What's old is new... and innovative
As the year draws to a close, it is clear that 2007 was a good year for innovation in videogames. Super Paper Mario and Crush both proved that a game can be fun if it challenges players to reconcile the difference between 3D and 2D game design. Portal opened gamers’ minds to a new style of puzzle that, despite thousands of years of human development, mankind has never been able to create until now. But despite all this, the game I’m most excited about at the end of the year is Super Mario Galaxy.
Now, I’m willing to admit that Super Mario Galaxy isn’t the most innovative game of the year. That title probably belongs to Portal. However, there is something that fascinates me about Mario’s latest outing: it is innovative because it takes ideas from an old videogame, and mixes them with ideas from a downright ancient videogame. This formula for innovation bears an uncanny resemblance to the formula for innovation that has dominated music culture for at least fifteen years.
Let me explain.
Trip-hop: God’s gift to the ’90s
I love trip-hop. I love Massive Attack, Tricky, Portishead, and even Sneaker Pimps. Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor may have been the only man in popular music to make it into the list of 100 Most Influential People in Time Magazine in the mid-late ’90s. But if you ask me? The fact that his mopey music was so popular is proof that life in the ’90s sucked. The ’90s is proof that there is a God, and he hates us. The only reason trip-hop exists is because God only wanted us to feel mostly abandoned, but not completely abandoned. There, I’ve said it.
A few years ago, I read that the “classic” definition of trip-hop is music that borrows elements of hip-hop and classic jazz, and marries them with current-day production values (which, in the ’90s, meant adding elements of techno). Granted, this definition was long before 100th Window, but that’s what I read, and I’m sticking to it. And besides, the music was fantastic. Even in the first decade of the 21st century, the more I delved into trip-hop, the more I loved it. The mere fact that “Teardrop,” from Mezzanine, is known now as “that amazing theme song from House,” even though the song is now almost ten years old, speaks signifficantly to the timeless quality of quality trip-hop.
Let’s assume for a moment that most modern media obsessively follows trends. Let’s further assume that trends change every year or so. That means most modern media becomes obsolete within a year. If Massive Attack uses modern production techniques to craft music that speaks to people ten years after the fact, it’s clear that they’re a cut above the rest. And as I stated earlier, the way they do that is simple: they mix elements of hip-hop, popular in the ’80s, with jazz, which was popular at the dawn of pop music as a medium.
Super Mario Galaxy: 1985 meets 1962
In case you haven’t already figured out where I’m going with this, let me spell it out: Super Mario Galaxy is a combination of 1985’s Super Mario Bros. and a game widely considered the first “proper” computer game: 1962’s Spacewar.
Yes, that’s right, videogames are that old. When I told my dad about how Spacewar was written for a PDP-1 computer, he told me that when he was in college, in the late ’60s, he used a PDP-3, and that machine, for him, is the definition of “old-school.”
A brieft history lesson
For those who don’t know what Spacewar is, let me spell it out. You’ve played Asteroids, right? Now imagine the same game, where you fly a triangular vector object through space. Except there aren’t any asteroids. Instead, your only enemy is another trianular vector object, controlled by your human opponent. And there’s a star in the middle of the screen, complete with gravitational pull. If you get too close, you’ll crash into it. If you get just close enough, you’ll slingshot around it, and gain a tactical advantage.
Not getting it yet? If you Google up “Spacewar Emulator,” you’ll probably find a link to a Java applet of the original game
Ironically, this “first computer game” was deemd “too complicated” when Nolan Bushnell used it as the main ispiration for Atari’s first game, Computer Space. Newtonian physics, despite being the cornerstone of the first computer game, never caught on in popular videogames.
Arguably, that is, not until now.
Super Mario Bros. meets Space War
Super Mario Galaxy may be hyped as the true sequel to Super Mario 64, but in the big picture, I don’t think that description captures the game fairly enough. I feel that Super Mario Galaxy really is a mixture of everyone’s favorite platform jumper from 1985, and the granddaddy of all videogames — just like trip-hop is a mixture of music from 1985, and the granddaddy of all popular music.
Granted, Mario isn’t going to slingshot around a planet or a star in quite the same way as players in Spacewar, but the mere idea that large objects create their own gravitational field has been implemented in so few videogames, this ancient idea has become new all over again. Combine these two ancient elements with technology that defines our current day and age, and you’ve got something that will continue to speak to people even after today’s trends fade into obscurity.
Just like trip-hop.