<story><title>The Powerful Emotional Pull of Old Video Games (2014)</title><url>http://nautil.us/blog/the-powerful-emotional-pull-of-old-video-games</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>csense</author><text>Gaming site gog.com [1] [2] built a successful business around acquiring rights to game companies&amp;#x27; back catalogs and selling them online.  (Originally they were Good Old Games, but they&amp;#x27;ve now rebranded to simply &amp;quot;gog.com&amp;quot; and sell new games as well.)  HN readers may be interested in the technology (Dosbox) and gog.com&amp;#x27;s strong anti-DRM stance [3].&lt;p&gt;From a user&amp;#x27;s perspective, the work they&amp;#x27;ve done getting games to work on modern systems is alone worth the price of admission -- I must have spent hours [4] tweaking Dosbox configs to try to get my copy of Master of Magic to play music (the game directory that began with a 7-floppy installation in the mid-90s has been copied to every system I&amp;#x27;ve had since then).  Buying (another) copy of the game from GOG and getting a Dosbox config that Just Works, was well worth the modest price.&lt;p&gt;From the publisher&amp;#x27;s perspective I&amp;#x27;m sure it&amp;#x27;s a win as well -- I could easily believe they gave up on ever realizing any more income from that IP a decade before they were approached by GOG.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gog.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gog.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;GOG.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;GOG.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gog.com&amp;#x2F;support&amp;#x2F;website_help&amp;#x2F;what_is_gog_com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gog.com&amp;#x2F;support&amp;#x2F;website_help&amp;#x2F;what_is_gog_com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[4] The finickiness isn&amp;#x27;t unique to Dosbox, I remember having to fiddle with the in-game settings for a while running bare-metal on at least one &amp;#x27;90s era PC as well.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Powerful Emotional Pull of Old Video Games (2014)</title><url>http://nautil.us/blog/the-powerful-emotional-pull-of-old-video-games</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>carsongross</author><text>Two non-nostalgia aspects of old games stand out to me:&lt;p&gt;1) The gameplay is often much easier to pick up quickly without a crutch mode because there were fewer degrees of freedom.&lt;p&gt;2) The artistry was at times amazing.  Orson Wells said that &amp;quot;the enemy of art is the absence of limitations&amp;quot; and I think the 8-bit and 16-bit eras, in particular, demonstrated the truth of that maxim.</text></comment>