Why do we still play retro games?

[pakopako]

It was certainly a shrewd move on Sony's part, yes. However, I think a company that was more invested in the creative side of the games industry would have done a better job maturing the popular trends in gaming... (Rather SONY, which bought a bunch of developers to get exclusives, encouraged the industry as a whole to make so many bland, cumbersome, colorless game-as-movie affairs.)

A very good point. Though being a theoretical parallel timeline, what's to say that the videogame industry would have become so mainstream if they weren't big-budget game-as-movie affairs?

[flamepanther]

It was certainly a shrewd move on Sony's part, yes. However, I think a company that was more invested in the creative side of the games industry would have done a better job maturing the popular trends in gaming... (Rather SONY, which bought a bunch of developers to get exclusives, encouraged the industry as a whole to make so many bland, cumbersome, colorless game-as-movie affairs.)

A very good point. Though being a theoretical parallel timeline, what's to say that the videogame industry would have become so mainstream if they weren't big-budget game-as-movie affairs?

I personally couldn't give a you-know-what whether games became "mainstream" or not, just so long as they had stayed fun. Who cares if everyone else is into it or not? The extra base certainly hasn't helped the games get any better, and ironically, the cost of making games with mass appeal has placed publishers and developers at greater risk of going out of business. Seems like it's only been a good deal for the big generic producers like Activision and EA. Everyone else has suffered for it. Look at what it did to Capcom!

(edited for spelling errors)

[Runefaust]

Another issue to take note of, and former Capcom boss Keiji Inafune stated himself, is the old school devs were passionate about games in the past. That passion really reflected in the final product and is one of the reasons so many old classics still hold up to this day.

Today those peeps have grown old and there's more concern about the money. Devs are being pushed to take shortcuts, sacrificing the quality of the final product for the sake of making a deadline to save/make more money. And in most cases they have no choice but to conform. In regards to the JP industry this, and the inability to innovate, or surpass the limitations it's imposed upon itself, is what's holding them back.

To me, personally, most of our current gen games lack the appeal that the old games had. If not for Catherine my Nintendo would be eclipsing my 360 in terms of usage.

[flamepanther]

^^ It's hard to be passionate about making generic, boring games, so I think this is very much related to the point I was making. Thank you.

[BoringSupreez]

^^ It's hard to be passionate about making generic, boring games, so I think this is very much related to the point I was making. Thank you.

It may be hard to be passionate about making generic, boring games, but I've known plenty of people who were passionate about playing them.

[flamepanther]

It may be hard to be passionate about making generic, boring games, but I've known plenty of people who were passionate about playing them.

Oh, me too. I just don't typically associate with them.

"OH MY GOD, COD4 is OUT!!!!"


Just one more reason I don't think mainstream support has been good for the industry in the form we got it. That's not an elitist or hipster attitude on my part--I'm just fine with the recent "casual" revolution brought about by PopCap, Wii, and Farmville. Especially in light of that example, I think it's entirely possible that "core" gaming could also have become mainstream under better circumstances--and that if it couldn't we would have been better off if it didn't.

[chalo 07]

It may be hard to be passionate about making generic, boring games, but I've known plenty of people who were passionate about playing them.

Oh, me too. I just don't typically associate with them.

"OH MY GOD, COD4 is OUT!!!!"


Just one more reason I don't think mainstream support has been good for the industry in the form we got it. That's not an elitist or hipster attitude on my part--I'm just fine with the recent "casual" revolution brought about by PopCap, Wii, and Farmville. Especially in light of that example, I think it's entirely possible that "core" gaming could also have become mainstream under better circumstances--and that if it couldn't we would have been better off if it didn't.

It's usually a rare time in history where "art" coincides with "popularity." Do you know who Nathaniel Parker Willis is? Probably not. He was the most popular author in the country during the 1840s. Who do we actually still read from then? Edgar Alan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. They weren't nearly as popular. (In fact, it was N.P. Willis who got the struggling EAP a job.

In many artistic mediums (print, film, music, to a lesser degree), there will always be a "farmville." And like you said, that's not necessarily a bad thing. But, it can be pretty for "popular" and "high artistic quality" to intersect.

[flamepanther]

That's the thing though. For roughly the first two decades that videogames were around, the good stuff was the popular stuff. It's only (relatively) recently that games have this problem the way books and cinema do. There was a change in the attitude and focus of the industry that didn't need to happen, and now I'm not sure it's reversible. It's done irreparable damage to games as culture.

Only slightly off topic, but that's why I still dislike Sony's presence as a guiding force in the games industry. Not for helping Sega kill itself, not for supplanting Nintendo, but for changing the focus of the entire games endustry permanently for the worse. Largely because of them, games development has become a much more cynical process.

[D.D.D.]

Only slightly off topic, but that's why I still dislike Sony's presence as a guiding force in the games industry. Not for helping Sega kill itself, not for supplanting Nintendo, but for changing the focus of the entire games endustry permanently for the worse. Largely because of them, games development has become a much more cynical process.

Perhaps after Sony aimed to make gaming mainstream the process became more cynical... by cynical you mean merely for profit?
Albeit Nintendo typically makes/publishes my favorite games, I somehow doubt that their focus in the 80s or 90s (or now) was for anything but making profit. It just happened to be that they have a helluva designer, great software teams and we ended up with quality games.

[isiolia]

^^ It's hard to be passionate about making generic, boring games, so I think this is very much related to the point I was making. Thank you.

It's probably less of a conscious decision and more a byproduct of larger development teams.

Obviously, with a larger budget, a company is going to want to make sure their game appeals to a wider range of people. That may result in some toning down of things and picking projects that are similar to other stuff that sells.

However, I also mean that you get a lot less individuality with any product as you increase the number of people with creative control. Not necessarily a bad thing, as not every idea is a good one. Unless, however, you have a very like-minded group of people, they're going to turn out something a bit more generic than they would have individually come up with.

That said, I don't necessarily think that big budget, mass-appeal products are necessarily bad. There's often plenty to appreciate within them. Likewise, I don't think that every quirky low budget game out there is good. It's probably not at the point that music/movies are where counter-mainstream is pretty much a second mainstream format, buuut it's probably headed there.

Albeit Nintendo typically makes/publishes my favorite games, I somehow doubt that their focus in the 80s or 90s (or now) was for anything but making profit. It just happened to be that they have a helluva designer, great software teams and we ended up with quality games.

Nintendo is absolutely a cutthroat company. Not sure how they can be construed any other way.