15 Years Back Games Weren’t All Violence

Years ago the environment was simply different. Video games are now powered by complicated engines and powered by GPU/CPU chips the creators of Pong may have never even dreamt of. Video games are now beautiful on an intricate and realistic level. Realism has reached such a point we can watch trailers of the newest Uncharted and Beyond: Two Souls and feel eerie from how life like the models are. All this has brought about a level of immersion that has made our time with games so much more enjoyable. But at what cost?

[TheEnigma313]

Games were pretty violent the graphics just weren't as good as now. MK, slaughthouse, Primal rage, Resident Evil. Games were pretty violent back then.

[MariaHelFutura]

They were the minority, not the majority. Alot of games (not all) I find have no depth beyond violence recently. I just try to always have a few less violent more fun driven games in my playlist.

[ape007]

Doom, Duke, Quake, turok, goldeneye etc...

[SilentNegotiator]

Mario stomped on turtles, Sonic fought a fatty, Duck Hunt had you attempt to shoot a dog (not because that was the goal....just because he always egged you on), DOOM had you shooting apart demons....

We just have more options now. Parent groups aren't as successful at silencing games, hardware helps bring more things into reality, new distribution methods allow ANY game to be released successfully, etc.

Furthermore, you can blame certain publishers for making sports and music games less popular; they milked them to death. cough, cough, Activision, cough.

[BoneIdle]

15 years ago there was plenty of violent games and plenty of puzzle, sport and adventure games too just like now.

[Linsolv]

All games are violent? I'm confused.

What is Fez? What is Thomas was Alone? What version of Minecraft are you playing that it's more violent than Mario Bros or Megaman? FTL? I'd give Cave Story the same Megaman pass. But I'm sorry, these are all pixelly games aren't they. I'd better get some better-looking ones.

What would you call Dear Esther? Any of the LEGO games? Any of the racing games? Is XCom significantly more violent than Xcom games of the 1980s? Farming Simulator, which apparently is secretly an economic powerhouse?

Are these games all violent and I'm missing the subtext?

But I'm sorry. Let's look at the early days of gaming, with ASCII graphics and verbal descriptions for a minute.

Rogue and its remakes are about as violent (if not as graphically representative) as Diablo 3 or Elder Scrolls. Certainly more violent than Dungeon Defenders, where death can almost be considered "knocking out" for all intents and purposes and the bodies go BOOF. Linley's Dungeon Crawl literally features caniballism in ASCII form.

Adventure games were often hilariously descriptive in their gore. No less descriptive than Far Cry 3 (and like Far Cry 3, their visuals were often above and beyond the actual real life visuals). The Elder Scrolls were tame for the time, and they've maintained their essential level of violence from the first game.

I think author and everyone else parroting his ideas are just not particularly imaginitive so they want to put on their rose colored glasses and forget that Megaman is about shooting blameless guards, and unlike Dishonored you can't choose to let them live. (Well maybe you can, I'm sure someone's done a pacifist run of Megaman, but EVERYONE does pacifist runs of Dishonored, because it's part of the alure of the game.)

[BanBrother]

I agree with you, but at the same time we have seen some games that are marketed for their violence.

Bulletstorm, The Darkness 2 and Dead Island come to mind. I played them all, enjoyed them as well. But I have noticed a lot of marketing, more so than last gen, has been aimed at the brutality.

I suppose it is because with better graphics, violence looks more genuine.

Doom for instance, that was quite violent back then. But nowadays you get to see that persons life-like face as they are brutally killed, instead of some 2 polygons dropping to the floor.

I'm all for violent video-games, but I think there are enough non-violent ones out there to satisfy your thirst. I do enjoy the occasional LBP or dare I say Banjo Nuts and Bolts.

[Linsolv]

Doom and Quake were both advertised for their bloodthirstiness. Let's not mention Daikatana (coded on the Quake 1 engine, then ported to Quake 2 because lol John Romero) whose advertising campaign was just as, if not MORE, crass as Bulletstorm's.

Duke Nukem (let's stop beating up DNF. It was what it was: a license grab; Pitchford was pretty direct before and after the release that they wanted the license and put out a game with as few changes to its existing code as they could get away with) was both violent AND hyper-sexed, and before last year it hadn't seen a release in almost 20 years.

The complaint seems to be from people who don't like the idea of the shooter genre so they're throwing a tantrum about it. Genres come and go, get over it.

[Hicken]

They weren't then, and they aren't now.

Let's move on, shall we?

[InTheLab]

Games have always been violent. The first game I played had you shooting fireballs and stomping heads of various creatures....and the game that came with it was about hunting ducks. That's 1985 we're talking about so of course games were violent 15 years ago.