Atari vs Amiga was such an interesting time in computing history.
When I see generations that grew up with game consoles, and talk about the current uptake on desktop games, they really have no idea what they missed out in home computing and the first wave of indie game development,
from bedroom coders .
Tangent: the older I get, the more it annoys me that this expression kind of implies a failure of young people to study history, when I feel like it's more the responsibility of previous generations to preserve and pass down history for them to learn from. Especially because it's usually people in power in some form who are trying to keep the newer generations naive here so they can be fooled again.
Not saying that this interpretation was your intent (in fact I suspect it's the opposite), just directly expressing my annoyance at the expression itself.
> when I feel like it's more the responsibility of previous generations to preserve and pass down history for them to learn from
But everything has been preserved and passed down. The entire home computing phenomenon has been archived and is available on the internet thanks to the rampant 'software piracy' which was common at the time, and detailed schematics and manuals coming with the computers (which have all been digitized and are available on the internet). Even my obscure KC85 games I wrote as a teenager and 'distributed' on cassette tapes by snail mail are available as download because some kind person(s) digitized all that stuff during the early 90s and put it on some 'underground' game download portals.
The 80s and early 90s home computer era will be better preserved than anything that came after it.
> The 80s and early 90s home computer era will be better preserved than anything that came after it.
Indeed. Sadly, many more recent games will probably be lost to time forever due to DRM, online service components going offline or never being distributed on physical media in the first place. As someone into vintage computers and preservation, I worry that future generations may look back and see the late 2010s and certainly the 2020s as a 'dark age' when surveying the history and evolution of digital gaming. All we'll have are YouTube videos (assuming those survive future business model tectonic shifts) but no ability to actually experience the game play first-hand.
Recently I've been exploring the back catalog of more obscure PS3 and X360 games via emulation and have found some absolutely terrific titles I never even knew existed. Some of them were only ever sold through the console's online store and never available on physical media. With the XBox 360 and Nintendo Wii stores now long offline, only the PS3 store remains available - and who knows for how much longer, since Sony already announced its closure once and then changed their mind. There's now a race to preserve many of these titles
The good news is that not only was almost all of it preserved, teenagers today are really interested in retro gaming. My 15 year-old daughter, who's not into computers more than any other 15 year-old girl, just asked if she could go with me to the vintage computer festival this Summer. She tells me her friends at school are all interested in running emulators to play classic games from arcade to SNES to PS2 and N64.
I guess the 'dark lining' to that silver cloud is that this interest from teens in retro gaming is partly thanks to the increasing downsides of modern gaming (cost, DLC, ads, hour-long download/installs, etc). While game graphics continue to get more and more impressive, stuff like real-time path tracing doesn't seem to excite teens as much as does me. Ultimately, it's about game play more than visuals. Lately I've been exploring the immense back catalog of N64, PS2, PS3 and x360 games via emulation and there are some incredible gems I never even heard about back in the day. It's especially great now thanks to the huge variety of mods, enhancements, texture packs, decompilations/recompilations and fan translations. And current emulators can upscale and anti-alias those games even on a potato desktop or laptop with a low-end discrete GPU.
I never thought that statement was actually about having an “idea”, but more about not actually having lived through the experience. Quite the opposite from your belief, no amount of study would allow them to understand what is was like.
Understandable, hence why many of my comments kind of look like mini-history lessons, and I tend to be pedantic.
However curiosity also plays a big role.
If I know so much about computing history since the 1950's, is because I do my research, and take advantage of all archives that have been placed online, certainly I wasn't around to live all of it.
When I see generations that grew up with game consoles, and talk about the current uptake on desktop games, they really have no idea what they missed out in home computing and the first wave of indie game development, from bedroom coders .