A recent thread on X by author JD Cowan kicked off a trip down gaming memory lane.
In particular, he addressed how AAA studios killed 2D games for a generation.
Related: FF7: The 1st Unfinished AAA Game?
JD is right. The fifth home video game console generation was when game devs swithced focus from making games that players wanted to play to making games that developers wanted to make.
The advent of new technology that allowed devs to build the digital sandboxes they’d long dreamed of, coupled with an unhealthy obsession with novelty, created the era of gaming that’s held up worse than any other.
What hits you over the head when you go back and play 2D sprite-based games is the level of craft that went into squeezing the most out of every limited color and not-quite-square pixel. Art is a work performed to a standard. You can acknowledge the limitations of NES, Genesis, and SNES games, but you can’t ignore that those same limitations forced developers to up their standards.
In hindsight, the self-delusion and gaslighting perpetrated by game devs and journos pushing the 3D craze was just insulting to everyone’s intelligence.
A major cause of Generation Y’s terminal nostalgia was growing up when every form of mainstream entertainment hit its zenith. Millennials and Zoomers might give some pushback, but if you were a kid during the third, and fourth console generations, you just took it for granted that every new installment of your favorite movie, TV, and game series would be better than the last. The release of each new Final Fantasy game, for example, justified the hype.
Yet the gravy train had to run out sometime. And eventually, Cultural Ground Zero came for 2D games.
Related: Ground Zero
Hard as it is to believe now, every game publisher and media outlet hailed as an unalloyed triumph the overnight transition from this:
To this:
Nor was that phenomenon exclusive to Final Fantasy. From about 1990 to 1995, every major studio squeezed higher performance out of its flagship series, despite having only two dimensions to work with.
It sounds counterintuitive, but having to work within limitations can help artists make better art. By the same token, removing limitations can lead to artistic sloth and vanity.
What the corpos in charge of the vidya industry around Ground Zero missed was that the change from 2D to 3D constituted switching from a cool medium to a hot medium.
Your senses interact with 2D games on a whole different level than what are in essence interactive 3D movies. So the latter can never provide the same experience as the former.
That’s how AAA studios killed 2D gaming.
Thankfully, 2D games have enjoyed something of a renaissance in the handheld and indie markets.
Still, I’m haunted by nagging thoughts of that other timeline in which Sega of Japan didn’t veto Tom Kalinske’s deal with Silicon Graphics, and gamers got a RISC chip-powered Sega Saturn.
A man can dream …
How do you think the video game industry would be different today if AAA hadn’t killed 2D gaming? Speak your mind in the comments.
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Its hard to find a 2d only graphics engine. Companies that write graphics engines write it for 3d and then you have to shoehorn it for 2d use, like render 3d boxes with 2d sprite textures, resulting in your 2d game not being able to run on a potato like it should, because its in fact a 3d game hiding it by not ever rotating the camera.
That’s an obstacle to be sure, but it also seems like an opportunity. If I had the coding chops, I’d come up with a dedicated 2D engine optimized for modern hardware.
I remember how going from Dark Forces to Jedi Knight was such a comedown. Dark Forces was a Doom-like with very bright, pleasing 2D graphics. Yeah, the 3D was kind of jacked, and good luck looking up or down very far. But it the different enemies looked different. Jedi Knight was blocky low-poly 3D. Every enemy was a couple of blocks with a texture stretched across it, and the palette was much more gray. But it won awards because of the lightsaber weapon, which was actually kind of fun to use. Back at that time (what was it, like 95?) swords in 3D games were janky and broken, but Jedi actually made it kind of fun. We just put up with the terrible graphics. But yeah, it’s weird to play games like Chrono Trigger, which are still beautiful pixel masterpieces. I still can’t stomach Final Fantasy 7 just because of the graphics. Sorry, fanboys.
What’s weird to me is switching from Destiny 2 to Final Fantasy 14. FFXIV is, what, seven or eight years old at this point? So is Destiny. But FFXIV has slowly gotten better with time, as they upgrade the lighting and textures, but it’s still not a high-res game. Meanwhile Destiny is slowly decaying. They can make up for old, blocky models with really good lighting, but the high res everything has delayed development and patch time by months or years. FFXIV can get a hotfix within hours, meanwhile Destiny 2 has an entire reddit devoted to Telesto, a gun that has broken the game repeatedly.
