The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast
The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, where we take a deep dive into geek culture, tech evolution, and the impact of the past on today’s digital world.
The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast
S2E15 - Zork to Zelda
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Do you remember pulling a spring-loaded plunger without being told what it did? Watching a goomba walk toward you and dying without being told why? Typing "go north" into a cursor because there was nothing else to type?
So do we. The best games taught you how to play them just by existing. No tutorials. No pop-ups. No onboarding flow. Pinball did it with physics. Zork did it with a parser. Mario did it with a question mark block. The machine showed you what it was. You figured out the rest.
This episode is about fifty years of that. Coin-op arcades to twelve million monthly subscribers. Quarters in a diner to modern open worlds that sell the absence of hand-holding as a feature. The hardware changed. The business model changed. The core loop stayed the same. Here is a world. Here are the rules. Figure it out.
If you ever mailed Activision a photograph of your Pitfall score, still picture a small white house west of an open field, or held a Galaga high score at a pizza parlour long enough that you'd drop in just to check no one had knocked you off, this one's for you. And if you got eaten by a Grue, we forgive you.
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Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential.
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Marc my first video game was a pinball machine that.
Marc:Doesn't surprise me i think that that tracks
Renee:So we had one in the laundry room at our house and it was a real one like it was a real mechanical like retro even for that time it was early 80s it was retro it was spring-loaded yeah.
Marc:Your dad probably fixed it up right i could see that
Renee:I think we traded a car for it it came It was bartered somehow. I don't somehow. OK, so it was spring loaded. It had a plunger. It had a metal ball. It had those flippers with the rubber bands on them. Right. And it felt like you were operating machinery. It was a it was badly magic carpet. I still look for them today. Everyone's small. I'll be on eBay being like, can I find one? But they're hard to maintain. Right. But the cool thing about it was it only went to like you see new ones. You see new like digital ones now. And the score goes up to the millions. And that must be fun to watch, but this one went up to 9,999 and then it flipped over to zero. It was like Y2K, right? It was just flip over to zero. So the real score wasn't how high it got. It was how many times you flipped it over. So you'd come out of the laundry room and my brother would say to me, what's your score? He'd be like, nine. He's like, nine. I'm like, nine. I flipped it nine times. That's how good I got at it, right? But I remember the first time I played it, And I, you know, I'm standing there and nobody told me what I was supposed to do. Nobody explained the rules, but nobody had to. You pulled back the plunger. You let it go. The ball goes in and you try to keep it in there as long as you can. And you have two flippers to pull it off, right? The machine made the rules obvious. The ball goes in. The flipper stopped the ball from leaving. You hit things to score. It was completely self-evident. No training required.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, if that kind of design is either, you know, brilliant, intuitive design, or maybe it's the universe's simplest possible game loop. For me, like, I remember pinball, sure, but I never played pinball that much. For me, it was the Atari 2600 and the game Pitfall. Pitfall.
Renee:You remember Pitfall.
Marc:Pitfall, Harry. I remember Pitfall. Yeah, I played that game for hours and hours. And it was a time when my uncle was living with us as well. And when my uncle played, he would like press the buttons and he'd be like jumping and skipping around with it, you know, as if to like get pitfall Harry to move a little bit, you know. You know, but again, evidence, right? It was evident, running, jumping, swinging on vines, avoiding crocodiles. Like there's a pit, don't go in the pit, you know, don't get eaten by the crocodiles. And okay so I gotta tell you this Activision had this thing that where if you hit a certain score You take a picture of the screen, you know, your TV screen, because you didn't have a monitor. It was a TV, right?
Renee:Right. It was a TV.
Marc:On channel two or channel three, right? You mail it in, and they'd send you a patch, a real patch. You know, the mail is like a little triangle or something. And I played and played until I hit the score. I took the picture, mailed it off, and there it is. My little patch, it showed up. A physical object for a thing I did on screen.
Renee:That that's how they drove engagement because back in the day he had no other way to do it right yeah well.
Marc:It was like 1983 or something yeah
Renee:Right but i wasn't good at it though like i like if the ball came straight down the middle which it often did because you know there there's no money to lose right the the thing that you would drop the corners in the the metal plate on the front it had a key in it you just open it and then there was just this wire where you just keep pushing it down and we just keep giving you credits and so you never had to put any money in it oh and then my dad was doing the electrical in the house at the time and when you would put in whenever he would do you put in an outlet like there's these these round things that you would yeah they would poke through the outlet and so we would put those in too occasionally they got stuck but usually they worked and, Actually, I could feel myself getting incrementally better every time, right? The flippers, my reaction with the flippers was better. I started figuring out based on where it hit, where the ball was going to go. I started leaning into it. I'm not going to say I didn't tilt a machine once or twice, but without a tutorial, without instructions, without anybody explaining how to put some weight behind it, I just got better. You just got better because you did it more and more and more.
Marc:Yeah, that's like that's the entire design philosophy of the arcade era. And, you know, one simple story, right? No tutorial, no manual. And your best lessons, right, is failure. That's the instruction.
