As Cyberpunk 2077 makers CD Projekt Red apologise to fans today for releasing a game that doesn’t work properly, I am remembering my dad’s total outrage the first time he purchased a game for my mum (I think it may have been a Rollercoaster Tycoon game) that came on a disk but was buggy enough that it would only work with a downloaded game update. “They sold a game that doesn’t work”, he cried, aghast. It’s now pretty much standard practice to let games go out essentially unfinished. Updates are a feature for the bugs.
We had PCs early in my family because my parents used them in their business as soon as they could get their hands on them, but we never had the most expensive ones and we didn’t replace them very often — when I got my first one in my room, some time in the early 90s, it was one that had already seen some use in the family business beforehand, and I didn’t have my own modem for a few more years after that. I knew if I wanted to get a new game there was a very good chance it wouldn’t run without some serious video and sound card deliberations, and often actual physical moving of the…oh no what were they called, little thingumies that join something together. Hardware isn’t my thing. Anyway. It was always technical and there was always a really good chance the game wouldn’t work or I’d have to wait til my birthday for a new sound card. Monkey Island 3 was probably the flashiest game I ever got working on one of my own PCs.
On the upside, once you got the game working, it stayed working and was the same game until technology moved on and first you had no floppy disk drive and then your old games weren’t compatible with Windows 98 and on and on it goes. I still have some of my original PC games on CDs and look a them wistfully on occasion, aware that it’s almost never worth the effort of trying to get them to run. In fact my current laptop doesn’t have a disk drive, I notice.
Today I bothered to restore an iPad 3 that I’ve scavenged from my son who now has a newer one. I went to get some of the time management games I used to play a lot in the BeforeTwitter times. But the problem with the old iPad games is that you’re entirely at the mercy of the App Store. Sometimes your iPad is too old to play the available versions of the games, and sometimes the game is too old to run on the current version of the iPad, so you may have bought a game that you’ll never be able to access again. But the other thing that happens is the games continually evolve, so whatever version you can get now might be totally unrecognisable from the one you paid for 5 years ago. I’ve just tried to get a game I paid for and loved 9 years ago and it’s “no longer available”. I’m sure I’ve agreed to that in the T&Cs but it seems bizarre to me that you can pay for the use of something and then have to accept that it’s not even a thing any more.
One of my favourite Playstation 3 games was LittleBigPlanet, I used to stay up all night creating levels. But eventually I got frustrated with the game — I didn’t have time to play very often, and every time I went to turn it on, it wouldn’t run without first installing a very slow update (which used up the 20 minutes I had available to play) and a lot of the updates significantly changed the nature of the game. Then of course PS4 didn’t run PS3 games anyway and the PS3 stopped reading disks and then I somehow lost access to the account I’d used to make all my levels so I can’t get to them any more whatever I do because nothing on Heaven or Earth will reset that password without access the mystery email address.
In the loft I have a perfectly good GameCube that I would set up and run again if I could remember where I had put the games I want to play on it, safe in the knowledge that as long as the console still functions and the disk isn’t scratched, it’ll be the exact same gaming experience as before, even if it looks a little bit rustic through my HD-jaded eyes. If, and that’s a reasonably sized if, the TV still has the right input socket.
The concept of owning a video game has shifted dramatically over the last 30 years. The big console games have gone through phases of being difficult to re-sell or lend even if you’ve bought a physical copy, and the shift to downloads-but-at-full-cost means you can only have as many games as you have storage capacity for, and regularly have to make choices about which games to shelve for the time being — with no guarantee they’ll be the same game when you return to them, but certainly a guarantee that you can’t sell them on, which was always part of the value of the physical copy.
Evidently I’m just rambling without direction here, but anyway the Cyberpunk 2077 disappointment today is a reminder that video gaming has always been as frustrating as it is addictive.
*title needs work
