Why AAA Struggles With Nostalgia

This week on Cold Take, Frost examines AAA’s fascination with nostalgia, despite not really understanding it. Check out more recent episodes of Cold Take, including Why Are We Still Using Review Scores, The Hype Train is Running Out of Steam, Armored Core 6 and the ‘Git Gut’ Mentality, and The Problem of Voting With Your Wallet.

Why AAA Struggles With Nostalgia – Transcript

A toast to nostalgia! Ain’t what it used to be.

Nostalgia is a conundrum that goes as such: I want a new experience, just like the old ones. I want more of the same, but different. Let’s assume that it is 100% possible to make a nostalgia serum. Apparently money ain’t a part of the secret recipe because Johnny Triple-A has enough capital to toss God a quarter for the gumball machine, and they’re mostly still terrible when it comes to nostalgia. A difficult endeavor for sure, but corporate game development is specifically ill-equipped in this area because it operates more like a machine than a human–despite what the American court systems think– and humans are better suited for nostalgia than robots. It’s a faceless entity with no heart, no soul, and too many different departments trying to fight over what gamers really missed from the good old days. It can not miss things. It can not feel. The only fondness it has is for the days when their revenue was consistently skyrocketing. And it is this inability to tap into nostalgia that makes Johnny Triple-A violent. It tries to control the creative process, fails to do so itself, tries to force a timeline reset, and, worst of all, actively sabotages anyone else who could be successful. 

Nostalgia itself is tricky because it has to account for change. It is a longing for more than just having a specific game again. You yearn for the innovation it brought with it, the culture it created, and the impact it had on your own life at the time. Technically speaking, a re-released game can not innovate upon the techniques of now as it did prior because it’s building off of its old blueprints. It can not be a cultural pioneer sailing on uncharted waters, as it is now no different from one of the many legions of ships steering in the direction shown on old maps. And it can not impact your life in the same way, because that hole in your life has already been filled by itself years ago. Not every game needs to be innovative, culture defining, or life changing, and it’s okay to simply put out more of the same. But the video game industry likes to hoist the trend setters up as the frontmen, so there’s an unrealistic expectation that every game needs to be the new thing you love just like the others things you already love. Hard to make such a thing when Johnny Triple-A is naturally averse to taking creative risks

Every game that you know and love comes from people experimenting and delivering a twist on the formula you enjoy. The God of Wars, Elden Rings, and whatever Nintendo’s got cooking up are part of the reason why I say mostly and not all of Triple-A is terrible at doing nostalgia, because it feels like the higher ups of successful long running titles have this unusual ability to leave the creatives alone or, even rarer, they themselves are creatives. No, what I detest with an ulcer-inducing passion is when Triple-A refuses or is incapable of innovating, and instead of letting someone else who can innovate take charge or simply leave them alone, they actively attempt to coerce developers to play by their rules or they’ll stab a nail into the ball and go home.

The reason I praise FromSoftware is because they let a janitor run the company. I’m being dramatic. He wasn’t a janitor. He was a planner with no experience, but still, upwards mobility is to be praised. The reason I praise Kojima for finding success apart from Konami isn’t because I think he himself is so special but because he represents the pipe dream minority of developers who were able to wrestle for creative liberties and then become even bigger than the machine that was trying to control him. Sadly, Kojima is an example of survivorship bias, and the unfortunate truth is most developers will never get to the point where they can get payback on the studios that wronged them. You may have heard of Death Stranding, but have you heard of Amsterdam 1666? It was meant to be the next step by Assassin’s Creed creator Patrice Desilets until Ubisoft made a power play for it and wrapped him up in court until 2016. If you’re unsatisfied with Mirage’s attempt to reboot itself, maybe there’s still hope the Assassin’s Creed DNA lives on elsewhere. Kojima walked on with the genetic code for his style of development and gave us Death Stranding. In a way he managed to recapture the nostalgia of merging different gameplay at the core of a story and spectacle you’d expect to find in the cinema that made Metal Gear as big as it was. Meanwhile Konami gave us Metal Gear: Survive a failed attempt to continue the legacy without its original creators so bad that they hid the sales on the company financial report out of shame. Konami is now doing what major companies do when they realize they are not cut out to carry on the franchise they ripped away from the better parent, reset the timeline to a happier time when sales were still climbing astronomically. Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater is that reset to Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater, a much happier time..

Timeline resets is how I end up watching a release trailer in 2023 for Modern Warfare 3…again. A game that released in 2011, with a rebooted campaign but the trailer is showcasing all of the maps from Modern Warfare 2 which came out in 2009 and is even using the same song as the original Modern Warfare 2 trailer, Eminem’s “Till I Collapse” –the lack of self awareness there is extraordinary– but Modern Warfare 2 from 2009 was already rebooted in 2022.. The accounting department convinced everyone that our fondest memories were when we paid for the game so let’s have them do it again and again. It’s a little more awkward asking for mom’s credit card at 28 compared to 17. But the problem isn’t that it’s a reunion tour and a greatest hits concert. The problem is that the band that’s playing isn’t even the same band that made the game because they were kicked out as well.

Modern Warfare 2 (2009) was created by Jason West and Vince Zampella, the leads of Infinity Ward. They did so well with Modern Warfare 1 that they renegotiated bigger pay and complete creative control over the franchise with the stipulation that creative control would go back to Activision if the two were fired. In doing so they painted a target on their backs. Activision, like many Triple-A overlords, is frugal and a control freak, so they fired the pair on the grounds that they were conspiring against them with EA. West, Zampella, and 38 of the 46 original crew working on Modern Warfare formed Respawn Entertainment. They made Titanfall while trying to push the standards they themselves had set with Modern Warfare, but they struggled to get out from their own shadow. But being their own studio, they had the creative control and room to experiment. It was from this experimentation that Apex Legends was created in 2019 and in 2021 became one of the most played video games of all time with a player count of approximately 100 million players, surpassing their old franchise. 

That’s what convinces me to loosen the noose, the hope that some kind of video game Count of Monte Cristo will pop up years later and enact their revenge on those that wronged them. They’re few and far between, but it’s been an incredibly stressful year for game development behind the scenes with mergers, cancellations, price increases, and layoffs. Perhaps this is the beginning of the uprising and more teams will follow in the footsteps of Kojima and Respawn Entertainment who went their own ways and came out on top. We may not see them for another decade, but I’m cheering them on all the same because we could all use a bottle of the Good Ol’ Days. Oh yea…nostalgia is a refreshing concoction of brightest maroon, the color of childhood passion, with just the right balance of sweet familiarity and tart discovery that makes the lips pucker in a way ready to be tickled by the fizzy frothing of the good times of Christmas past. That’s what the label says anyways.