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Orson Scott Card on Games, 21 Years Ago
MilenCent writes "Long long ago, Orson Scott Card wrote a game opinion column for Compute! Magazine. In the November 1983 issue, he had some interesting things to say about the essential ingredients of a great game, all arguably still important today. He picked out one company that, at the time, consistently excelled in most of these areas--try to guess which one! Additional commentary over at Curmudgeon Gamer."
"The software firm Electronic Arts has added a fifth requirement for itself: The game must be truly original. No Donkey Kong or Pac-Man clones in this group, of games. Even though each of their games has roots in gaming traditions, the object has not been to recreate a favorite board game, or duplicate a sport, or translate an arcade game." Oh how the mighty have fallen.
OSC has quite the pr engine, digging up 20 yr old articles to hype the Enders Game movie. verrrrry sneaky
"Coffee is the lifeblood of champions" -Mike Ditka
"The software firm Electronic Arts has added a fifth requirement for itself: The game must be truly original."
lol
Other company mission statements from 1983:
Mac: Our computers must run everyone's software and be affordable.
Microsoft: By 2006, all bugs and security holes must be eliminated. Also, we will open source everything.
FCC: By 2006, ABC will be required to show boobs at the top of every hour, all day long. Also, Howard Stern will host the Oscars.
2006 - 1983 = 21? man...I guess that's the new math for you
Yes, I agree, games should always be excellent.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
Killing Origin Systems was the beginning of the end of my respect for them.
Now they've evloved into more of a video game sweat shop than anything else. The games they publish that are still good are designed and written by third partys.
Reading this article really hightens my sense of loss for one of the great companies of my generation.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes, it's hard to believe that *that* company was once the unquestioned leader of innovative gaming.
Consider the company's first five titles:
* Hard Hat Mack for the Atari 800 and Apple II
* Archon for the Atari 800
* Pinball Construction Set for the Atari 800 and Apple II
* Worms? for the Atari 800
* M.U.L.E. for the Atari 800
One is absolutely, bar none, one of the greatest games of all time. Two more are notable milestones in gaming history. Four, perhaps all five, are considered classics.
I like EA and its games. It's a tremendously-successful company, is (I think) the *only* videogame maker other than Nintendo and Sega to survive intact over the past two decades, and over the past 23 years has put out many other fine titles. But let's not forget that there was a time when it didn't depend quite so heavily on annual releases of Madden and NBA Live.
"It should be an excellent game"
And I figured out how to win the next Superbowl - all I have to do is score more points than the opponent...
But seriously - the article is pretty useless... The hard part is not to understand that you have to do something new and excellent - its how to do it. A minor detail the article unfortunately doesn't explain...
Peter.
It has been said a lot, but it really seems like most games today try to focus on having amazing graphics, and then move onto focusing on gameplay later, if ever.
Some games manage to innovate both gameplay and graphics, but they are rare. A lot of sports games have played essentially the same for the past 5 or 6 years, with only graphical updates. Most FPS games are similar, with just better graphics (physics is an exception, but that's not really gameplay when it just has to do with rolling barrles after an explosion... only when, like in HL2, it's used for essential elements of the game like strategy, etc.).
Hopefully more games will be made that innovate, like Darwinia (steampowered.com), which looks alright, but has amazing and unique gameplay.
Every game should have a naked shower scene like in his books.
Clearly that one was forgotten about long ago, these days its just endless sequels each containing fewer differences than the last. Originality was forgotten about long ago in favour of squeezing every last dollar out of a 'franchise'.
Read about and download M.U.L.E. here.
EA (or ECA for us old-timers ;-) ) made some truly AMAZING games back in the day. Through them they established themselves and... well... led to what we have today.
Ironic, I suppose, but at least they were worthy of success to begin with. Heh...
The sports games like the Madden series were the beginning of the end for EA. They made hunks of cash with minimal creativity required. As a result, their production rules got applied to everything else EA made with devastating results. By the time they bought Origin there was no longer any room for out-of-the-box thinking.
Then again, Origin was already half-dead. Starting with Ultima 7 they did just what Card lambasted in his article: "I have little patience with games that play me, forcing me to follow only one possible track or learn one mechanical skill if I hope to win." I remember I lost my first attempt at Ultima 7 because I started wandering around and hit the story elements out of order. U7 part 2 fixed that: you simply couldn't wander beyond the nearby area until you had completed the story-line there. A double-whammy for Ultima 8 which was both strictly linear and required a lame jumping skill to win. Even the beautiful Ultima 9 was nastily linear for the first half of the game, opening up only when you got a control of the ship.
