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Retro Gaming Gets Hot
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently, retro gaming is big business, according to a recent article in The Rocky Mountain News. The story talks to Nintendo, Namco and the maker of those all in one controllers that feature games from old systems like Atari. Lin Leng, who's working on the latest Pac-Man game, summarizes it best: 'The games today are hyper-realistic, photo-realistic and take a long time to complete, an average of 20 hours of gameplay,' he said. 'But with Pac-Man you just jump in and play and you get a quick fix. It also brings back childhood memories for some of us.' There's also an interesting sidebar to the story talking about Invader, the Parisian graffiti artist tagging famous locations around the world with images from Space Invaders. The author's website has the full interview with Invader posted in his weblog."
20 hours is a long time??? That, right there, is the problem with american society today.. The A.D.D. / short attention span people seem to rule the country. That's why 'news' is presented as sound-bytes, not full stories. That's why the Apollo missions were cancelled after 17. That's why there's a new world (read: US vs. X) conflict every few years. I used to play games like King's Quest, Space Quest, and Mindwalker. These were games where the play time was in the days-to-weeks category (actual play-time, not real-time) if you didn't fall back on the hint book, and Mindwalker was virtually un-beatable. Played that one for literally about two monts of play-time. I'd feel ripped if I bought a game that only offered 20 hours of play. What a joke.
Short attention span is why adventure games (read: long-play) went the way of the shoehorn. When computers were still mostly restricted to 120+ IQ families/people, games were aimed at them. Now that any old kid from 80 - 120 IQ can pick up a game, the market is much bigger, and game companies have to pander to their tastes. This is why Sierra On-Line has disappeared for all intents and purposes. They used to produce several high-quality games a year.. now they publish other people's IQ 100 trash.
Shame on the average! Producing for those outside the 3-sigma IQ norm used to be a good thing. Now it's frowned upon because it limits market share. Thanks, dumbasses.
Cheers
Anon