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HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
Imagine the following scenario: you are sitting in a dark room, with a joystick in your hand, defending the Earth from space invaders, racking up the score. Can it get any better than that?
There was not much to the games at the beginning. The graphics were minimal, sound effects were primitive and the length of the game was infinite. It was all about the gameplay, and for everything else, we used our imagination. It might sound like playing games during the Stone Age, but it was a marvel back then. No other source of entertainment gave you control over characters on screen.
A pile of pixels can be a human, an animal or whatever we want it to be. The visual presentation was secondary to gameplay. Not that developers didn't want to put some visual flair, there just simply wasn't enough memory on the cartridges so they played to their strengths.
POINTS AND HI-SCORES
One of the main video game characteristics of that time were high scores. It was all about the points and getting on the leaderboard. It was the beginning of competitive gaming. Even today, people are breaking records on arcade classics such as Pac-Man, a game that is all about the points. The only way to hinder your point accumulation was by losing lives: lose all your lives and you are done. You have to start over from point zero. It is a heartbreaking feeling to go so far yet lose all of it in a single moment, but at the same time, it pushed us to try again and get an even better score.
GAME CHANGER
There wasn't much of the story either. Most of it would hide in the manual, and everything else would depend on, again, our imagination yet we hardly complained. The novelty of video games as a concept was more than enough to satisfy our entertainment needs. But as the industry evolved, the technology got more sophisticated, the doors to a new world opened and developers went all in. Suddenly, games got actual stories. At first, developers used the „show not tell“ system to tell them, but today we have detailed epic tales and characters larger than life that are worthy of movie adaptations. Long gone are the days of getting the high score. Today it is more about the experience rather than high score competition.
LIFE AND DEATH
Not even lives are implemented anymore. It came to be that concept of lives hinders gameplay more than it helps. There is still death in games, but the penalty is minimal, usually getting you back to the exact moment and place where you lose a life. Even games that get you all the way back are usually the games with short levels, like Super Meat Boy. Not to say that games are getting easier because of it, they just get fairer. Nobody wants to get all the way back to start when losing all lives. It is tedious to beat part of the stage that you have already beaten over and over again. It was a standard before and it came from the fact that they adapted the play from arcade games which the main goal was to eat up your quarters. That approach doesn’t really fit when applied to modern games.
There are games that harken back to old ways, but most of the time it is intentional, yet never going full old school, with developers knowing that might distance a good chunk of the gaming audience.
Like everything in life, video games changed and evolved. Older gamers (including me) tend to say we had it better back in the day, and in our hearts that will always be true, but there is no denying that the amount of games playable today, for smaller prices with much more approachable gameplay is an improvement. Evergreens will be evergreens and games will keep evolving and improving, leaving the obsolete elements behind.
Get in the Game ! 
