I had a mini movie night with two colleagues, one is around middle age like me, and the other in their twenties. We were going through some DVDs and Blurays, and Die Hard came up. We two older folks said we liked it but the younger said that they’d never seen it. Well obviously we had to watch it right then.
Afterward, the young colleague said they found the movie boring and unoriginal. Talking it over, we came to the conclusion that while Die Hard had done so much in fresh and interesting ways at the time, it had been so thoroughly copied from by so many other films that it offered little to an uninitiated modern audience, looking back.
Although I haven’t played it myself, to read someone saying that Ultima 4 is derivative and lacking in originality feels a lot like that experience with Die Hard. Additionally, I think that the real old games usually expect a level of imagination and willingness to put up with discomfort that even I sometimes find a little offputting in 2025, despite the fact that I grew up with many of those games and had no issues with them at the time. If I don’t remind myself of it, it can be easy to forget that old hardware wasn’t limited only in audio-visual power, but also storage size and processing power.
I still search through old games, but I’m looking for ideas that maybe didn’t work well or hit the market right the first time, but still deserve further consideration, especially in light of technological advantages that have happened in the intervening years.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
This becomes SO obvious when you look at “the great classics”. Citizen Kane is, by all modern standards, a pretty boring and uninspiring movie about a really lame topic.
But at the time, it was absolutely groundbreaking. It basically pioneered half a dozen techniques such as “letting foreground and background be in focus at the same time” and “nonlinear storytelling” (which of course was hugely telegraphed, because it was new) and “using a montage” with “Sound to make transitions”. He also used such amazing techniques such as “long takes” up to several minutes. He moved the camera around, not just taking a stage-view, but low and high angle shots, and then he added lighting to make things stand out.
Stuff like that is now SO basic that they might not even teach it in filmschool, simply because people are inundated with it from modern media. Orson Welles basically invented all of that though, and it was revolutionary. Now it’s just boring a movie about an asshole’s sled.