Atari Co-Founder: Mobile Games Make Me Want To Throw My Phone (theguardian.com)

Will Freeman, reporting for The Guardian (condensed): One industry veteran sees arcades and mobile gaming as almost indistinct. He is Nolan Bushnell, co-founder of Atari. Often referred to as the godfather of video games (a phrase he dislikes), he is just about to make his debut in mobile game development, having established a partnership with Dutch publisher Spil, where he will help deliver at least three as-yet-unnamed titles. "When you look at mobile and arcade gaming, they're identical," Bushnell says. "Mobile has some of the same game constraints for the player, and that 'easy to learn, and difficult to master' metric." [...] "Generally, a tremendous number of mobile games are poorly designed," he says. "They can be so focused on graphics that they forget they have to get the timing right, and they have to have proper scoring constructs. I have been so pissed off with some mobile games I've wanted to throw my phone, even if I'm only going to hurt my phone there, and not the game."

Comments

When a phone, is anything but.

[geekmux]

The irony of a game developer pissed at a platform designed and intended for communications.

Anytime people want to stop calling it a fucking phone, I'm ready. It's not like we actually talk on the damn things anymore, and voice is about the last priority with smartphone development these days, as evidenced by the mood of a game developer driving next-gen phone software.