Renee:And I think pinball's interesting as a starting point because it's technically it's not a video game, right? There's no display. There's no software. It's entirely physical and mechanical. But it contains every design principle that the video games would spend the next 50 years refining, right? We've got a clear objective, immediate feedback, escalating difficulty, the dopamine loop of, you know, a near-miss. I mean, the designers of Pong and Space Invaders grew up on pinball machines. That's not a coincidence. They were translating the same logic onto a screen.
Marc:Essentially. Yeah, the coin-op industry in the late 60s and early 70s you know, totally dominated by pinball. Bally, Williams, Gottlieb, you know, these companies were making all the money, just millions. And then Atari came along in 1972 with Pong, and, you know, they say, well, what if pinball, but on a screen? And now you can play against somebody else. And the industry totally shifted right then.
Renee:But the reason Pong landed, right, the reason it felt immediately intuitive to people who never touched a computer is because they spent their whole lives understanding a ball bouncing off a surface. The physics are fake, right? The underlying instinct is real, but the physics are fake. Atari didn't teach people a new skill. They gave people a screen to use and a skill they already had, which is why people loved Pong. Oh, plus you could put the English on it, right? Like you can make it bounce crazy if you just turned it really fast. It was fun. Pong was fun.
Marc:The best games don't require you to learn how to think. They translate thinking you already do into a new medium.
Renee:And every game since, every game in the 50 years between that pinball machine in the laundry room or wherever and whatever's running on your phone right now is some version of the same project. How do you take something a human brain already wants to do and build a world where doing it is possible and meaningful and crucially fun when it fails? when it fails.
Marc:Yeah, that's, you know, that's the winning strategy right there. So let's talk about, let's go back to 1972 here. You know, that was, you were alive, right? You were alive then.
Renee:Oh, stop it. Yeah, I was like four.
Marc:Okay, yeah. That was, it's a little, just a tiny bit before me. So most Americans had never touched a computer. Computers are the size of refrigerators, right? And they live in universities. They require punch cards. Go back and listen to the punch card episode. They output data on paper reels. Go listen to the printer. The printer. Nobody is having fun with these systems.
Renee:And then some engineers decided to put a ball on a screen and charge cores for it.
Marc:Yeah. Atari releases Pong. They got two paddles. Have you ever seen like, because it went through several revisions. And I remember my grandparents actually had like an OG hook it to the TV Pong system. And you know it was weird like u-shaped connectors that you plugged onto the screws you screw them down and yeah it was a little it was a little weird yeah it
Renee:Was a little beige like square and it had two knobs on it and it said pong on it.
Marc:Yeah it was good no cartridges no that's all it did Yeah. So two paddles, one ball, no narrative. There's no story to Pong, right? 1000% cultural impact. It's just huge impact. It's technically not even the first video game, though. That's a whole nerd. We go down and talk about space war and tennis and cathode ray tube amusement machine. Those are like, oh, gee, you know, underground stuff. But Pong is the moment when gaming enters to sort of public consciousness because Pong is in bars. Pong is in bowling alleys. Pong is accessible.
Renee:And here's the design insight that people miss about Pong. It was a two-player game. From day one, gaming was social. Not the lonely nerd in a basement stereotype that came later. That's what happened with the single shooter game. You were just a nerd with a headset on, right? But Pong, I can't play those. They make me sick. But Pong required another human being. It required a rival. You couldn't play it alone in any, seriously, have you ever tried? It's like playing the piano. Like one hand is trying to beat the other hand. Like you can't, you can't. Your brain doesn't work. Like, yeah, it's just, there's no meaningful way to do that.
Marc:Which is true of almost all the early arcade games, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Galaga. They had leaderboards, high scores, public competition, right? You would literally go to the arcade and the people around watching you. Gaming is performance, right? You put your initials up, you claimed territory in the arcade, triple A, you know, spell out whatever initials, you know, maximally annoyed the store owner. You put in, you know, all whatever words you wanted in there.
Renee:All order of bad names. Like, yeah, just somebody had to look at ASS on the screen for sure. I knew someone who had the Gallagher high score at a pizza place for three years. Three years. He'd stop in just to check that no one knocked him off. And if they had, he'd have stayed to fix that. Like, oh, I'll beat that. Right. And then you'd be like, all right, you can have it. I'm going to go home. He had a parasocial attachment to a peach pizza parlor arcade cabinet. And I don't think that was like unique to his ADD. I think a lot of people did that.
Marc:As sort of a community infrastructure. Right. But you know, what happens when they unplug the thing and then, you know,
Renee:There was a whole Seinfeld episode when George had the high score on Frogger. He didn't want to lose it, so they tried to figure out how to take it without unplugging it. It was a whole Seinfeld episode about that. But the thing that changed everything, I don't know. Zork. Zork changed everything. It holds a place in my cold heart.
Marc:Zork.
