Were old games bad?

It was the DICE Interactive Arts and Sciences Awards last night and Kotaku's Stephen Totilo was there to see the show and meet the legends--past and present--of the video games industry.  Now, I like Kotaku, they cover an incredibly broad range of video game-related news and they are one of the few sites that dares to review games without attaching a meaningless score to the bottom.  However, I did not realise that Totilo was a retro game-hater and such an attitude makes me a little bit sad.  Anyway, Totilo was on the red carpet at the event and asked various video game luminaries, "Were old video games actually good?" and "Weren't they just milking me of my quarters?"  Among those who answered were industry legends Ed Logg (designer of Asteroids) Rich Adam (designer of Gravitar) and Ed Rotburg (designer of Battlezonem, a game I plan to cover in a future CotM).  You can watch the interview on Kotaku.com or by clicking the link below:

http://kotaku.com/5885859/we-asked-the-red-carpet-were-old-video-games-actually-bad

Here's my (perhaps predictable) two-penneth worth:

In any generation of video games there are good games and bad games.  Even today, for every Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim or Portal 2 there's a Duke Nukem Forever or Postal III.  If you were unlucky enough to live near an arcade that only had bad games in it, then sure, you may feel old games were a waste of time, but are you really going to call out Pac-Man, Space Invades, Street Fighter or Tekken as bad games, especially when they are all still relevant today?  No, I didn't think so.

And yes, old arcade games were deliberately hard to make you put more money in, but you could argue modern console games, with their 8 - 12 hour campaigns, are designed to be completed so that you buy the next release as soon as possible.  And yes, I would include Skyrim in that, because even Bethesda admit the main quest can be completed in under 3 hours.

Oh alright, I admit it, I've spent nearly 60 hours on Skyrim and I'm only ²/_3rds through the main quest, but my point still stands--I think.

MTW