Triumph In Blog

Good Nostalgia vs. Bad Nostalgia: What’s the difference?

I have unfortunately had quite a few thoughts about some of the video game news coming out of Gamescom’s 2025 “Future Games Fest.” The first thought is the easiest: why couldn’t they come up with a snappier name than that? It sounds so brutal, and ineloquent. “E3,” that was just fun to say, it was easy marketing. What happened there? But the second and third thoughts actually have a little more meat on their bones: one of them I will write about later, because I have a deeper urge to ramble a little more about it. The other will be the subject of this post, which I’m optimistic will be a little more brief than usual.

The basic premise is this: video games rely on nostalgia to make a lot of their money. Everyone and everything does–nostalgia is sort of the default mode of advertising. It’s an incredibly evocative and powerful emotion that everyone feels, and it’s really easy to conjure up. The ease with which you can convince people to care about something because it reminds them of their youth is frightening to consider, and it’s no surprise that sentimentalism is the primary weapon of cheats, liars, manipulators, and fascists the world over. Video game publishers would fall under “all of the above” compared to those standards, and something huge like Gamescom is the perfect observation point for their worst behaviors. These bloated, horrible announcement ceremonies are where the big boys come to test out their newest psychological warfare techniques, laundering huge sums of money back and forth to generate speculative investments in what kinds of advertisements seem to yield the most “hype,” in lieu of products actually existing yet.

How does nostalgia play into this? How exactly is it leveraged against us, and is it always a complete falsehood? It’s true that nostalgia is often used against us to manipulate us into paying for drivel, but surely it can’t be that our most powerful feelings are always misplaced, yes? Let’s look at the two examples that caught my eye in this regard, and have a little dialectical boxing match for the two of them.

To avoid allegations of baseless cynicism, let’s start with the antithesis. I have asserted that I think nostalgia is typically used as a weapon, but not all of our pathologies are such dangerous things. It’s very possible to look back on things that were different, recognize why they’re still meaningful to you, and learn something about the present from them. This is why we study history, yes? Video game history itself is a deeply decaying institution, not only rotten from years of neglect but also strained under the weight of constant censorship and revision. Big publishers are well aware of the fact that games used to be cheaper to make, cheaper to play, and far more personal, meaningful experiences. Games were art pieces, meant to be played once and remembered fondly for their design and direction, but this framework died off when it was determined that the financial returns were diminishing. AAA games thus have sort of a vested interest in preventing us from enriching ourselves with too many old games, lest we develop a taste for things that rip us off less. This is why a lot of old games are never ported to modern systems, but also why, even when they are, they seem to get killed off pretty frequently; that frequency is increasing exponentially. Old multiplayer games getting their servers unplugged is only the beginning. We are now seeing older games removed from storefronts, backwards-compatible consoles being phased out, and many classics being butchered by AI upscales or “remakes,” a lot of which simply take the place of old games.

Sorry, sorry, I said I was going to avoid cynicism, didn’t I. But the reason I bring that stuff up is because I was stunned to see a huge studio like Sony randomly changing their mind for one special little case: Helldivers 2. I’ve mentioned before that I like the game a lot, and I think it’s the only live-service multiplayer game going right now that seems to recognize its players as human in any way. But what we saw in the last few days was astonishing compared to what we’re used to: Helldivers 2 is now doing a crossover event with the game Halo 3: ODST. This is a game not only made by Microsoft–Sony’s long-time rival–but is also 16 years old now, and wasn’t even very well-liked when it came out. It is a black sheep, a weird spinoff of a popular franchise that was already poised to die off, but Arrowhead, the studio behind Helldivers, doesn’t seem to care. They’re fans (if you’ve played both games in question, that would be obvious already,) and they wanted to throw a little light on something sort of forgotten because it was important to them, and they want it to be reappraised positively.

Ordinarily, I think this kind of crossover stuff is cheap, and definitely out of hand by now in AAA games. But thinking about it, how is this anything but good for video games? Nevermind my own assessment that I like Helldivers and I liked Halo as a kid, let’s just think metacognitively; an incredibly popular game from the biggest studio around has randomly decided that something from 16 years ago, before the invention of the live-service video game model, is interesting enough to be worth putting more money back into for a new generation of players, and the original game wasn’t even theirs! And the old game in question actually is an interesting piece of direction, that took a bizarre new direction with established canon and built something unique and memorable!

