18 things you'll never see in videogames again

[Blacklord]

18 things you'll never see in videogames again
Get your hankies out and start mourning.
Game journos are constantly complaining that there are no new ideas in the software industry and that nothing ever changes. While the first part is probably true, the second is way off the mark. To prove it, here are 18 things that have left videogames for good, never to return.

1. One-man development teams. In the original home computer boom of the early eighties, you didn't need huge teams of specialists to create videogames. You needed one man, sitting at home with a Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum and a couple of free weeks. Dave Perry, Peter Molyneux, Jez San, Dave Jones, etc. all started off this way. Despite misty-eyed nostalgia, though, most of these games were pants. But then, most games are pants nowadays and that's with 40 people involved.

2. Concept Games. When the budget to create and market a game was still in the thousands rather than the multi-millions, publishers were willing to experiment with a few wacky ideas. Hence Deux ex Machina, a Spectrum/C64 title in which you guide a human from conception to old age via a series of surreal mini-games, starring Jon Pertwee. Or Captain Blood, the bizarre - in fact virtually incomprehensible - French-developed space adventure with a plot like a Eugene Ianesco play. The strangest things you get these days are the farting aliens in MDK2.

3. FMV sequences starring 'down on their luck' Hollywood stars. For a while, no PC or PlayStation game was complete without a series of cinematic cut scenes to 'flesh out the plot'. These were often filmed by failed film students and filled with D-list celebs. Face it, we'll never see Mark Hamill or Corey Haim in a videogame ever again. No one does FMV sequences any more. They're expensive and players skip them because they're shite.

4. Blatant copies of best-selling titles. Most early C64 and Spectrum games were unauthorised and barely disguised rip-offs of coin-op hits like Donkey Kong, Scramble and Centipede. Even in the slightly more serious Amiga days you had stuff like Great Giana Sisters (see if you can guess what that game was ripping off). Things are very different today. Try marketing a game called Grave Raider starring Laura Crift, and you'll see what I mean.

5. Publishers based in pokey offices above small computer shops in Sheffield. That was Gremlin, by the way, now part of the Infogrames group.

6. Games on cassettes. C64, Spectrum, Dragon 32, Oric and BBC Micro games all came on audio cassettes. We waited three minutes for them to load and then they'd crash on the opening screen. You don't know you're born today.

7. Games on cartridges. Nintendo kept the cart fire burning for as long as it could with the N64, but the days of the loveable 'lump of plastic' are over. Let's face it, they're just not sexy. The music industry realised this ages ago thanks to the death of the 8-track cartridge.

8. Computer music superstars. In the olden days, specialist musicians wrote game music via the computer's internal sound chip - developers couldn't just store 20 minutes of audio on a CD-ROM like they can today. The simple C64 classics produced by such immortal names as Rob Hubbard, David Whittaker and Martin Galway will forever haunt the minds of 8-bit gamers.

9. Digitised graphics. Mortal Kombat. Pit Fighter. Horrible little characters made out of digitised photos. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. It wasn't.

10. Barely understandable digitised speech. How impressed we were in the eighites when our videogames managed to splutter out three words to us. They won't shut up now.

11. Blatantly unattractive lead characters. Nowadays there are four categories of controllable character: sexy (Lara), cute (Croc, Mario), cool (Sonic, Crash) and, my personal favourite, psychopathic (Shadowman, Duke Nukem). Go back a few years and you had fat, myopic rodents (Monty Mole), bizarre eggmen (Dizzy) and formless blobs (Horace, Seymour). Lord knows what Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy were.

12. Overhead-view soccer games. Sensible World of Soccer is arguably one of the most tactically realistic and enjoyable football games ever created. But, gulp, it wasn't even 3D. You saw the players from...above. Gameplay-wise it made perfect sense. But why let gameplay get in the way?

13. Taking on the role of an inanimate object. Marble Madness was a brilliantly constructed arcade game in which you guided a metal ball around a series of fiendish mazes. There were various home computer takes on this idea, the most notable example being Spin Dizzy on the C64. A game based around a metal ball would never get beyond the first pitch to the marketing department these days. "Players can have no affinity with a ball" one bright spark would point out. Then another would add "and it doesn't even have breasts".

14. Text-based adventures. The first adventure games (Zork- springs to mind) involved nothing more than a series of text messages. You'd get something like, "You are in the great hall of Gartonlax. There are exits to the north and south". Then you would have to input a two-word command. "go south", "eat chicken", "smack imp". To which the most usual response from the game would be "I can't do that right now". Marvellous stuff.

15. Completely random death. Nowadays this is used to highlight bad game design. In the past, though, CRD was an accepted part of the gaming experience. In Domark's classic 8-bit battle adventure game, Lords of Midnight, for example, one of your lead characters could slay a whole army one minute and then get eaten by some wolves the next.

16. Conspicuous millionaires. Oh there are plenty of rich men in the videogame industry now, but they tend to be managing directors and CEOs - middle-aged men in suits who refer to videogames as 'products'. When the industry really boomed globally in the late-eighties, you had all these teenage coders - Jez San, the Darling Brothers, Fergus McGovern, etc. - dressing like rejects from Miami Vice and driving cars so powerful you could never legally get them out of first gear. Classy.

