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Five That Fell
Ground Glass writes "The games industry is as cutthroat as any in entertainment or tech, and it so happens that many loved, respected, and influential companies nevertheless get crushed in the waves of hardware transitions or left behind by market forces. Given that one of those shifts is rapidly approaching, now is as good a time as any to look at five such companies that are no longer with us, but are still remembered and revered by their fans."
Infocom
:)
Sir-Tech
Guess I'm a bit old school
"I'm an old-fashioned type of guy. I worship the Sun and Moon as gods. And fear them."
Atari
origin
serria on line
black isle
looking glass
there I just saved you from having to trudge through a horribly formated article. (ad impressions ftw). We really should be linking to the multi-page spanning articles. Link to the printer friendly or not at all.
If you hadn't tried to get First Post (and by the way, you failed) you would have had time to make a link.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
I missed playing the Wing Commander series, especially dealing with Manic, who came in it own as our own hated Biff from Back to Future Series in the 3rd series. Gotta love watching the videos of watching him getting slapped.
-- Amazing how the Internet still humms along.... -- Dispite all the flaws of Micro$oft in their software!
All those companies lost to EAssimilation:
Maxis...
Westwood Studios...
Mythic Entertainment...
ect...
*cries*
Demented But Determined.
You want to know a great way to get me to stop reading your article right away?
Include a banner ad that makes a lot of annoying noises that appear without warning and are deafeningly loud, especially through headphones. Of course, simply causing physical pain for your readers is never a good stopping point, so why not add insult to injury by giving no way to turn the damn ad off?
And then all the bad formatting. . . great job, guys.
Infocom. The flag-bearer of text-adventure gaming. Brought us dozens of hits like the Zork trilogy, Enchanter trilogy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, etc, etc. You didn't need the latest and the greatest GPU to play those games. There are still indie text-adventures but the genre practically died with the company. Oh I just miss those days. Reading "You are likely to be eaten by a grue" sent more chills up my spine than seeing the most grotesque creature from (insert latest FPS using latest cutting edge 3D engine here) at maximum settings.
Like every market where money is to be made, it condenses down to a few global players.
Time warp back to the 80s. The game market was fractured, many, many small companies puttering along, some creating great games, some creating mediocre games, and even the odd gem surfacing every now and then made by a handful of freaks. The market was small, there wasn't a lot of money in it, and thus everyone took the share they could. There were EA (yeah, they already existed. But back then they actually even made games), Accolade, Bullfrog, all of them were more or less "small" businesses.
Snap back to today. The game market exploded, literally. Games ain't anymore something for the geeks in an age range of about 12 to about 18, it's gone mainstream. It's become everyone's pastime, age independent. As soon as a market appears to actually generate revenue, money is being pumped in. As soon as money is blown into a market, small companies are hoovered up in the process by the companies that let the money flood in.
That's pretty much what happened.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Article seems to focus on companies that were players in late 90s on. Microprose made many classics: Xcom series, Master of Magic, Master of Orion, Railroad tycoon, and many others.
I started with nothing and have most of it left.
I agree with the sentiment, even if it doesn't apply to the article. LucasFilm Games (anyone else remember when they were called that?) made some outstanding adventures. I recently paid $70 for a copy of Monkey Island 1&2, and didn't feel ripped off in the least.
Bungie.
I'm still pissed at microsoft for having the insight/monopolistic impulse to buy them. They put out some great titles, Pathways into Darkness, Marathon, and of course Halo, originally demoed in the late 90s on a powermac.
Lucas didn't think that people would want to buy Star Wars games as much after the movies were finished so he intentionally set up LucasArts to publish and make non-star wars games so that when one source of revenue died up(Star Wars) another would be available to him.
Also I think he didn't want to put all his eggs in one basket.
Once the earlier Star Wars games began to greatly outsell the rest LucasArts began to withdraw from that area.
Oddly enough the non-star wars game Armed and Dangerous was published by LucasArts a few years back and it was brilliant.
Read Errant Story.
Infocom did more with text inside of five years than the entire first person shooter genre has done in its lifetime.
My personal favorite was "Suspended." You were in a cryogenic state, only able to interact with remote robots to bring a group of out-of-whack computers into working shape again. Each robot had its own abilities and senses -- they rolled or walked, one could smell, and so on. The puzzles made you work at them, and this was one game where the packaging and manual and so on really helped and were necessary. I remember the laminated map vividly. It was the complete package.
The gaming industry should be looking to people like those Infocom writers and Dani Bunten as its prophets. Instead we get John Carmack opinion in nauseating detail about the latest graphic cards.
(Dang kids! Get off my lawn!)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.