People who think music was better in the olden days always overlook a crucial detail: the only songs we listen to from bygone eras are the good songs. The vast majority of songs just didn’t have the legs to span multiple generations. We talk about The Beatles and The Rolling Stones only because they were the best of the best; the rest of the rest were just consigned to history.
It’s always curious to think which songs, movies, and, increasingly, games people will still be enjoying in decades to come. In this blog, we’re going to focus on games, outlining a selection that we think people will still be playing half a century into the future. You might want to bookmark this article and come back in 50 years to see if we were correct.
Pac-Man
People have already been playing Pac-Mac (and all the spin-off games) for more than forty years; it would be no surprise at all if people were still playing it in fifty years. It’s the highest-selling arcade game of all time, having generated more than $3.5 billion in revenue. It’s unlikely that gamers will be visiting arcade halls in fifty years, but that’s no death knell for Pac-Man — you can play the iconic game online; type Pac-Man into Google and a web version of the game pops up. So long as people love five-minute bursts of entertainment, Pac-Man will have a following.
Dark Souls
People listen to The Beatles because their albums are considered to be the best of all time. The video game equivalent of that is Dark Souls, a masterpiece that is routinely awarded the title of best video game ever. And you can see why; there is much to love. It helped to legitimize video games thanks to the complexity of its storyline and the quality of the graphics. It is a challenging game, sure, but all works of genius must be somewhat challenging. It’s a game that’ll surely be on many “best ever” lists for a long time to come.
Poker
People were playing games before the advent of the computer, of course. It’s just that the majority of those games didn’t have the longevity required to make the transition into the digital era. But some made it through. One such example is poker, which is as popular today as it’s ever been, and though the game has been around for some 200 years, it continues to appeal to new generations. Its enduring popularity just goes to show you that trendy games will come and go, but true giants never die. The same could be said of chess, which has an even longer history than poker; it’s more than a thousand years old, yet people still tune in to watch the world’s best players go head to head.
Bioshock
Bioshock is a fan- and critic-favorite because it hits all the sweet points at all the right moments. It is, in a nutshell, a work of art — and that alone is enough to justify its longevity since before Bioshock came out, there really weren’t many people who even thought that video games could be art. Bioshock showed the gaming world what was possible and, since its 2007 release, has had a significant influence. It’s unquestionably groundbreaking — even people who didn’t like the game would admit that —and you can imagine people in 2072 loading up an emulator to see what all the fuss was about. Or perhaps they’ll be stepping into a hyperrealistic Bioshock virtual reality world, which would be just about as intense an experience as we could imagine.
These selections are far from set in stone, but if in fifty years people are still playing games we enjoy today, then there’s a solid case that these titles would be likely to be it.