Iconic games from the 2000s are selling nostalgia to fans eager to relive the early Internet days.
SINGAPORE – For those who grew up as the internet entered the mainstream, their memories of that era are intertwined with a handful of iconic video games.
These moments are among the fondest memories of his primary school days. Mr Teo says: “I found my close friends in school through these games. We would always gather to share what we did with our characters.” “These games used to be such a big part of my life, and so many of them have faded away. Thinking about it today makes me realise how temporary all of this digital stuff can be.”MapleStory celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2023, while World Of Warcraft and Neopets are celebrating their 20th and 25th anniversaries, respectively, in 2024.MapleStory’s South Korean server celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2023.
Cashing in on this sentiment, developers have introduced classic game modes and re-releases aimed at recapturing the original magic. Despite the technical hurdles of rebuilding the 2000s game with modern code, the overwhelmingly positive reception from fans validated the team’s efforts, and led to the development of more experimental and nostalgia-driven modes.
Some games, like fantasy MMO RuneScape, see nostalgia as a way to begin anew. Old School RuneScape, which began as a re-creation of the 2007 version of the game, uses player polls to determine what kinds of new features should be introduced to the game. The Neopets team now sees its future in bringing back “relapsed” players by making it easier to recover dormant accounts.
“There was no social media or smartphones, so whatever your community was into felt like your whole world,” she says. But his continued interest in the game means he still attends gala dinners celebrating the fan community organised by MapleStory’s South-east Asia distributor, PlayPark. To experience the slower-paced, nostalgic charm of MapleStory in its “old school” form, Mr Gabriel Low plays the game on a private server. PHOTO: GABRIEL LOW
Mr Low, a Microsoft recruiter, adds: “Gaming was ‘slower’, but exploring the game world to discover hidden secrets was exciting. In 2008, Activision Blizzard intentionally recreated elements of World Of Warcraft’s “Corrupted Blood incident” as part of an in-game pandemic leading up to the release of a new expansion. PHOTO: ACTIVISION BLIZZARD
Old School RuneScape was first launched in 2013 as a re-creation of the game as it existed in 2007. PHOTO: JAGEX GAMES “I quickly ran out of food and died, dropping all but my top three most expensive items for the scammer to pick up. I was devastated, but I learnt an important lesson that day about blindly trusting internet strangers.”
“I think modern versions of the games I played give players a greater sense of accomplishment and achievement without investing that much time and effort,” adds the public relations agency co-founder. “No one knew what they were doing, so people built communities and shared discoveries – compared with today, when everything is just data-mined before release,” he says.
Mr Teo notes that modern MapleStory has more content that can be experienced alone. “Grinding has never been easier. You can solo the majority of bosses, compared with the past where you needed to recruit a party,” he says. “My level was usually lower than my friends’, so I often played the mage to heal them as we took on bosses. I had fun just hanging onto ropes or running for dear life when enemies got too close,” she says. In the early years of MapleStory, mages were the only player class capable of healing others.
“But when I revisited those older areas in MapleStory I used to hunt in as a kid, I feel nostalgic thinking about the sweat and tears that went into levelling up,” he says. In copyright law, video games are treated differently from books, music and other media. Strict restrictions, such as the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, lack the exemptions that allow archives and private groups to preserve video games in the same way.
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