Alright, Brah! I spent my Saturday afternoon playing Final Fantasy VII on the original PlayStation. Not the remake with the fancy graphics and the real-time combat and the voice acting that makes every character sound like they are in a Christopher Nolan film. The 1997 original. The one where Cloud Strife looks like he was assembled from six triangles and a bad attitude. The one where the backgrounds are pre-rendered static images and the characters glide across them like action figures on a painted board. The one where the music is compressed MIDI that somehow sounds more emotional than entire orchestral scores.
And I had a better time than I have had with half the new games I have bought this year. Not because old games are “better.” Because they are different. And the difference matters more than most people realise.
The graphics paradox
Modern games look like reality. Not “realistic.” Reality. You can see individual pores on a character’s face. You can watch individual blades of grass bend in the wind. The lighting is calculated in real time by graphics cards that cost more than my first car. It is technically astonishing. It is also, strangely, less memorable.
When everything looks like a photograph, nothing stands out. Your brain registers it as “real” and moves on. But when Cloud Strife has polygon arms that look like hexagonal sausages and a face made of twelve pixels — your brain has to fill in the gaps. Your imagination does the heavy lifting. And the image your imagination creates is always more personal, more vivid, more yours than anything a render engine can produce. The original PS1 Final Fantasy VII looks different in every player’s memory because every player’s imagination filled in different details. The remake looks the same for everyone. Higher fidelity. Lower imagination.
The constraint that breeds creativity
Old games were built under brutal constraints. The original PlayStation had 2 megabytes of RAM. Two. Megs. My Switch 2 has more processing power than every console released before 2005 combined. But those constraints forced developers to be creative in ways that modern developers — drowning in processing power — rarely have to be.
The most iconic moment in Metal Gear Solid is a boss fight against a telepathic enemy named Psycho Mantis. At one point, he “reads your mind” — actually, he reads your memory card and comments on other Konami games you have saved. He tells you to put your controller in port 2 so he cannot “read your movements.” This is a fourth-wall-breaking masterpiece of game design. And it was only possible because Hideo Kojima was working within the PS1’s limitations and had to find a way to make a boss fight terrifying without being able to render a convincingly scary enemy. The constraint created the creativity. The creativity created the legend.
On my Game Boy Advance — the purple one, still working, still loved — games had even tighter constraints. No backlight on the original model. A screen the size of a biscuit. A processor slower than a modern calculator. And yet Pokémon Emerald and The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap and Metroid Fusion are still more compelling to me than half the open-world collectathons that dominate the Switch 2 store today. Because those GBA developers had to make every pixel count. Every sound effect. Every line of dialogue. When you have so little to work with, you cannot afford filler. Everything matters. And when everything matters, the player feels it.
The emulation generation
My retro emulation handheld — a tiny device loaded with every game from the Game Boy Color through to the PS2 — should, by all logic, make me play fewer original games. Why hook up the old grey PlayStation when the ROM loads in three seconds with save states and fast-forward? And yet, weirdly, it has done the opposite. The emulation handheld reminded me how good these games are. It made me want to go back to the original hardware — the click of the power button, the physical weight of the disc, the ritual of booting up a console that is older than some of my colleagues.
There is something about playing a game on its original hardware that an emulator cannot replicate. It is not just nostalgia. It is authenticity. When I play Gran Turismo 2 on the PS1 with the original DualShock controller — no analog sticks on my original grey controller, just the d-pad — I am playing the game as it was designed to be played. The input lag, the load times, the occasional frame rate drop — these are not bugs. They are part of the experience. They are the texture of the era. Removing them is not improving the game. It is sanitising it.
What we are really chasing
Here is my theory — and you can disagree, but hear me out. We do not play old games because they are better. We play old games because they remind us of who we were when we first played them. The 17-year-old who saved up for a PlayStation. The kid on the bus with the Game Boy Advance, grinding Pokémon levels by the light of passing street lamps. The version of yourself that had more free time, fewer responsibilities, and a brain that had not yet been colonised by notifications and deadlines and the constant low hum of being reachable 24/7.
Old games are time machines. Not literal ones — but close enough. They transport you to a version of yourself that is frozen in amber, preserved in 32-bit graphics and MIDI soundtracks. When I hear the Final Fantasy VII victory fanfare — duh-duh-duh-DUH, duh-duh-DUH-duh — I am not just remembering a game. I am remembering my bedroom in 1997. The poster on the wall. The smell of the CRT monitor after it had been on for six hours. The feeling of having nothing to do on a Saturday except play a game until my eyes hurt.
New games give us better graphics. Old games give us back parts of ourselves we forgot we had lost. That is not nostalgia. That is archaeology. And I will keep digging as long as the old consoles keep turning on. XAXAXA!