While the pandemic isn’t over yet, I’m pretty sure one of my strongest memories of it will be the experience of replaying Command & Conquer and Red Alert – 102 combined hours so far. I started at the end of 2020, in other words the first year. On some nights when I couldn’t sleep, instead of dwelling on the horror of it all, I shuffled into my playroom (which had become my home office overnight) and played a few missions until I tired enough to stop thinking .
Over the next year and a half, I followed C&C with WarCraft 2, Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit the Road, and Halo 1 & 2. No new PC games for this player, just old favorites. I mean it didn’t stop me to buy new games – I’m still a sucker for a Steam sale – but my installations of Disco Elysium and Ghostwire: Tokyo continue to watch from digital limbo. I may not be in quarantine anymore, but I can’t free myself from revisiting these old familiar places.
I know I’m not the only one with these nostalgic binges. People talk about TV shows they’ve compulsively rewatched, books and comics from their early years that they’re rereading, and sometimes even bigger nostalgic purchases. My pandemic brain even led me to buy a classic Macintosh. More than ever, it feels like this retreat backwards offers a mental safe space in a time of fear and uncertainty and sadness and loss. And there is certainly no shortage of bad news in the world right now.
Now, “nostalgia experts” (yes, there is such a thing) like to point out that basking in nostalgia isn’t always positive. For example, Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia (opens in new tab) two kinds of nostalgia discussed. One can lead people to get stuck in the past with the fear of giving up – sometimes even a past that never was, as in the case of longing for romanticized ‘good old days’
The other kind (the kind I hope I practice) is a more positive enjoyment of what once was without an unhealthy attachment to it.
A focus on nostalgia can also lead to creative stagnation, as game developers (or movie producers, or TV writers or novelists) rely too much on the past. This may come from their attempts to capitalize on the nostalgia of customers, or even designers own nostalgia. In either case, this can result in derivative designs, sequels to sequels, and a plethora of things that value a formula that worked in the past over creative new ideas.
On the other hand, nostalgic gaming can be a positive tool to help us through bad times. In addition to the nostalgic warm fuzzies I get from my old favorites, I feel fulfilled by completing a game I’ve never completed before – either because I “got right” or because it’s now easier to find guides and videos online to help where I may have been stuck decades ago. I keep adding new games to my “to play” pile as I check others off the bucket list. It helps that being a PC gamer makes nostalgic replays trivially easy. No other platform will allow you to play just about any game dating back decades.
Next-gen nostalgia
My 19 year old son recently told me he is homesick for games from to be childhood, which was only 5-10 years ago. I would have thought “recent nostalgia” was an oxymoron, but apparently not. It hadn’t occurred to me how much nostalgia can be for different ages – I mean, I can be nostalgic about parachute pants, Star Wars, Wham!, In Living Color, dial-up modems, Betamax, and New Coke. What has my child… Angry Birds and Twlight?
I’m kidding, he has a lot more than that. Most of my son’s nostalgic replay time since the pandemic has gone to Minecraft, Terraria, and Garry’s Mod, the games he gritted his teeth as a little PC gamer. These all feel like recent games to me, but checking a calendar isn’t. During the pandemic, he and I spent several long evenings replaying PixelJunk Shooter and Halo 1 and 2, alternating between original and remastered graphics in the Master Chief Collection.
For him, the soothing power of nostalgia goes beyond playing the same game for the umpteenth time. He says he sometimes plays an older game has not played before gives him a nostalgic feeling, that it takes him back to a time he has never experienced and a different style of playing than what is common today.
He’s currently working his way through ’90s first-person shooters. I’m not sure if this counts as nostalgia for him, but it’s helped us bond over shared stories about old games as I watch him relive moments that amazed me when I was his age. While he was playing Doom in full, I had to tell him about the shareware distribution model and how my first PC could barely handle the game when there were more than a few enemies on the screen—all while watching my son battle the hordes of Hell. destroyed on a higher difficulty than I’ve ever done.
Not quite pink
While I highly recommend gaming with nostalgia as a way to have a good time or get through a bad time, I would suggest that we all be careful in our binge eating. I may have spent more time than I care to admit playing my mental health support games when I could have been doing something productive. Tragically, my neglect of recent popular games sometimes hurts my understanding of modern memes – can someone explain why dogs in Elden Ring look so weird?
I also don’t want game publishers to think that most customers just want old games, or keep making more and more remakes and remasters at the expense of original ideas. I mean, buy what you want, sure, but maybe check one or two reviews first, because not every remake is worth your memories. Some try to tickle our nostalgia center (“Hey, remember this favorite character? Wasn’t this funny?”) without much substance.
Anyway, speaking of content – that reminds me that I recently re-purchased the Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders. I’m going to use it to do some social distancing.
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