Games All Downhill Since Pong?

In a recent article Nolan Bushnell laments the current state of gaming, stating that modern games are nothing more than a "race to the bottom" resulting in complete and utter trash. In order to combat what he sees as the downward spiral in game quality he continues to work on his new dining experience uWink that features tabletop games and a "reasonably priced meal". RPS weighs in on the subject arguing that, while the unhealthy obsession with Halo 3 might be a bit misplaced, there are plenty of gems to be found amidst the flotsam and jetsam.

Comments

No.

[Arathon]

See: Portal.

Re:No.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that FPS games have gotten as pretty as they can marketing will have no choice but to focus on game play elements.

Re:No.

[General Wesc]

3.) If you're really so up your own ass as to actually believe Pong is the best game ever, what do you suggest for a future title? How many balls and paddles can you add before you've totally exhaust the third-person-timewaste platform and we're having the same discussion?

See, that's the thing: we don't evaluate games on the potential for sequels. We evaluate them on how much we enjoy playing the game itself, and for how long they stay enjoyable. I guess.that's why we're not in marketing.

Personally, I was never a huge fan of Pong, but Aquanoid and the like are essentially Pong and I found them great fun. I think Tetris may have them all beat, though.

Re:No.

[dhavleak]

Well, it's certainly an interesting game. Not gripping, but it's cool to see a game developer explore new game types.

And I certainly think Nolan misses the point when calling all games these days crap. Lots of gamers would agree that Halo 3 is a great game, but not on the same level as the hype surrounding it. But in some ways Halo (the entire series) has had a role in growing the gamer population. It wasn't the first to have multiplayer gaming by a long shot, but the ease of the multiplayer scenario was probably the turning point in the social aspect of gaming. I mean, when doing a system-link with Halo (Combat Evolved) who knew that in just a few years time we would expect every FPS to have a multiplayer component?

And in that sense, even Portal might be somewhat under-appreciated. It might be breaking ground in the same way. The current flood of FPSes probably has game developers thinking "what can we make that's completely different and engaging?", and this could be just one result of that thought.

I think an analogy with movies is apt here: the next FPS is sort of like the next action movie these days (this is especially true when you consider the reason most gamers bought Halo 3). Its only different in an incremental way, but enough people love the genre (or the series) that they want to see the latest movie. Portal is an attempt at introducing some drama/mystery to the audience. Maybe in some years this will evolve into games that are engaging, entertaining, and enlightening in ways similar to say, Eternal Sunshine, or Crash, or maybe Blade Runner, but without directly being say a quiz game like Carmen Sandiego. The very fact that developers are starting to experiment with such genres; I'd count that as a success for the industry as a whole.

Re:No.

[UncleTogie]

How many balls and paddles can you add before you've totally exhaust the third-person-timewaste platform and we're having the same discussion?

Two paddles.... 'cause then it's Warlords, for Atari 2600! ;)

Hmm, OK...

[Junior J. Junior III]

What metric is being used here? Fun-per-pixel? Fun-per-Hertz? I guess if you go by that standard, Pong is the best videogame ever.

I Completely Agree...

[LBArrettAnderson]

I have a similar view - only differing by a generation or so. I'm probably a bit younger than the author. In my very humble opinion, games have gone downhill ever since they moved from 2D to 3D. My all time favorite game is Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES version). Ocarina of time was alright, but the games these days are just a little bit too complicated with way too much stuff going on. They're fine if you want to really get into them, but again, they are too complicated, and they just feel different.

Perhaps it's just a generation thing... you love the games you were brought up with... I'm sure that there are plenty of people who feel that games have gone downhill ever since they started using "advanced" graphics (tiles, images, etc... the stuff you see with Zelda, Donkey Kong, Mario, etc... for the SNES and NES), as opposed to a ball and some paddles...

Re:I Completely Agree...

[Jarjarthejedi]

It's probably generational. I've played Space Invaders, Pong, and Galaga in their original styles and I found them all terribly boring. Give me a full form FPS or RPG any day. I recognize that a lot of people love those games but for someone whose first real game was Battlefield 1942 those older games are far too simplistic. That ridiculous complexity is one of things I love about games. As long as it's done right it offers you plenty of things to learn how to use which is something I find fun.

I'm sure you'd have a great time playing Tempest again. I wouldn't enjoy that game much at all, I'd much rather play Age of Empire 3 or Battlefield 2142 or Halo 3. To me those are good games (well, Battlefield loses points for it's awful DRM lagging my computer for 10 minutes after I close it...) and the 'classic' games I nostagize about are Battlefield 1942 and Star Trek Armada 2 (which I still play). Simplicity is probably a great thing in a game, if you grew up with simplicity.

As Douglas Adams once said, "Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things." That's really what this article is all about, modern games are against the natural order of gaming for those who grew up with Pong-generation games. To those of us who grew up with modern games they're normal and ordinary and the older games are boring.

Re:I Completely Agree...

