Well, I thought that I’d talk about why older media is better than you might think. This was something I ended up thinking about in mid-late November last year when I started playing a two-decade old computer game called “Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy” (2003) and I was surprised at how timeless it was.
Whilst there are a few elements which are clearly from the early-mid 2000s – such as an optional “crop top” outfit, slightly retro graphics, the slightly weird default controls (“R” for “use” anyone?) and the slightly trickier old-school level design – the actual game itself is weirdly timeless. Part of this is probably to do with the sci-fi setting, but it’s a game which was clearly meant to be cool and fun to play, and it still is. You literally get to feel like a Jedi, swinging your lightsaber whilst dramatic music plays etc…
This is a screenshot from “Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy” (2003). Despite the “But where is the lower-back tattoo?” 2000s costume design, this game is more timeless than you might expect.
Ok, regular readers will probably be saying “Yes! We know that you like retro games!” or “I’ve deduced that you are a Millennial. How old were you when the game was released?“. To answer the latter question, I would have been fifteen when the game was originally released. But, although I played some “modern” games (on the PS2) back in 2003, this game wasn’t one of them. I played it for the very first time at the age of thirty-five.
Yet, even when I was about fourteen or fifteen, I was enjoying things that were as old then as this game is today. After discovering the wonderful world of second-hand 1980s splatterpunk horror novels (by Shaun Hutson, James Herbert etc…) when I was about thirteen, I used to read these older horror novels regularly for at least a few years.
Looking at them again a few years ago – the writing style in them is slightly more elaborate than modern novels (eg: longer sentences, larger vocabulary, slightly more formal tone), the setting feels a bit more “1980s” and there’s the occasional “politically incorrect” moment – but, on the whole, they have still aged fairly well. They’re meant to be thrilling, shocking, melodramatic and/or scary and this still comes through surprisingly well.
Likewise, I listened to a ton of older music – a fair amount of it from the 1980s – during the early-mid 2000s. Whether this was a local radio station which often played older music or, at the age of about thirteen or fourteen, discovering the heavy metal band Iron Maiden and a ton of other amazing classic metal music too.
One of the interesting things about back then is that people didn’t care as much about how old a piece of media was. Maybe it was the lack of modern social media, but older stuff – from the 1970s-90s – felt more “current”, in a way that older stuff from the 1990s-2000s doesn’t quite do these days.
Anyway, the point of this rambling article is that older media is often better than you might think because it was – usually – designed for people to enjoy it. It was often made to evoke emotions, to entertain, to thrill or delight or scare or whatever. And these qualities can often be more timeless than you might think. Especially if something is only maybe 10-40 years old.
Just like how popular film-makers, game designers and musicians today don’t make things with the intention that they will only be studied by 2040s scholars or historians, people in the 2000s or the 1980s or whenever just made films, novels, albums, games etc… because they were cool, interesting, meaningful, fun etc… Because ordinary people would enjoy them. And this “built for enjoyment” quality is more timeless than you might think.
Case in point, when I was about seventeen, I went through a phase of reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Sherlock Holmes” stories. Even at the time, some of these stories were over a century old. And, yes, the writing style is a bit old-fashioned by modern standards but, again, these weren’t stories that were meant to be studied by academics/historians. They were originally published in monthly magazines, in a similar way to episodes of a TV show. And a lot of this entertaining quality still shines through. The stories aren’t too long, they’re written in a relatively “matter of fact” way and each one contains a gripping mystery which makes you want to read more.
Again, if something is primarily made to be entertaining, then it’ll usually age better than you might expect.
—————-
Anyway, I hope that this was interesting