Renee:I loved that game. I loved it.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, when you say it changed everything, it's a different type of game, a different type of engagement, right? So for people that don't know, for the uninitiated, Zork is a text-based adventure game released in 1977. Originally developed at MIT, not CMU this time. No graphics, no music. I mean, it's 1977, so what do you expect? No controller. There's a cursor, and it says, you're standing in an open field west of a White House with a boarded front door. There's a small mailbox here.
Renee:Small mailbox here. Yeah. And that's it. That's the whole game, except it's not, because now you type, go north, or open the mailbox, or take the leaflet. Oh, by the way, when you did take the thing out of the mailbox and you opened it and you say, read it, it's the credits for everybody who wrote the game. And then you put it back in the mailbox because technically it's not your mail. And the game responds. The game is parsing your words. It has a vocabulary. It has a world model. It knows what's in every room and what you're carrying and whether the lantern you have is lit. Like if you walked into a dark room and your lantern wasn't lit, it would be like, you can't see anything. You're in a dark room. You're like, snap, light the lantern. Now what's in here.
Marc:Right? You better do it quick, right? Or else you know what happens. Zorkin, one of the most sophisticated natural language parsers of the era, it could handle multi-word commands, indirect objects, complex sequences, put the sword in the chest, then close it. It understood that. Now, that being said, if you shifted just a little too much left to right, You know, around those wording, not so good. Yeah, no. Yeah. But if you knew, you know, the nouns and verbs that worked, then you could string the nouns and verbs together pretty well. And that's in 1977 on hardware with 64K of memory.
Renee:And it had the grue.
Marc:Yeah, okay, the grue. So the grue is a creature that lives in darkness. You can't see it, you can't fight it. The only thing you know about it is that if you're in the dark, it will eat you. So hence, you better make sure that that lantern is lit. The game's message, if you enter an unlit area, it is pitch black. You're likely to be eaten by a grue.
Renee:Yeah, right? Not you might be. Not be careful. You're likely to be eaten by a guru that's a promise that's just a promise right and because you can't see it because it's never described like to me it was grendel your imagination does all the work the guru is whatever your brain decides is the most terrifying it's the first procedurally generated horror experience except the procedure is your own psychology, Yeah. It's really good. It's really good.
Marc:Technically, the Gru was also a clever resource management mechanism. The lantern fuel was limited. You had to budget light. The Gru turned darkness from an aesthetic into a systems threat.
Renee:It's an elegant design that made me afraid of the dark in different ways than I was before, which is a sentence I never thought I'd say about a game with no graphics.
Marc:Zork matters beyond those mechanics, though. It established the idea that a game could have a world, a whole place that you could explore, not just a level, with lore, a story, with internal consistency, with things that existed even when you weren't looking at them. The great underground empire wasn't just rooms on a map. It was a civilization with a history. You had to discover it as you explored the universe. with architecture, with the narrative, you know, you uncovered, you know, through that process.
Renee:So back in the day, they would print magazines, computer magazines, right? And every once in a while, you'd find one that had, the whole map to the underground empire and you'd buy that one and then you would laminate it so that you had it by the computer so you knew what room you were in because you knew you work you walk straight i'm in this room you turned left i'm in this room now you know that room has only two other rooms off of it so you're not going to go you're not going to go like left you're going to go right because you know that room goes somewhere like if you really it was a whole thing.
Marc:I had i used grid paper like graph paper yeah
Renee:Oh yeah no we like my dad went and bought the magazine so we had a full-on map. And you could win it or you could fail it. And losing didn't feel arbitrary. Losing felt logical. If you ran out of lantern oil and stumble in the dark, you get eaten. I mean, that's fair. It's not like they didn't tell you. That's the world's rules. It's the consequence. Zork taught a generation that games could have coherent internal logic and that the game wasn't out to cheat you. It's not like being in Vegas playing the slots where it's out to cheat you. No, it's just honest about its stakes.
Marc:Yeah. Sometimes I've played and I felt like it was, yeah, the random, you know, whatever random number generator was using was a little unfair. It wasn't as random as, you know, it should have been. But it, you know, it taught a generation to save obsessively. You know, you'd enter a new room, save, enter a new room, save.
Renee:Yes. Yes. And the floppy dance would be like, chum, chum, chum, chum.
Marc:Chum, chum, chum. yeah yeah because if you mess up in zoric you're deeply permanently messed up right there's no auto save no respawn you can you know render the game unwinnable basically you know if you could you carry a critical item into a situation that destroys it you know if you use the match you know without lighting the lantern you're toast you're right and you'll find out you know 30 minutes later when you needed that item and guess what it's gone
Renee:Which taught a generation about irreversibility. You know, it taught us about consequences that compound, about thinking three moves ahead. And for those of us who weren't good at chess, it was the only experience we were going to have doing that, right? Which is, and I'm one of them, which is either great cognitive training or the reason I have trust issues. You know, it's possibly both. But before we move on, this is the era of E.T. Let's talk about E.T. Or do you want to wait for the 80s, like, in-home console? I think because we can't we can't close this out without actually having to talk about that so you know what we'll talk about et because I think like as we're sitting here talking about these games at the same time though I remember my atari 800 which was my first computer that's running on eight mega of ram like that's and an external floppy the big floppy disks that that's where you would store things you didn't store it in like it had almost no working memory but even with almost no working memory there was things you could play i still played fogger i still had a joystick i could still do all that on that on that machine right so that it wasn't really like i would hate for everybody to think we were in the dark ages because we like it was the beginning but it wasn't necessarily the dark ages yeah i.