[ILuvRamen]

Yeah they sure killed the fun. If you sit two twelve year olds down at a 2 player flash game where you beat each other in the head with hammers, I personally know like 4 kids that would laugh every single time for like 5 minutes and say it's the best game ever made.
anyway, the trend is tons more time having to be spent on art and design and skinning and textures and cutsecenes and Feng Shuing the map and whatever the hell else they waste time on these days. And that leaves a tiny budget and no time for actual gameplay development because of deadlines. Remember when game programmers had someone do graphics in like a week or two then got on with making the game good
But now no, they spend $10,000 and a week or two hiring people to go photograph trees in Ireland from every angle then hurriedly throw down a page of AI script that runs your escort into that tree in game until you restart the level.

In related news...

[Anonymous Coward]

All art downhill since first cave drawing.

I mean like, how could we possibly, you know, improve on, like, the idea of art, man?

Zero risk committee thinking

[Weaselmancer]

IMHO, that's the reason why games today for the most part suck.

Games these days are multimillion dollar affairs. And that's even before the movie is released. There is so much money at stake that no sane person would ever risk making a game without a market study and focus groups. Large projects demand it.

And that's the problem - innovation gets lost in that process. Put another way, innovation isn't safe.

Back In The Day(tm), it was just a couple of guys sitting around thinking up wacky ideas. Sometimes they stuck, and sometimes they didn't. If it failed, who cares? It's just a half a dozen guys that are already on the payroll. But if it worked, you could get innovation - and that made the difference. That's why guys my age sit around playing MAME and not giving a crap about Madden 07. How different could is possibly be from Madden 06?

Nolan is a product of the Golden Age. That's why he's disappointed with today's games. Innovation was the thing back then. A half a dozen mad mavericks could easily turn the world upside down with a really great idea.

Sadly, not possible today. That's why despite all the beautifully rendered cut scenes, bazillions of vertexes per second and obscene piles of money thrown at new titles these days the games are just simply missing that magic spark. And just plain fall flat for guys from our time.

Re:Zero risk committee thinking

[The Raven]

Indie != Good. Innovative != good. Small != Good. Generally it's nostalgia clouding your judgment. You look back and remember xcom, pacman, supermario, rygar, etc.. and forgot all the dreck.

Wow, you completely missed his point. He didn't say that at all. What he said was that variety was good, and that independant small teams could innovate frequently, and sometimes that innovation struck gold. The whole problem with current day gaming is that triple-A titles are almost never breaking new ground. Innovation isn't always good, but without innovation you have stagnation. Stagnation is bad, and that's where we are at.

Multimillion dollar budgets create stagnation, because nobody wants to fund a stinker. There are very few development houses regularly pushing out innovative titles... and, sadly, they're often being purchased by Microsoft or EA, the goliaths of stagnation. Valve is one of the very few completely independent development houses... and, over the years, they've brought us Half Life, Counterstrike, Portal, and Team Fortress 2; each of these was a major innovation at the time that they moved into the mainstream. Hell, even they don't do their innovating in-house. They encourage independent developers and hire them when they make something really good; that's how they acquired Team Fortress, Counterstrike, and Portal.

But most of the other development houses don't even do that. They keep on making the same things year after year, with tiny little innovations; a new graphical method, a single gameplay element, one new multiplayer mode. Innovation still occurs, but it's surrounded and suffocated by similarity.

Re:One way to look at it...

[EmbeddedJanitor]

... and no undo/save.

He's just trolling

[rgo]

I respect Nolan for his GREAT contribution to the gaming industry, but I can't believe he said that current generation games are pure trash.
Come on, the company he founded was a great contributor to the videogame crash. The crash happened many years ago, and a phenomemon like that hasn't repeated ever since; not because there are huge budgets or people buy crap, but because there are very good games in the market. There are games with charismatic characters (Mario), cinematic experiences (Goldeneye, Metal Gear Solid), inmersive worlds (Oblivion, Zelda, Half-Life), or plain-ol fun (Wii Sports, Mario Kart, DDR, Guitar Hero, Metal Slug).

Maybe he is ranting against american game publishers like EA, Activision, that like to market the same crap season after season, giving no more entertaining value. Maybe he is too old and don't play complex games. But that is no excuse, because there are also really good indie (or indie like) games, like Every Extend, Geometry Wars, Bejeweled, Clubhouse Games, Pac Mac CE. Games that are WAY more fun than the late 70s titles.

I also been thinking that maybe he doesn't really like videogames, but he likes to make them. It has always happened, just read some interviews to game developers and they'll tell you they don't really play games. Maybe he liked the old games, closer to the heart of the beginnings of videogaming, he was a protagonist in the revolution. Right now, there is nothing, in gaming, that makes him PASSIONATE because he FEELS there hasn't been a real Paradigm Shift(TM) in the way games are made or people interact with them. I hope he is trying to say what I have just written, but the interview is very poorly done to draw any conclusions.

