Introduction How Video Game History Shows Us Why Video Game Nostalgia Is So Important Now.pdf

How Video Game History Shows Us Why Video Game Nostalgia Is So Important Now Nicolas Esposito University of Technology of Compiègne Heudiasyc UMR CNRS 6599 Centre de recherches, BP 20.529 60205 Compiègne Cedex, France http://www.utc.fr/~nesposit/ nicolas.esposito@utc.fr Introduction We are all nostalgic about one thing or another and nowadays, many of us are nostalgic about the video games they played as children or teenagers. No reason is necessary to be a nostalgic player. But some reasons can be easily identified. The first one is a common temporal effect: we often to look back to 20 years ago. It can explain why we play games from the eighties now (for example thanks to the Namco Museum compilations). It also can explain why the video game nostalgia mainly began in the nineties, since the first popular video games were released in the seventies (for example: Space Invaders, 1978, see figure 1). Another reason is that video games have come to our pockets in the nineties thanks to the handheld consoles and now thanks to cell phones. This kind of hardware is not powerful enough for current video games. So, publishers have converted old games for handheld consoles and cell phones. For example, Namco Museum can be played on the Nintendo Game Boy Advance and we can find a lot of converted Super Nintendo games on this handheld console. We also have to take into consideration the numerous emulators that allow the players to play old games on recent computers. This way of playing has been more and more popular since the Internet is widely used to exchange game files. MAME (Salmoria, 2002), for example, allows us to play thousands of arcade video games on a recent computer. Hence, emulation is one more opportunity for the players to express their nostalgia although it raises numerous legal problems (Pettus, 2000; Conley et al., 2004). Figure 1: Space Invaders (1978). But the video game nostalgia goes further than compilations, game conversi