Marc:Mean the consoles yeah the console wars you know there's been many console wars right and you know you have this kind of even in the early days there was this multiple paths, arcade systems, arcade systems were arcade systems, and they were running on far better hardware and sound and all of that than you could afford to bring into your home. Then you had, you know, home computers, right, an Apple II, right, the original IBM PC, the TRS-80. I played Zork the first time on a TRS-80. And, you know, some of the other early text-based games as well. So the TRS-80, that was, you know, that was it. But I think, you know, all of the, all of those platforms had text-based systems and then consoles, right? Pong being an early example of a console, the Atari 2600, the Atari 800, what was Intellivision, Coleco?
Renee:Coleco.
Marc:Right. These are all pretty early kinds of systems. But yeah. So let's talk about how that collapsed. So by the mid 80s, the home console market had collapsed. So all of those that we had talked about, the Atari 2600, the Atari 800, whatever, all the different numbers they had, Coleco and television. The crash of 1983 was sort of catastrophic to the home game market. Too many games, too little quality control, consumer confidence just gone. The industry was basically declared dead. And if you remember some of these games, like, they were crap. Like, E.T.
Renee:Yeah, E.T. Okay, okay. Let's talk about it. All right. Okay. E.T. comes out, and it's a joint thing. And it's the first time, I think, everybody's thinking, oh, this new market of games. People are buying them like Great Pitfall. People are just buying this stuff. And it's like, let's do one. Because E.T. Hadn't come out yet. I think we think about E.T. as being like, always been there. No, there was a time when, like, that movie was just coming to the theater. Yes, and Spielberg decides, what a great thing. It'll be that and the game. Like, how amazing. And so here's all these designers at Atari. And there's a whole documentary about this if y'all want to go watch it. But they go to Atari and they say, we want you to create this game. They're like, okay, how much time do we have? They're like, six weeks. They're like, what? Like, yeah, six weeks. That's six weeks before it launches. We want to launch them together. Can you guys do it? And stupid Atari said, yeah. And so here they have one designer who's supposed to figure this out and a bunch of programs that are supposed to. And you know what? They just decided, you know, we're doing a lot of coke. We might be able to pull this off. Let's do it. Let's do it. We got the coke. We got the weed. We're going to do this. And they start on this journey where they develop this, what seemed like Zork. It was a world. It was a world, right? You were going into different rooms. You know, Elliot was doing different things. He was looking under rocks. Like, E.T. ran away. Elliot has to find him before the government finds him. The whole game's about that, right? Now, imagine up until this point, you're a guy on a vine, like flying over crocodiles. And it was completely linear, right?
Marc:Yeah. You know what E.T. reminds me of is that 2600 game Adventure. Did you ever play that one?
Renee:Yes. Yes. Yes.
Marc:It reminds me of that. You know, Adventure, you were just a little cursor and you had to like go through the maze and then pick up the sword or the arrow and, you know, you could walk back through the maze. it was sort of It was a crappy game, let's be honest. Well, right.
Renee:But it was a first-person kind of game, and you were given a world to kind of navigate, right? You had to explore. Yeah, you had to explore. And so, like, that was E.T., but they only had six weeks to do it. E.T. was pixelated and terrible. I mean, Elliot found him and gave him a potted plant or something, and his heart glowed red, and yay, everybody wins. It was terrible. It was, and it was universally panned. It was panned. Like everybody hated it. Warner Brothers had created so many of these things. They had them in a warehouse. And like the guy who created it was so ashamed of his work. He quit being a game developer and got into social work. He wanted to, like people who couldn't deal with life, he wanted to counsel them because he couldn't deal with his own life anymore. Like it was really a sad outcome for what, what if you ask game makers today the guys who design zelda go ask them today what was the thing that that brought you to what you want to do and they're like man et what a crazy game that was like you got to be elliot like you got to go do that that was crazy but then with that came the second greatest like like mythological story in the history of anything and it's that warner brothers was also so ashamed that they buried it in the desert of Albuquerque. Never to be seen again. And then one day, some guy spent 10 years of his life because it was a landfill. They buried it in a landfill. They didn't bury it in the landfill. They emptied the warehouse. The truck took it to that landfill in Albuquerque and dumped it. And so one guy spent 10 years of his life going through all the landfill records until he felt like he knew where it was. And he pretty much knew how far they would have to core to find it. And so before they turned that landfill into housing, they were about to level it down, pound it all in and put houses on it in Albuquerque. They decide, or not even Albuquerque.
Marc:It's like Tucson or something, right?
Renee:No, no. It's Alamogordo.
