Past meets present: Elevator Action Returns

It’s incredible how quickly the video game industry used to change, in terms of priorities and design. That’s not a knock on the current standards, but a reminder that a whole lot of what you see today got its start at the beginning of the HD era, two decades ago — there’s a reason that people fight over what qualifies as truly “retro” and what’s just a continuation of the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 era into the present, only shinier and on more powerful hardware.Leaving aside the validity of those arguments, though, there is no debating how different things were for video games in 1994 than in 1983. Taito’s Elevator Action released in ‘83, and it was shockingly violent, especially for what was a cartoony, 8-bit depiction. Shocking because, just a few years before, in 1978, Taito made its presence known worldwide with Space Invaders, a game that asked the then-profound question “what if enemies attacked the player, though?” — a question that came with the caveat that those enemies…