Living in the Future - A Videogame Tale

I have a flash drive in my house that has the entirety of the games library for the Super NES and the Game Boy/Game Boy Color. Not just localized games that had made it to American shores, either. I mean that I have the international libraries on their. The funny thing is, that while that would technically be enough games to nearly fill a warehouse in a physical sense, here they barely take up any space on the flash drive on their own. It's basically the treasure trove that a nine year old me had always dreamed existed, and now it's no big deal that I can summon it up on my PC from a little rectangle whenever I please.

Nine year old me would be impressed. I get the feeling that I should be more impressed by it more often than I am too.

It's not really anything new. Emulators have been around for years, hell, I've been putting them to good use since I entered undergrad. Using a virtual console to emulate a real system and bring it up has been around for a while. But it can be easy to just think its kind of cool and not really think about the fact that essentially hundreds of thousands of dollars of old entertainment are at someone's hands, immediately. We can, of course, also talk about the morality of using emulators, considering so many of these games can still be purchased. For my part, if any games I play can be purchased, I do buy them. But there are a ton of games that otherwise hadn't been available to US consumers and still aren't, and now are thanks to the use of emulation and to fan groups who translate them from their original languages, Japanese or otherwise.

It's amazing to think that games I loved as a child are so readily available if I chose to go through less than legitimate methods. It's impressive. What can be even more impressive, however, are the legitimate ones.

See, I also have my Nintendo 3DS beside me right now. Not only is it loaded down with 3DS games, but I have several games from the NES, SNES, and Gameboy libraries on it that I used to love. A nine year old me never would have imagined walking around with a SNES in their pocket. That would have been something that would have inspired wonder in that young a me.

But to me right now it's just a fact of life.

It's weird, because it seems like the dreams I had as a mini little gamer are, today, in many ways reality. Games and media used to be bulky things that took up space. Now we're able to strip them so much to just being the data that they are at their base that we can bring them up whenever we want.

Steam, the PC service, is a gaming service that has had a lot of criticism drawn its way, for many reasons, over the years. That being said, the service it provides is amazing in how it has streamlined the process of getting PC games out to people, as well as providing a platform that allows small developers a better chance to have their products seen and distributed. That's far from a professional opinion; I don't really make any claims to having too much of an idea of what I'm talking about when it comes to the video game industry. I'm a gamer and love games, but I'm not one of the big boys who knows all the details they're talking about. I'm just a fan, kind of shooting from what's on my mind at this point.

And the big part of it that's amazed right now is the realization of just how much the digitalization of media has streamlined experiencing it, both in finding old classics and playing with them and new ones. Really, there's a Penny Arcade strip from about five years back that summarizes how I feel.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/09/07

There's something amazing in how what seems like it would be fucking magic to us a decade ago is now just a reality right now. As we get older, we know it isn't magic of course. It's just the natural path of technological progress. But that doesn't change just how wondrous it actually is when you can put it in context.

What seems like a daydream or science fiction to us eventually becomes our science fact. That's something incredible in and of itself.

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The comic strip, of course, isn't mine but belongs to Penny Arcade.