Dark Forces was great, one of my favorite Doom-like games. 3D, but with excellent gameplay, surprisingly sophisticated level design and objectives, and it nailed the feel of classic Star Wars. The hand-drawn graphics were a big part of that, as they retained the charm of 16-bit gaming, and avoiding the ugly, transitional polygons of late-90s 3D games.
I actually kind of like Jedi Knight despite how weird and clunky it is. The level design is completely bananas, it frequently feels like you have to break the game in order to progress. The devs just absolutely didn’t know what they were doing, but were really trying their hardest, and the result is this wild, cyclopean game with ridiculously huge environments you blast through at high speed, performing illogical puzzles and constantly falling to your death. It’s a unique vibe I haven’t experienced in any modern 3D game.
If you look at the technology and game library for the Sega Saturn, it’s clear that it was designed for 2D games first and foremost (which look gorgeous on it.) I suspect that this is one of the reasons that it failed in the west. I think that they were thinking of 3D like it was used in Yoshi’s Island, i.e. as a supplement to attractive 2D graphics and not as the main attraction. 3D games at the time had huge downsides, requiring some combination of low frame rates, low resolutions, lack of textures or short draw distances. When they all struggled to run Doom, you knew that it was too early to transition to 3D and especially too early to make 3D the default.
I think (and this part is just my own speculation) that the Saturn was designed to pander to 75% 2D games and 25% 3D games, sort of like a SNES where the Super FX chip could pull its weight to actually make things that looked sort of decent. However, shortly after release they were forced to pander (at least in marketing) to a 100% 3D audience. US commercials certainly featured 3D games almost exclusively; JP focused a lot on 3D too but showed some 2D games and showed a lot of anime cutscenes. I do wonder what would have become of things if Sega had managed to take the initiative in pushing 2D games. Stuff like Symphony of the Night shows that there was a market for it, and everyone likes how stuff like Street Fighter Alpha, Darkstalkers, Marvel Super Heroes or the King of Fighters games of the era looked. Some stuff like flight sims or FPS games obviously had to be 3D, but there was plenty of room for 2D in RPGs, shoot ’em ups, simulation games, platformers, etc.
Of course, we also had to deal with this on PC. I find the Gabriel Knight trilogy to be interesting since each was made within the fad of the era. The first one was done with hand drawn graphics making full use of super VGA cards. It still looks nice enough that my only complaint is about the resolution; I think it looks better than its recent 3D remake. The second is a FMV game. Maybe one of the few decent FMV games, though the gameplay suffers from the limitations on what they could shoot. It still looks okay, but is definitely less palatable than the first. The third is done in 3D and looks laughable.
Of course some games had to be pioneers to get to good looking 3D games down the road. Warcraft II still looks better than Warcraft III despite the 7 year gap, but Warcraft III still is able to do some things that Warcraft II can’t because of the change in format. The trouble wasn’t so much making 3D games in the 1994+ world, but it was making that the default after 1997 or so, despite most games working far better in 2D.
There are tons of great Saturn games that are 2D, but we got almost none of them because of the anti-2D policy. Also, if you notice, Japan doesn’t have the same anti-2D bias we do over here. They were still making, releasing, and buying 2D games while we missed out on most of them. Sony’s own Arc the Lad trilogy only got released over here because Working Designs managed to wring it out, and one of those three games is even 3D. That’s not even mentioning how tough it was to get games like Alundra released here in the first place.
I’m convinced that the 3D and HD worship of their respective generations was manufactured to sell a bill of goods, and since most of us were young, we fell for it. While 3D has allowed certain ideas and genres to flourish, it’s pretty clear that it was never a true “advancement” as far as gameplay goes. Cuphead never would have been possible in 3D, after all. One of the goals with Sonic Mania, the most popular game in the series since the Sega Genesis, was to make a 2D game that could have run on the Saturn and used all its advancements accordingly. The game corrects a mistake Sega made long ago and was rewarded for it.
Thankfully, younger gamers do not seem to care nearly as much as older gens do about mindlessly pushing tech. They just want fun games.
All great points, especially the last. Anyone who’s familiar with how Gen Alpha interacts with video games knows they don’t discriminate between 2D and 3D. Instead they’ll tool around in the latest Spider-Man on PS5, speed run the original Metroid, then pick up a handheld to make some progress in Drgaon Quest 11. It’s telling that the most recent generation doesn’t dismiss 2D games “because they’re old.” They just seek out and play quality.
