My 15-year-old, born in the summer of 2009, barely makes the GenZ cutoff. It’s a source of pride for him. He describes the up-and-coming Gen Alpha kids in the grades behind him as “scary” and “nearly feral.”
For my part, I like to constantly remind him how lucky he is to have a couple of no-nonsense members of GenX for his mom and dad, rather than some squishy Millennial or out-of-touch Boomer. Our little forgotten generation is the best.
We’re the sandwich generation that learned how technology works and how a computer goes together. We grew up with the music of the eighties (clearly the best). We tasted the forbidden fruit of edgy R-rated movies like Predator and Robocop.
And we had the BEST games. We were the first gamer generation, witnesses to the long line of progress from Pong to Space Invaders to Quake, Mario, and everything that came after.
But let’s take off the nostalgia-tinted glasses for a second. A lot of older games were… kinda terrible.
They were groundbreaking, sure. Maybe a core mechanic or two was addictive and polished. But times have changed, games have evolved, and for the most part, I’d much rather play a modern title than replay something from before the turn of the century.
Still, there are games on my all-time greats list that, despite their flaws, will always be memorable for me. So pity my poor GenZ kiddo – at some point, just to shut his dad up, he fell down a rabbit hole and started to play my top-ten list.
Gateway Drug
My son’s gaming tastes were already quirky. He isn’t a console player, like most of his friends; he’s a PC player all the way.
As a family, we play a lot of co-op games, especially Deep Rock Galactic. It wasn’t a great leap from his modern favorites like Deep Rock and Ultrakill to firing up older shooters.
One day, he picked up Doom on sale (the original, not the excellent reboots). At first, he struggled; the controls for Doom were super sluggish after Ultrakill, and the inability to aim “up” blew his mind. But he persevered, pushed through his early negative reaction, and found the magic that captured an earlier generation.
level – a glorious success! He’ll
chase par time on another run.
At the same time, he was able to articulate the game’s flaws quickly. It’s often unclear where to go; Doom’s level design, masterful for the time, is confusing by modern standards. Player tactical choices are limited, enemies appear out of nowhere, and the environments don’t feel like real places.
Immersive Sim Deep Dive
Around the same time – and I don’t remember the exact sequence – I steered my son toward Morrowind, which quickly became one of his favorites. I’ve written before about Bethesda’s fantastic blend of story and free exploration that the studio has evolved over the years, both in the Elder Scrolls and the rebooted Fallout games.
It took a while for my son to get into Morrowind, but after a few aborted attempts (and a shift to the OpenMW version, which makes the game more playable on modern machines), the magic got its hooks in him.
With a modern gamer’s sensibilities, he deconstructed the game’s mechanics in far more depth than I ever have. He watched tons of old YouTube videos on the lore and experimented with the best character builds, utterly breaking the game’s balance over his knee. He finished the game and then finished it again. He found all the funny little easter eggs and exploits (mud crab merchant, anyone?)
When he came to me asking for my advice on more games to play that might scratch the same itch, we ended up discussing immersive sims – one of my favorite genres, albeit one that has a broad and sometimes fuzzy definition.
First I showed him Cruelty Squad – a modern, very strange take on the immersive sim genre – to give him the idea. That led us to Deus Ex (and a lengthy discussion on the complex history of Ion Storm and the game’s development).
Deus Ex was a hard sell. It took him several restarts to find the rhythm of the game. I love the original Deus Ex, and it’s easily in my top five, but it is a flawed masterpiece in retrospect.
If you don’t stack all the boxes,
you’re not doing it right.
The shooting mechanics are rough; enemy AI is almost non-existent. The game is fragile and it’s possible to get in near-unwinnable soft-lock situations – something that happened to my son on his first run. Yet as with Morrowind, my son eventually found his footing, built his character in a way that fit his playstyle, and completed the game.
My son’s next immersive sim was the original System Shock, a game he now ranks as one of his favorites. So far, System Shock 2 hasn’t grabbed him, and though he’s picked up some modern titles in the genre like Dishonored and Prey when they went on sale, it’s older immersive sims and their special secret sauce that captured him the most.
Swimming in the RPG Pool
I’ve written extensively about our family D&D sessions. My son’s enjoyment of roleplaying helped him power through the quirky old-school opening moments of Morrowind and find the fun.
After Morrowind, he started looking for more old RPGs to try. Something (not me this time!) led him to Interplay’s original Fallout – a punishing, complex turn-based game even when it was launched in 1997. Yet I’m proud to say he also pushed through its unique challenges.
