Game developer Valve’s co-founder Gabe Newell talked in a recent interview about a good place for retro games nowadays, their online game download service Steam. Over 13 million Steam users seem to agree. To quote Mr. Newell’s own impression:
“Retail doesn’t know how to deal with those games. On Steam there’s no shelf-space restriction. It’s great because they’re a bunch of old, orphaned games. They’re games I want to play. The day we turned on the Team Fortress 2 beta I was sat in my office playing Quake 1, saying, “Hey, this is great!” I’d never had been able to find my original Quake discs, they are long, long gone. But it shows up on Steam and I can start playing.”
When Mr. Newell asked if he expects more retro games to show up, he gives the surprising answer that he wants every game ever made on Steam!
Question: And you expect more old games to show up?
Answer: Oh yeah, I expect we’ll go back in time and eventually pretty much every game that’s ever been available will be on there 24/7.
Question: Old LucasArts games?
Answer: Sure, those are some great games. I mean there are some real problems, where the waters are muddied and companies have gone out of business. That makes things difficult.
Question: But there’s something else to all this: perhaps if LucasArts saw their 1990s games being popular again on Steam they’d lose their focus on Star Wars.
Answer: Any chance we have go back and be reminded what was good is important to a game developer. I mean we go to E3 each year and see the flavour of the month right now, and see it repeated four hundred times, so it’s refreshing to be able to look back and play the games that got us all into the games industry in the first place.
Question: Yeah, I’ve been playing Hexen on Steam and remembering what it did for FPS games in terms of looking up and down and so forth.
Answer: I wish we had Ultima Underworld on there. It’s a game that I think is invisible to the current generation of game designers. Also there’s a game called Shadowcaster – I seem to be the only person who has ever played it – but it was this first-person game with resources you could manage that you could transport to places, and it was really sophisticated. There’s a lot of lessons to learn from that. It’s a fun game to play, and there are more useful concepts than in a lot of the stuff you see coming out today.