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.'.:::::::`. Petros Katiforis (Πέτρος Κατηφόρης)
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; | C ..\ Feel free to contact me! <pkatif@mail.com>
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\ | / \ This post was published on the 21st of September, 2023
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I'm young, so when I'm referring to old video games I'm just talking about the flash game era, the late 2000's. This article is about my recent decision to replay some of these old games and what I learned from that pilgrim about human psychology and game development!
When I was about six to seven years old my mother introduced me and my twin brother to some popular pirated game collection called myplaycity.com, which albeit still being online has long ago deleted all traces of illegal activity and subsequently all of their games I used to love and play. Nostalgia got me seeking for these old programs and a long journey of searching in archives and chunks of video footage began. After I finally had a list of all game titles that my memory had not yet cleared, and after finding out that the original version of myplaycity.com with all of its pirated content is still secretly hosted by the official Zambian Government web servers (zambia.com) (!), I was somewhat... disappointed. The games which indulged me into hours of fun were now boring me out and I couldn't help but delete them after about five minutes of messing around with them. Despite of some notable exceptions (1 Penguin 100 Cases, Empire Earth, Magic Farm, Sky Taxi, Subsea Relic), I released that my young self had some pretty low standards and hardly paid any attention to the details. I was so amused at the ability of the computer to render stuff on my flat monitor that I seriously didn't mind what I was playing. I could hardly read any English but that didn't cause me any boredom at all, I was just happily pressing random buttons for hours on end in the hopes of receiving some useful visual feedback!
While searching for all these games, I came across a pattern. Every single one of my childhood video-games that I could still bring to memory, even after a whole decade of me growing up, had remarkable soundtracks. I'm absolutely confident that if it weren't for their original sound effects and music I wouldn't even bother searching for them throughout huge online lists. And that's my advice to any programmer reading this, including my future self: A video game without a memorable soundtrack is (at least in my experience) damned to oblivion.