Talking Point Is There Such A Thing As "Bad" Nostalgia?

Bad nostalgia can't exist. That's like asking for hot ice cream.

I have deep love for some bad games too, I am sure. None I can name off the top of my head, but surely some games I love are considered bad by most.

Would I play them again now? Probably not, but probably more for lack of time than anything else.

i agree that anything you can look back fondly on shouldnt immediately be taken as a bad thing, but there are 100% cases where nostalgia bait is used for cheap engagement and brownie points

going back to movies i enjoyed shark tale and chicken little as a kid, even liked the CL gamecube game. but i wont defend it as anything good that shouldve paved our future

It's not my place to judge what games others like or feel nostalgic for. Someone could feel nostalgic for Bubsy 3D or Superman 64, and you know what? Cool, good on them. Glad they managed to make good memories with those games. Who am I to call their nostalgia bad?

It's good that Jedi Power Battles is being re-released, for preservation's sake at the very least. A game being perceived as "bad" shouldn't prevent it from being experienced, so I appreciate when companies are willing to rerelease even the less-liked games rather than just the ones everyone loves.

Given the misplaced hype for a Croc rerelease I'd say yes. That game was bloody awful.

I think nostalgia can be a problem when people nitpick modern games to death while ignoring glaring problems with the versions they feel nostalgia for. Logic goes out the window.

The only bad nostalgia is the false nostalgia for something that never existed. Enjoying something from your youth is harmless, but trying to return things to an idealized past is harmful, either personally or politically.

There’s definitely such a thing as bad nostalgia, but it’s all subjective. For example, the Star Wars prequels were objectively worse than the original trilogy, and I think they’re pretty lousy. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t have emotional heft for people who were kids when those movies came out. They’re just wrong about liking them (kidding)!

"Bad nostalgia" completely misses the entire root of nostalgia itself, which comes from the Greek "nostos" (return home) and "algos" (pain). Nostalgia is always tinged with negative connotations, the yearning for a place and time long gone.

@RadioHedgeFund

It is not a Masterpiece, but far far away from being awful.
I have played many Games on the C64 and Super Nintendo that could be called awful.
I even count the Ninja Turtles on NES as a very awful Game.

@MasterChiefWiggum
There were some Scenes that were bad, but overall the Prequels had many very good outstanding ones, be it the Battle with Darth Maul, the Pod Racers or the Colosseum Battle.

Personally, I feel like there such a thing as "bad nostalgia," but its less in the form of what people enjoy, and more so people just using nostalgia like a buzz word for any old thing ever like its the only reason to check something out. Like I watch Spawn Wave a lot, and no offense to Jon, but my man says nostalgia way too much when talking about a lot remasters & rereleases, like him only really saying a NSO or PS Plus Premium month is good if a game is "nostalgic" from that era, just saying to check out a remaster or something because it's very "nostalgic." I just kinda groan when people say that because I feel like it makes old games sound like they have no value in going back to unless you have nostalgia for something, and that every little old thing needs to be nostalgic. Just kinda tires me hearing it, but that's just me.

@Medic_alert Yeah, the commercialisation of nostalgia has been sucking the fun out of entertainment for well over a decade now.

Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: Yes there is.

Nostalgia is bad when it blinds you to what's wrong with a work of art. You have to accept that there is such a thing as a guilty pleasure.

I have a handful of games that I would count as guilty pleasures, but that hold a sweet spot in my heart because of when I discovered them. Sonic the Fighters is hideously unbalanced and barely works as a multiplayer diversion-- but the animation is snappy, the aesthetic is cute, and it was my gateway drug to Tekken and Virtual-On and all the classic low-poly fighters I love now.

But that's a fairly innocent example. I think nostalgia gets much messier when the work in question has a point of view. I used to love Terry Gilliam's Brazil because of its style, its score, and the way it bounces between tones and entire genres while staying in the same story. Nowadays, my skin kind of crawls watching it, since the plot hinges so heavily on the 'stalking for love' trope. Anyone who doesn't admit what's wrong with that movie is probably engaged in a harmful lifestyle.

