Slashdot Mirror
Don't Go Down Memory Lane?
fieldsofclover writes "Gamers With Jobs is running a piece today about the darker side of gaming nostalgia. From the article: 'Here's an example. Konami's Castlevania had interesting monsters, catchy music, and a great gimmick: a guy with a whip. But if you went back and played it today, chances are you wouldn't bother playing past the second level. Why are the newest games in the series so drastically different from the original? The answer is because gamers demand more from their hobby now, and there's just not a lot of meat on those old bones. But when the fully 3D, story-driven sequel fails, they point at the original on its lofty pedestal and demand an experience that lives up to their memories. It's a double standard that's next to impossible to satisfy.' Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by staying obsessed with the old classics?"
That's a tad melodramatic don't you think?
The first RPG I ever played was simply called "Dungeon", this was the Commodore game that got my entire family hooked on video games for the rest of our lives.
We would sit around the supper table, each trading stories about our experience in this expansive and immersive alternate reality. I would inform everyone about the secret passage I found, where I found a secret spell called Temporal Fugue; my brother would update us as to how much money he had stolen from the bank that day; my father would describe his run-in with "The Devourer".
This game held a special place in all of our hearts and often we would fondly discuss how great the game was... until last year... when I found an emulator and ROM and decided to relive all my old memories. The lush and vibrant full-color dungeon memories that I had in my mind was immediately shattered by a crude 4 color, blocky rendition of what vaguely looked like walls and doors. My memories of thrilling game-play in a true-to-life virtual world were replaced by agonizing and seemingly endless boring hall-walking.
I showed my father. All he did was scream "NO! THERE IS NO WAY THAT THAT'S HOW BAD IT LOOKED! CHRIS YOU MUST HAVE MADE A MISTAKE. THIS CAN'T BE DUNGEON!!"
While my father is STILL in denial, I have accepted the truth. My fond memories of that game are gone forever.
I'm a professional game developer and have been for nine years, my entire post-collegiate life. As you might expect, I'm also a dedicated gamer and on the one hand, I really agree with what you're saying. We rely too much on rehashed ideas, license tie-ins, clones, knockoffs and sequels. I'm sick of it, and I just don't buy those games anymore. So I can sympathize and agree with where you're coming from.
That said, your comment is awfully naive. It's really, really easy to sit outside the industry (or pretty much any creative-based industry) and complain about the lack of originality. Big-picture creative ideas for games are cheap; practically worthless. Just about every single person I've worked with, every kid I meet that finds out I make games, my friends, etc. has ideas for some weird, creative, potentially fun game. But the vast, vast majority of those ideas would collapse under the crushing weight of the reality of game development. Got an idea for a game? Great. Now, is it going to make money? (The large majority of games don't justify their existence, financially speaking). Is it technically feasible? Is it appealing to a wide audience? Will it sell overseas? Can you get capital to finance its development? If so, can you get it without giving up the rights to your idea? Not likely. Can you find money and people to actually build the game? How are you going to market it? Who pays for marketing? Who's competing with you? Is your idea fun to play for 10 minutes? 10 hours?
It's not as simple as pulling your head out of your ass, and presto, crazy new creative games start showing up on shelves. Like everything, money speaks loudest.
Don't even get me started on the watering-down of "puzzles" in modern games. The modern idea of a difficult puzzle is one that requires you to find eight levers (hidden beyond reflex-based "jumping puzzlre" obstacles) and push them all up (changing a red light to green) to open a door somewhere. You punks would WET YOUR PANTS if you saw the kind of monstrously devious crap we had to solve in our day. Plover's egg emeralds hidden beyond a crack your lamp doesn't fit through? Try THAT on for size!
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
yes, but now we seem to be getting to the point where in most entertainment media, truely original ideas have almost no chance of getting through the bean-counters to ever be seen. It ain't just the game industry, it's movies and TV as well. The propblem is that our production values for entertainment is so high that just about any entertainment product MUST gaurentee the producers that it will make millions, because a loss isn't just "oops", it can be bankruptcy, or at least major cutbacks.
.NET.
to make a long story short, the fastest way to make any form of entertainment get stale and derivitive is to make the cost of failure catastrophic.
A year ago I would have agreed with you. But with Steam finally getting some momentum under its belt, suddenly, it's been a lot easier for indie developers to find an outlet. It was a rocky start, and there were problems, but we owe a great deal to valve for taking such a big risk and fuck-starting steam's role as a content distribution system by putting their crown jewel, Half Life 2, on the line. The gamble worked, and the result is that millions of Half Life fans now also are exposed to the work of these indie developers. Think about it from a developers point of view. When millions of HL players from around the globe log in, they see their game, smack dab in the center of the Steam Storefront's main window. It's an IV directly into the pulse of their target market, and I guarentee you that getting such exposure through conventional means would be several orders of magnitude more expensive.
What happened as a result of this? The developers of Darwinia sold more copies of their game in a couple days than their run of Darwinia or Uplink in a box by itself. Now, Introvision is on solid financial ground and also has the leeway to keep creating new games such as DEFCON. This basically opened the door to other indie developers who now market and promote their games online. And because you dont have to go out to a store and buy the game itself, it's a lot easier to make impulse purchases, which is good for developers at least. Of course, some of the indie games are sucessful, some of them not, but the point stands that it is a LOT easier for indie developers to get exposure now than it was a couple years ago.
This is to say nothing of the strides that free software, with its vast array of mature and free compilers and libraries making serious programming accessable without having to fork over hundreds of dollars for Visual Studio
Digital content distribution is the way of the future. There will always be titles of all shapes and sizies being at the whims of the publishers, but now with digital content distribution, the indie developer is no longer relegated to living on the margins, scraping out a living on a small fanatical fanbase...if that.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion