformers and fighters as well (after all, the fundamental design of Street Fighter hasn’t changed much since its 16 bit inception).

So here’s one of the things I’ve noticed about 16 bit games: despite their limitations, there’s really nothing that 16 bit RPGs, puzzlers, platformers and fighters fail at representing. Terms of scale, scope, humor, pacing, they’re all there, often better executed than they are in more contemporary games. Want to represent something as big? Have it be four times the size of a character sprite. Want it to be really big? Make it much, much bigger. These shortcuts, emerging from technical limitations to be sure, were effective, simple as they were. And their effectiveness was largely a result of this simplicity. These tricks relied on the tacit participation and imagination of the players in constructing the game world: they reinforced the collaborative nature of narrative structure in games. Instead of trying to fill in gaps in our imaginations, they provided an inroad by which we could generate an environment to place ourselves within.

When you consider games like Crono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI (or three or whatever) and the time we were willing to invest in these projects as gamers, as young gamers with purportedly brief attention spans, you can really see what I’m getting at. These were games that used relatively simple visuals to great effect, evoking profound emotion and illustrating complex scenes with two dimensional sprites, a limited color pallet and a rudimentary collection of animations filling in for the more elaborate sort of movement we expect from games today. And they got their message across, even if it was at times crude. I still remember islands in the sky shattering apart in both the aforementioned titles, literally restructuring the world with their impact. I remember elegant moments of self-sacrifice, moments of betrayal, profound moments that still resonate with me as a gamer.

I recently finished playing Crysis 2 for the second time. It’s tough to get much further from the 16 bit era of gaming than Crysis 2, a game where spectacle is a constant distraction rather than an evocative aspect of play, where game elements are somehow, despite being lovely rendered, possessed of a profound regularity that makes the entire endeavor feel more often middling than profound. Each time a massive piece of alien technology devastated New York I rolled my eyes. More of this? Pfft! I’d been watching New York get ripped up by weird robot aliens for fifteen hours by the end of the experience, and the enemies I found myself fighting had all been introduced to me by the game’s midpoint, along with the tools I was using to combat them.

Yeesh. Even Final Fantasy had the common courtesy to occasionally reskin more powerful versions of enemies as the game progressed. And the manner in which settings varied, even within their primitive context, was far more evocative for me than Crysis 2’s obliterated cityscape ever managed to be. This comparison likely seems quite arbitrary, and it is. Because the reason I’m thinking about this, and the reason I’m comparing Crysis 2 to the halcyon RPGs of the 16 bit era, is because immediately after finishing Crysis 2 I sat down and started sinking into Zeboyd’s smart, lovingly crafted Cthulhu Saves the World. And something incredible happened. I remembered the amazing capacity for storytelling and spectacle nested in the 16 bit RPG format.

There’s a lot to be said for the life Zeboyd brings to the aging medium, enough that I’ll probably write something up after I actually finish Cthulhu Saves the World. But aside from that, what’s reverberating with me is just how rich and full of room for expansion the 16 bit top down RPG (with random battles and all) remains. Zeboyd is doing some interesting things with the genre, experimenting with where its problems and grind lay, and it’s paying off without cutting any of the teeth out of it. I’ve had to restart a handful of boss battles already that I simply couldn’t figure out, and the random encounters, true to the genre’s form, take the shape of brief puzzles that you as a player need to solve. And while I am enjoying a distinctly traditional game as I explore this world, I don’t feel the same exhaustion that I would experience while playing other grind heavy games like, say, Final Fantasy IV. But it all fits into the aesthetic and model of play established in 16 bit games of yore.

And it works. It works well. The internal language of the genre remains fresh, and the narration, tongue in cheek, is tremendously effective. I remain impressed with nearly every element of the genre, and how vibrant it has managed to remain despite almost two decades of obscurity. And indie developers are recognizing this left and right of late, or so it would seem. Games like Lone Survivor take 16 bit aesthetics and play and turn them into profoundly original games with elements of classic 2D side scrolling action games presented alongside elements of high-tension survival horror games. There are even throwback sidescrollers with slightly more impressive visual conceits or complex concepts governing the overall games (I’m thinking of A Valley Without Wind in this case) that use the 16 bit visual style and play aesthetic to showcase an original concept.

Perhaps this isn’t necessarily a strength of the medium so much as a showcase of its capacity for creative expression in the hands of a few tremendously talented young people with few resources, little time and big ideas. Indie games have been exploding of late, and it is considerably easier to design a game in a 16 bit style and keep it on budget while dealing with a foully oppressive day-job, as many indie developers must. But even if it is easier, in general, to construct a 2D 16 bit game rather than trying to render a full three dimensional engine for a given concept, the play is what impresses me. The play and the effectiveness of the medium in conveying its ideas and purpose. Is it perfect? No, but that’s sort of the whole point. It’s good enough, and it presents players with a framework where they must be engaged in order to contribute significantly to the narrative. I believe that’s key to any successful game: if we don’t feel like we’re a part of the game itself, if we don’t feel necessary to the game reaching its full potential, why are we playing? Why should we care? I’ve never once wondered that while playing a 16 bit game.