Marc:It's out that way.
Renee:Yeah, it's way out that way. And so they're ready to do this. And before they let in the contractors to start building the houses, they let them core and they core it and they get down like, I don't want to say like 200 feet. It was ridiculous. It was a really big coring operation. And they pull up what? Cartridges for et and they didn't just pull up one they pulled up like 10 000 of them and when they did alamogordo sold them on ebay and made over a hundred thousand dollars on them so the city made a ton of money people who loved the game i mean there were people standing all around waiting for that core to come up to see if they got it like it was i i have looked it up and when i was there i was in alamogordo i was just going around new mexico having a really good time And I said, we must stop at this street corner because that's where E.T. was buried. Like, it's a thing. It's a thing, right? It turned into this big, like, epic, like, urban tale. But at the end of the day, the people who worked at Warner Brothers just said, no, we just needed room in the warehouse. And that's where it ended up. I'm sorry, you guys, in retrospect, think it was something great. But at that time, we had 15,000 of them we couldn't get rid of. So we just buried them.
Marc:But that's why the market collapsed. The game was bad. But the economics around it is what really collapsed the market. Basically, people don't remember this, but there wasn't a game shop or a video game place. There was these toy stores and specialty retail and stuff. And these guys had to order from the distributor a whole ton of games. It didn't matter if they sold or not. and they got stuck with lots and lots of copies of these E.T. Games and they couldn't sell them and it forced some of these guys out of business they got mad they sent them back to the distributor didn't get any money back so that's why Warner Brothers got all this stuff, all this stock back and it kind of cratered selling of games inside of toy shops and the mall and stuff like that. It just Yeah, it ruined companies economically. But then, Nintendo. Talk about the entertainment system.
Renee:So they called it an entertainment system, not a game console. And they sold it with a robot. Oh, gosh, the robot. Because toy stores had stopped carrying the game consoles. Nintendo said, we're a toy company. Here's your toy. It comes with a robot and a gun. There's one way to do it, right?
Marc:The nes the nintendo entertainment system known as the famicom in japan launches in north america in 1985 with super mario brothers and here's the design philosophy embedded in you know world one dash one right if you know super mario brothers it's it's been analyzed by game designers for 40 years now. It teaches you everything you need to know without a single word of instruction.
Renee:Right. Mario appears on the screen moving right. The level's designed so the first thing you encounter is a question mark block just above Mario's head. It's floating there. It's suspicious. You will almost certainly try to hit it. And when you do, you get a mushroom and you grow. You get power. You understand, right? The entire control language of the game is communicated through environmental design before you've pressed a button intentionally.
Marc:I think that's Miyamoto's sort of design genius. Of course, you know, it's Japanese, right? Like, I think that these guys are really good at that kind of intuitive design. He said the first Goomba, the first enemy in World 1-1, was placed specifically to teach you that enemies exist and that contact is death. It walks directly into you if you stood still, you know, that's an intentional part of the design. You die early and you learn early and then you go on from there. And then, da-da-da-da, Sega. Sega arrives. Right? And so console wars, you know, kind of the real, when it really kind of kicked off, the console wars begin again. You know, Sega does what Nintendon't was the actual marketing slogan. Can you believe that? Yeah, I can. Yeah, Nintendon't. Yeah, it was the 80s. Which is historically one of the most aggressive corporate marketing campaigns ever run by a company with the hedgehog mascot. I think, like, it's got to be like that and the Burger Wars, right? You know, Pepsi.
Renee:Oh, that's got nasty, too.
Marc:Yeah, you know, Pepsi and Coke and Burger King versus McDonald's. Well, Sega versus Nintendon't.
Renee:Nintendon't. Sonic was explicitly designed to be cool. It was cool, which is a weird design brief. Design me cool. But they pulled it off. Fast attitude, finger wagging at the player if you stood still too long. The game was impatient with you. It had options about your gaming pace, and that was new. It had opinions about that stuff. Like, it was going to pick on you. I mean, Guitar Hero did it, too. But, like, this is way before then.
Marc:Right? Yeah. Is Crash Bandicoot Sega, is that a Sega? Didn't you and Sam like— No,
Renee:Crash was Atari.
Marc:Oh, okay. I think it wasn't, didn't Sam like Crash Bandicoot?
Renee:I still like Crash. I still play it. Crash Team Racing is still my favorite game.
Marc:There you go. Yeah, I remember one of you were a Crash fan. The 16-bit era was when gaming got its first real kind of identity crisis. Should games be about depth or spectacle? Nintendo said depth, RPGs, Zelda, story. Sega, on the other hand, said spectacle, speed, attitude, blast processing, which was a marketing term that meant, you know, nothing technically, but it sounds incredible. Blast, blast processing.
Renee:The Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past, is arguably the game that proved gaming could be an art before anyone was using that phrase. The dual world mechanic, light world, dark world, it was a narrative device, a structural device, a gameplay device simultaneously, right? The same map, inverted and corrupted. The same kingdom, sick. That's a metaphor. That's literature. That's a game using its own mechanics to communicate meaning. Yeah, Zelda kind of changed it, right? Zelda changed it.
