5 ms·

Having worked as a game reviewer, they're correct. There's a ton of hidden pressure behind the scenes to positively review some games, for threat of losing the

Having worked as a game reviewer, they're correct. There's a ton of hidden pressure behind the scenes to positively review some games, for threat of losing the publishers review materials. Some publishers were great, and some were complete asses putting up embargoes on review release dates to hand them off to the bigger magazines first. Overall it just made the experience of reviewing them rather negative, which has tainted my view of games as a whole. I used to be an avid gamer, now I'd barely classify myself as a casual gamer. There are some great and truly innovative games in all sorts of terms from gameplay to story, however mostly I just see Arbitrary Action Element 12 followed by Unsurprising Plot Development 8, even in some reputedly great games.

jacquesm 16y ago
The golden days of game development imo were the late 80's, just enough computer power to make things interesting and not enough big money in it to make it hard to get in to for creative small companies. It's been very much downhill since then, with the exception of a few interesting developments in the console market.
- _delirium 16y ago
  I think it was reasonably agile up to the mid 90s, at least in some areas. A lot of the top PC games of the early/mid 90s had smallish teams and smallish budgets: Quake (1996), for example, had 9 employees on it. These days a 9-person game company has little chance of breaking out of the "indie" category (though there's still some interesting indie stuff happening).
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    Ok, I'll settle for 'doom' as the cut-off :) 1993. (I was doubting about 'wolfenstein', but that only makes it one year earlier). After that it really got out of hand. 9 people is already a fair sized team. Compare that to Jeff Minter or Braben & Bell.
    - ido 16y ago
      How many people worked on doom?
      - jacquesm 16y ago
        The wikipedia page lists 3: Designer(s) John Romero Programmer(s) John Carmack Composer(s) Bobby Prince
        trafficlight 16y ago
        To be fair though, John Carmack counts as at least 3 people.
        ido 16y ago
        The article* mentions at least 5 more people: Tom Hall, Sandy Petersen, Adrian Carmack, Kevin Cloud and Gregor Punchatz. * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_%28video_game%29#Development http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_%28video_game%29#Developme...
- arn 16y ago
  I think the iPhone/App Store marketplace has made it similarly interesting. Small studios can (with some luck) make a living on passion projects. Lots of people have compared it to the "old days" of game development.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    Yes, that's a good point, mobile development has so far been mostly tackled by smaller groups or individuals. I wonder if that's because of platform limitations or because the big companies think there is no money to be made there on the scale they require.
    - arn 16y ago
      I think it's a combination of factors. But low barrier to entry means anyone with $99 + a Mac can try. That combined with the low cost of games also prevents big budget titles from dominating. While there is still room for a relatively higher budget games (sold at $9.99), companies simply can't poor millions and years into titles and expect to make their money back. Also as much crap as the App Store gets, it's very democratic in that everyone is equally screwed by the volume of apps. But it means that unknown IP seems to have a chance to rise to the top as well.
- barrkel 16y ago
  Almost all video games from the late 80s were crap by today's standard. I think you're guilty of some pretty severe bias in your estimation. You need to justify the criteria by which you are measuring, IMO, in order to explain why such brilliant games are not currently out-competing today's games. By crap, I meant that they had so little resources to work with that most could only work on the level of playability, puzzles and reaction times; to get deeper, they had to rely on text, where they didn't enter into a visceral feedback loop with the player. They worked only on very slim slices of the mind's abstraction stack. If they were reaction-based, they would be at most tactical, not strategic, and certainly not epic in a story-telling sense; and if they got into story-telling, they ended up in interactive fiction land, where they lose the immediacy of high-bandwidth visual and aural representations. They need to say, rather than show, so the user gets a narration, rather than an experience.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    > most could only work on the level of playability, puzzles and reaction times That's exactly why I liked them. I used to play games a lot because it was great fun, the games out today concentrate on 'the experience' rather than any of the above, and I already have a great world around me to experience. The pacman game on the google page really brought that home to me, I really had to very strongly resist playing it or I would have been hooked for at least an hour.
  - iuguy 16y ago
    I think you're thinking of the early 80s. Certainly Prince of Persia, Another World (Out of this World in the US) or any of the other mid to late 80s games that came along don't really gel with your comment. The issue of gameplay versus slick graphics dominated the early to mid 90s when FMV started to appear. It took a long time for game developers to create the modern interactive narrative and it still gets screwed up today. I do respectfully disagree with your comment about the games being crap by today's standard and also your point on interactive fiction and narration, Classic games such as Lords of Midnight, Contact Sam Cruise and Maniac Mansion provided both narrative and visual representation and experience.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

jacquesm 16y ago

The golden days of game development imo were the late 80's, just enough computer power to make things interesting and not enough big money in it to make it hard to get in to for creative small companies. It's been very much downhill since then, with the exception of a few interesting developments in the console market.

