The Decline of Gaming Classics

There have been many videogames over the years that have been classed as 'Classics', from Pong to Super Mario Bros and even up to games like Grand Theft Auto Vice City.  Some of these classics have been around for upwards of twenty years and some of them have been more recent but are games that you know will become classics; games that will always be played by someone, somewhere in the world.  But the other night whilst trying to get to sleep this thought hit me, a thought that there are very few, if any, games that have been released in the past few years that I can see becoming a videogame classic.

NES Classic Super Mario Bros.

With the advent of the internet and playing online against your friends rather than playing split-screen in the same room has placed the general perception of what a videogame needs to include to a different level.  Most gamers in the current gaming world will generally look to see if the game has online capabilities before buying a game, because online multiplayer has now become one of (if not the) major selling points when making a game.  I personally feel that we gamers who look for a good single player game, with a great storyline are a dying breed; slowly being eradicated by the social gaming youth.

It's the need for online gaming and an adequate single player section that is the main contributor in the lack of potential gaming classics around at the moment.  The one thing pretty much all current gaming classics have in common is that they have no online capabilities, and the only chance of playing with friends was to have them on the same screen sat next to you with another controller.  All the classics currently around generally have a good storyline to them, granted some of them may not be long or written to an award winning standard but the stories were good.  The gameplay is usually easy to use and easy to just pick up and play even if it has been years since you last picked up the controller.  The visual are dated and in honesty look terrible but that doesn't matter, because you play the game because of a deep rooted love of the game and it's that love of the game that masks the graphically power (or lack of it) in an old game.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 Online

Obviously it would be difficult to keep many of today's current run of games online and running because running the servers to play the game costs the company money, with most games having a certain amount of time after release before the servers are cut off.  Evidently if hardly anyone is playing the game online then it makes sense financially to cut the servers and spend the costs elsewhere, either developing new games or adding new online features to current games of the moment.  But with cutting off the servers you leave the game to stand alone on it's single-player which is generally not good enough on it's own feet and fails to lift the game above the shoulders of all the other games around, generally condemning the game to videogame oblivion.

There are a couple of games that I think could make it into the videogame classics of the future; games like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout series but that is mainly because these games have no online.  Sure enough these games have downloadable add-ons but these are not essential when the games stand on their own feet without them.  Games like Call of Duty will gradually fade into the distance with every new game in the series pushing the older versions further away from our minds.

Red Dead Redemption

The video game industry is a strange place and anything can happen; maybe in 20 years time games like Call of Duty 4 and Red Dead Redemption will be viewed as classics with private firms/people paying for workable  servers so that a select few can still play them online and relieve the good old days when you first picked up the game.  Feeling that nostalgia fill you up in the same way it does today when you pick up a Mega Drive controller to play the original Sonic or when you pick up an N64 controller to play a round of Goldeneye.

I know it is an old and well overused phrase but it is true, because only time will tell.