And to the point of what the other commenters have been saying: I am extremely sick of corporations weaponizing nostalgia. There is nothing inherently wrong with being a nostalgic audience member, but there is everything wrong with shoving a near-dead Bill Murray into your Ghostbusters sequel while original IPs and... everyone in the film industry, frankly, get shoved aside.

As a 46 year old, this speaks to me.

I don't think there's any such thing as "bad nostalgia" per se. I revel in many of the things I loved in my younger years, and have a fairly robust setup for enjoying retro games (among other retro media).

I do think that nostalgia can become problematic, though, if it prevents you from enjoying and engaging with new experiences entirely. The nostalgia itself still isn't "bad," but anything enjoyed without balance can still have negative consequences.

Do I find comfort in old games, movies, and music? Of course! And I always will. But I'll always seek out new things. After all, one day I'll find myself nostalgic about those too.

I don’t think I totally understand the question? What is bad nostalgia? There is, I think, excessive or harmful nostalgia. There’s also nostalgia that’s cheap or shallow, as in the constant usage of nostalgic references in modern films. Then there’s nostalgia for things that are bad, as the article mentions. What are we talking about here?

I recognize several levels of video game nostalgia in life, including but not limited to:
"Guilty Pleasures", things which are largely considered objectively bad but retain personal satisfaction for one through personal experience - this is the most relevant experience the author is mentioning here.

I have lots of NES games in my collection which are largely overlooked as inferior, or just plain bad, or no one even knows they exist (less guilty pleasure and more a deep cut in those cases): 8 Eyes, Magic Of Scheherazade, Xexyz, Caveman Games, Bayou Billy, Dino-Riki, Kid Niki, all these fall under this for me.
"Rose-colored glasses": this one's easy, and mentioned a number of times in the comments. Something is deeply wrong in one way or another with something you have fond memories of. This one is trickier to define, as one person's example of RCG is another's GP, but for what it's worth, the NES games Amagon or Rescue The Embassy Mission fall on this side, slightly. They used to be guilty pleasures to me, but there's little they do now that hasn't been outclassed dramatically since.
"Crap-colored Glasses": This is a term I've been thinking of whenever a game I saw loved in it's day gets spat on for it's flaws in hindsight, but those flaws are not as egregious, if you look at them more clearly. the NES TMNT and Top Gun, and Simon's Quest are top examples. I LOVED every one of these, but I keep hearing on the internet the "crap" and" not crap" arguments all over the place. For everyone who brings up "The Dam Level" or "Carrier Landings" or "Nonsense clues" there's another reference to "well-represented avs of each turtle" or "tight graphics and the carrier isn't so bad" or "the game doesn't NEED so much grinding if you're a Castlevania vet" arguments, but all of these, in the face of how I felt back then, and how I feel when I revisit them now, are irrelevant to me. These are the games where one must simply not be afraid to form their own opinions, regardless of the internet chatter.

Maybe I'm not understanding well, but I have 2 ideas of "Bad Nostalgia".

1. When I played something I didn't like or outright hated back on its day, played very recently and I still hated it, if not even more than back then.
Something like Sonic Spinball on the SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis falls on this category.

2. When I enjoyed something as a kid and played recently and I realized it probably wasn't as good as I remembered.
Donkey Kong 64 comes to mind, it was one of my favorite games on the N64 back in the day, but when I did my triple playthrough in 2021 (Wii U Virtual Console version on January, American N64 version on June, Japanese N64 version on October), I realized how tedious it can get. Maybe the fact that I also played other Rare collectathons on the same months didn't help matters either: N64 Banjo-Tooie on January, American N64 Banjo-Kazooie on June and Japanese N64 Banjo-Kazooie on October.
And yes, I 100% all of them except the Japanese Banjo-Kazooie due to the language barrier in Grunty's Furnace Fun.

Then there are games I didn't quite like as a kid but as an adult I really enjoy. Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures and Yoshi's Story are examples of this.

This is a great article! It really got me thinking.

