The Shortsighted Charm of Our Whip-Cracking, Web-Swinging Heroes

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the first game that my once top-of-the-line computer can’t run. Not on performance mode, not on the lowest settings, not at a stuttering 15 frames per second. The game’s demands are apparently too great — the fronds of its jungle palms too multifaceted, the pores on its Hollywood Nazi faces too multitudinous — to display with my aging graphics card.

Video games are technological objects. Dedicated gamers tune into flashy news conferences and read the enthusiast tech blogs to learn anything we can about the newest console, the most powerful graphics card, the next sophisticated upgrade to the Unreal engine. We get excited about real-time rendering and ray-tracing and pixel depth.

Yet all of this fancy technology is often tuned toward the purpose of re-creating the past. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is meant to evoke images captured by a movie camera from the early 1980s; a small strip of celluloid, exposed to light and shadow, is simulated with obsessive granularity and rendered by a powerful computer. It’s a lot like putting an electric engine in a Model T.

The gaming industry has always wanted to turn beloved franchises into playable experiences. It’s easier to build from the shoulders of giants than it is to create something from scratch, and established franchises have ready-made audiences. No matter how much we like to think we crave art that’s new and unique, we often flock to the old and familiar, the creative experiences that bring us back to our childhoods when everything felt simpler.

A key selling point to games like RoboCop: Rogue City, Star Wars Outlaws and Alien: Isolation is their ability to plausibly rekindle the experience of watching the films that made these franchises household names.

There’s the graphite gray sheen of RoboCop’s helmet and the way it picks up the light of a Detroit bodega’s neon sign. There’s Alien’s chunky computer screens, splashed with xenomorph slime and android milk. And of course, there are the glowing red streaks of a “Star Wars” laser blaster. We come to these franchises as sites of memory where we get to feel lost in adolescent wonder, once again in awe of something magical.

But the newest thing about these games is the hardware required to run them. Their fealty to classic aesthetics allows them to coast on what we expect to see, not on what we might be surprised by. They elicit the wonder of their source material without necessarily doing anything wondrous on their own.

Even smaller-scale indie games can tap into nostalgic desires. Audience affection for early Nintendo games means there is a crowd eager to play Zelda-likes such as Tunic and Death’s Door. The blocky, polygonal look of early PlayStation games exploded into the indie mainstream last year with critical successes like Mouthwashing and Crow Country.

Nostalgia is the act of yearning for something, some hard-to-pin-down feeling, from a previous point in time that has been lost, and perhaps was never here to begin with.

As children, many of us would study the box art of our most anticipated games, gazing at the lovingly depicted images of heroes triumphing over their adversaries. We would then pop the cartridge into our Atari or our Nintendo (or our Nintendo 64, or our PlayStation 2) only to experience a sharp disconnect.

Our beautifully detailed heroes — our Double Dragons, our fraternal Contras — were flattened and minimized to a handful of pixels. Their textured human faces, complete with war paint and a five-o’-clock shadow, were mercilessly rendered into a few similarly shaded squares.

Back then we desired to see those figures come to the exact form of life in our imaginations. We wanted to play that version of those games, and we still do. The version that lives in our heads, in perfect verisimilitude.

In looking so longingly at the past, however, we neglect our future. Our visual technology is at the point where it can depict almost anything. Why limit ourselves to ancient desires?

In the big-budget space, burdened by ballooning production costs, experimentation is limited to a list of prepackaged visual aesthetics: military first-person shooter, science fiction action-adventure, cute and cartoony platformer, racing simulator and so on.

But we can celebrate the indie games that have made the refreshing choice of exploring visual possibilities beyond what’s expected. Memory of a Broken Dimension uses glitch textures laid on top of pitch-black spaces as a way to light the contours of the world’s abstract shapes. Mundaun does an incredible job evoking folk horror by building its 3-D dioramic worlds from sketchy, hand-drawn artwork.

As consumers, we are often pulled to nostalgia. It’s undeniably satisfying to feel like we’re chopping Nazi necks as Indy, like we’re swinging through a skyscraper-strewn metropolis like Spiderman, or pulverizing goons like Batman.

We want to see our childhood dreams inscribed onto these digital objects. It’s all that we as 10-, 15- and 20-year-olds could have ever wanted. The industry’s relationship with the past makes it seem like we’ll never have to grow up. But perhaps it’s time we did.