Origin was already in trouble. EA just finished the job.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I've re-read Ender's Game lately (written in 1985), and was amased by some of the predictions Orson made in just one book. The "network", online news and bloggers (Locke and Demosthenes), hand-held devices used for education (we only start seing them now). Damn, I think we shouldn't be surprised if we see the buggers real soon! :)
1's and 0's should be free.
Can anyone point me to screenshots of that "Worms?" game. It sounds quite interesting, but I can't find screenshots anywhere on Google. In fact I can find next to nothing on it.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
""Long long ago, Orson Scott Card wrote a game opinion column for Compute! Magazine. In the November 1983 issue, he had some interesting things to say about the essential ingredients of a great game, all arguably still important today."
And yet the one game he had a hand in, Advent Rising. Did poorly in the marketplace.
1983+21 is the year of the first dupe...
Hurrah! Evidence of the existence of the computer games industry. It's not something you see often on here. Not the video game industry, the computer game industry: The one that almost all of the major players in the current game industry were borne out of.
Video game crash in the U.S? Irrelevant...computer games never stopped. They went on from strength to strength via the C64, ST, Amiga, and then the PC (when it's CPU speed finally came up to scratch).
It's getting harder and harder these days to find any sort of real history of games due to revisionists re-writing everything and putting such huge importance on video games, Atari, and Nintendo.
Let's have more articles like this.
You can avoid the ads and the hassle and just get the file here. Everything you need to play it is in the .zip.
They put a pretty interesting spin on it with Mutant League Football. It would be nice to see stuff like that come about from time to time.
After the National Football League agreed to a long-term exclusive contract with EA, wouldn't you want to blitz the league?
FYI, don't point to the C64 games on the Underdogs - they are bloated as they contain much more files than necessary.
That file in particular contains PC64 - which is abandonware (actually Public Domain). There's much better emulators available that can run nativly under Windows - WinVice in particular is quite good at zooming past loading times.
HOLY CRAP. I can die happy now.
(Though based on the guidelines, shouldn't your sig read, "Do not promote personal agenas when meta/moderating"?)
I believer there were 2 different choices for the colors. Something like light blue, white, black and magenta or green, yellow, black and white?
While EGA was an improvement, it wasn't until the advent of cheap VGA cards that PC gaming really started to get good.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
From what I recall Magic Carpet 2 sold horribly.
I don't retro-game much. Sometimes for 5-10 mins here and there for the memory and for kicks. MC2 however, I can still play it start to finish and enjoy every second of it.
Wasn't there some great theory at one point that Ender's Game was nothing more than an apology for Hitler?
What about that Ender's Game was actually written by a comittee, that this comittee abandoned him for "Speaker for the Dead", but decided to write "Xenocide" for him.
How about the least crazy one, that one of his series was a fairly direct retelling of The Book of Mormon.
http://www.adventtrilogy.com/overview_fe.htm
"Unprecedented collaboration with award-winning, sci-fi author Orson Scott Card on sweeping storyline"
Considering the pervailing slashdot attitude about current games (AR came out in 2005). The above wouldn't be considered "little".
I think M.U.L.E. had to be my favorite game back in it's time. That game rocked. Though the Nintendo port never quite lived up to the C64 original.
The way I see it, no FPS is "original" except THE original, Wolfenstein. But some people still consider Halo "original" since it follows a storyline - like Marathon didn't?
www.linuxpenguin.net
I understand. Having no sense of humor can be troubling at times, but I'm sure you will learn to live with it.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
like Marathon didn't?
I think you misspelled Pathways Into Darkness.
I remember playing that game late at night... it's amazing how scary you can get 640x480, 8-bit graphics.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Actually, Ender's Game was a novella published in Analog science fiction magazine in August 1977. The predictions were there largely intact - I was reading it as a teenager at the time. This was still before the time of Radio Shack's TRS80.
.....of todays games. I wonder what he would think of "Homeworld" specifically, as that game seems to be heavily inspired by the games that are played by the main protaganist in "Ender's Game"?