Glory to the epigones, or the Great against the best

I usually try to write on the case, but sometimes you can think about the abstract. Not so long ago I got into the hands of a good (and, perhaps, one of a kind) book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die , the authors of which took on the titanic work of isolating the best, in their opinion, thousands of games in the history of the industry. Considered almost all known platforms, starting with arcade machines of the seventies and ending with the Xbox360 and iPhone. Of course, any hit parade (even if there are already 1001 positions in it) is subjective, and each of us may not be surprised to find a favorite game in it. More authors clearly favor the last decade, which got half of the entire book. On the other hand, to their credit, the declared format “1001” is not limited to business, and often slips comments like “this game had such a predecessor, and later a similar idea was embodied in such a project”, essentially expanding the main list. However, I was struck by another feature, which, it seems to me, reflects any “lists of the best” of anything, namely a clear admiration for great works.



I guess I understand better in games than in books, music or movies, although I try to fill in the gaps, so I’ll try not to deviate too often from the main line. (Considering that the history of the games was created much less than, for example, books, they are much easier to grasp with their eyes).



My generation, whose childhood and adolescence fell on the collapse of the iron curtain, had an interesting effect: the games that poured from abroad were “compressed” into a single tangle, and we did not perceive them as something that was developing consistently. Say, our foreign peers, playing enough in Super Mario Bros. (1985), watched the avalanche of platformers growing like mushrooms after rain. At first, we did not have anything, but then we got everything at once, and in this sense, plumber Mario was in our hearts a direct competitor to Chip and Dale from the same game (1990).

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Particularly interesting in this regard to study the ZX Spectrum. Not only because I personally love him, but because the case is completely clean: the platform has lived in almost unchanged condition for about 10 years, by the beginning of the 90s all the main commercial games had already been released (later Russian programmers would catch up and create several masterpieces) , and every self-respecting Sinclerist had a huge catalog of games. Still, on the usual tape cassette fit 10-12 games, and the tapes were easily copied. On the consoles, they also played what they needed (not everybody could afford to buy a ton of cartridges), and the PC didn’t “compress” the time, because the hardware capabilities had changed so much in ten years that they could put some Alley Cat on the same board on the same level eighties with Dune II (1992) is absolutely impossible.



However, I digress. Leafing through the book, I (expectedly) found Super Mario Bros., Jet Set Willy and Boulder Dash there. However, I did not find either Chip & Dale, or Darkwing Duck, or Dynamite Dan, or Earth Shaker. For me, these are games of the same era, inspired by their predecessors, only more interesting, more fun, more diverse. Leaving aside Super Mario, which has a lot of loyal fans, and focus on the pairs Boulder Dash - Earth Shaker and Jet Set Willy - Dynamite Dan.

Boulder dash	Earth shaker

Jet set willy	Dynamic dan

The second members of pairs are better than the first in all respects, except for one. They are not great. The authors of Boulder Dash came up with a great idea and offered a rather modest implementation, which I tried to play several times, but could not get much pleasure. About the same can be said about the Jet Set Willy. But the epigones were not asleep: not only the share of "Tetris" and "Arkanoid" dropped a lot of imitations; albeit not in that volume, but Boulder Dash and Jet Set Willy created genres. However, the discoverer of the genre and the peak of the genre are not exactly the same thing.



If I read a book on the history of art (anyone), it is always interesting to know who has broken the road in one direction or another. But no less interesting is what better gave birth to some time. I don’t presume to talk about literature and cinema, but in games the situation is almost unambiguous: look at any list of the “best games of the 80s” look, and you will actually see “the greatest games of the 80s”. But I'm not a game historian; I just want to play the best and the most unusual thing that was created. In this sense, I don’t care if I have a great Boulder Dash or Pygmy epigone Earth Shaker - this is one era, one platform (if you take the Boulder Dash spekrumovskiy port), and it’s for the best products from the point of view of my current, not burdened by personal experience The first Boulder Dash in the years when there was no genre, I will evaluate those times.



Do you think the game Boulder Dash, the genre of the genre, really raised the bar so high that it still roams from list to list? Or (I am afraid to encroach upon the holy) the great mover of the fantasy genre, Professor Tolkien, from the first entry, wrote such an outstanding book that it is still being filmed with great success even nowadays? But what about epigones? I want a rating of the best, but not great! ..