In my opinion, as to whether or not bad nostalgia can exist, I'd say both "yes" and "no."

If we mean "should we gatekeep old stuff that is bad from being ever released again?" Then no, bad nostalgia is not a thing.

But if we take bad nostalgia to mean "Old people love a property so much that they will tyrannize the makers of said property into forcing us all into a death loop of remaking the property exactly as they remembered and no new ideas are ever allowed" then yes, we can absolutely have bad nostalgia.

(I don't care about Star Wars, but I think in this case it's not bad nostalgia.)

If you mean "Nostalgia, but as a negative emotion rather than a positive one", then yes of course. There are plenty of games/media that I didn't like when they were new and thus will have a loaded opinion of now, even if any remakes end up being great. I have zero interested in this Power Battles game for the same reason you do.

@Medic_alert Also I learned recently that "decadent" has a much bleaker original meaning — that you were so absorbed and lost in the pleasurable thing you were doing, that you would forget to pay attention to your own wellbeing and start to literally "decay"

@Damo Let me just first say, welcome to the "Ol' *****'s 45th Year Extravaganza!"-- You're in good company. Let me just say... I ABSOLUTELY went to sleep on Star Wars Ep2: AotC, no lie... thought it was just me. Second, as a Ghostbusters fan, love the reference 👌

Now as far as bad nostalgia, it's already a subjective beast to begin with. But I do believe bad nostalgia exists in one of two flavors:
1) You have nostalgia for something and remember it fondly, however upon a closer look, you realize it wasn't as fond a memory as you recalled. Example: Having great memories of a game, returning back to play it again after many years, and realizing it that it wasn't all that good despite your good memories about it.

2) You recall something knowingly bad, but despite its badness, you're able to see the silver lining of where it brought you to today. Example: Anything that's so bad, it good, such as seeing the live action Super Mario Bros. movie, knowing it's bad, but it'sa part of you, that time in your life, etc.

@RadioHedgeFund I remember croc getting panned at its time of release but recently it seems like that’s all been forgotten about I remember it as a pretty lame attempt at a Mario 64 clone but all that has been distorted by numerous retro gaming sites

Every game, good or bad, deserves to be archived and made accessible, either reasonably monetary or public domain.

Does every game deserve nostalgic celebration accompanied by re-releases... doubtful

As bad as Star Wars Episode 1: Jedi Power Battles is, it is still better than....

• Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire
• Star Wars: Demolition
• Star Wars: Masters of Teräs Käsi
• Star Wars: Rebel Assault
• Star Wars: Rebel Assault II

it feels like a complex situation.

you can often for example see something from the past which is celebrated dismissed due to "nostalgia goggles" or "rose tinted glasses" or whatnot, though a lot of my favorite classic games were ones i ended up missing out on as a kid either due to not having a snes (had mega drive) or that a lot of rpgs ended up outright missing europe. i even ended up finding some games which werent considered "classics" which i ended up really enjoying.

naturally as well theres also the fact that tastes can change over time though this also can go either way, some games i remember enjoying i ended up enjoying less when returning to them years later, sometimes there were games i ended up enjoying more due to being able to appreciate aspects of them more (such as how movement worked in certain platform games)

there are also some aspects where its not someones memory playing tricks on someone such as certain quirks with some modern ports and remasters, such as the higher res character models clashing with the psone backdrops in modern ports of FFVII-IX or the whole buisness with the silent hill collection a while back, theres also certain subtle visual details in some games which can look off on HD-TVs

while i generally enjoy retro gaming there are naturally still some quirks of back then i dont miss, such as region locking, 50hz, the growing pains of the early 3d era and whatnot.

in the end there's always going to be something that will affect someone's judgement or feelings towards something though the key is often just looking at things from various angles, theres lots of good games out there both new and old and sometimes theres a game which ticks some oddly specific boxes for you which is why im always cool with seeing some lesser known games make a return.

long ramble i apologise.

@Medic_alert something that can be said for some of these old games is that theres often a semblance of a good game there and with a bit of quality of life improvements they can be fun to revisit.

