I’ve been talking about nostalgia recently, and it’s easy to understand why. When your hobby finally reaches more than 50+ years of relevant history, there is a lot to look back at all of the stunning quality involved with a respectful fondness.
And sometimes not
With that in mind, once a year, I usually get a hankering to go back and play some old, old…old old school video games, and the hankering to play Yars’ Revenge hath returned. I decided to download Atari Flashback Classics Vol.1 to quell the desire, but also because I kind of needed something a bit short and sweet due to time constraints to discuss, and several decade old video games fit the bill.
Sic Parvis Magna
The classics collection series has been around in some form or another for awhile now, seeing both physical and digital releases over many years. They also had a run of plug-and-play related mini consoles that stored the dozens of games involved with any single iteration just to give it that real old school feel, Atari 2600 controllers included and all. This was well before Nintendo wanted in on the slice of the mini console retro pie with the release of the NES and SNES mini respectively. My point: in both their original forms and their re-released iterations, all of these games have been around for a hot minute.
Oozing forth from the halcyon era of the primordial soup
So one has a lot of games to choose from, even if many of them are extraordinarily simplistic and straight forward, and I cannot heavily emphasize enough of just how basic the games we are dealing with are. With Pong having been released all the way back in 72′ and working from there, to say these games are antiquated is an understatement. The severe technological limitations of the time demanded that the experiences were ridiculously compact, so often times a game would involve sometimes only a single screen encompassing the totality of all gameplay involved. 
Which did save a lot of time on gathering screenshots, mind you
You have to have a sense of humor about it, cause the whole thing is fucking silly when you really think about it for longer than two seconds. Don’t get me wrong: I do genuinely appreciate the gameplay involved with these classics, and the history that they represent, but you take a step back for a second and realize you’re dictating on a bunch of blocks on a screen with a high pitched buzzing sound from time to time and quantifying the creative endeavor or semantics of the game design therein. This write up will probably take more of your time than the average amount you’d spend playing any one of these games, in all of their adorable succinctness.
Behold! Basically all of the gameplay of Black Widow in a single pic!
Much to that point, there is a relevant quote I’m re-appropriating from a game designer named Jaime Griesemer, who worked on Halo 1 and 2 for Bungie back in the day. He famously described the process of designing a game as trying to nail that “30 seconds of fun”, massively paraphrase of course, going on to describe an average encounter in the Halo games he worked on. He would go on to point out that you can have great graphics and a cool story, but if you don’t nail that 30 seconds, you don’t have a game. (apologies for the lack of linked source; it happened, trust me.) Based on the caliber of design for both Halo titles in question, I would most certainly be inclined to agree. Retrofitting and applying that quotation within consideration to these old school Atari titles, the games represent such a distilled sense of concentrated gaming goodness, coupled with the limitations of the time, and you really are seeing that quote live up to it’s essence in real time, as any of these games really are that 30 seconds of fun and nothing else.
The replaybility on Millipede really has legs
And that’s perfectly alright, mind you, as these games had no frame of reference to work with, as their mission statement was to become the frame of reference for future generations to be inspired by. The onus back then was on giants like Atari to create the context for what would become the groundwork for the very foundation of gaming itself. Accomplishing that by spending time developing a title in a couple of months with almost no staff, a couple kilobytes of memory, and 30 seconds of fun to play around with, and you are left somewhere between shock and awe as you laugh at the absurdity of this very notion having spawned a multi-billion dollar industry that helped to make gamers of us all.
Yars’ Revenge: a real work of art
As is the case with a lot of my writing, I always have a billion ideas at the ready and only about 10 minutes to to do anything with them all. I’ll leave you with the reminder that Yars’ Revenge is awesome, and that in a stroke of ridiculous absurdity, a follow up sequel more than 40 years later (!) called Yars Rising, which is taking the form of a Metroidvania, is coming out for the Switch in a mere 23 days. And how!
~Pashford
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