He was properly critical of the game’s rough edges, especially its sometimes clunky UI, but the freedom, clever storytelling, and excellent combat system were enough to sustain him to the end.
I began to realize my son was surpassing me as a gamer. I had struggled through completing all these titles when they launched, and each was a long, slow burn for me. By contrast, my kiddo was beelining efficiently to the end of each game once he understood the mechanics, with only minimal help from modern internet walkthroughs.
For a time we diverted back to the modern era with a family cooperative game of Baldur’s Gate 3. I should have expected what happened next. First, he completed a solo game of Baldur’s Gate 3 on his own (though this one took him a while – there’s no way to turn Larian’s masterpiece into a short game). Then he started asking me about a couple of my favorite games, Bioware’s original Baldur’s Gate titles.
We had a lot of discussions before he dived in, especially the merits of turn-based combat versus real-time with pause for RPGs. Coming off the high of Baldur’s Gate 3, he was skeptical of real-time with pause. He was even more skeptical of games built with the clunky Advanced D&D mechanics after so much experience with the smoother play of Fifth Edition D&D. (Explaining the concept of THAC0 to a GenZ kid will quickly make you realize how dumb it is.)
Recently, Beamdog’s Enhanced Editions went on sale, and my son snapped them up. His journey, playing a Gnome illusionist/thief in the rough early going of Baldur’s Gate 1, has only just begun – but he’s already started to see why the game is a classic.
Starting Baldur’s Gate 1 directly after Baldur’s Gate 3 highlights the older game’s flaws, and my son has enumerated them in detail. The story and companions in Baldur’s Gate 1 are thin, there are a ton of trash encounters and pointless wandering through empty maps, and there is a lot of worthless loot to sort through.
A mostly empty field and
worthless gnoll leavings.
Some enemies are unkillable at low levels with the wrong gear and you’ll wander into them completely unaware. It takes forever to make any progress. Level-ups in Advanced D&D are generally boring, with meaningful new abilities few and far between for most characters.
Still, he’s been able to look past those flaws to the heart of what made Baldur’s Gate 1 a great game – challenging combat encounters that tested your tactics, where positioning of your six-person group (along with a healthy dose of exploiting poor pathfinding) makes all the difference between a party wipe and a clean victory.
In an early fight, with all his characters still at level 1, he stumbled into four spiders in a confined area – the worst kind of encounter in an old Bioware RPG. I told him some fights might require him to level up first, but he pushed his party to the limits.
Eventually, with the right spells and a lucky roll or two, he found a way to beat it. He cheered after the last spider went down, as big as his cheers after a tough victory on a hard co-op Deep Rock Galactic mission. Baldur’s Gate 1, as flawed as it is by modern standards, still has great moments that engage him.
The Great Dissector
My son, with his analytical personality, loves to dissect games. He’s also picked up a touch of my passion for the classics. Like a pushy drug dealer, he’s constantly chattering about his latest favorite to his patient group of ninth-grade buddies, who are more into Hollow Knight and No Man’s Sky – games my son couldn’t care less about.
I sometimes feel like I’ve done him a disservice by pushing him toward my old favorites. Am I warping his tastes? Is he dismissive of modern design advances – no longer interested in better and more polished games? Does he genuinely like older games, or is his quest to complete games that his dad loves just some kind of Freudian competitive urge?
playthrough, where he exploited the
heck out of the magic system.
But when I watched him play Deus Ex and Fallout, it was clear he had a genuinely wonderful time. And I know more modern games will be there when he’s ready.
If he enjoyed Baldur’s Gate 3, someday he’ll check out Larian’s last game, Divinity: Original Sin II. If he liked the real-time with pause combat of the older titles, there’s Obsidian’s polished Pillars of Eternity, a modernized near-homage to Baldur’s Gate 1. When he’s in the mood for another immersive sim, Bioshock, Prey, and Dishonored are waiting in the wings.
I’m jealous. His collection is filled with great games he’s barely touched, a few clicks away in a growing Steam library. But it’s only a tinge of jealousy. I mostly feel enormous pride in his ability to sharply analyze mechanics and figure out what’s great about classic titles that are two decades old or more.
As a developer, seeing classic games through my son’s eyes is a treat. Chatting with him about titles we’ve both played lets me reminisce about my original playthroughs: what was great, what was awful, and what got better in the sequel.
It’s a great reminder of all the good times I had – and a fresh perspective on how far game design has come.
All the games mentioned are available on Steam. The excellent OpenMW mod (which makes Morrowind more playable on modern machines) can be found here. New Scree Games content appears regularly on Tuesdays.