Text by Scott Meslow / Illustration by W Studio

For 21of21, GOOGLE SHOPPING and PAPER came together to break down some of the most memorable shopping moments of 2021 based on Google's trending search data. After last year’s global obsession with the Nintendo Switch game Animal Crossing, we managed to be even more hooked on video games. Google search interest for the term “video games 2021” was up 1,350% this year in the US.

Anyone who tuned into YouTube for a 40-minute commercial called “Nintendo Direct” on September 23, 2021 was treated to a flurry of teasers. New video games in the Bayonetta and Splatoon franchises, new content for Mario Party and Mario Golf games, and, for some reason, the news that Chris Pratt will star in the upcoming Super Mario Bros. movie, which... sure! Okay!

But all those announcements were dwarfed by Nintendo’s other huge reveal. For the company’s staunchest fans, the biggest announcement was their plan to port classic Nintendo 64 games like Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to its current console, the Nintendo Switch. They’ll even be selling a wireless, but otherwise identical version of the clunky, three-pronged controller the console originally launched with.

The internet exploded. What gamers really want, it turns out, is the same games they played 25 years ago.

Looking backward isn’t anything new in this industry. In games — more than pretty much any other artistic medium — it makes sense to iterate on your biggest successes, because the technology you developed for the previous game is such a handy jumping-off point. That’s part of why many of the industry’s heavy hitters were established early. Super Mario Bros., the game that revived the industry when it debuted on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1986, starred the little guy with the mustache from Donkey Kong, which hit arcades five years earlier.

But back then, even when a company like Nintendo returned to the same franchises, it was to improve upon its previous offerings. The second Super Mario Bros. Game, released in the United States in 1988, let you play as four different characters, including the princess you saved in the last one. The second Zelda game switched from an overhead view to a side-scroller.

This principle — to never linger on something long enough that it feels stale — guided the company through several generations of consoles. Years later, the introduction of the Nintendo 64, which took gaming from 2D to 3D, required a total rethink of what a Mario or Zelda game could even look like. And on the rare occasions when the company looked backward, it felt like a shrug. In 1994, a cartridge containing updated versions of the first three Super Mario Bros. games was included at no extra cost when you purchased a Super Nintendo console. In 2002, anyone who preordered Zelda: The Wind Waker at Gamestop got a free bonus disc containing the Nintendo 64’s Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

What a difference 20 years makes. As the industry has advanced, developers have discovered that revisiting the old hits can be lucrative. Sometimes they’re remade, sometimes they’re remastered and sometimes they’re released exactly as they were. In every case, plenty of gamers seem perfectly content to pay for them all over again.

Which brings us back to 2021 — a year in which COVID simultaneously made game development more difficult and nostalgia more appealing. Instead of releasing a new Zelda game, Nintendo dropped a marginally upgraded port of Zelda: Skyward Sword, which debuted on the Wii 10 years earlier. One of the most anticipated games for the Nintendo Switch this upcoming holiday season is actually two games: Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Pokémon Shining Pearl, which are remakes of games that came out on the Nintendo DS 15 years ago.

And right in the middle of those Nintendo blockbusters, Blizzard dropped Diablo 2: Resurrected, which updated the graphics of the beloved 2000 hack-and-slash RPG, but avoided modernizing the gameplay in any meaningful way. Like Halo: The Master Chief Collection before it, Diablo 2: Resurrected even includes a feature designed to reassure gamers that this is the exact same game they originally loved: The ability to revert to the original 20-year old graphics at any time with a single keystroke.

Can you imagine a more apt metaphor for the nostalgia a video game can offer? Just press this button and you’ll instantly be teleported 20 years into the past. These devices aren’t a game console. They’re a time machine.

For years, gamers huffed about critics like Roger Ebert insisting that games couldn’t be art, or congressional inquiries into games like Mortal Kombat, or the anti-Grand Theft Auto antics of the now-disbarred attorney Jack Thompson. But those culture wars have been settled and games now hold a genuinely prominent role in the media landscape.

Today, the first generation who grew up with video games as a normal part of their diet is having kids of their own — and the culture is starting to reflect it. Just look at Hollywood’s mad scramble to gobble up the film rights to games, which looks a lot like what happened with superheroes 20 years ago. It’s difficult to gauge what a true box-office hit looks like during a pandemic, but all available evidence shows that the $55 million film adaptation of Mortal Kombat topped the viewership of King Kong vs. Godzilla, which cost at least three times as much to make, when both premiered last spring on HBO Max. One of the summer’s only unambiguous hits was Free Guy, a Ryan Reynolds action-comedy that assumes the audience is familiar with jargon-y game concepts like NPCs and HUDs. They were right; the movie wildly overperformed expectations and a sequel is already on the way.

This is when everything could start sounding a bit Black Mirror — a generation so lost and frustrated that they can only find pleasure by regressing to their childhoods. But the truth is simpler and less cynical than that. It’s been a hard year. And the childhood comfort feels good. Plus, those games were fun! They’re still fun.

VP of Production: Katie Karole, Creative Director: Jordan Bradfield, Digital Director: Justin Moran, Art Director: Malcolm Mammone, Managing Editor (21of21): Laia Garcia-Furtado, Managing Editor (PAPER): Eliza Weinreb