Context and classic compilations
In recent weeks I’ve been playing Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection, a compilation of the best titles from the heyday of one of the gaming’s top developers. With nearly 50 games on one disc, the compilation is a great deal and an excellent chance to get your thumbs on a full body of work from one of gaming’s most distinct eras. Aside from being a nice collection of software, this compilation tells a story. But it’s a story that could have used some fleshing out. I love many of the games here, but I would have loved to see some more context about them in this release.
I’m a longtime jazz fan. What’s always fun about buying a classic jazz album — besides listening to the music — is that you’ll usually get some nice liner notes to go with it. When I was just getting into the genre and exploring its rich history, those essays usually offered invaluable insight into the music and the people who created it. It gave me a chance to understand a little more about why the music sounded the way it did and how that album or artist influenced what came afterward.
Retro videogame compilations are a great value, monetarily speaking. Each one of these games would have cost 60 or 70 bucks as a new cartridge back in the day. But as a piece of videogame history, most of these compilations offer piss-poor value, especially for new players. While one could argue that these compilations are targeted toward the nostaligia-hungry people who grew up playing the games the first time around, the inclusion of the Sega’s blue bomber in the title (only six of these are Sonic games) tells me otherwise. It’s an attempt at mass-market appeal by putting something recognizable on the cover. And if Sega really wanted to offer new players or even lapsed players something of value, they could do a lot better than two box art images per game and a handful of three-minute video interviews.
As I said, these games tell a story. These titles were ammunition in early years of the console wars, a time when consumer loyalty first took on the mutated form we know today. These games were Sega’s answer to Nintendo’s almost prenatural ability to turn out games that everyone wanted to play. In those days Nintendo released games at a pace of just two or three a year, but they almost always became instant classics. Sega couldn’t quite compete with Nintendo’s magic touch. It was Dreamworks Animation to Ninty’s Pixar (can you tell which side of the battle line I grew up on?) So its answer was to put out as many good games as it could, hoping for a balance of quality and quantity. Between 1989 and 1995 it pumped out an amazing run of action games that reflected its arcade roots, yet played to the strengths of the boxes it was putting into players’ homes across the world. This is the software that nearly won the war, just before Sega was eclipsed in the final few battles, mostly because of the company’s own blunders with marketing and hardware.
The reviews of SUGC left me disappointed in their lack of context, too. I expected the dumb “you can’t go wrong with X number of games for Y dollars” reviews on all the major Web sites. But even fan sites like Sega-16.com were missing something. Sega-16’s review even suggested none of the Sonic games should be included because they were in the last compilation. But then again, they’re writing for their audience — the people who DID play these games the first time around, and likely DID buy the very similar PS2 comp released a couple of years ago. So even if you think the context I’m looking for doesn’t need to be in the box because it can be found somewhere in the wilds of the Internet, I’d argue that it’s harder to find than you might think.
Those of us in North America and Europe are never going to get the kind of wonderfully put-together re-issues like the Sega AGES collection released in Japan. But I wish we could get something of both historical and monetary value out of these re-issues before they all go the way of digital releases.
