There’s a lot of talk about retro games being better because they don’t have the quality-of-life improvements that modern games have. Sometimes written off as hand-holding, features that make games more accessible or just more fun are expected in games today, but when they were initially conceived they were seen as revolutionary.
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It’s hard to imagine a video game without lots of the things listed below; they might seem humdrum by today’s standards, but make no mistake, seeing each of these in action for the first time was – quite literally – a game changer.
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Patches And Updates
Even if you buy a physical copy of a game (an increasingly rare phenomenon these days), you can still expect that it will get constant patches and updates for as long as the developers support it. It’s not even surprising anymore to bring a game home on launch day, pull it out of its shrink-wrapped case, and see a download bar pop up as a day-one patch is applied before you can start playing.
Before the days of pervasive connectivity, when a game shipped, it was done and there was no going back. All its bugs, exploits, and imbalances were there forever, enshrined on a cartridge or disc. Patches might be frustrating, but they at least offer a chance at redemption; in the old days, developers’ mistakes couldn’t be undone.
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Headshots
The earliest first-person shooters, like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, just tasked you with shooting bad guys, whether they were demons or Nazis. As the genre evolved, though, games started rewarding precise aim and skilled play, and there’s no more iconic display of FPS mastery than the headshot.
It’s practically unthinkable for a shooter not to give you bonus damage for hitting a target right in the noggin, if not taking them down in one shot altogether. The earliest shooters, though, just cared about whether you were aiming at the enemy’s hitbox or not.
As this Kotaku article points out, the concept of “locational damage” was brought to shooters in 1997, first appearing in an update to Team Fortress. For the majority of players, though, their first headshots were pulled off in GoldenEye 007, the legendary James Bond shooter for the N64, which came out a few months later.
Virtua Cop, which launched in 1994, had “Justice Shots,” which allowed you to disarm enemies by shooting their weapons out of their hands. Theoretically, the technology for headshots was there, but Sega chose a more peaceful solution.
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Shoulder Buttons
The rise of Nintendo and Sega helped to standardize controller designs, which until that point had been either the classic Atari stick-and-button or weird keypads. The NES and Sega Master System introduced (comparatively) ergonomic controllers that let players easily enter inputs with their thumbs.
What modern gamers might immediately find missing on these classic controllers are shoulder buttons – the L and R triggers that bring the index fingers into play as well. When the time came to release their next generation of consoles, Sega put three times as many buttons on the face of the controller for the Genesis/Mega Drive, while Nintendo’s SNES/Super Famicom added shoulder buttons, with only X and Y joining the face.
Six-button Genesis controllers had a “Mode” button on the shoulder, that was used to switch between three-button and six-button input modes when powering the console on.
The SNES launch title, Super Mario World, used L and R to pan the screen left and right, letting players see what was ahead.
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Internet Connection For Consoles
Your PS5 or Xbox Series S might be virtually unplayable without a stable Wi-Fi connection. Even some kitchen appliances demand Internet access, so a device that doesn’t require a subscription service and a network might seem like a breath of fresh air. In the late ’90s, though, the Internet was still fresh, exciting, and new.
By 1999, PC gamers had been enjoying online play for quite some time, but consoles, for the most part, were still the domain of in-person couch gaming. A few consoles had experimented with selling modems as optional accessories, but the Sega Dreamcast included one built-in, one of the many ways it was well ahead of its time.
Some players might have never even used the feature, but others – particularly owners of games like Phantasy Star Online – made full use of Sega’s wonderful final console and all it had to offer.
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Controller Vibration
Half the time, you probably don’t even notice the vibration function on your controller anymore, unless it suddenly stops. Players in the ’90s had the opposite experience when their controllers started shaking for the first time. Truly, games had reached peak immersion.
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Neither the PlayStation nor the N64’s default controllers included vibration features. N64 owners could purchase a “Rumble Pak” that slotted into the controller’s peripheral port, while Sony launched the Dual Shock line of controllers in the same year (1997). Unlike the launch PlayStation controller, the first Dual Shock had analog sticks and built-in vibration, which could be turned on or off with a button at the center of the face.
An earlier PlayStation controller, the Dual Analog, had the thumbsticks, but only included vibration on the Japanese version.
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Objective Markers
For some games, the fun is in forging your own path and figuring out the solution to every problem. If it’s done wrong, though, this can lead to hours of floundering about, wondering what on earth the game actually expects of you. Objective markers and waypoints have made navigation and finding your next destination a snap.
Games like Halo introduced the concept to a wider audience around the turn of the millennium, but a few games had played with the idea previously. Flight sims in particular, as early as 1991’s Gunship 2000, included maps with objectives and customizeable waypoints, letting you plan and execute your flight path with in-game instruments.
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More Than Two Players
Multiplayer is as old as video games themselves; Pong, after all, was a head-to-head competition. For the longest time, though, hardware limitations meant that outside of the arcade, only two people could play at once.
We live in the age of the Battle Royale and the MMO, where hundreds or even thousands of players share the same online space. Before online play became the standard, though, consoles required accessories like the SNES Multi-Tap to accommodate extra controllers, and then only for games that supported them.
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Saving Your Game
Early video games were short; the very first titles were built around getting a high score in a single sitting, while by the third console generation games like Super Mario Brothers challenged players to see how far they could get on a limited number of lives. As games have gotten bigger, though, they’ve outgrown single sessions. Saving your progress is a must.
The first console game to include a save feature was Pop And Chips, a 1985 puzzle platformer for the Super Cassette Vision, a European console. Of course, for most gamers of the era, the first game in their library to offer a save feature was Link’s very first adventure, The Legend Of Zelda.
Saving On PC
PC gamers, on the other hand, started saving their games as early as 1981, in Zork 1: The Great Underground Empire. A review in BYTE Magazine at the time praised the option to save your progress to a blank floppy disk as a boon for gamers with busy lives and insurance against power outages, but bemoaned the “cowardly” idea of using save states to try different approaches instead of being booted all the way back to the beginning of the adventure.
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