I may never play Sonic on a SEGA again.

You can’t go back to your favorite games like you can a movie or a song. Even when Super Mario Kart shows up on the WiiU, the exact mechanics are lost in 1992. The original intended form is gone forever…

That does sound very dramatic, and original consoles from all eras still no doubt exist. But a song in 2019 can transport me right back to 1999. That exact recapitulation of memory is missing for my gaming self. What I’m holding doesn’t quite feel the same.

The real video game exists stuck in time.

This sentiment seems plausible to me because the original game was designed for the original platform. The TVs are different, the controllers are different, and the computers are certainly exponentially different. I would argue replication of a video gaming experience can’t be complete without accounting for all of the original parts.  

The technology of today doesn’t remember GameBoy. The technology of today has been built by the unstoppable wave of progress. So sure, technology builds off of other technology, and somewhere in your Switch exists the remnant of a GameBoy. In gaming, it seems like we don’t want to preserve the past. We strive to be making video games that are better than ones that came before. But what about all of the games we loved through our lives? Why move on from the greats? We make new games knowing they don’t have a chance of holding on. The platform is king. Technology is driving the constant evolution of interactions and story and experience. In lots of ways gaming experience has gotten so much better because of the push of technology. But a lot of excellent experiences have been left behind.