Gaming Industry Engages in a Bit of Nostalgia

An anonymous reader writes "At Gamasutra, the latest answers to their Question Of The Week are up, asking game professionals how they got their start in the industry. Answers range from the classic ("While I was an MIT undergrad, a couple of my closest friends were co-founders of Infocom in 1979") to the quirky ("I got into games because my sister complained that I never called her. She set up an account for me on GEnie so I would at least email her. Not long afterwards, she suggested I check out GemStone III... Eventually, I ended up... [at] my current position as a designer for EverQuest II.")"

Comments

My Start

[mfh]

I started coding for TI/99 4A and sold cassette tapes around my neighbourhood. I wondered why sales were bad, but since I was only 10 yrs old... I tried to convince people to buy a TI so they could play my adventure games.

23 years later, I'm still not in the gaming industry. I'm not bitter either because the whole thing is flakey anyway. Many companies try squeeze all the good years out of someone until they've got nothing left, and then toss them asside for newer blood.

I'm looking for something more stable and with better hours. Maybe I should take Scott Adams' advice and be a cartoonist. Okay I'd have to be able to draw first.

Aaah, those were the days..

[Anakron]

Anybody else think it was easier back in the day to get a foot in the door? Of course, this isn't unique to gaaming..

Re:Aaah, those were the days..

[kaens]

Well, of course it would have been. The industry was a lot smaller then, and people with the skill to make games were not half as abundant as they are today.

Those who program...

[suspected]

Funny thing is, most people who love programming and enjoy games tend to become programmers. Loving games alone is often not enough of an incentive, although some feel it is and later realize it's not.

Games ain't what they used to be

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, i wouldn't like to develop games today, nobody makes 'em the way they used to be any more.

Games today are subject to the same problem that's ruined contemporary movies: Special effects. For some reason they (the developers) think that a game is better just because it looks good. Sure: They can be a nice touch - but they don't make the game (in fact, too many details ruins your ability to imagine what's going on the way you could in old text based games).

It's funny how they managed to squeeze more joy into one 1440 KB 3.5" floppy than they do in a 4 GB DVD these days.

And suddenly yelling at some kids to get off the lawn felt compelling. I must be getting old.

a fist fight in the hallway?

[ChipMonk]

Hose them down. If they're gonna be immature twits, treat them like immature twits. And if the company has a problem with that, point out that you can end the fight safely, without endangering anyone else, thereby protecting the company's interest against really big lawsuits.

That's exactly the problem

[zippthorne]

The games end up being coded fairly well by competant programmers who enjoy what they do, but fail to be designed by creative authors, artists, and just plain clever people. So we get a programmers idea of a good game instead of actually good games:

technically excellent, visually stunning, boring. I point to `Racing game of the week: Ford car advertisement' and `Madden sells out again! 2005' as evidence. Gone are the days of super mario bros, the legend of zelda, frogger, TIE fighter, space quest and the lot. (Where have all the comic adventure games gone to anyway? I know there's a new leisure suit larry, but is that it?)

Re:That's exactly the problem

[typical]

See, the funny thing about this is that the games from the "classic" days were the ones that generally didn't *have* much of a development staff of authors and artists -- just programmers, some of whom might wear multiple hats.

It seems that your evidence directly contradicts your argument.

My start...

[Skraut]

In 1980 I got my Atari 800, played star raiders and desided I wanted to program games. Sure, I was only 4 at that time, but it was a dream that stuck with me. I finished all of my High School's computer and programming classes, by the time I was a Sophomore. I spent the rest of high school teaching myself C++ and Assembly.

In college I had a cocky attitude. When I had to write a word processor, my word processor was texture mapped on a spinning cube. I would do other dumb things like that to show off, and spent so much time writing "Fluff" for my programs that I didn't actually finish the assignments.

I ended up flunking out of college, and working at a Babbages. I'd go home from work and spend all night playing in a Quake I Team Fortress Clan. I didn't have "The Skillz" anymore and got tired of getting beaten by 13 Year Olds, so I hacked the quake models and cheated... I shared the cheat with my clanmates, one of whom unbeknownst to me worked for a game development company.

He shared the cheat with his bosses, and I was called for an interview, and eventually had a job. It took me a few years to realize it really wasn't what I wanted to do, but it was a fun ride getting there.