_delirium 16y ago
I think it was reasonably agile up to the mid 90s, at least in some areas. A lot of the top PC games of the early/mid 90s had smallish teams and smallish budgets: Quake (1996), for example, had 9 employees on it. These days a 9-person game company has little chance of breaking out of the "indie" category (though there's still some interesting indie stuff happening).
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Ok, I'll settle for 'doom' as the cut-off :) 1993. (I was doubting about 'wolfenstein', but that only makes it one year earlier). After that it really got out of hand. 9 people is already a fair sized team. Compare that to Jeff Minter or Braben & Bell.
  - ido 16y ago
    How many people worked on doom?
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      The wikipedia page lists 3: Designer(s) John Romero Programmer(s) John Carmack Composer(s) Bobby Prince
      - trafficlight 16y ago
        To be fair though, John Carmack counts as at least 3 people.
      - ido 16y ago
        The article* mentions at least 5 more people: Tom Hall, Sandy Petersen, Adrian Carmack, Kevin Cloud and Gregor Punchatz. * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_%28video_game%29#Development http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_%28video_game%29#Developme...
arn 16y ago
I think the iPhone/App Store marketplace has made it similarly interesting. Small studios can (with some luck) make a living on passion projects. Lots of people have compared it to the "old days" of game development.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Yes, that's a good point, mobile development has so far been mostly tackled by smaller groups or individuals. I wonder if that's because of platform limitations or because the big companies think there is no money to be made there on the scale they require.
  - arn 16y ago
    I think it's a combination of factors. But low barrier to entry means anyone with $99 + a Mac can try. That combined with the low cost of games also prevents big budget titles from dominating. While there is still room for a relatively higher budget games (sold at $9.99), companies simply can't poor millions and years into titles and expect to make their money back. Also as much crap as the App Store gets, it's very democratic in that everyone is equally screwed by the volume of apps. But it means that unknown IP seems to have a chance to rise to the top as well.
barrkel 16y ago
Almost all video games from the late 80s were crap by today's standard. I think you're guilty of some pretty severe bias in your estimation. You need to justify the criteria by which you are measuring, IMO, in order to explain why such brilliant games are not currently out-competing today's games. By crap, I meant that they had so little resources to work with that most could only work on the level of playability, puzzles and reaction times; to get deeper, they had to rely on text, where they didn't enter into a visceral feedback loop with the player. They worked only on very slim slices of the mind's abstraction stack. If they were reaction-based, they would be at most tactical, not strategic, and certainly not epic in a story-telling sense; and if they got into story-telling, they ended up in interactive fiction land, where they lose the immediacy of high-bandwidth visual and aural representations. They need to say, rather than show, so the user gets a narration, rather than an experience.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  > most could only work on the level of playability, puzzles and reaction times That's exactly why I liked them. I used to play games a lot because it was great fun, the games out today concentrate on 'the experience' rather than any of the above, and I already have a great world around me to experience. The pacman game on the google page really brought that home to me, I really had to very strongly resist playing it or I would have been hooked for at least an hour.
- iuguy 16y ago
  I think you're thinking of the early 80s. Certainly Prince of Persia, Another World (Out of this World in the US) or any of the other mid to late 80s games that came along don't really gel with your comment. The issue of gameplay versus slick graphics dominated the early to mid 90s when FMV started to appear. It took a long time for game developers to create the modern interactive narrative and it still gets screwed up today. I do respectfully disagree with your comment about the games being crap by today's standard and also your point on interactive fiction and narration, Classic games such as Lords of Midnight, Contact Sam Cruise and Maniac Mansion provided both narrative and visual representation and experience.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]