@TransmitHim yes I think that's why nostalgia can often feel bitter sweet.

"While I'm too young to have been alive for the original Star Wars (I was born in 1979),"

No, you were around for:

• The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
• Return of the Jedi (1983)

I'm a year younger than you and I loved the prequels. I also hated them.
But I love them.

Also, I grew up with the original three movies, and saw Return of the Jedi in a drive in.
I was not quite three years old yet.
It's one of my earliest memories.

I'm not sure that I believe in bad nostalgia, per se, so much as misuse of nostalgia, i.e., pandering: when modern sequels, reboots, or tributes are too heavy-handed in their callbacks to the classics, rather than developing their own identity.

I also take issue with the idea that only the best media deserve to be preserved and/or re-released. Maybe you don't care about Croc or whatever, but for others, it's "literally [their] childhood!!!!1".
Or in my case: I'm fond of 3D platformers, I've already played the classics many times over, and I can handle a bit of jank. So I couldn't care less about seeing Mario 64 or Banjo pop up on NSO, but a remaster of Croc does appeal to me!

People constantly tell me SADX is bad or Sonic Heroes is bad, which to me, to this day I still find them to be magnificent games where I never encountered any problems.

To use Star Wars as an example, I grew up with Masters of Teras Kasi, which I would play with friends and family, that game is known to be bad (and I personally was hooked on 3D platformers like Spyro) but it's such a fun time, I could easily still play it today just to hear the funny sounds and how cool it is to play as Mara Jade. Luke Skywalker vs... Hoar. That's classic.

Can't say the same for Lego Star Wars II another game I had as a kid, playing that now feels very wrong somehow. Not like it's a bad game, but it's kinda bland and the appeal doesn't work as an adult.

@Fighting_Game_Loser This is a good point.
Re-releases of older games are sometimes implied to be specifically for those who want to revisit them, and people will often dismiss older games as only being highly regarded because of nostalgia ("Goldeneye has aged terribly", "Sonic was never good", etc.). But these games have plenty of value in themselves.

This is obviously highly subjective, but there are plenty of games that I discovered late, but still saw the appeal in (as well as some that I didn't!), and even now, I still enjoy picking up and experiencing old games that I missed out on the first time around!

One man's trash is another man's treasure. I dunno, I'm sure there are loads of people happy about Jedi Power Battles. And who am (or indeed anyone) to dictate what gets 'preserved' or not. Surely all games need preserving. So don't bemoan the ones one person might not like along that journey.
I too didn't really like the prequels as films (but loved the lore!) but by God does Disney Star Wars make them look like masterworks! Nostalgia is nostalgia. You either have it or you don't. I'm not convinced there is good or bad.

@AlienX Funny how that works- in your case, it would seem to disprove the idea that the appeal is all just from nostalgia!

I had a similar experience with Star Fox Adventures. Gorgeous game, but it feels so, so shallow now (whereas I apparently didn't really notice this as a teenager). It just hit me on my latest playthrough that almost every item/power is just a key in disguise: instead of using the blue key on the blue door, you have to use the pole vault move on the pole vault tile.

Sonic Adventure (DX), though- I don't play it nearly as often as I used to, but I still love the feel of the controls, the ridiculously flexible and powerful move set, the rockin' soundtrack, and the sheer ambition that went into this game!

The problem with nostalgia isn't that it's good or bad, though it can be either, it's that so many people are addicted to it like a drug that it blinds them to reality.

The inability to use objective thought is the problem not nostalgia.

Bad nostalgia is when people are fully owned by nostalgia for five games and nothing more. So yes, it exists!

Yes, but this isn't it. Nintendo fans that only play Mario, Zelda, and sometimes Pikmin have bad nostalgia. They think anything that isn't exactly those three is just taking resources from something that could be Mario, Zelda, or sometimes Pikmin.

This is just "Middle Earth Enterprieses & Friends" wanting to milk that Star Wars license Aspyr managed to trip into for all it's worth, and Bob Iger being happy to oblige; because Video games are the only medium he's currently being praised for just selling people back what they already like.

