Tablets were invented for recycling old PC games

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Remember when we were playing really great games on our first home computers in the 80s and 90s? Good times. My gaming journey started with the Spectrum 48K (snowman FTW!), and slowly progressed to where we are now. Today's games truly are a piece of art, I have to give full credit to ventures such as Angry Birds and GTAs, but back then, everything was so much simpler, as if different rules applied. Games were there purely for the gameplay, and were awesome even if they came in 4-bit colors.

Luckily, these classic MS-DOS games received the opportunity to be revived. A few months ago, I played The Secret of Monkey Island on the iPad and it was fucking brilliant. Such a perfectly integrated experience, as if the game was originally designed for the tablet. Loved the humor, loved the clever tricks, loved the simplicity. It brought back so many memories... I want to play more games like that! More Lucas Arts and Sierra titles! Street Rod and Duke Nukem 2D! Dune, Syndicate and UFO! Railroad Tycoon!! Starcraft!!!

(Besides The Secret of Monkey Island, I noticed Civilization. Simcity and Prince of Persia are also available in the App Store, while The Incredible Machine seems to have been removed. Don't like the generic modern graphics though.)

These old games were great because they offered so little, but due to today's information pollution, insufficiency is bliss. Imagine a game where you don't need to be impressed with its amazing graphics or clever physics. Yes, we used to enjoy things like that, things that were pure and simple. Things like The Monkey Island, which managed to make me calm and relaxed with its plain ingenuity, besides reminding me of my childhood.

I'm not sure about the legal issues that come with it, but I am certain there's a huge opportunity in republishing classic games and abandonware on tablets and smartphones. The concepts and scenarios are there, they just need to be modified and rewritten for another device. So, if you have the opportunity to do so, please recycle one of those old PC titles, I would love to enjoy every bit of its vintageness on my mobile device before I go to bed. Because people are sentimental, and old times will always mean good times. And there are many of us who are prepared to pay money for that.

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written 1.4.2014 22:15 CET on chronolog
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