The Evolution Of Games

Thanks to Reality Panic for pointing to a new IGDA-hosted article comparing evolutionary biology to the organic process of videogame creation. The author compares the Cambrian era, an "early period of developmental simplicity for organisms", to the '70s and early '80s for games, with both containing "...a number of... oddities with few or no modern descendants". He goes on to liken the possible wiping out of the dinosaurs with "the impact of a giant meteor" to "...the arrival of the Sony PlayStation... [marking] a mass extinction of 2D games", and concludes by suggesting that, like the evolution of fauna and flora, "...periodic outbreaks of originality, and the corresponding extinction of certain game genres, are useful to drive the form forward, but the conservative intervals between these events are what serve to sustain."

Comments

Atari Crash

[DrWho520]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. The meteor was the market crash in the '80s. Atari, being the fat, lazy, unadaptable dinosaur that it was, could not stand the ensuing cold. The NES and SEGA were the small mammals of the time, and that's why they survived. PS1 was an offshoot of SNES, a direct decendant of the NES. I am not sure even nature is as fickle as the videogame market, though.

You are right, this article is a big, steaming pile.

Re:2D games

[PainKilleR-CE]

It's becoming much more common to use 3D engines to make 2D-style games. Off-hand most of the ones I can think of are console games, but Ikaruga is a great example of a very old style of game built on a 3D engine without becoming '3D'. I believe there was at least one version of Asteroids that did this, as well, though it wasn't very successful, iirc. Diablo 2's use of 3D effects is the same way, and over time more and more people will do it, in part simply because the support for building a strictly 2D engine is very limiting (and if you're using DirectX it's gone unless you want to use the old versions).