2004 was the greatest year for gaming that has ever and will ever happen

There is nothing useful in this post. This is a rant where I yell at the clouds about why everything in the past was better.

There was something particularly special about the 6th generation console era. The PS2 era. A combination of the right devs being around at the right time, combined with what would have seemed like quantum leaps in storage technology. But not just the generation was great; the specific year 2004 was the best. I can definitively prove in this post what was responsible for that insanely fantastic year, via a series of seemingly unrelated rants with some half baked factoids.

This is another post by someone else who is not a raving lunatic and also had this thought and expressed it in a blog, almost a decade before I did. I present an offbrand maymay to accompany it, because Mad Men is quite simply the best primer on how to navigate the professional world that exists, and I relate to Pete in many, many ways. This is not a good thing.

To see how we got such amazing games in 2004, it’s important to look at the power of the devs who were seasoned by 2004. Look at this shit. The devs performed literal MAGIC to compress Resident Evil 2, a 1228MB game, onto a 64mb cartridge. Do you think they wanted to do this? You think they WANTED to weave arcane spells that have never existed before to combat the physical limitations of the 5th gen? No; it was necessary, and it worked. And (from what I have heard) it’s a fucking cracker. I say this because I never had a 64. I don’t think I missed out on much. Earlier in 2022, I played some matches of various games with my hacking homie and by christ that fucking controller was made for and by an alien. This was literally the first time I had used an n64 controller for more than 5 minutes in my entire life, and it took until I was nearly 30 for this to happen.

So we have devs performing insane hardware tricks to cram shit into cartridges meant for stuff 16 times smaller, and we have people literally stealing memory used by sonys libraries on the ps1 to just push the hardware to its absolute limit. I personally do not like crash bandicoot, I don’t find that sort of game fun. but after watching this guy talk about the lengths the team went to to ship, I have a new appreciation for it.

But these stories are not about the 6th gen I hear you say, and isn’t this story about why 2004 in particular was so great? Do you think talented devs just grew out of the ground? This was the time before unity and the ability for every garbage NEET to do asset flips to pay rent. This was when Game Maker (a program I spent far too much time on in high school) was in such infant stages it was for the most part, useless. (I of course refer to versions prior to 6 as being useless; 6 helped me learn to script.) The only “accessible” tool was the Quake engine, which required a brain the size of the Netherlands to operate. Which brings us full circle; 2004 was made so great in part because of the insane ability of the devs around, a lot of whom had cut their teeth weaving magic for years as illustrated above.

I recall setting up Neverwinter Nights in 2003 or so, and it came on 5 fucking CDs. This was the most frustrating thing I had encountered in my life up to that point, swapping the shits out constantly to even get it installed. Then, after all that, my pc couldn’t even handle the fucking game lmao. But with the DVD, came space. Not just a lot of space, but a quantum leap in storage capabilities.

It’s no exaggeration to say there has not ever been another statistically large increase in console storage space as from 5th gen to 6th; 64mb cartridges to 4.7gb DVDs. An increase of OVER SEVENTY-THREE TIMES.

Not even DVD to Blu-ray achieved that, and I remember being blown away when the ps3 dropped by the size of Blu-rays. At the time, it hadn’t dawned on me just how pivotal the DVD was.

Obvs this isn’t a fair comparison; CDs were well in adoption at this point, rendering the increase to “just” seven times. Which is still staggering. I may gripe about NWN on CDs, but it could have been worse. But I think this unfair comparison is necessary to illuminate what I think is another part of why this particular year was so amazing.

So, we have clever devs, and improvements in storage. But that’s not all that’s at play here; all of these were present (on the ps2 at least) from 00 - 03. so that doesn’t explain the massive haul of amazing titles in 2004.

In no particular order, here is a list of everything pivotal that dropped that year

• San Andreas
• Need For Speed Underground 2
• Spiderman 2
• Champions of Norath
• Shellshock ‘nam 67
• Smackdown vs Raw
• Metal Gear Solid 3
• Far Cry
• Knights of the Old Republic 2
• Hitman Contracts
• Fable
• Jak 3
• Half Life 2
• Paper Mario
• Postal 2
• Halo 2
• Red Dead Revolver
• Star Wars Battle Front
• Rainbow Six 3
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• Warhammer 40k Dawn of War
• Garys mod
• Doom 3
• N
• Final Fantasy X2 (It didn’t hit Aus until 04 so it still counts!)
• Evil Genius
• Pokemon Fire Red & Leaf Green
• Dragon Ball Z Budokai 3
• World of Warcraft
• Counter Strike Source
• Battlefield Vietnam
• Killzone (what a fucking disappointment that series turned into)

There are two camps here; the empty point is a delim. One is things I thought were amazing, and the other is what others thought were important. Some in camp 2 however, became important to me after their release, such as CSS. This is included in the second category because I didn’t actually get internet access in my home until 2009. As such, online games mean 3/5ths of fuck all to me, and I struggle to relate to the modern era where gamification and online are “essential” ingredients in new releases. I digress. I have very fond memories of 2010 playing CSS in gg ffa servers and just fucking pwning. So much so, that I even made my own server when they became harder to find. How could this possibly come to be, that I can be good at online games whilst not spending any of my childhood playing online games? The answer is high school share drives; I cut my teeth with hours and hours and hours of Wake Island for all the years a cracked version of Battlefield 1942 was just left on the share. It might have been on the S drive. I don’t remember. It has been nearly 15 years since I graduated. Fuck. How did that happen?

