Sixteen Bits Was Enough

I love the Super Nintendo. Really, genuinely—if I could convert my consciousness into 16-bit data and transplant it into that Japanese retro console to spend the rest of eternity inside Secret of Mana, Super Mario World, and Terranigma, I wouldn’t lose a second of sleep over the decision.

Old games are better than new games. Not all of them—the rose-tinted nostalgia filter does real work—but the fundamental argument holds: the big publishers stopped caring about mechanics, story, and invention somewhere along the way and decided that photorealistic grass rendering was the metric that mattered. They’re terrified of the YouTube generation, of review scores, of the mob. The grass doesn’t sway convincingly in the wind? 70/100. BACK IN THE DAY, GRASS WAS GREEN PIXELS AND WE WERE FINE.

Vlogger and party animal David Hain put together a video unpacking exactly why we keep going back to old games, why we still pull them out decades later. He articulates it better than I would on most days. My first console was the Master System—Alex Kidd in Miracle World packed in, plus Sonic the Hedgehog and Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker. That last one alone justifies the entire history of gaming as far as I’m concerned. You could moonwalk. Into criminals.

Hach.