Re:Game testing

[typical]

You really sure that you want to be a game tester?

Think about it, first.

You don't make *that* much money.

Part of what makes video games fun is that you *can* do them -- that you don't *have* to play them. That isn't the case here.

You don't get to do things that are the most fun. If it looks like there's a bug involving walking around a translucent pillar in a game, you may be walking around the thing and modifying the environment slightly each time for hours. When you finally find the bug, you get to write up a report on it and figure out how to reproduce it.

It's not quite the same thing as just dropping into a fragfest with your friends.

The other problem with game design -- a lot of people think "I love playing game series Foo, so I'd love to work *on* game series Foo". That doesn't necessarily hold; as a matter of fact, if I really liked playing a game, I'd deliberately want to avoid working on the team that makes it. Why? Most games have finite replay value, and if you work on the game, you know the whole game in advance. All you've done is ruined your favorite game series for yourself; you can't play it.

Game development takes place on a tight timeline, and can be high-stress and demanding of hours.

There isn't much job security, as game development houses don't have a very long life expectancy.

For all I know, you may like game testing, but you shouldn't be walking into the thing under a bunch of illusions...

Philosophy & Games

[typical]

Now everything seems so bland.

I felt the same way. I went back and played some old games, and they actually weren't as good as I remembered. I think that a lot of it was nostalgia, and some of it the fact that *we* change as we age. It's hard to get me excited and enthusiastic about a game now.

I don't think I could stand playing most NES-era games now -- too repetitive.

There are a few good games out there, but so many pretenders and entire genres have all but disappeared. What happened to the {something} quest adventure games? or the clever puzzle games?

They evolved into new genres. I enjoyed the graphical adventure games as well, but honestly, the genre had its share of flaws. A good deal of the gameplay consisted of clicking on just about everything in sight, or trying objects that might be remotely related -- there often wasn't a strong rational correlation between a problem and the solution. It was also possible to get stuck. Sure, funny stories made the games enjoyable, but honestly, I'm not going to kid myself that the core gameplay in Lucasarts' old games was that astounding -- it was the funny story and animations, doled out over time.

What ever happened to manuals with jokes in them?

I've found that game manuals themselves are a dying breed. The newer the game, the smaller the manual -- a new PS2 game may have only a few pages in its tiny manual. Joe Sixpack doesn't want to read a lengthy instruction manual -- he wants to play the game he just bought.

There are exceptions (sims, some strategy games), but in general, manuals were something more suitable for the more literate "geek" audience that used to play video games, and less suitable for a mass market. Plus, there was a time when box and manual art was the best sort of visual appeal that was going to go into the game because of system limitations, and that's just no longer true.

Games now have generally evolved to not need a manual -- they have been architected to have a very shallow learning curve, which usually lasts over the life of the game, and is assisted by in-game mini-tutorials.

I haven't played a video game recently that has quite the subtle, dry, educated wittiness that I remember in some older, independent games. Simple slapstick seems to be more predominant -- but if you look at television, it seems to do the same thing. And it was never *all* games that did this.

If you want excellent writing, you can still get it in the form of text adventures (most independently made and freely distributable).

And why do people keep buying 'the sims'? It's a "real life" simulator with 4x the frustration and none of the "chance for passing on your genes"

I'd say that there are two reasons.

First, it is a "creative tool". It falls into the same category as Legos, building blocks, or a painting set -- it allows exploring a very wide range of ideas and strategies. You have a good deal of replayability because the user can create a great number of variations; this contrasts, say, a simple vertical shmup, where the number of things that the user can do are pretty limited.

Second, I've a theory (but little hard evidence to support it) as to why the Sims did well, particularly among the "non-gaming" audience. Today's "gamers" have generally been playing games for years. Today's game designers, programmers, and artists have been playing games for years. They have all undergone, to some extent, a standard canon of work. They were all influenced by past eras in games, and they have a common body of knowledge to rely upon.

For example, take the "break every crate" phenomenon. In many video games, the player can acquire items hidden in crates or other containers, but to do so, needs to break them open.

Now, back in the day, video game worlds were generally small and fairly static. Allowing the user to change the world (such as by breaking or moving objects) produced a good deal of interest. A good way to show