"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"

I run into the lack of historical awareness all the time, even in contexts where you would expect better.

In the Game Design class I taught for a local art school there was, and at work (where I'm roughly twice the age of all the people on my team) there is an amazing (at least to me) lack of any sense of gaming history.  I can't count the number of times that someone comes up with a "new" concept and I go "yeah, there was a variant of that done in X and it worked out pretty well except for..." or "it tanked badly because..." or even "I don't remember much about it but you should look it up and play it with an emulator..."

Even some of the senior people I meet in the business have only 6-10 years of experience and don't remember much, if anything, before the current "a niche for everything and everything in its niche" period of console gaming.  M.U.L.E., Ultima 4 and Robot Rascals are as far away for them as Chainmail and Little Wars.

Emulators are apparently not enough.

Comments

[Poicephalus]

Wait,
I am not the only one that remembers M.U.L.E.?
We played it for days on the Atari (or maybe it was a Commodore), when I was in the Army.
Don't think you are the Lone Ranger as far as no one remembering squat. It is a daily occurence for me, even with co-workers who predate me by 2 decades.
Yeesh!
C