The noise my old console made as it started up was something I could always count on, and it would fill my room with a heavy sound, forcing anticipation as the screen in front of me flickered to life. When the logo appeared—no way to put it but plain as day—I was catapulted into whatever storyline some very 8-bit hack had cooked up. And no hack could have cooked up a better intro than the one for Defender. From that very moment, my imaginations ran wild and let me scale impossible heights as I packed it into two or three hours after school.
Space Invaders was one of the first games to really win my affection. It may seem simple by today’s standards—aliens moving in unison, your laser cannon frantically firing back—but then, it felt like magic. It was thrilling to dodge the pixelated invaders, with my heart racing against every near miss. The tension built level by level, almost feeling cinematic despite the basic graphics. Now, of course, I realize that what made the game so special was its simplicity. Of all the components that make up a video game, the premise is arguably the most important. If the premise isn’t engaging, players won’t care what happens next.
That era’s games had a unique way of squeezing every bit of potential from each pixel. A game that perhaps best exemplifies this is Metroid, which took me, almost literally, to a different world—the eerie, cavern-dominated, not-quite-infinity of Planet Zebes. Nor was it the landscapes alone, splayed in all their half-hewn, half-painted glory, that entranced me, although they contributed. And nor was it just the precursively creepy chiptune score; the sounds of Metroid were more capable than those of other games of genuinely unsettling me. And unsettled was what I was: adrift in a hostile world, alone with nothing but Samus and a secret or two against the civilization-munching Metroids.
Still today, as three-hundred-plus-dollar game packages go, they rival or exceed the combined Christmases’ worth of 110-decibel experience that was unwound in and around my bedroom when I was 11—”a-maze-ing” and “dalek-hunting,” both with and without the strict chiptune ambience that was part of an era.
Yet these games weren’t thrilling just because we got to explore their vast worlds. They were setting the stage for something even cooler: storytelling, but in a new way. The Legend of Zelda, with its dim dungeons, oddball characters, and hearty doses of campfire mythology, began blending not quite sci-fi but pure story with the complex joy of problem-solving and the sheer delight of wandering off the beaten path. I remember with clear and present intensity the awesome thrill of stumbling upon an irresistible secret, a cave with an air of forbidden mystery at its entrance—all because I’d just graphically burst through a wall with my sword and shield.
I imagined what lay ahead with both fear and hope. Indeed, in The Legend of Zelda, the most mind-blowing narrative trick was not actually a trick at all. It was allowing us to play and live inside a world with more than a little secretive spirit.
If you grew up in the 1980s and early 1990s, you may remember those late nights spent in front of a glowing computer screen, immersed in pixelated worlds you felt you could explore for hours. For me, those evenings playing Star Wars: X-Wing on my family’s old, clunky PC were among the most formative experiences of my love for all things sci-fi. But the game was not merely a 1980s rundown of Death Stars, X-Wings, and TIE fighters. This was not a game merely played. This was an experience lived. X-Wing allowed you to pit yourself against—well, the “secret forces of the evil Galactic Empire.” Beyond such heralded good vs. evil story mechanics, however, X-Wing took place within the inherent weirdness of Star Wars’s multiverse, a transhistorical space of gameable myth.
X-Wing’s complexity taught me an important lesson about the allure of these kinds of games: they demanded genuine commitment. You didn’t just interact with them in a surface-level way; you dug deep into their various aspects in order to appreciate them fully. You learned their personalities, so to speak, until you felt a kind of affection for them. That was something Keita Takahashi understood when he designed Katamari Damacy. When a game asks for this kind of thing from you, it builds a bridge between itself and the world of fragility and blown-up animals that you now inhabit.
Suddenly, that world makes sense to you, and sense-making is what games as a medium are all about. Whether we’re talking about sense in the way we grasp a game’s mechanics or in the way we understand and relate to the story it tells—that is a large part of the appeal.
While space may be vast, many of my fondest memories from gaming come from its more grounded aspects. One title that stands out prominently in my mind is Flashback, which came out in 1992. Unlike sprawling space simulator games, Flashback was a cinematic platformer with a taut, engaging narrative that felt like a blend of Blade Runner and Total Recall. Despite its rather modest graphics, the game’s painstakingly created, rotoscoped animation gave it a fluidity that felt almost lifelike. As I guided protagonist Conrad through jungles, alien cities, and underground complexes, I marveled at how well the game managed to convey a sense of narrative weight.
Today, it would be considered a “B-game” because of its relative lack of cutscenes or dialogue, but somehow—which is more or less how it has to be—a player-led narrative unfolded for me as I experienced its story.
