Week 8: Video Games and Their Containers

While reading through the topic for this week's blog, I was stumped. Maybe I'm easy to fool, but there hasn't been many circumstances in which I have been easily able to point out recognizeble flaws between content and its container. The more I read blog posts this week - not just from this group, but the other blogs - the more I was disheartened. Honestly, I couldn't think of anything. 

Except for classic Playstation video games. 

In 1997, Sony Playstation released Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortext Strikes Back. This little fact may seem useless or silly to most, but it is a very important detail in my life. For Christmas that year, my parents splurged and bought my twin brother a Playstation along with this game. It was the only game he received, and would become the first of many. After opening presents, wishing everyone a Happy Christmas, and pigging out on chocolate, my family piled into my parent's room, waited while my Dad set up this fancy little machine, and spent our two weeks holiday playing this weird little game with an orange guy who wore no shirt. 

Almost twenty years later, it is still my favourite video game, and it is something my brother and I continue to enjoy. We've played it so much that, between the two of us, we can beat the game in less than five hours (sans getting all of those fancy crystals, which you need cheat codes to get).

There's a point here, I swear. 

In 1997, we had a small television. My memory isn't the greatest - especially asking a then-7-year-old to try and remember the size of a TV - but I would estimate the screen being no bigger than 19 inches. It was the late 90s, after all. I remember the picture being clear, smooth, and pretty easy to see.

Over Christmas 2015, my brother and I wanted to play something that used muscle memory more than ability, so we whipped out our favourite game. Now, my brother's love of video games has gotten worse - he owns multiple consoles and a TV to match. When he turned on Crash, I could barely recognize the game and had a hard time seeing the images. On the massive high-definition screen (maybe 60 inches), the characters were literally nothing but giant pixels. After messing with me a bit, he told me the PS4 allows him to smooth out old games to make them easier to see, but he wanted to see what I would say when I saw our beloved Crash. 

While contemporary video game designers and console manufacturers have taken into account that players will want to play their old games on new consoles, I don't think that in 1997, Naughty Dog Creations (one of the creators of Crash) would have anticipated their game living on and being played on such big and defined screens. 

This has been one of the few times that I have seen the flaws between content and their containers. Older video games weren't meant to be seen so clearly and so large, but here we are. Stretching these games to fit onto screens for which they were never intended points to some of the short-comings when they were being designed. Perhaps the creators never intended them to survive or remain this popular for so long; however, with the advent of newer generations of consoles, young-at-heart gamers can still enjoy their favourite games, perhaps with brighter and better images than when they played them twenty years ago.

I own a second-generation PS1, and a standard definition 21 inch television, so I never noticed if the pixels were too large, or the resolution was not quite perfect. But the tension between the content and the container is noticeable when the device it is played on is far more advance than when the content was created.