This is, to me, an example of good nostalgia. Sony is selling new toys based on Halo nostalgia, sure, but this is shedding some interesting light on a piece of Halo history that even Microsoft themselves doesn’t talk about much anymore, and they’re doing it because their nerd developers actually had ideas that somebody was willing to listen to. Now, a bunch of new people are going to see some cool stuff from an old game, and learn something, and see something different, and the money still gets made either way. It’s a little cynical, sure: the in-game content is technically going to be more expensive than the previous, original Helldivers stuff, and none of it will be customizable. There’s an element of Halo worship going on, where we can’t even touch the holy artifacts of Halo and besmirch them with any of our filthy, modern game mechanics. That attitude is a whole other writing, but considering the devs themselves have been horny to put Halo stuff in their games for years anyway, I’m sure they weren’t even considering letting us put scopes and shit on the guns.

This is more than a few baby steps towards treating older games with a bit of respect, and I think I’m 100% for it. The added benefit is that I’ll be able to use a Halo shotgun to blast illuminate overseers into paste, since I’m a Helldivers 2 player. But these things are relevant in more abstract ways than just the moment-to-moment shootin’ stuff that we see when the play the games.

Which is why the second example I have foreshadowed now rears its ugly head. What about when nothing is respected, and everything is pathetic? What about when we treat old games like jokes, or internet memes, and we sell things based 100% on the notion that we will simply remember the thing we’re seeing, then money will dispense out of our bodies like robots? As a matter of fact, irony sales aren’t a new concept at all, but it still feels a bit like a risky tactic–not everyone does it, it’s not a guaranteed success. Sometimes it does work though, and somebody will say “what if we make something that sucks, but we do it smugly and knowingly?” and the pigs line up at the trough just as expected. Movies actually love to fucking do this, and you’d know if you’ve ever watched “horror movies” nowadays, but video games are rapidly catching on.

I know this because I saw the announcement for Bubsy 4D, and the subsequent reaction. What the hell are we doing here, guys? The Bubsy games have never been good, or respectable, or prestigious, or worth a whole lot of memory in any way. In their time, they were regarded for the shameless attempts to cash in on popularity of existing video game mascots, and unceremoniously died after failing to achieve their level of status. He kinda falls somewhere in between Jazz Jackrabbit and that one cat thing that they tried out for the Xbox in the 2000s. The only reason anybody remembers fucking anything about Bubsy is because the last Bubsy game in his “heyday” was the notoriously awful Bubsy 3D, which was itself mocked into obscurity until accidentally being made into a crass internet meme by fucking Jontron. He’s not even relevant anymore, and that was only a decade ago!

Now, because enough reddit users or roblox players or people who draw the boykissers on that wplace app–whatever the fuck the intended market is supposed to be, maybe furries or something–have proven that they are willing to laugh at the meme status of Bubsy, why not try to wring a few more pennies out of it? Let’s create this fucking Frankenstein’s monster of bad ideas that nobody wants, try to sell it for about a decade, then wait 20 years after it dies to sell its bones to some fucking vultures. That’s the kind of artistic devotion we need in this industry, huh?

I’m hoping that everybody will call this for what it is an ignore it, but I already have seen many seemingly greeting it with a smile, and thinking of it as funny. This wouldn’t have been funny if it had come out 20 years ago, let alone now, and the implication that it somehow got enough production budget to take out an ad at Gamescom is deeply concerning. How stupid, how tasteless, and how easy do these people think we are? Don’t they know that only I can call everyone pigs and tell them they’re worthless?

Really though, the existence of a Bubsy 4D is as cynical a thing as any human being could even come up with. It’s like the Samurai Cop 2 thing, just completely fucking meaningless, but enough people could use the money so sure, just fucking do it, who cares. People will pay for things they recognize. It’s Mr. Plinkett shit, it’s a joke. I sincerely hope that it fails, and nobody would lose much of anything if it did.

So let’s do those dialectics I promised a little bit. What can we learn about nostalgia from observing these opposed examples? One is an example of someone showing respect to the past of their own volition–they have something to gain from it, it’s marketable, but the way they’re doing it gives the impression that they really do care about the thing they’re evoking to some extent. The other is a completely careless attempt to exploit the past more or less out of necessity–someone wanted to get money quick, so they’ll try a proven method for preying on everyone’s worst instincts. What is the difference between these or, at least, what makes them appear different?

