It’s never too early to discuss video games’ future in the history books. How will the ages of video games be divided; what are the influential turning-point moments, etc.

A friend of mine got me thinking. He proposed Final Fantasy VII started the Silver Age of Video Games, which at first I fought on the grounds that it’s too early. But I now agree for these reasons.

Final Fantasy VII divides the video game medium between an art of visual stimulation to an art of interactive story telling. Final Fantasy VII raised the bar on graphics, cinema-styled art direction, and a rich story filled with character development, back-stories, and emotion not yet seen. Certainly games explored this style, especially the Legend of Zelda games and early Final Fantasy games, but these games, with their cute, pixilated figurines just had too many limitations visually to create the emotion needed. Early video games created these cute characters not for aesthetic quality, but because this was the best computers could do.

At first this sounds like a contradiction: early video games were visual arts without good visuals. But that, simply, was the art: It was about creating a believeable 2D world that encouraged extremely repetitive play and rewarding challenges. These games were short, often only a few hours took to beat them, and the joy of constant play came from finding shortcuts and power-ups. A friend could jump into a game of Super Mario Bro. at any point and not be worried about following the back-story.

Now, a game of less than 20 hours is considered too short by critics. Games, as a standard, are expected to have compelling lead characters and a structured story. This change is most obvious in fighting games like the Mortal Kombat series which started out as the controversial blood bath where only avid fans knew the mythology. Now, Mortal Kombat has evolved into a detail story where characters die, come back to life, and players must complete role-playing styled missions to unlock new characters. These stories are rarely as fleshed out as the champion of story-telling, the role-playing genre, but the change in style is revealing.

The visual styles of older video games resemble the black and white silent pictures of cinema’s golden age. Video games manages to create atmousphere and style using limited means - no voice overs, 2D, minimal memory to save games or variety in game play. But games fought through the challenges, creating the colorful world of Mario and Sonic compared to the dark and scary adventures of Castlevenia. But we played these games for those visuals, not the story. In the end, the story broke down to saving the princess or killing Dracula. Everything else was about finding a power-up mushroom.