Marc:Yeah, I never played the Zelda games and stuff. I was a PC gamer when I was that age, but I had people that played and stuff. Technically, A Link to the Past is one of the most sophisticated dungeon design philosophies of that period of time, that era. Each dungeon introduces a new item. That item was required to defeat the boss. It was also the key to secrets in every dungeon you'd already explored. The game was constantly rewarding re-engagement with past content via new tools.
Renee:And it made you feel smart, which, I mean, can we talk about this as one of the great underappreciated achievements of game design? The best games don't make you feel like a button presser. They make you feel like a genius. The puzzle clicks, the path opens, the boss falls, and for one second, you feel like you solved something. You feel clever. Feeling is design engineered it ain't you but it is a gift yeah.
Marc:Yeah i i so i sort of transitioned you know when i was a kid to pc rather than platforms and consoles and stuff and my dad and i built this 386 dx40 if you remember an intel 386 dx40 and so you know you think about dungeon design i played doom and you know you memorize the maps you know you go level to level you know you could jump from that 2d to 3d now you know in that corridor space and you could move through it so you know that was the kind of the beginning of that actual three-dimensional journey inside of the the pc space but on the console side you know
Renee:Wait let's talk about that for one second because i don't i don't think people realize that we used to build our own pcs for this stuff.
Marc:Oh yeah right yeah well they do now right i mean they
Renee:So yeah if you're a hardcore gamer you probably do go out and buy your own like really fast processors and install them into some you know chassis that cost you almost nothing or was some other thing you used or the lights.
Marc:They got the lights
Renee:Yeah yeah they do all that right um but like that anything you wanted to run like that you're like you really had to go down to radio shack and figure out how you were going to make this work or you ordered online or not online in a catalog you picked out what you needed you ordered it all together but you didn't go buy an alien laptop off of a you know off of someone and just be like it's gaming ready like you really paid a lot like you had to go build one which is why i didn't do that i actually used consoles like i used consoles we bought that stuff.
Marc:Yeah. Well, we, you know, in Southern California, there was these, it's probably like once a month or so, there was a, like a big giant computer parts, computer show. Yeah. And it was at the Pomona Fairgrounds and all the local computer shops would have a booth, you know, and you would go from booth to booth to booth looking at, you know, who's got the best price on this motherboard, who's got the best price on memory, who's got the best price on this processor. And then you'd pick them up and you'd Frankenstein together a PC. And we did that. We did that a lot. We built, you know, PCs for ourselves.
Renee:See what you guys missed. Yeah, you guys missed it. It was a big hobbyist thing back in the day, for sure.
Marc:The big hobbyist movement was huge. We ended up building PCs for police officers that were, you know, cops in my dad's office and stuff. Because they were stuck using typewriters, you know. And then all of a sudden you had a word processor you could use. But that's a story for another episode. So, but, you know, 1996, a new console era, right, arrives. the Nintendo 64 launches. Super Mario 64 ships as a pack-in title. That's a bundle that, you know, you get a game with. You know, it didn't always used to be that you would get a game with a new console.
Renee:No, it was not.
Marc:And every person who played it at launch describes the same experience with Super Mario 64. You walk around the courtyard outside Peach's Castle and they stop. You just stop and you look at it.
Renee:Because it was in 3D. Actual 3D, not an illusion of depth with perspective tricks, not, you know, Mode 7 fake 3D. Real three-dimensional space that you could orbit, that you could see from above and below and behind. I mean, it had mass. It existed. That's crazy. That's what 64-bit brought you. It was crazy.
Marc:Yeah, the camera problem is this sort of great unsolved design challenge of the 3D era. And Mario 64 was the first game to genuinely grapple with it on the console side. You know how to control your character and manage the camera. Two sort of cognitive functions simultaneously. Some people never really adapted to that. Some people found it just sort of instantly natural. You're swiveling your head and moving your eyes at the same time, right? The camera became its own kind of mini-game inside every 3D game for a decade now.
Renee:Yeah, well, Rene never quite mastered it. Anyway, Sony entered the room. So meanwhile, a few moments later, Sony enters PlayStation CDs instead of cartridges. That's crazy, right? Loading times that would be considered criminal today, they would. It would take forever to load. But you just didn't matter. Like, you'd kick it off, walk away, go to the bathroom, because you're going to sit down. But also came Final Fantasy VII.
Marc:Okay so final fantasy you know what always confused me about final fantasy is that none of them have anything to do with each other they're all yeah they're
Renee:All like yeah they're all separate.
Marc:Yeah yeah they're all they'll call them final fantasy but they're have nothing to do with each other and
Renee:There's so many of them it was never final.
