Written by Otaku Apologist
This is an unstructured rant to describe a personal sentiment. What I miss dearly from the games of my childhood and early teens are the stories which had real tragedy. Stories where the heroes arrive late to the scene, unable to save the innocent villagers or the princess, witnessing the final stage of the hero’s transformation into the villain, a ritual sacrifice. In many games I played, the heroes rarely won, and their victories were often costly, bittersweet.
In games like Diablo 2, you’re not a hero at all. You are an avenger. You’re not Superman, arriving at just the right time to stop the bullet mid-air. Instead, you almost always come to the scene moments too late, blood already on the floor. It’s like the stories were offering you a mop and a blunt “where the fuck were you, hurry up before shit gets any worse”.
Every single act in Diablo 2 was thematically the same. Stepping on the blood of rogues, you arrive after Andariel is summoned. Duriel delays you and the wanderer escapes you. The hell portal is opened. And while you’re too busy fighting Diablo in Chaos Sanctuary, Baal starts a war in Mount Arreat. And the World Stone? Yeah, that gets fucked too.
If we go back to Warcraft 3, the World Tree was destroyed by the Night Elves in a clever whisp trap. The Night Elves lost their immortality when the tree was lost. They made a huge personal sacrifice to destroy the great demon. That’s a powerful story, not even far-fetched from its real-life parallels.
Stories where heroes win decisively don’t offer the same resonance with our lived experience. Because they’re not real. Evil always comes back, it does so faster when we turn our backs on it. Just like debates we thought concluded get resurrected, often by charismatic speakers using phony arguments, pushing back social progress by decades.
We thought liberal democracy was the best system in the world, evidenced by our success. We thought everyone wanted our system. But pushing democracy in Afghanistan did nothing. Trying to democratize China via trade and cultural exchange did not democratize them. Same happened with Russia, who never adopted the liberal democratic model, despite seeing how great we thought it was. They were observing us from a different perspective and made their own conclusions.
I played a lot of war strategy games in my youth. Games like Starcraft, Warcraft 3, Populous: The Beginning, the Myth series. These stories resonated with me, filled with heroism and interesting villains, an emphasis on leadership and overcoming great obstacles with forward-thinking and sharp execution.
The stories dealt with the inevitability of conflict. There is no peaceful path to co-existence for the Protoss, the Terrans, or the Zerg in the first Starcraft game. They’re all too different to just sit down and settle their differences. Hell, they can’t even settle disputes within their own ranks, like mainstream Protoss and the Dark Templar. Some missions featured the Zerg having to massacre a rogue brood whose cerebrate had been killed. Meanwhile, the entire Terran campaign is of a civil war!
When we look at the world today, many stories in games made between 1990 and 2010 are still relevant. The world is full of evil and conflict, oppression and injustice. The demons and dragons that were sealed away generations prior are having their “stars aligned” moments. Storytellers of my generation had fathers and grandfathers who fought in horrible wars, they had this deep pool of experience to generate epiphanies from. Personally, both my grandfathers were war veterans.
I was inspired to become a writer by games, less by books. The medium took some strange leaps backward in the last few years, because I’m having to return to old games to experience good stories. Retro-gaming has become my hobby.
Unless a game is at least 5 years old, preferrably 10-20, I’m seldom interested. Because there’s almost never any interesting stories, when modern writers are avoiding complex themes that might offend somebody, or they’re writing rubbish riddled with mainstream media propaganda talking points. Or, they don’t want to depress their readers, so they force happy endings. But that’s not for you to decide as a writer. The story decides.
Populous: The Beginning, made by Bullfrog Productions, was one of my favorite games. The story there was simple, told via a couple of cinematics and text boxes. You’re the shaman of the smallest tribe in the solar system, fighting to amass followers and defeat powerful enemies. It’s kill or be killed. You can theoretically convert the entire enemy tribe to your side with preachers, but more often than not, you also needed warriors and fire warriors and a couple volcanoes to convince them! While the story was very bare-bones, it was resonant, harkening back to the medieval age of crusades. These days, we abhor violence as a means of advancing political aims. But reality is that these methods were used for centuries and will likely be used for centuries more after you and I are pushing daisies.
The Myth series were a unique strategy game franchise with three installments, originally made by Bungie. My favorite of the three was Myth 2: Soulblighter. I replayed this game countless times over the years, always finding it challenging. The story was interesting, told via multiple cinematics and diary entries, giving context to the world, the units, and every level. You were always fighting hundreds of enemies with just a handful of fragile units. One mistake and the game snowballed, not necessarily because your veteran dwarfs died to a ricochet molotov cocktail, which they certainly did often, but because units would get wounded so badly, you’d have to micro-manage them the rest of the level to avoid projectiles, leading to mess-ups in other unit management. And the entire time you’re stressing about your micro and formations, you’re living through this epic eternal war between Light and Dark.
In conclusion, what I want back is stories that don’t shy away from tragedy, stories that deal with real-life complexity. Eternal themes that are interesting to debate and discuss decades, even centuries later.
This post was inspired by the below video of Asmongold watching some nostalgia-fag’s rant. Check it out.
