RetroGrade Episode 1: A Question of Time - Part 1

Welcome to RetroGrade, a feature wherein we track a particular concept through the annals of gaming history, visiting one prominent example of the said concept per console generation from today all the way back to the 8-bit era (that’s five if Wikipedia is to be believed).

In short, this is an excuse for me to talk about games I want to talk about across multiple hardware generations using a gimmicky theme to loosely tie them all together. But I digress…

My main purpose with this feature is to disassociate myself with a growing rift between the gamers of today and yesterday. This rift exists not only between generations of gamers, but within gamers themselves — a rift between the nostalgia of our childhood and the gritty reality of today. On one side of the rift you have those who bask in the contemporary model of gaming (whatever that means). On the other, you have those who yearn for a time long lost, a time today’s developers cash in on with titles like Mega Man 9 and Chrono Trigger DS.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that gaming is something that should be embraced and cherished as a whole, across all genres, platforms, and lifestyles, and there are thematic threads that tie the old to the new, our childhoods to our 20s and 30s. This feature is about those threads and how they can make games great and bring people together to enjoy them.

Before we begin, I’d like to give you folks a rundown of the rules I’m giving myself when it comes to this ongoing project:

1. I will never feature the same game more than once. Life’s too short and there are too many games out there for me to harp on the same ones over and over again. If that were the case, this page would just be an endlessly looping flash video of the Chrono Trigger opening movie. If a game I’ve already used for another topic is relevant, I will mention it, but for the most part, I’m going to have to have to be resourceful and find other examples.

2. I will try my best to incorporate PC games as much as possible. That said, they’re not what I grew up with, so I apologize in advance for these console-game-heavy features.

3. As mentioned above, there will be one game exampled for each hardware generation. That’s five games per feature: One from the current “HD” generation (360, PS3, Wii, DS, PSP), one from the DVD generation (Dreamcast, PS2, GameCube, XBox, etc.), one from the 32/64-bit generation (Playstation, Saturn, N64, etc.), one from the 16-bit generation (TurboGrafx-16, Genesis, SNES, etc.) and one from the 8-bit generation (NES, Master System, etc.). For PC and Arcade, I’m roughly considering a generation to be a span of about 5 years with other considerations taken. For instance, we’ll say the PC/Arcade generation corresponding with the 32/64-bit generation is roughly 1995-2000.

Now, with that out of the way… let’s get started!

For our inaugural episode of Retrograde, we will discuss what is possibly the most relevant theme we could discuss when it comes to tracing thematic threads through time: time itself.

Time, in spite of its very definition, has consistently been one of the most unstable elements in video games and the arts. It is often toyed with, but few works of any medium have truly nailed the concept. Video games in particular have had a fairly tumultuous relationship with the concept of time. I recall in my youth being excited for the Back to the Future game on NES. That game single-handedly instilled in me an instinctive fear of any game based on a movie I loved. 

Of course, even games that aren’t by any means bad have misused the opportunity that tinkering with time offers. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time is a great game and one of the crowning titles in the beat ‘em up genre, but the concept of time was used there merely as a convenient way to create more interesting wallpaper to fight on than the various sewers and cityscapes of its predecessors. More recently, Timeshift primarily uses time as a way to make typical FPS gunfights a bit more snazzy by injecting Zack Snyder-style cinematography into them.

But as I said, there have been a few keynote titles throughout gaming history that have truly captured the essence of time. Not coincidentally, these are typically some of the most celebrated games ever released.

Braid (XBox Live Arcade, Playstation Network - 2008)

 

The rollout of downloadable games services, in my opinion, is the greatest thing ever to have happened to the video game industry. Earlier on, in the Atari and NES days, the industry was fairly transparent. Anyone could do anything, and while this led to a lot of really bad games being made thanks to extremely lax or nonexistent QA measures and licensing, it also led to a lot of really good ones. As hardware became more powerful (and expensive to develop for) and expectations for games increased, the industry rapidly became more impenetrable, leaving independent game developers trapped in the confines of the freeware PC and Flash-based domains, for the most part. Thanks to services like Steam and XBox Live Arcade, indie games are not only back, but they’re in the spotlight and readily available to just about everyone that has an internet-ready machine in their home, and it’s because of this that incredible games like Braid are able to grace our households.

The masterwork of a single man, Jonathan Blow, Braid is a labyrinthine love-letter to the platformers of yesteryear. It takes the idea of games like Mario at their foundation and changes the vernacular, creating something that is structurally familiar while being an entirely new experience. The tool that Blow uses to reform our perception of the traditional platformer in Braid is, of course, time, and not merely as a commodity as it is used in Sands of Time.

Examining Braid as a “game”, we see that it is a platformer where the player can manipulate time. Contact with an enemy leads to a very tentative death, as there isn’t a game over screen, merely a prompt telling you it’s time to press the rewind button and try that again. Soon, it becomes clear that the enemies aren’t even a threat. In fact, there are no threats in Braid. No tangible ones, anyway, just this suggestive feeling of dread in the distance that is communicated solely through the game’s atmosphere and the almost nonsensical journal entries that embargo the entrance to every world. These entries, which form the only narrative Braid contains, imply what some speculate to be anything from the loss of a loved one or an inappropriate obsession to the creation of the atomic bomb.

Braid is a very surreal experience. It’s like watching a David Lynch film. Like in a dream, the elements it is comprised of are immediately recognizable individually, but they are mashed together in a way that puts them out of chronological context and makes the entire experience an eldritch enigma. Likewise, the game itself is constructed of set pieces from platformers we played as children, but with impossibilities strewn about that throw us off, forcing us to seek out new solutions. This motif is also apparent in the game’s overall aesthetic: the stages are constructed from mash-ups of random elements from a person’s life, with Victorian pillows, fishnets, Grecian pillars and other objects creating the exquisitely designed and detailed refuse pile that is a person’s memory. The keys that unlock these stages are puzzle pieces that create equally enigmatic images of moments in a person’s life.

Also like David Lynch, there is a fairly admissible level of pretension present that Braid’s opponents tend to exploit in criticizing Blow and his work. Indeed, it can be argued that Braid is a naked emperor masquerading as the height of fashion in the video game world. Yes, the game is ultimately a fairly simplistic platformer that’s too short and facile to merit its $15 price tag. Yes, Blow is a pretentious douche who’s hidden anything even remotely resembling a coherent narrative behind a whitewash of unintelligible, self-fellating, existential jargon.

But you know what? There is always doubt involved in true works of art. By art’s very nature, some people will simply exclude themselves from the experience for various reasons. The fact that a work of art, regardless of the medium, garners divisive opinions and vocal opposition means that it is more interesting and complicated than universal worship can allow. And, ultimately, what decides whether something is a true work of art is whether or not it can be observed in a museum decades after its creation. With video games not currently having an outlet for hallowed study such as that, only time will tell if video games like Jonathan Blow’s Braid will be viewed as such.