Gaming's Greatest Generation

The Escapist has an article up discussing what they refer to as The Greatest Generation of Games, ala the people who fought in World War II. From the article: "The decade between the Fall of Atari and the Rise of Doom was a dark age for many gaming companies, as wave after wave perished in an onslaught of returns and red ink. Arcade gaming vanished, seemingly, overnight. Computer gaming seemed like it was going to be relegated to geeks; console gaming, to children. But just as modern society was birthed only after the fall of Rome swept away Antiquity, so, too, modern gaming was born from the ashes of the Golden Age, with products from upstart companies like Nintendo, Sega, and Electronic Arts."

Comments

Too early?

[OK PC]

I think its a bit early to start talking about the greatest generation, as gaming is a relatively new medium when compared to film, music and literature. Surely the greatest generation will come when gaming is seen as an equal to those?

Erm what?

[Turn-X Alphonse]

I read the Escapist every week but please. It's a good way to waste an hour or two, but this article is not news worthy at all. It's a look back to the age a guy things was better.

Why wasn't the article on the "homeless gamers" posted here instead? It seems closer to the mentality of many gamers(including myself) today. Go and check it out if you haven't.

Right now the magazine needs a lot of work (AKA needs more people writing intresting things not just ranting on how yesterday was better, or they have boobs, or whatever minority group wants a whine for a while). Still it's worth keeping an eye on it, every week theres usually one or two articles I want to read (just a note to people, if you sign up to the subscription they will send you an e-mail when the extended edition is out, which is usually 2 more articles on a Friday), but it's nothing ground breaking. It'll bring back a couple of memories, maybe make you smile once ortwice. Make you want to pick up an old genre or game you left. It won't on the other hand insprie you to do much more..

Lack of Diversity?

[DrHac]

From the article: "Doom brought us the first-person shooter (the definitive genre of the modern era)"

I've never been a fan FPSs. The assertion that FPSs are "the definitive genre of the modern era" is rather unfounded. Perhaps every couple of years or so an FPS does something original but aren't they all otherwise very much the same? To define the modern era of gaming by such things makes me wonder what we can look forward to.

This article is one guy's PoV and very little more.

Re:Lack of Diversity?

[DingerX]

Well, Doom was a turning-point for a lot of things, but the reasons shift with perspective.

At the time, Doom demonstrated the power of the internet as a distribution system, and the relevance of what today would be called "Independent games". Here was a company with no distributor, making a game that turned heads and dropped jaws.

With a little perspective, we realize that Doom came out about the time the Amiga and Atari ST had ceased to be commercially viable game platforms -- we were seeing titles for them into 91, maybe 92, but that was it. By 93, if you had a personal computer, it was either an intel-based machine (usually running DOS), or a Mac. Suddenly, DOS became what it never was in the preceding decade: the primary platform for PC-based games.

And, God yes, most of the stuff released in the "Golden Age" alluded to there was crap; most of it was industrial crap, mass-produced for a market.

And, yeah, everyone has their own masturbatory history of video games, and their own lists of "most influential". Most of their work is based on memory and sweet nostalgia.

BTW, the Earl Weaver Baseball article is pretty cool, and brought back some fine bits of Nostalgia.

Here we go again..

[CheechWizz]

I'm getting sick of all these 'gaming used to be much better' articles because it's just not true.

While I love classic games, I still play alot of my old favourites from all sorts of different platforms but only classics, It seems alot of people mistake old for classic. Just take a stroll through the library of any console, new or old, and you'll find that 90% of the titles are crap. It's those 10% of really good, inventive games that survive the test of time and still get played today - they're basically the reason gaming is fun.

Also the idea that today the good, fun inventive titles don't get made anymore is utter nonsense they still make up that 10% and they're the reason I'm still gaming.

Re:Here we go again..

[Anonymous Coward]

While what you said is mostly true of console games, the same can not be said for arcade games. There were a ton of excellent arcade games in the 1979-1988 (less so after '85) range.

That was the true golden age. Everything was new and the games were fun (they still are actually).

Computers and consoles took over after 1985 and there were some fun things there on the computer side (noteably the longer games, fantasy/adventure games like the SSI titles, Ultima, Bard's Tale). I have never cared for consoles much. I hated my 2600 when it was new because it couldn't match the arcade and I hated later consoles because they couldn't match the computer stuff.

The later 80's and early 90's were absolute shit. Then Doom came out rushing in the era of FPS games which was no longer fun after the Quake2/Half-life time frame. Which brings us to the current generation of crap. Consoles still suck and computer games are lame because all the money is going into crap console stuff.

So right now pretty much all I play is the original arcade games on my arcade cabinet that I built. Including some newer games like DDR on the DDR stage that I built.