I was thinking along similar lines the other day. One of the things I realised was that imagination played a much bigger part in my enjoyment of games than it does now (as it did with playing with toy cars, lego etc. back at that age).
I vividly remember playing one of the Shinobi games on the Sega Master system, and spent a huge amount of time wandering back and forth in the levels thinking about the townsfolk who occupied various buildings and their work days.
There was also a mountain range in one of the backgrounds on one level, and I recall spending time planning to explore it later, even pausing the game to draw a map of an imagined village there.
Of course now the vocabulary of games (and my understanding of them) has changed a lot, and it's far more obvious what the limits of a game and its interactive areas are - to me they're now throwaway pieces of entertainment, no longer worlds to inhabit and explore.
> I vividly remember playing one of the Shinobi games on the Sega Master system, and spent a huge amount of time wandering back and forth in the levels thinking about the townsfolk who occupied various buildings and their work days.
I remember Choplifter for the Sega Master System. Half the fun was the story in my head regarding the hostages, the behind the scenes operation of rescue attempt, etc. And the tragedy of it all going wrong when you'd crash with people on board...
I vividly remember playing one of the Shinobi games on the Sega Master system, and spent a huge amount of time wandering back and forth in the levels thinking about the townsfolk who occupied various buildings and their work days.
There was also a mountain range in one of the backgrounds on one level, and I recall spending time planning to explore it later, even pausing the game to draw a map of an imagined village there.
Of course now the vocabulary of games (and my understanding of them) has changed a lot, and it's far more obvious what the limits of a game and its interactive areas are - to me they're now throwaway pieces of entertainment, no longer worlds to inhabit and explore.