I only have one message to him: Mr. Bushnell, thank you, you're work has made a great impact in our lives, in ways that no one can imagine. I'm glad you are still an active innovator, I love your restaurant idea, but don't treat the gaming industry like that, please look at Wii Sports and Wii Fit and you'll really see gaming is changing for the great benefit of our glorious nation.

Hey, remember that one film?

[doyoulikeworms]

Where it was a bunch of pictures of a horse running? Yeah, that was the best fucking film of all time. It's just been downhill from there.

Nag nag nag

[tsa]

There will always be people who nag about everything being better in the olden days. I didn't read the article because of the stupid advertisement, but if the guy who wrote it really thinks pong was the best game ever made I feel sorry for him. I, for one, am enjoying the torrent of new adventure games that we are experiencing at the moment a lot!

Re:Obligatory

[FishWithAHammer]

No it isn't!

new games, new kids

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only does this phenomenon apply to games, but movies, music, comics, novels, etc never seem to be as good as they were when you were 15-25*.

This rule is applicable to everyone. How many 50 year olds do you hear say, the music in my time was bland, boring and repetitive. It all sounded the same... now this new stuff the kids are listening to, it's new, refreshing, exciting and is nothing like I've heard before.

Re:What a curmudgeon

[DeadDecoy]

Well, if you compare Bioshock to System Shock 2, then it does feel like it's going down hill. Sure Bioshock looks prettier, but System Shock 2 felt like it just had a better interface. That and I can't really play Bioshock on my pc without it crashing every so often. Still, SS2 offered more of an exploratory experience, where you have to piece together what hapend on this ghost ship. Bioshock seemed more centered on running around to nuke Big Daddys, resurect, and shoot them again. Bioshock is a good game but it only improves upon its predecessor through pretty graphics and a physics engine. Bioshock's depth (pun seriously not intended) isn't the same as SS2.

WTF

[graviplana]

I read this thread and I think most comments are just ridiculous. The Commenter in the Article is ridiculous as well. Games today are _amazing_. I noticed that nobody seemed to mention World of Warcraft. Love it or hate it, it appears to be one of the most successful video games _ever_. Now Halo 3 is getting up to that status as well. I personally think the opinions presented here are mostly completely subjective. Games today are really very much approaching http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality. I think that the change of games and television and all content is really more fascinating than this lamenting of yesterday. What does it say about our World Culture? Where are we headed? What is the next form of entertainment going to be? Have we been entertained too much so now we're all bored?

Re:Feh

[networkassault]

Supposedly, Duke Nukem Forever is actually under active development again. Now, we won't be able to use it as the ultimate vaporware, assuming it comes to completion. I guess GNU HURD is our only good example of vaporware. Too much of the industry consists of cloning and serialization, but there are, as always, good games out there waiting to be found. The problem is, you gotta find them. Besides, there's nothing wrong with serialization as long as the games are still good. (I use the same logic to support the Bond series. :) ) Cloning is a bigger issue, though. A sequel can still innovate, but a clone never does. In my opinion, there are way too many FPS games out there with not enough innovation. I suggest that only certain companies should be allowed to develop FPSs. This should reduce the number of clones, the owners of which will go on to try to clone a genré they know nothing about, and everyone will see the game clones for what they are.

There's always been plenty of dross...

[Alioth]

...Being involved with old computers like the Sinclair Spectrum and BBC Micro, where most of the games are now easy to get hold of, I can tell you that the rose tinted view of all old games being great is just that - a rose tinted view. People remember the games they like from 'back in the day'. However, most of the games back then were dross. Only a few actually stood out. Nothing has actually changed (well, except the games are much, much more expensive in real terms now).

Confusion

[say]

He seems to be confusing the amount of good games per year with the ratio of good games to bad ones per year.

While the odds of getting a good game through picking one at random is diminishing quickly, the number of good games is still constant (or rising). You just have to be more picky.

They Said That About Movies, Too

[EgoWumpus]

The movie industry continues to crank out pretty-but-stupid after pretty-but-stupid movie. The "hey-day" of special effects has come, and then come again. Visual art is not something that is ever going to reach an absolute apex; just look at the successful games out there that do *not* use as-real-as-possible graphics; World of Warcraft, for instance.

Gameplay is, unfortunately, a far more expensive investment than graphics, with less return. It's hard to market as well; what can you say in a few words about gameplay that isn't an anecdote that everyone has already heard a dozen times ("Best gameplay in years! - PC Gamer Magazine") or simply marketing copy that we disbelieve by force of experience ("Unlimited replay value!")? On the other hand, screenshots - remember, pictures say a thousand words - are easy and can genuinely distinguish you from the competition.

I think the upshot is that 90% of games will continue to have no redeeming value, and 10% will either do the graphics so right or have the gameplay elements we crave. The 90% is the price we pay to the industry gods.

Re:One way to look at it...

[justthinkit]

Chess has plenty of save points (DON'T TOUCH THAT BOARD!)

That would be a PAUSE function. Doesn't make the game easier, and is not very effective if your opponent has to go home and you need the kitchen table for something else.