17. Videogame magazine ads with airbrush art. Right up to the age of the Megadrive and SNES, videogame advertising was simple and naive...and airbrushed. You didn't get clever campaigns courting controversy, you got airbrushed soldiers, airbrushed cops, airbrushed cars and possibly two screenshots. You knew where you were in them days.

18. Loading screens. I mean proper loading screens. Not black screens with 'Loading' written on them. Because 8-bit loading times used to be about two minutes, you'd get a lovely picture to look at while the game was deciding whether to crash or not. That was when computer art was a single 2D screen. They were great for the comedy value alone.

Keith Stuart



   

[BydoEmpire]

Hah, great list.  Sad (in some cases) but true.

[Diddl]

Point 7 isn't true.

Nintendo NDSi is a console living since a few month and is using cartridges ...

[commodorejohn]

Some day I am going to bring back the point-and-click adventure game, so help me God.

[BydoEmpire]

The iphone also brings back the potential one person dev "teams" and the point and click adventure (in fact, I just finished playing the iPhone port of Transylvania - it's very cool).  Although, I'm not sure how many one developer games have a publisher, I would guess they're mostly indie games...

So... partly true, but still funny.

[Chapman003]

good to read it . . . hope it will not ruined the quality of gameplay .

[XmikeX]

Rebuttal..

#2 - nintendo dishes out concept games all the time, and even sony is known to have few odd concept games every now and then

#3 - I wonder what those FMV sequences of latest generation of Command & Conquer games were all about...

#4 - blatant copying can and will happen. check out Singstar-wannabe 'Lips' on x360... or...
        (or maybe every FPS made since Doom.. perhaps..)

#5 - publishers have, are, and shall continue to work in the most 'interesting' places.

#7 - games on cartridges never disappeared. they've followed nintendo all the way, as pointed out already.

#8 - given the right title, there is still the possibility to rise to fame with game music.
        (pay attention to wipeout series (through ps1/ps2/psp/ps3), it's been a regular superstar-generator)

#9 - MoCap came to replace digitized graphics. it's effectively the same, however, only for different era.

#11 - plenty of unattractive characters out there - this one comes to mind right off the bat (since it's still fresh in memory): http://www.thegamecritique.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Brutal-Legend-3.jpg  Also, stuff like left 4 dead 1 and 2 have a decidedly average bunch of main characters, which makes them believable.

#12 - almost every soccer/hockey game you can rig to overhead view mode through menu buttons

#13 - Archer MacLean would most certainly disagree at this point. he can and will bring out games starring "inanimate objects" (or substances/liquids).

#15 - if you never see it coming, it counts as completely random.   no, this insanity never really went away.
         (e.g., Killing Floor loves to spawn a fleshpound or scrake 2 feet from you... just as soon as you turn around and look the other direction for a moment ... basically instant death)

#16 - simple enough idea with low enough production costs and moderately sized development studio, we will all walk away as millionaires.  PopCap games, I am looking at you.

#18 - Bioshock, Left4Dead, Call of Duty games (among others) make a big point about their Loader screens.

XmX

Side Note : one-man dev teams · probably now more than ever for iphone, as suggested in this thread.
it seems as if iphone these days has more titles than all computers+consoles combined from 1980s onwards.  gee, that was fast.

[commodorejohn]

1. One-man development teams.
2. Concept Games.
5. Publishers based in pokey offices above small computer shops in Sheffield.
13. Taking on the role of an inanimate object.
15. Completely random death.
17. Videogame magazine ads with airbrush art.

These are vanishing from mass-market, mainstream gaming, but thankfully, the indie-game market is picking up where the corporate big dogs have left off. One-man development teams? Cave Story. (A damn fine game, too.) Concept games? Passage. Completely random death? La-Mulana. Even airbrush art is getting its representation - witness Capcom's winking homage with the American cover for Megaman 9.

8. Computer music superstars.

This isn't quite true. Game composers vanished from the limelight in the early '90s, but they've fortunately been getting more recognition in recent years (though more with long-time industry pros like Nobuo Uematsu, but then, those are exactly the kind of people who know more about game soundtracks than "fill a CD with generic movie-trailer orchestra.")

4. Blatant copies of best-selling titles.
16. Conspicuous millionaires.

These I will happily bid farewell to. Well, the conspicuous millionaires, at least - unfortunately, carbon-copy games are alive and well, almost moreso than ever.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

18 things you'll never see in videogames again
Get your hankies out and start mourning.

Not this dinosaur.  I never had much interest in video games, whether on a coin-op kiosk or a Commodore 128.    That may have been the result of having lots of real-life adventures, such as doing dangerous things at high speeds in automobiles.

14. Text-based adventures. The first adventure games (Zork- springs to mind) involved nothing more than a series of text messages. You'd get something like, "You are in the great hall of Gartonlax. There are exits to the north and south". Then you would have to input a two-word command. "go south", "eat chicken", "smack imp". To which the most usual response from the game would be "I can't do that right now". Marvellous stuff.

Games such as Zork required that the player possess a modicum of imagination, something that isn't a prerequisite to playing a graphics-based games.  Just how much imagination is required to push a joystick around and watch little red zoogies fly across the screen?