Marc:I mean yeah right it was forever fantasy right final fantasy 7 though deserves its own episode at some point we should probably go into like one of the, you know, the whole deep dive on games, its own, you know, doctorate, the library of Congress designation. So it's a, it's a moment when games made people cry, not, Oh no, I did so bad. No, you know, not, I'm so frustrated. You know, I could throw this game out and cry, cry because a character died, cry because of a narrative loss, a real story, an emotional story you know cried the way you cried a movie cry because you were emotionally invested in a polygon with spiky hair it's very spiky and you know people were not prepared yeah
Renee:I don't think anyone was and the marketing didn't say warning this game will emotionally devastate you in a church it just said experience the epic adventure and we said okay i'm and then, And then the games were undeniably capable of producing genuine human grief, which is either the mark of extraordinary artistic achievement or proof that we're extremely susceptible to narrative manipulation via polygons and a midi score. You know, maybe both.
Marc:Probably both. I mean, you
Renee:Are pretty immersed in that, right? I didn't care if my Tamagotchi died, but, you know, I wasn't emotionally invested in that like it was me, right? That single person thing is really, yeah, it's interesting. We're being manipulated again by algorithms because we always are.
Marc:The PlayStation era also gives us the survival horror game as a genre. Resident Evil, Silent Hill, games that weaponized the medium itself against you, limited ammo, tank controls that made you slow and clumsy, cameras positioned to maximize dread, music manipulation, right? The horror came from the controls as much as the monsters, though.
Renee:Silent Hill specifically, it used the hardware limitations of the PlayStation as a design tool. The draw distance, like, Yeah, you can't draw it out very far, right? The console couldn't read far objects. So instead of pretending that that wasn't true, the game put the town in perpetual fog. The technical limitations became its literal aesthetic. The horror came from what you couldn't see, which is also, incidentally, not very good horror writing. I'm not going to say Stephen King's Everything He Ever Wrote in the Fog was bad, but probably wasn't as interesting.
Marc:I don't know. I think that's okay, right? I think that's good, you know, when you can't see everything. I think that's all right. But, you know, it is what it is. So, okay, consoles, we're talking about the 90s, you know, the late 90s. And then the internet happens to games. And things change all over again.
Renee:The early 2000s online gaming era was simultaneously the best and worst period in gaming culture. EverQuest, Ultima Online, World of Warcraft. You could play with strangers across the planet. You could build guilds. You could coordinate 40 people in real time to fight a dragon. Meanwhile, you couldn't manage a team of 40 people who were trying to develop anything, but you could figure out how to put them all on the internet to kill a dragon. I don't know. I don't see how that couldn't translate, but it never did. And you could also get called unspeakable things by a 13-year-old from Ohio who had no social accountability whatsoever.
Marc:Yeah. That happened to Elon. Man, Xbox. Oh, I know. Xbox Live is just sort of rife with really just...
Renee:Awful kids.
Marc:Atrocious kids, man. World of Warcraft at its peak had 12 million subscribers paying monthly fees. Wow. I know, a lot. 12 million. It had its own economy, real-world exchange rates between in-game gold and actual currency, which when the game first came out, you weren't supposed to be able to do. It had social structures that mirrored corporate hierarchy. Guild leadership required project management, conflict resolution, scheduling coordination. People put wow Guildmaster on their resume. It's like, I've seen that seriously.
Renee:This could be why I was not getting hired. I managed a handful of actual people. Maybe that was my problem. Maybe I needed a guild because then I could prove I could do big projects.
Marc:I think my dad still plays this game, but I don't know. I played it a little, and I just— Well,
Renee:Not if it's that complicated. Who wants to do that? And you know what? Those skills transferred. The people who ran high-level raid guilds in World of Warcraft were managing logistics, personnel, and strategy for dozens of people in real time. That's legitimately complex organizational leadership with the added benefit of dragon slaying. I mean, why is that not cool?
Marc:Yeah, I mean, I don't know. It lost the appeal when I saw how it just sort of sucked people in and people couldn't get out. Open worlds, right? World of Warcraft, it's open world, but it's not exactly open world in the same sense that something like Grand Theft Auto 3 was in 2001. It was the first time a mainstream game offered genuine systemic freedom. You don't follow this path, freedom, actual go anywhere, do anything, freedom. The city existed whether you were there or not. Cars drove, pedestrians walked, crime happened, because of course it's Grand Theft Auto. The world didn't care about you. You were just one agent inside the simulation.
Renee:And the moral panic that Grand Theft Auto generated, which was at the time spectacular, was largely missed the actual design innovation. The critics were focused on content. Now, to be fair, you did drag people out of a car, beat them and steal their car. I mean, it wasn't morally high-minded. The designers were building the first widely accessible sandbox simulation. They were teaching players that the systems have consequences. The world responds to your actions, that emergent behavior is interesting, and arguments about the game miss the argument that the game was actually making. I mean, they were upset about the violence, but it really was a step forward.
Marc:But in this era here, we have games like Elden Ring. They have no tutorials, no hand-holding, no explanation, and sell 40 million copies. Minecraft has no objective, no end state, no instruction, and becomes the best-selling game in history, where a game can be defined entirely by the absence of conventional game design.
