With the response to last year’s announcement of Final Fantasy VII Remake, and reception of the recently announced Crash Bandicoot PlayStation 4 remasters, it’s clear that nostalgia is very important to today’s gamers. But, as PlayStation President Andrew House told The Guardian, this wasn’t something they first thought when starting work on the PS4:
We did some early research for PlayStation 4 and we found that people’s gaming memories were way more important and resonant than we first thought. We definitely saw that last year with the Final Fantasy VII Remaster reveal. That title has obviously been cited by a lot of people as the first game that made them cry. It was a sign of the increasing depth and maturity of the medium. I certainly felt it.
As someone who 100% completed the first Crash Bandicoot, and stood outside the Nintendo office and shouted at them with a comedian dressed in a bandicoot suit, House “can fully understand that identification.”
He also talked about how the games industry doesn’t have to compare itself to movies any longer:
We’re past the days of comparing the size of the games industry with Hollywood box office. I think we needed to do that for a while to attract attention, but we’re now mature enough that we can look for cultural legitimacy in other areas.
After maybe 10 years of being in the mainstream we perhaps still don’t do a good enough job of communicating the sheer variety of what we do. We need to articulate that story a bit better.
How important is nostalgia to you?
[Source: The Guardian]