I voted "I'm not sure" because you almost said how I feel but not quite. I don't take exception to people being nostalgic for things I am not; after all, I'm nostalgic for Red Dwarf and Doctor Who and that makes me an outlier to many other people. What I find bothersome is the tendency to remaster or re-release things that were million sellers at launch and still widely available in thrifts and retro stores today. Why buy a new copy for more? Why make more plastic than needs to exist? Nobody asked for the NES, GameBoy and N64 Star Wars games to get reprints from LRG, but they did anyway.

Not directly answering the question, but Jedi Power Battles holds a place in my heart as one of the games my brothers and I had for the PS1 (which was not many, well into the GameCube era and when I was still quite young). The platforming is so janky, even with a control stick, and we never made it to the end of Level 1 until we revisited it as adults. But it reminds me of hanging out with my brothers and the innocence of youth and not really knowing good game design (I'm about as nostalgic for JPB as I am for Super Mario World). It's ripe for a remake that improves the controls to make platforming realistic (and maybe make you teeter on ledges rather than just walking off).

That being said, this is Aspyr, so I ain't buying this remake. I'll just try and beat the original on my computer.

We can put the two words together and interpret them in different ways.
Bad Nostalgia as in, it would be objectively bad if anyone had nostalgia for these SW prequel games? Of course not. If any fans are benefiting from this release then objectively it's a good thing.
Bad Nostalgia as in, you know the games are bad but you still are nostalgically drawn to them because, you know, it's as much about a time in your life as it is the game itself? Or your nostalgia goggles make you buy something you actually think is great but turns out to be bad in the cold light of the present, potentially ruining your great memories? Or you see something like this or Superman 64 or Bubsy 3D and are nostalgically drawn to it because it's bad - legendarily, generation-definingly bad - and you want to see it again or perhaps even for the first time. All of those are fair uses of the phrase I'd think.
And then there's "cynical" bad: companies or politicians twisting your nostalgia to trick or trap you, like the idealised 1950s were for conservatives. Or in our case we have stuff like that Intellivision Amico scam. Or one might even say, Star Wars in general at the moment.
Which leads me to the biggest culprit, in my opinion: over-saturation of nostalgic content, each instance of which is harmless or often good, but taken together can get pretty damn depressing. How much of the media landscape is taken up by sequels, remakes, spin offs, callbacks, etc? Sometimes it feels like 80% at least is just milking old IP as opposed to coming up with new things. And things that I love such as Stranger Things (i.e. 80s revival) and the current renaissance of PS1-aesthetic and even N64-aesthetic in the indie scene, or the YouTube echo chamber with its gaming retrospectives and "old Minecraft" retrospectives etc, all of which I have really enjoyed but now it's EVERYWHERE and just gives off the feeling that a lot of people (perhaps myself included) are trapped in the past... Either that or just riding the content train as far as it will go...
Anyway, good talking point, I enjoyed it.

One day my friend called me and said "I got a Genesis!"

I biked right over and marveled at what I saw on the screen.
It was Altered Beast. "It looks just like the arcade!" I exclaimed. The sprites were so massive compared to the NES that the quality of gameplay didn't matter. Actually it wasn't until years later that the Internet taught me that "Altered Beast sucks".

@MontyCircus There are many thoughtful comments in this thread, and I think you really touched on something with “the internet taught me.” In my younger days, I was pretty vulnerable and definitely “unliked” a lot of things I personally loved because “the internet taught me” it sucks/is lame. Bands, movies, games. Took me longer than I’d care to admit to get over all that and just be true to myself. (At least I think that’s what you sort of meant. If I got it totally wrong, my apologies.)

I don't think there is any bad nostalgia because if you have fond memories of something regardless of if it was to good or bad subjectively it's the memories of the time and situation you are remembering and not necessarily the quality of something.

That being said I find in the years since people have created a nostalgia that they never experienced first had on how good things were that they claim to remember more from hearing other peoples experiences or in the early days of the internet from what they heard from friends on things and they will often have false recollections of how much they liked something or how big of a deal something was despite not directly experiencing it.

