Hints of greatness

It was the French composer Claude Debussy who said, “Music is the space between the notes.” In short: without music being given the room to breathe, you’re left with a cacophony of noise.

I don’t know if any of the rest of you used to experience this, but often older games for me spread far beyond the boundary of what you see on the screen, precisely because they were more minimalist. The restrictions that have long been swept away by technological progress is precisely what made them so vivid and iconic.

Almost all the games that have stayed with me through my life are the ones where so much of their promise was merely hinted at. I’ve played all the Call Of Duty games, but even if you pointed an AK-47 at me, I probably couldn’t tell one from another. However, I remember every last pixel of Eric’s skool, and somehow could tell you the pattern of the wallpaper in Miner Willy’s mansion (don’t tell me he lived in a black – occasionally blue – void).

Invisible walls and linear pathways were a consequence of the available technology, but a good game, no matter how basic its graphics, could make it feel like I could go anywhere within its world.

In my head, The Lords Of Midnight’s

mountain ranges were swollen full of ominous threat, because they were rendered so simply. Starglider was little more than a black screen broken up with some lines and dots, but I just knew that beneath those shadows was a whole planet looking up at me. So much could be shown without showing much. Consequently, what WAS there mattered so much more.

Even as graphics became more ambitious and colourful, I was still craning my neck to peer around corners. Those gorgeous, fully painted, Parisian streets in Broken Sword were just asking to be wandered through. Even the original Doom had more atmosphere for me than its recent instalments, because they seem to revel in that cacophony. They’re a constant assault of visuals and sound.

Once parallax scrolling started to become a thing, my mind fractured. The very first time I played the original Sonic The Hedgehog,i

could scarcely believe what I was seeing on a home system. I’d already become obsessed with parallax scrolling when it was used to crude, but subtly impressive, effect on the Mega Drive’s Rambo III. I lived for those overthe-shoulder boss stages until Sonic came along (because, let’s face it, there wasn’t much else to justify the game). Admittedly, none of the stages beyond Green Hill Zone use it as well, but I wanted to reach into that screen. I wanted to explore beyond the 2D plane, and splash around in those deep, blue waters.

It’s so different now, of course. In today’s open-world games, if you can see it in the distance then you can travel to it. There’s not really any such thing as background graphics anymore. Triple-a games have become faster, busier, more overwhelming. Everything is bigger, louder, more explosive. Literally. There’s less time to appreciate what’s there, and what’s there is often shoved so hard in your face that your jaw detaches.

There’s really no time to stop and take a shotgun to the roses.

In my head, The Lords Of Midnight’s mountain ranges were swollen full of ominous threat, because they were rendered so simply