Thanks to Eric Ruth and his PixelForce NES "de-make" of Left 4 Dead, we now have an idea of what the zombie apocalypse simulator would have been like had it released in the '80s. Valve is apparently aware of the project and finds the concept "hilarious." Ruth reveals that he plans to release the full game as a free download in early January 2010 for PC. It features all the campaigns from the original game, including 8-bit incarnations of the special infected, for two players to play through -- it is a NES game after all, fancy four-player wasn't standard.
Check out a video of the game after the break. The only thing we'd wish this "de-make" had was a sprite flickering zombie rush, so all the youngins could experience the glory of NES flicker when there were too many things on the screen at once for the system's 2KB of RAM.
Update 2: Check out Eric Ruth's interview with sister site Big Download
Update: Changed "didn't exist" to "wasn't standard." Nintendo released the NES Four Score adapter in 1990. Remember the one for the original Game Boy?
I think kids today aren't quite that disconnected. I'm sure most of them are smart enough to think that gaming started on PlayStation 1. (At the very least, I'd assume they could deduce it's existence by counting backward from 3)
On a more serious note, I always wonder what it would be like to live in a later generation where games have just always been there. I imagine it'd be very different from now, where we've lived through and witnessed the birth of a new medium.
Could you imagine being born before music existed as a medium? Or, (more recently) film? Both are so infused into our culture now it's hard to imagine a world without them. I wonder if in 50 years or so people will think the same of video games.
That's exactly what I mean! It's such a strange concept to get your head around. In 50 years I would think games would be, as you said, infused into the culture, but I wonder what new form of medium will take root in that time.
My friend's sister (he's 25, she's 15 now, 12 at the time of story) came home and told us she was playing the original Nintendo. She has a GameCube and isn't heavily into gaming. Has a DS now. We were both thinking "wow, you know someone with a working NES?"
Then she continued on. "He had a bunch of weird games. There was this one with Pikachu where you take pictures, some James Bond game, and he had this one like Mario where you're a bear and a bird". We both face palmed, sat down and told her about the bits and the bytes. N64 was their third console, dated by Nintendo by like 11 or 12 years in America.
what do you mean lol @consoles invented gaming? I hope you arent talking about PCs because they certainly didnt. Hell, the first game ever was on a huge ass radar machine!
I started gaming in 1986 when I was 2. Dad got a NES for the family and I remember playing Super Mario Bros and Duck Hunt. My 11 year old cousin whose living with me right now knows his video game history, I MAKE SURE HE DOES! He knows about every console from the Odyssey to the current gen consoles, Commodore 64, Apple II, MSX 1 and 2, and other gaming computers. He loves playing NES, Genesis, SNES, PS1, and N64 as much as current gen consoles. But other kids these days are all about graphics.
I'm not sure you could really differentiate what took it mainstream very well. Arcades, early consoles and PC gaming all really arose so close to one another, that each of them could be said to have heavily contributed to taking gaming mainstream.
Just to be clear: you're not implying that you've played Tennis for Two, are you? Y'know, a game that was invented in 1958 for the oscilloscope (no, seriously, it was nothing more than a specialized analog computer hooked up to an oscilloscope) and never released commercially? And that when they tried to remake it in 2008 it took three months to do it because they couldn't find the parts?
"lol at consoles inventing gaming." playing outside invented gaming. sure, we could imagine lots more than games could show, but it didn't hurt to actually have something visualize our thoughts. i'm 21 now and i wish more people my age would go outside and play cops and robbers with me or maybe kick the can.
I have an original working NES with the original Super Mario Bros (no Duck Hunt) that I received as a wedding gift. Me and the wife play it almost every night.
Golgo 13 had first person sequences. God that game was awful and incredibly difficult. My brothers and I played it for hours and I don't think we ever finished the first level.
I could never get past the submarine part... I shot it for like a year, swam around it, I could never figure it out. I heard the ending is terrible. The Mafat Conspiracy, which is the sequel, well... Maybe it's cause I didn't play it until a couple years ago, and so I don't have fond childhood memories of it.... but yeah, it blew XD
