3 ms·

> Benj Edwards, How-To Geek: Do you think the video game industry has lost sight of any innovations from the early days of Atari? > Nolan Bushnell: A little bi

> Benj Edwards, How-To Geek: Do you think the video game industry has lost sight of any innovations from the early days of Atari? > Nolan Bushnell: A little bit. Remember that Atari was founded as a coin-op company. And coin-op has this requirement that a newbie has to get into the game almost instantly without reading instructions. So the simplicity of onboarding is lost by a lot of people right now. > HTG: If you play a modern game, you have to sit and wait for loading, go through a tutorial, watch all the cutscenes, and it’s an hour into the game before you can finally play something. I don't agree there. Some games are still like this. "Arcade" games are not the ones I like. I didn't like them when I had an Atari 800 XL but back then there wasn't really much else to play, due to limited system resources. But even back then I loved "Adventure", the idea of a whole world inside that computer. Shooting endless waves of aliens had much less impact on me. We have more types of games now, and some are approaching the complexity of the real world. Some are still not. This is a good thing IMO.

criddell 4y ago
I mostly like shooters (like Far Cry) and skip every cut scene I can. I wish games had an auto-skip all cutscenes option. It drives me nuts to have to skip more than one cutscene in a row. Do they really think I’m going to want to skip three cutscenes and then watch the fourth?
- mattnewton 4y ago
  How do you feel about games like the original half life, which mostly don’t have cutscenes separate from the game, just scripted events on rails you can observe?
  - bombcar 4y ago
    For me half life wasn’t bad because you weren’t entirely railroaded - some grab control of your character and force you to look a particular way, which is a cutscene by another name.
  - criddell 4y ago
    If it lasts less than about 3 seconds, I'm fine with it. I love movies and I love games, but I mostly hate movies based on games and games that want to be a movie.
dinvlad 4y ago
I wish game intellect was far more advanced than graphics, by this point. Without good in-game AI and unless there's really good writing (which is rare on itself these days!), it all gets boring really fast. Talking about single-player here, of course.

criddell 4y ago

I mostly like shooters (like Far Cry) and skip every cut scene I can. I wish games had an auto-skip all cutscenes option. It drives me nuts to have to skip more than one cutscene in a row. Do they really think I’m going to want to skip three cutscenes and then watch the fourth?

mattnewton 4y ago
How do you feel about games like the original half life, which mostly don’t have cutscenes separate from the game, just scripted events on rails you can observe?
- bombcar 4y ago
  For me half life wasn’t bad because you weren’t entirely railroaded - some grab control of your character and force you to look a particular way, which is a cutscene by another name.
- criddell 4y ago
  If it lasts less than about 3 seconds, I'm fine with it. I love movies and I love games, but I mostly hate movies based on games and games that want to be a movie.

dinvlad 4y ago

I wish game intellect was far more advanced than graphics, by this point. Without good in-game AI and unless there's really good writing (which is rare on itself these days!), it all gets boring really fast. Talking about single-player here, of course.