Remember When

Nostalgia is overrated.

Don't get me wrong; I have a fondness for certain things I've experienced, and I've been around long enough to have a lot of that stuff lurking in my memory. I once had a job working alongside people who helped create the video game industry in the 1980s, so as someone who grew up in those same 80s, it was like rubbing shoulders with gods. Ready Player One was published, and we all read it. They read it because they (or their creations) were mentioned; I read it because it held dear many of my own favorite memories.

But nostalgia washes away a great many sins. We remember the good parts, and not so much the bad parts. I had first seen 2001: A Space Odyssey in a summer school project as a kid and was mesmerized; I watched it again a few years ago and was considerably less impressed.1 I played many games of Monopoly as a kid, but now I know what a terrible, anti-fun game it is.2 Take any other embodiment of culture–books, music, comedy, sports, whatever–and compare the reality of what it was with our glossed-over memories, and reality comes up short.

While writing this I had to think about what it is that was bugging me about it. A few more examples of things that left me with a bad taste:

• Marvel Rivals was released with a massive budget,3 clearly trying to shoehorn its way into the crowded team-based ability shooter space. Examined strictly on its game mechanics, to me it's kind of "meh" and has been plagued by numerous balance issues and frustrating (un-fun) gameplay mechanics. From an IP perspective, it has played fast and loose with the source material, especially considering within the Marvel universe some of those characters are vastly more powerful than the others. Adjustments had to be made to get a playable game, but maybe this rubber band has been stretched so far it has snapped. So this feels like a big-budget play to get me so thrilled to be playing as Spider-Man etc. that I'll happily empty my wallet for a special skin.
• Dr. Who has me worn out. I remember sitting in front of the telly watching first-run episodes starring Tom Baker on the BBC every Saturday night, so I've been familiar with the franchise for... a while. I slogged through the first couple of seasons of the reboot until Tennant took over and I settled in for the ride, but I got tired of chasing the series between streaming providers and, honestly, the constant revision of existing canon required to keep a 60-year-old series "fresh". I did not watch any of the spin-offs. New tie-ins seem again like an excuse to capitalize on any lingering affection I might have, when at this point the stories could have been generically transplanted into any other setting.

These are just two examples of many. The common theme that irks me was taking something old and beloved, repackaging it with something that felt either sub-standard or repetitive, and using that to extract money from me. To varying degrees, the source material didn't feel like it was respected; it was just a useful lever to make "another game" or "another TV show" or "another blockbuster movie". I could list dozens of examples of big budgets playing fast and loose with licensed material in order to get lots of money.

Considering this, I wondered if that meant all old things should be off-limits, and my money should only be spent on new things. And I came to the conclusion of not quite. Sometimes a remake can be good, when it is largely faithful to (and respectful of) the original material, and I think a decent (but imperfect) example is Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies. Less so the Hobbit movies, which were notably less faithful to the source material and invented entirely new subplots and character appearances, and interpolated the very end of the book into an entire three-hour movie on its own. Blech. But the LotR movies were fine.

And there are other things that I don't find inherently objectionable. There are lots of indie video games which are inspired by older video games, either in art style or game mechanics that aren't as common today. But the best ones here take something old and blend it with the new. As a form of entertainment, video games have come a long way since we had simple spaceships blasting rocks apart in outer space.4 For a small team to build something new that still respects the old feels right to me; for a large, well-funded game development project to do so seems lazy, and a big licensing tie-in feels like a crass money-grab.

Then again, most of the old things I mentioned were a bit nerdy, and I might just be cranky about somebody messing with "my stuff" when they could have made their own stuff. That would've been more interesting.