What do we actually really miss and what are we lying to ourselves about?
Let’s not pretend everything used to be better. It didn’t. Some things were just what we had at the time, and we either tolerated them or convinced ourselves they were good because we didn’t know any different. A lot of the features we now talk about with wide-eyed nostalgia were barely functioning workarounds. They weren’t charming. They were just necessary.
You didn’t love tank controls. You wanted to play Resident Evil, and that’s what it came with. You didn’t enjoy blowing into cartridges. You did it because someone told you to, and it felt like you were fixing something. Demo discs weren’t magical. They were all we had, and most of them barely worked.
“Classic” controls were barely functional
Tank controls didn’t make horror games scarier. They made them harder to play. The only reason they existed was because fixed camera angles in early 3D games couldn’t handle movement in any sensible way. It wasn’t a clever design choice. It was a compromise. If you played games in that era, you didn’t enjoy how they controlled. You just accepted it. There weren’t other options.
The same goes for early shooters with rigid inputs and no settings. We didn’t talk about sensitivity curves or rebindable controls because nobody expected games to give you that level of access. It wasn’t better. It was just what we were stuck with.
Save systems punished you for existing
Memory cards, password systems, and single save slots. They weren’t quaint. They were a hassle. You had to buy extra hardware to hold your saves, and if it broke or got unplugged mid-load you were done. That’s not old-school charm. That’s design that didn’t value your time.
Modern saves are better. Quicksaves. Cloud backups. Auto-saves that don’t ruin progress if you forget to hit start. That’s not handholding. That’s respecting the fact that you might have a life to live outside the game.
Demo discs were scraps, not bonuses
You’d get a disc with a magazine and feel like you were getting something special. Then you’d boot it up and find one short level of a game you didn’t care about and a few trailers for stuff that never came out. Most of the time the disc was already scratched, and the menus barely worked. But we played them because we didn’t have alternatives.
Now we talk about them like they were some generous offering. They weren’t. They were marketing tools we were stupid enough to pay for. We didn’t love them. We just had no choice.
Blowing into cartridges achieved nothing
This didn’t work. It never did. The issue was dust or loose connections, and blowing on the pins added moisture that sometimes made things worse. But everyone did it, so it became a ritual. You felt like you were doing something helpful. That doesn’t mean you were.
The only reason this is remembered fondly is because it made you feel in control of something that clearly wasn’t working. It wasn’t effective. It wasn’t clever. But it stuck, so we pretend it was part of the fun.
Lack of tutorials wasn’t some clever design philosophy
Most older games didn’t explain themselves because they assumed you had the manual. If you didn’t, tough. You figured it out by trial and error. That wasn’t good design. That was an oversight. Now we call it “exploration” or “freedom.” It was just confusing. You weren’t being treated like a smart player. You were being left to guess what button opened the inventory.
Modern games take five minutes to onboard you and people act like it’s an insult. You don’t lose IQ points by being told how to block.
We don’t miss the features. We miss the feeling.
What you’re nostalgic for is a time when games surprised you. When you didn’t know what was coming next. When you had fewer options, so you gave more time to each one. That’s fair. But don’t pretend the systems were better. They weren’t. They were clunky, limited, and often unfair. We just made do.
You can appreciate what old games meant to you without pretending they were perfect.
What’s one thing from the “good old days” you secretly hated but pretend to love?