Renee:Which brings us back to my laundry room in a metal ball, because the girl who stood in front of that pinball machine and figured out the rules without being told, that's the same instinct that pulled people into Zork, into Zelda, into Dark Souls. The medium kept saying, here's a system, figure it out. And we kept saying, yeah, and we still do it today. Download something from the app store. There's no manual. You just figure out how to get the Yeti to steal stuff off of a picnic basket. Like, yeah, we're still doing it today.
Marc:Fruit Ninja, that's like one of my, that's my favorite, totally intuitive, you know exactly how that game is supposed to work. You swipe your finger along and slice the fruit. Like, that's brilliant game design. I haven't played Fruit Ninja in 10 years. Me either, but like, I just saw that the other day on something. And I was like, oh man, that is like, that is the perfect game design. No instructions on that.
Renee:Can I just tell you the one I miss the most? Because I can't find it anywhere anymore. Once the PlayStation 4 was gone, so was SSX, which was a snowboarding game. Like, that was open world. That was, you know, you could ski anywhere down a hill. Like, I loved that game. And because I can't go back to versions on my new PlayStation, like, I can't play it anymore. I miss that. Like, there are games that I truly miss. Like, I wish I had them back. I wish I could do that.
Marc:I miss some of the, like, Simpsons Road Rage. I miss that one.
Renee:Oh, that was good, too. Yeah. Yeah, the phone Simpsons games aren't that great. And anyway, all right, gaming is 50 years old, roughly. In 50 years, we went from a blip on a radar screen to the largest entertainment industry on the planet. Bigger than movies. Bigger than music. And it did it by doing something no other medium quite does the same way. It made the audience responsible for the outcome.
Marc:Yeah. Some of these games, the AAA title games, can cost a billion bucks to make, you know? Yeah. Crazy.
Renee:It takes hundreds of people in a team.
Marc:To do it. About 10 years or something, yeah.
Renee:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Interactivity, though, it changes the relationship. When you watch a film, the narrative happens to you. When you read a book, the narrative unfolds for you. When you play a game, the narrative happens because of you. Or does it happen because of you? I always do all the little side quests. I try to stave off the main quest as long as I can. You know, you can be casual, your choices have weight, your failures have consequences, and that's a fundamentally different cognitive and emotional experience.
Renee:And the progression from Zork's text parser to Elden Ring's open world is the story of designers constantly expanding what your choices can mean. From go north or go south to jump or don't jump, to spare him or don't spare him. Oh, that's really, wow. I don't like making choices like that. Choices that span entire games, entire series, entire fictional lifetimes.
Marc:My so my daughter she loves knights of the old republic which is you know it's sort of a role playing you know thing based on star wars and you can choose to go dark side or light side and she she always has a hard time with the dark side because she's like she's like i don't want to i don't i don't hurt anybody i don't want to hurt anybody i feel bad about that yeah that's a good
Renee:Thing i'm glad she has a world compass.
Marc:Of course of course Me too. Yeah. The technology change, right? The design philosophies have evolved. The business model went from quarters in an arcade to live service games that are technically never finished now. But the core loop never changed. Here's a world. Here are the rules. Figure it out.
Renee:And maybe that's why gaming got under our skin in a way other media didn't. Not quite, right? Because... Failing at the game feels like failing at something real. The stakes are simulated, but the frustration is genuine. The victory is virtual, but the satisfaction is like real. You feel like you accomplished something. Your brain doesn't actually distinguish between the two. The emotion is real. And 50 years in, the medium figured out how to make that emotion do almost anything.
Marc:You can grieve for a pixelated character.
Renee:Make you afraid of the dark because of a creature you've never seen.
Marc:Yeah, make you coordinate 40 strangers to achieve a shared objective.
Renee:Make you stand in front of a machine in a diner, lose all your quarters and come back the next day anyway, because something in the system was waiting to be understood.
Marc:That's not really entertainment, right? That's an education mechanism. That's the longest, weirdest, most expensive curriculum ever designed.
Renee:And we paid for it by the quarter. Then $50, then $70, then monthly subscriptions. And we'll pay whatever comes next because at some point, a text on a screen said, you're standing in the field west of a White House. And we walked in.
Marc:I love Sark.
Renee:If the Gru ate you, we forgive you.
Marc:If you credit Aerith's, I think that's the name, death, you're not alone. See, I didn't know that one. We don't talk about it, but you're not alone.
Renee:And if oh and if you still hold a pizza parlor high score yeah.
Marc:Don't let anyone take it from you that's yours you earned it you've earned it Renee thank you now this is the Nostalgic Nerds podcast where the games that broke us turn out to have been building us all along
Renee:Thanks for tuning in subscribe follow share this with someone who has strong opinions about SNES versus Genesis or the PlayStation that's what I always played we'll be back next week loading a new cartridge. Marc, thanks. It was fun.
Marc:Thank you. And thanks to all our listeners for Overcast. We've got a ton of Overcast listeners now. So thank you very much.
Renee:Thanks, everybody. Thanks for tuning in.
