The game industry wasn't that much better in the past. Maybe not any better at all. Games copying each other also happened back then. Lots of clones too. There is still innovation, it hasn't decreased, but you should look in the right place for it.
155: Excellence Never Goes out of Date
- Thread starter Rob Zacny
- Start date
Excellent! Thank you SO much for writing this article! I have been saying this for years. I used to work at a game store and I'd have to tell people a thousand times, "Games don't get worse; they only get cheaper"... yet they'd buy FFX instead of FFVI despite it being 20% the cost and 200% as good. I recently wrote a similar article at The Expensive Planetarium, my weblog: http://expensiveplanetarium.blogspot.com/
Thanks again man, wonderful article.
Thanks again man, wonderful article.
This is a pretty good article, but with regards to old games being inaccessible you probably should have mentioned Nintendo. Their games may not be to everyone's taste, but at least they make an effort to make games available to kids who've never played them before. Stuff like bringing out NES classics onto the GBA, letting you download old titles onto the Wii and releasing compilations of stuff like Sonic and Zelda onto the Gamecube (which you can also play on the Wii) are really good ideas.
Actually the further back you go, the *more* likely you are to still be able to play the game. The oldest games can be played via emulators; you mentioned DOS games in particular, which are generally trivial to get working on any modern PC: just run DOSBox.
It's the Win3.1/Win95 era of games that are currently the hardest to get working, primarily because there aren't really any emulators around for that platform, and they won't necessarily run on modern systems.
Heck, with all the DRM lashings that recent titles are getting, there's a decent chance that recent titles will cease working even sooner than the older ones did.
It's the Win3.1/Win95 era of games that are currently the hardest to get working, primarily because there aren't really any emulators around for that platform, and they won't necessarily run on modern systems.
Heck, with all the DRM lashings that recent titles are getting, there's a decent chance that recent titles will cease working even sooner than the older ones did.
I'm coming into this late, and so almost hate to bump the thread when so much has already been said that's on point about it (older games are actually easier to access, roms, copying, nostalgia value giving us an unclear idea of superiority of the past -- ie data data data that disproves the basic theory here), but it's also interesting that an opinion like this can be prevalent when there's really a rise in re-issues going on right now:
http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/07/good-old-games.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Console
Getting older games via download has never been that difficult -- I played Genesis roms through most of college -- but getting mainstream access to these games is now even easier.
I think games as a medium tend to be too down on themselves, and I really don't know why this is. It's a heck of a lot easier to find classic games than it is for me to get access to a Rembrandt (and experiencing paintings over the internet is not at all the same thing, so Google doesn't really mitigate this), or a myriad classic forgotten films.
To me the interesting thing is why anyone would have a perception that games have less of an appreciation of their past. Appreciation of game history has only increased in the last decade, and if it dwindled before then, it was because there wasn't that much history to be had -- it was happening in real-time. I taught a one week game design course to a crop of twelve year olds last year and it was a revelatory experience to have to explain _Joust_ to them -- but one of the kids, bless his heart, knew about the brown box. And all of them were fascinated with classic games and game history, even though their modern interests were in playing current games.
There are certainly a lot of things about the industry that need fixing, but I don't think this is one of them. Before you decide that games-as-art don't appreciate their past, you need to talk to a game artist. Most of them fully and deeply appreciate the past, as does the growing field of game history.
http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/07/good-old-games.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Console
Getting older games via download has never been that difficult -- I played Genesis roms through most of college -- but getting mainstream access to these games is now even easier.
I think games as a medium tend to be too down on themselves, and I really don't know why this is. It's a heck of a lot easier to find classic games than it is for me to get access to a Rembrandt (and experiencing paintings over the internet is not at all the same thing, so Google doesn't really mitigate this), or a myriad classic forgotten films.
To me the interesting thing is why anyone would have a perception that games have less of an appreciation of their past. Appreciation of game history has only increased in the last decade, and if it dwindled before then, it was because there wasn't that much history to be had -- it was happening in real-time. I taught a one week game design course to a crop of twelve year olds last year and it was a revelatory experience to have to explain _Joust_ to them -- but one of the kids, bless his heart, knew about the brown box. And all of them were fascinated with classic games and game history, even though their modern interests were in playing current games.
There are certainly a lot of things about the industry that need fixing, but I don't think this is one of them. Before you decide that games-as-art don't appreciate their past, you need to talk to a game artist. Most of them fully and deeply appreciate the past, as does the growing field of game history.