Postmodernism in Video Games

Postmodernism has hit video games faster than any media. I can think as far back as 1996 with Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars having the secret where you can become (temporarily) the 8-Bit Mario or the encounters with characters like Samus and Link. Now, it's unavoidable. No More Heroes embodied this, making a game with none stop game refrences and acknowledging to the player that what he is playing is a game, and we gamers eat this up.

It's not a bad thing by any means. Postmodernism has been embraced all other forms from Jean-Luc Godard's famous first film Breathless to Frank Zappa's note by note quotations of Igor Stravinsky in "Absolutly Free" to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. These works all make you very aware of the creation of the medium itself and that it exists, that it's not just magic but that there are human beings behinds those works. The refrencing didn't really start until the mediums have fully developed.

But with video games, you already saw Nintendo talk about their past within a decade after their NES. The Gameboy Camera had tons of preloaded images of Nintendo's systems, ROB, and characters from other games. Super Smash Bros. conciously makes you aware that you're getting video game characters and fighting them in an imaginary setting. And it's effective.

These refrences to games past are nothing but gold for these times. That's why they're is such a growing market for people who grew up with games in the eighties, because all these games are coming back in one form or an other. Take New Super Mario Bros. for example. It doesn't bring anything new to the table. It's the same loveable over-weight Italian stereotype stomping on Koopas and Goombas. But it's fun, easy, and the first time a Mario game felt this was since Super Mario World. But most importantly, it reminds people of the past.

No matter what, people look at their youth with rose-tinted glasses. Cartoons are a perfect example. Each generation will argue that the cartoons they watched growing up were better than the other generations. If you really do watch these cartoons, you'll see how they don't age well and probably were never that good. I can't count how many times this has happened to me when I got older. It turned the Garfield cartoon was never that good...

Now all these companies are capitalizing on our nostalgia. Futurists say that in these though economic times people want to buy things that remind them of happier times. The era Reagonomics that was one of the factors leading us to the financial mess we're in now had children that are full grown now and eat up anything that reminds them of their childhood. I can't count how many times movies like The Goonies, Sixteen Candles, and Night of the Comet get rented from the video store I work at.

Finally, this all came to an apex when Mega Man 9, a platformer done in the style of it's NES predeccesors, was released back in September on every new console for a budget price of ten bucks. Now ten bucks for a full fledged Mega Man game is an amazing deal.

It turned out the game was no gimmick by any means and ranks among the best in the series. It seems like the trend of all things eighties won't be going away anytimes soon. And as annoying as it is to hear something like A-Ha on the radio, you can't help but admire and love want knowledge of the past is doing to video games. Hopefully, when whatever next generation of video game developers mature, they take what they've learn from the past and use if for their medium.