Although I have often seen people call old games that were even considered average at the time as classics and think they were considered great at the time by many others. There was also no real way to see how the majority of not only the public near you thought of something but all over the world as there was a time when we only had reviews in games magazines as a way to tell us if something was good and if you're favourite said it was then it had to be true. This is despite the fact that some magazines gave drastically different scores back then on average and terrible games.

Then we come to games then get remastered like Croc in the modern age and even at the time it was considered average and no one who brought it probably considered it great and the reason it sold as well as it did was many games did on the PS1 regardless of quality especially if the got rereleased on a budget label for half the price. Yet you would think people were crying out for it from some of the articles written about it since it's announcement. I think some people are trying to now cash in on nostalgia now with things just because they are old and are hoping people have false memories of a product thinking they loved it more than they actually did just because they owned it.

Yeah, I think both things can be true. Like for example, Dragon's Lair was a phenomenon at the time. I remember first seeing it in a convenience store, a bunch of older teens crowded around it, but I got the full view from the 2nd monitor on top. "They're playing a cartoon?!?" The creator, Don Bluth, thought it was the future of video games. He was wrong of course, because the gameplay is very limited. But I'll be damned if it wasn't incredible at the time.

As for movie examples, Star Wars: Episode I has a consensus negative opinion now in retrospect. But it was all theatres PACKED with cheering crowds at the time. We were just happy to have a new Star Wars film for the first time after such a long wait since Jedi. That was when having more Star Wars movies to look forward to was not guaranteed!

Another one is Star Trek: Generations. Now it's looked at as "one of the odd numbered Trek movies to 'skip' ". But at the time? Picard and Kirk together? It was incredible. Also, that was the first time I downloaded a movie script from the Internet, BEFORE it hit theatres!

So, now I can intellectually accept criticisms of those things, but no one can take away the rush, the thrills, the happy memories that they gave me at the time, and still do nostalgically.

Problem is, when people are stuck with nostalgia glasses on.
Yeah, the 80:s was fun, but there was just as many problems back then, as today. Everyone remembers the era, they grew up in, as the best decade ever. Sadly some get so brutally stuck in that childhood nostalgia, that they didn't evolve beyond that.
And the "Retro" companies, knows how to feed upon those.

@Gs69 I feel it is perhaps journalists in their late twenties or early thirties who played it and enjoyed it as a young child. This would heavily tilt their nostalgia towards a positive experience as they were too young to perhaps know any better at the time.

Many of the top 32bit titles were over the heads of the under-tens of the era; I can’t imagine many parents of the day letting their kids play Metal Gear Solid or Resident Evil. What did this leave them with but Croc, Spyro and Crash?

Happy Birthday Damo!!!

I don't think there's bad nostalgia as such, I just think people need to learn to separate the idea of a game they absolutely love from whether it is actually any good or not. A game can be objectively bad (controls not being responsive, graphical issues, bugs etc) but none of that has any actual bearing on whether you - personally - enjoy it or not. It does, however, have a bearing on whether other people will think the same way as you. I like plenty of games most people think are ***** and will bore you to tears at any chance about why I like them - but can't always say that they're 'good'.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter if a game is good/bad if you like it. It does matter if you're trying to review it and speak to a broad audience who might be interested in it. Your nostalgia is yours to love and enjoy alone.

Even mediocrity should be remembered, lest we repeat it

@MontyCircus Generations is still awesome.

There's no such thing as bad nostalgia and every game deserves a remaster regardless of its quality. My problem is Aspyr not doing anything to improve the graphics of this game.

Also any sane person is going to think the Sequel Trilogy is worse than the Prequel Trilogy which look like masterpieces today in comparison so erm...thanks Disney I guess? 😆

@Steel76 Quite simple really. Make better things today and then I won't be reliant on the past. 👍

There's definitely false nostalgia, like how many kids today think EVERYONE grew up with a NES, all because of the American YouTube channels talking about their history.