Just what makes a classic, anyway?

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Defining a Classic

A Classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read – Mark Twain (1900)

Videogames have existed in one form or another for about thirty years now, traversing several generations. Over that time more than a few games have become hallmarks in the medium, like Pac-Man, Mario Brothers, and the GTA series. Be that as it may, has anyone actually sat down and tried to figure out just what a classic is in this industry? Pundits will point to these games, and countless others and declare them a classic, but there could be so many different reasons why this is so. Is it because they helped to further advance a particular genre? Is it a classic based on technical achievement? How much does the passage of time factor into this? Did the game age like fine wine? Chances are that any game being deemed a classic probably meets several of these criteria.

What’s interesting, though, is just how quickly the marker can move around, potentially, for defining a classic in the videogame industry. Consoles generally have about a five-year cycle before a new generation comes out, and with it new standards are set in what these systems can do in terms of hardware performance. The same holds true for PC games, though there are no firmly set hardware cycles as compared to their living room-bound brethren. So, videogames continually have more and more that they can do on an aesthetic level, as well as things like physics, and to a lesser degree AI. On top of this, new genres continue to pop up that take games in completely unexplored directions.

That being said, one has to wonder how long games currently considered to be classics will remain so. As the years pass, and the bar raises higher and higher for what qualifies as the technical, and creative cream of the crop, today’s classics will be left more and more in the dust. When this pattern becomes more noticeable, will the only thing keeping these games in their “classic” standing be a strong dose of nostalgia? Perhaps, 20 or 30 years from now, the key factor in defining early classics in videogames will come from how much of an impact specific titles had in

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pushing the industry forward. For many, one of the main reasons something becomes a classic in its field is that it has managed to stand up to the test of time. However, due to the constant, accelerated evolution games, this becomes increasingly difficult. As things like visuals, physics, and approaches to gameplay continue to be innovated how can a high-quality game released today not look at least a little antiquated a decade from now?

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One possibility is that the medium is simply too new for clearly defined parameters to properly exist yet when trying to identify a classic. In literature, the debate has gone on for centuries as to just what a classic is. One of the main points that keep coming back holds age as one of the most important facets when declaring a work to be a classic. That in mind, there is still the question of how old a work of literature has to be in order to earn this mantle. Fifty years old? A century? More? While this does seem rather arbitrary, it also serves a purpose. If a piece of literature can still receive accolades for its entertaining, engaging, poignant content after 100 years has passed, then surely it deserves to be considered a classic.

Unfortunately the concept of the instant classic, or saying something is destined to be a classic tends to muddy this whole process. The problem with both of these is that it is near impossible to make these sorts of statements with absolute authority. Much of the time when people make these sorts of claims they can’t see the forest from the trees, and are so in love with this new creation that they want that euphoric feeling they had when they first experienced it to last forever. Maybe the work will indeed become a classic one day, and maybe it won’t. We don’t know, and only the passage of time will give us the answer.

We’ve been running a classic gaming section on this site since it first came online five years ago, and as it comes time for some upgrades to it like figuring out if it’s time to add N64, Saturn, and PlayStation games to the section, the question of what makes a game a classic has crossed my mind a number of times. There’s no doubt in my mind that age plays a part in it, but the more I think about it the clearer it becomes that due to the speed at which the medium evolves, what we consider to be a classic today may not be such in the future, as the bar responsible for dictating what a classic is continues to rise. Who knows. Maybe in 100 years from now, only a small handful of what we consider classic games today will still be so. In the unlikely event that the industry continued on this path of hyper evolution indefinitely it may become even more difficult to identify classics through the ages.

Mr. Nash

October 31, 2005

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