Then came Another World (called Out of This World in the U.S.), a game nearly more art than entertainment. Nearly all designed by Éric Chahi, it told the tale of a scientist sent to an alien world, every moment crafted to elicit wonder—if not outright peril. Playing Another World was dropping into a dream; with no flashlight, you had to feel your way through the hostile environments, trusting that if you made it to the next screen, some respite would await you. Watching Another World’s narrative unfold was as good as doing anything in a theater or a living room.
The game is imbued with so many captivating visions that its imagination refuses the temptation to let the mind wander.
As I think back on these games, I see that they were more than just something to occupy my time; they were portals into various storytelling modes. They inculcated in me the idea that the best science fiction isn’t always about the most advanced technology or the hugest explosions. They made me feel that atmosphere is extraordinarily important; that it’s crucial to create a powerful illusion, to immerse the player in a strange new world. What I learned from them, and from the classic films I loved in my youth, is that a good story doesn’t always need a major studio’s budget; it just needs a powerful vision and the courage to take some chances.
The Importance of These Classics and Their Impact on the Sci-Fi Game Genre
When I examine the roots of what we play today, it’s interesting to see how these fundamental sci-fi video games developed past our current limitations. They pushed boundaries, and that has driven us to be more creative in what we put forth to our gaming audience. Nowadays, games look fantastic—if you have the right console, that is—and they sound great, too. But there’s something more about the graphics and sound of older games that I think today’s audience wholly overlooks. That’s driving a segment of our audience to an all-time low in appreciation of visual aesthetics and our historical significance.
One game that combined sci-fi horror with a complex and engaging narrative was System Shock, which paved the way for immersive titles like BioShock and Dead Space. Released in 1994, System Shock offered a fully three-dimensional world where you could interact with almost any object, hack into computer systems, and piece together a story through scattered audio logs. In spite of its blocky graphics and in spite of having what were then considered to be pretty poor controls, System Shock managed to be a relatively scary game that wove together a pretty fascinating narrative garnish. And if the SMODAN experience wasn’t enough to get you thinking, you only had to consider what made a rogue AI so scary.
These classic games are undeniably influential. They built the blueprints that developers today still use as inspiration and that many of us don’t realize we are even riffing off of. They are unrefined in ways that make them feel special. Gaming with friends feels special too. On weekends, I’d retreat into a rooms with friends and take turns marveling at pixelated worlds. I’d jam with rhythm, sync like I was part of some co-op army, and take final stabs at beating levels that made no fucking sense but were somehow a masterpiece of bad design. When I finally beat Contra, I felt as if I’d done something truly heroic.
Yet I didn’t do it alone. I needed players with me to share in the victories and the defeats.
To me, the really old games have something very compelling. It feels like they had a soul when they were made, and that’s something I miss a lot in today’s big-budget game titles. I find them, at worst, a kind of sterile product that exists merely to extract money from the wallets of gamers, and at best, I find them really ambitious but bound by a weird kind of corporate oversight that makes them also feel kind of sterile. And then I play the old games and feel amazed at how much warmth they have, how much love they exude for the premise of what a game can be.
That’s what I want from a game: a strange and wonderful world to explore.
These games taught me that the essence of science fiction is to push boundaries—whether those are the boundaries of space and time or the limits of our imaginations. Much like the practical effects in the classic sci-fi movies that I grew up watching, which used miniatures and practical sets to create impossible worlds, these games had a certain tactile quality. But instead of using plaster and rubber, they were built with pixels and ingenuity. Looking at the classic LucasArts library now, I see a kind of love letter to the era in which they were made—a recognition that sometimes, the way to move forward is to look back.
When I think about Hyper Light Drifter or Axiom Verge, two modern-day side-scrolling titles that are somewhat of an homage to the classics, I see just that.
What makes these games still significant? They take us back to an era when creativity formed the very foundation of an interactive experience. From the moment we pressed “start,” it didn’t truly matter whether the characters we controlled looked even remotely human or if the settings in which we found ourselves bore any resemblance to the real world. What mattered was whether the experience was engaging. This qualifier served as the sole hurdle to cross for something to be considered a good game. Stick with us as we continue to navigate this trip down memory lane while holding onto these key qualifiers for what makes a game significant and why it’s acceptable for a game to feature anything but photorealistic visuals.
I prefer to think that when I return to these masterpieces, I am not merely wallowing in nostalgia. I am preserving their spirit and even their essence. I am greatly entertained, of course, but I am also reminded—as if I ever needed reminding—that the true magic of science fiction, of all its “reams and vertices (to say nothing of its rumored plotization),” emanates from the supremely entertaining yarns it spins. They are not always new (they seldom are); when they are not new, they are usually heavily modulated. But within the confines of that please-plot, I am following a tale, a game-thing.