What helps out Gen Alpha, and to a lesser extent the Zoomers, is that they never fell into the AAA trap. It was extremely important for Gen Y to remain “on the cutting edge.” By the time the Millennials really got into gaming “the cutting edge” wasn’t moving nearly as fast as it was for Gen Y, but by that point gaming had become obsessed with numbers like texture resolution, number of polygons, etc. So both generations flocked to AAA games, especially when defending their pick in the console wars. How many times did you see mega zoomed in screenshots passed around, with one side saying that a game on a certain console was “unplayable” due to very miniscule pixel distortion and without ever once mentioning the gameplay?
By the time we got to Zoomers there was very little difference between the consoles, especially when you ignore Nintendo. The game is probably going to be the same for all practical purposes on PS*, XBox whatever or PC. The arguments about graphics had reached a point where many things were literally undetectable by the human eye, and when you could see it it often involved fads like the use of ugly filters or bloom effects. Thus if you weren’t already swept up in the hype, there was really no reason to care. Add into the fact that Zoomers often had phone games as their baseline comparison, and you get a generation very receptive to non-3D indie games. Generation Alpha is even more like that, with the big difference being that Gen Z does seem to care about the age of something but Gen Alpha is of the mind that video games are video games.
Everybody pays lip service to the last 3 console generations effectively being reduced to prefab gaming PCs, but few consider the full implications.
The problem the industry had is that it sold every new idea or technique as revolutionary and game-changing and that every single person had to buy into it. That’s how you got awful 3D Contra and Castlevania games, sports games shedding their arcade identity for simulation pandering, and eventually movie games completely divorced from the purpose of skill-testing difficulty in exchange for cutscene carrot on a rope. Not everything needed to be changed, and yet everything was, and they also tried to justify every bit of it and tried to shame those that didn’t conform. They still do it today.
I missed the console wars. My family had an Atari 5200. Then, much later, I owned a Gameboy. Much later, I bought a PS2, mostly so I could play Kingdom Hearts. Much later, we got an XBox 360 Arcade, so we could play the Travellers Tales Lego games. In between, I played video games at other people’s houses, or played PC games. All in all, I can’t remember how much better 2D was than 3D, because I had my nose in a book and no TV in my bedroom.
What I notice, however, is the word “revolutionary.” I have no reason to doubt the folks upthread about how much worse “new and improved!” was compared to “tried and true.” (I played ChronoTrigger in a ROM emulator in college. It was in fact better than what I remember of shoulder-surfing folks playing FF7). It seemed pleasantly old-school at the time, but old-school is often another way of saying proven. The “revolutionary!” sales pitch stands on the shifting sands of progressive ideology, in which the past must always be discarded for the glorious future. Thus modernity eats our free time and leaves us worse off for it.
Novelty for novelty’s sake is the root of many sins in tech and the arts.
As a matter of moral theology, which vice out of the seven would you say drives that tendency?
Pride
The best 3D games of the 90s were Descent and Descent II. They eschewed the clunky games-trying-to-be-a-movie tendencies in favor of doubling down on tense, exciting arcade action with tight physics and gameplay. They took the possibilities of 3D gaming to their furthest with the six-degrees-of-freedom movement, which took some getting used to; but hey, if I could learn to play these games as a second-grader just fine, the learning curve is highly overrated. There was nothing like it on consoles (yes, there were PS1 ports, but they didn’t work well.) Unlike a lot of N64 and PS1 games, Descent I and II are still massive fun and play great today.
The original devs even made an excellent spiritual successor to Descent a few years ago with Overload, which I also highly recommend.
One of the biggest boons for 2D gaming in the 3D era was the Gameboy Advance getting all those great ports of SNES games. I mostly missed out on the SNES originals as my parents wouldn’t let me get a game console back then, but getting to experience classics like Super Mario World, A Link To The Past, and others on GBA made up for lost time. Oh yeah, and I’d take the Golden Sun games over Final Fantasy VII any day.
By that point 3D gaming had landed on its feet as the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube generation produced a lot of great games, but I never felt like my GBA was playing second-fiddle to the big three consoles.
I can’t imagine having to wait for the GBA to play those iconic classics. But perhaps delayed gratification is the best gratification.
Certainly! But being born in the late 80s, I think I’m a couple years younger than you so I wasn’t old enough during the SNES heyday to persuade my parents to get me one, heh.