It was a time when devs took the free roam idea brought to life by GTA and didn’t just try to ham fist it in there; it WORKED. The discovery mechanic in NFSUG2 to unlock new parts was great; it gave you an opportunity to race more and understand the layout of the city, which gave you an edge for uncovering shortcuts in races. A self perpetuating feed back loop.

The city felt alive in Spiderman 2, with tokens to find, bad guys to beat up for XP and tricks to accomplish. It bordered on, flirted with but never fully entered the territory of the modern Ubisoft plague. Ironic, because the CURRENT Spiderman games fall victim to this; too much to do, and zero, absolutely zero fucking incentive to do any of them.

Jak3, a platformer series at heart, made the free roam mechanic work for it. Two completely unrelated game styles, yet it was pulled off. I had actually never paid much attention to the series until the third tbh, because platformers as a base don’t really interest me. But this one did, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

What really didn’t dawn on me until I put this together, is the sheerly staggering number of these that are sequels. There are fresh IPs too, but the sequels are where it all shines. San andreas, the like seventh GTA iirc, Underground 2, the second in its sub series, etc etc.

But even more interesting, is a lot of them never received further sequels; a lot went on to receive reboots. Hitman Contracts, for instance, was the third in the series. There has since been a literal Hitman 3 released in 2021, because of the series rebooting. A notable exception is Smackdown vs Raw; this turned into another yearly series. I quite enjoyed it a lot whilst it stayed as SVR; when it turned into WWE things seemed to shift. I had a discussion about how WWE back in this era was truly the best; when Triple H signed the “contract” to give up his title with a fake signature and just being shook when he pinned Vince McMahon. Mind blowing shit as a kid. And honestly, still kinda enjoyable as an adult.

Of the original IPs however, we have the insane hype machine that was Killzone. Holy fucking god, I recall the excitement of everyone about this game more than I recall the actual game. The anticipation for this was almost as high as it was for San andreas, the game we knew was going to be everything we wanted. We have n, the little flash game that spawned a billion clones and imitators. I quite enjoy this video as it in a way sums up a notion I can’t express properly. Not having internet at home meant flash games were a school time thing, and I’m assuming because the sysads wanted to play them themselves, shit like newgrounds and what have you were never blocked.

We have Far Cry, which is a FAR CRY huehuehuehue from the current games in the line. Another victim to gamification and the Ubisoft model, this was a great starter to the series, to be perfected by Far Cry 2, but a great game itself none the less.

Far Cry as an example brings us full circle; eventually, the life was squeezed from all gaming as it became a “solved” problem when the gamification strategies were ironed out. I say solved in the sense that GOAT format within yugioh is solved; a definitive, best strategy has been established, of exactly the right cards to always play to give you the deck that will statistically, always win that format. It isn’t enough to assemble the right pieces however; they need to be put together in the right combos to win. This is what happened with gaming; seemingly overnight Ubisoft stumbled upon the perfect combination of achievements, collectables, minimap colours and icons that stimulate and hit all the sensors required to get people to grind perpetually on these unfun games. The problem of how to get customers addicted to gaming, to spend money on microtrans and dlc has had its resolution distilled to a literal formula now. games, like slot machines and pachinko parlours, are a finished equation.

You, after reading this verbal diarrhoea and realising that the raving lunatic author actually has a point and that gamification IS a blight on all industries it touches.

So in summary, we have devs who are experienced with squeezing the maximum out of hardware, at a mature stage of the generation (7th started literally the next year when the 360 dropped), utilising mechanics that have been refined via many failures (I really don’t even want to trudge my memory for all the ham fisted free roam pieces of dogshit that dropped in GTA3s wake), with the right balance of big budget sequels and fresh IPs, when gamification hadn’t yet been perfected to a science designed to extract money.

Satoru Iwata, a figure more important to gaming than any of us will ever dream of being, summed gamificaition up in the linked article, which I will now quote. “However, if the industry continues down the path we’re on now, where games are simply about collecting rewards, and gameplay itself becomes stale and formulaic, and the important thing is not having any mistakes or flaws in your game… if we go down that path, there will be no end to it, and games will ultimately all become the same—and very boring.” This was in 1999; the man saw where the industry was headed before anyone.

We had the most perfect year to ever exist, and most of us took it for granted. I do find myself wondering why I spend so much time in 202X modding games from nearly 20 years ago, and this post answers that. They were polished, and they were fun. Which sadly, is something that has been lost along the way.