I believe that it’s the perceived respect. For us, the players, and for the history being evoked. It seems far more believable to me that the Helldivers thing is an equally stupid investment with the Bubsy thing in a vacuum, because for as famous as the Halo series is, ODST remains, to date, its unequivocal worst financial decision in spite of the love that went into it. A company renowned for never bending knees like Sony is stepping out of its way to allow this risky decision to happen, which means that somewhere, somebody has to believe in something. There is some kind of respect for the visions of the past buried in all these youtube ads and NVIDIA investments, unlike with Bubsy 4D, where not only was this something nobody could possibly want or like (nobody ever did,) there wasn’t a whole lot of vision in the first place. There’s no understanding of history at all that case, no care at all to know whether or not the thing we’re digging up is a meaningful artifact or just some old rock. Either way we need to turn a buck. Fuck the consumers, they’ll take anything if it has a face on it they know.

The synthesis, then, is this: nostalgia can have as much thought behind it as any other complex emotion we feel, and as often as it’s used against us, it can certainly work to our benefit as well. In the case of advertising, and the case of digging up old things to make new sales, I would contend that it can be approached with a sense of honesty, so long as there’s some kind of attention paid to the original material. You have to know why you’re referencing something old, and have some kind of love for it. In the regime of remakes and reboots and other dogshit that we currently live under, we seldom see that. The viewer is expected to do the work of giving a shit after they coughed up the money, and usually we find that the only thing gleaned from re-examining the old work is that it had an interesting brand name.

Here’s a good example of that synthesis in action: remember the Oblivion remake from a little while ago? What a pile of shit, right? The original thing was more-or-less copy-pasted into a new graphics engine that actually looks much worse, but keeps all the bugs and bad design decisions. Also, hilariously enough, Bethesda saw fit to ironically re-release the controversial Horse Armor DLC in the exact same capacity as DLC it first released; if you don’t know, the original version was, in 2006, considered ground zero for predatory DLC being introduced into singleplayer games. It kinda was, but Bethesda doesn’t care. This is stuff people recognize as being “brand name,” if you will, so why not just make more money off of it? Never mind the inherent cynicism of this being their own IP, so it’s extra easy to lazily rehash it, but they were bold enough to make the same mistakes they were hated for originally, and remain entirely confident that it would simply work. Even the meanest things I’ve ever said about the American public haven’t been that cynical. Bethesda themselves don’t even understand why Oblivion was special in the first place, so just capitalize on the internet meme status and sell people whatever they still remember, and don’t forget to minimize effort to save money on production.

The lack of respect for the original thing yielded a reprehensible, soulless product, built for marketability and nothing else. Of course, it succeeded in terms of sales, but what inevitably happened was exactly what I described a second ago. People bought the thing, and then they had to do the work of remembering why they liked Oblivion 20 years ago, or else there would be no reason to have paid another 70 fucking dollars for it. God knows the game itself didn’t add anything new to the experience, and honestly, why would they? That would actually, not even joking here, be kind of bad for the experience, because there’s nothing really wrong with going back to the original. We don’t want to pay respects, or extract something new, or reference in any way that our lives have been enriched by this piece of our history. We’ll just replace it with a shitty facsimile, charge you again, and by the time you realize you’re fucking bored and bought this for no reason, we already have your cash, so fuck you.

That’s the real final point: fuck you. That’s what we often hear from these misallocated, heartless nostalgia exercises from the games industry. Fuck you, and pay us. But you shouldn’t pay them, at least not always, and any time your memories are served up in front of you like you don’t know what they are, I recommend you do a little homework first. Sometimes it can be really fun to relive some of the ideas of the past, but my golden rule is that if nobody cared to make it, why care to buy it? That goes for remakes, reboots, crossovers, legacy sequels, and all that stuff, but also for anything new. So no AI slop, of course.

I’m personally partial to the idea that reboots and shit are almost always garbage fires, but sometimes they prove me wrong. As always, it’s worth knowing who is making something, rather than what the subject matter is, and I would caution against paying literally any attention to anything that’s selling itself on a brand name before anything else. That being said, I will not ever be watching that new Alien show, and I will absolutely not ever be watching the new Fallout show. Shows about video games are dumb enough in the first place, but the Fallout one is especially egregious to me. Why, it may even be the subject of that other thought I alluded to at the start of all this…