However, with the indie boom and a renewed interest - almost veneration - of the earlier data of gaming, the Mega Man platformer has come back into style. Then, they went away in the wake of 3D gaming. Mega Man-like games formed their own subgenre of the platformer, and gamers in the 80s and early 90s could gorge themselves on all of the Mega Man games they could possibly want.
Like seemingly all things, gaming genres are cyclical. Just stating that title adds certain cognitive implications - spike traps, precise jumps, a variety of weapons to choose from, and tough bosses - on top of those implicated by the term “platformer.” The “Mega Man” platformer is, itself, a distinct ancestral memory in the DNA of the gamer. Platformers existed before Mega Man, but Mega Man was something special. Each game presents its own twists, of course, but even the newest gamers have some idea of what a platformer is. Individual platformers are actually a little hard to describe because that one word - platformer - conveys such a detailed impression into the mind of any person who has ever played one. Typically, this is not an easy process - a fair degree of precision is required. You move from left to right - jumping and attacking - from the start to the end of a discrete stage. Without any actual experience, you understand something at an intuitive, instinctual level.Īfter 40+ years of gaming, certain types of games have become so intertwined into the DNA of gaming itself that they feel like ancestral memories. The concept of ancestral memories has always been of interest to me - this idea that certain concepts have become so ingrained in the human experience that new generations are born with these concepts burned into their mind.