July 22, 2010 at 18:29The plastic world has won. Nearly
I was looking through the list of games bought in Steam the other day, that’s what I thought.
Looking back at the past, you suddenly come to the conclusion that the mid-end of the 90s of the last century is a brief “golden age” of computer games. Which will never happen again.
At that time, a lot of stars came together:
1. personal computers were rapidly gaining popularity, the market was growing at an unprecedented pace;
2. The Internet was in its infancy, there was no competition from today's network services and social services. networks that take away free time from customers;
4. Computer hardware was inefficient. The success of the game depended much more on a successful idea / plot / gameplay, and much less on technical "advancement";
3. as a result - the cost of developing the game was relatively small (this is not 100 million for Starcraft 2);
These four points are enough to explain the unprecedented heyday of that time and everything that happened to CI afterwards. And then there was this:
1. The market settled down, large players came, the audience crawled into niches. Innovations and attempts to create a new genre have been replaced by clear business rules and long-term investments that do not chronically revolutionize revolutions.
Over the past 10, or even 15 years, not a single new genre has appeared. On the contrary, many genres were either dead or driven into the reservation: quests, turn-based strategies, war-games and tactical games, serious simulations, etc. Prosperous, in fact, is only the interactive movie genre with different variations - war epic (Battlefield, Call of Duty), sci-fi (Mass Effect), fantasy (Dragon Age), sitcom / soap opera (Sims), detective (Alan Wake ) The funny thing is that this genre was invented in the 90s.
And it is not necessary to say that Dragon Age, for example, is a “labor old school RPG”. I really love DA, but this is just a good interactive movie.
2. The development of the Internet has influenced CI so much that books can be written about this. But the biggest of all the troubles he brought was attention deficit. In the era of Twitter, it is impossible to imagine aperson reading this essay to the end of a game with complex game mechanics. Such that it could not be figured out in 20 minutes. Too long, skipped. The last difficult game was released in 2003 - Sim City 4.
3. Pictures that were ugly by today's standards in the resolution of 320 by 240 looked great 15 years ago - the imagination made up for the lack of technology. In addition, no one expected visual beauty from computers of that time. Schematicity was taken for granted, as a standard. From chess, for example, no one demands real bloodshed on the chessboard, no matter what Joan Rowling writes there.
The rapid development of technology has led to the fact that on computers it became possible to do various tricky things; gradually they became mandatory, and genres in which innovations remained unclaimed or difficult to implement - died. In the same genres in which good graphics, sound, and AI were out of place, values were replaced. The "picture" outweighed the plot, the shell outranked the filling in importance (the first, moreover, is much easier to sell). Add the twitter effect here (see above), and we get the degradation of all the components of the CI, except for graphics and sound.
4. At the same time, the need for high-quality graphic (primarily) design naturally increased the complexity and cost of creating games. Small studios and lone developers have been squeezed into the niche of casual toys "for five dollars for one evening." The KI industry is more and more reminiscent of cinema: sometimes there are masterpieces with a relatively modest budget (Plants vs. Zombies, “Ninth District”), but in general the threshold for entry is too high.
So, the Internet, technology and big money killed interesting games. What is left?
* * * * * *
Remain (thanks to Steam, Amazon and torrents) diamonds of the past, which no one will ever surpass.
Unfortunately, most of them look just awful or do not work at all on new computers with new operating systems. You can try to adapt the “old people” in some way - the same Steam, for example, sells X-COM with a pre-installed DOS-BOX. At first glance, the ideal solution would be to simply update the graphics: some hypothetical Valve, having access to the source codes of old games, could put a team of artists and programmers in it - rework only graphic engines, increase resolution to Full HD, leaving the logic intact ... It’s almost impossible , unfortunately - even if you do not take into account licensing problems. How, for example, to add support for modern textures, the size of which does not fit in 16 bits, into 16-bit code?
The solution lies on the surface. We have already compared the CI industry with cinema, so why not the first to adopt from the second such a wonderful invention as a remake? The same story - new technologies. In relation to games, the same gameplay is also. All that is required is one single publisher or developer who guesses just to re-release his old hits - not Starcraft 2, for example, but Starcraft HD, not Dragon Age, but Baldur's Gate Remastered. The result, with a well-conducted advertising campaign, will be amazing. Old masterpieces already have their own audience - those who are now 30-45 years old. These people will buy a remake to remember their youth and show their children what they played when they were boys and girls. The only condition is that it must be the same game, without improvements and alterations.
It remains to wait until this thought comes to someone’s head with money. Amateur remakes exist for a long time, but not one of them was successful - the threshold for entry, I remind you, is too high. Need money and a professional approach.
We wait.
PS The case, as it turns out, is still moving in this direction - Monkey Island has been reissued , only the graphics have been updated.
Looking back at the past, you suddenly come to the conclusion that the mid-end of the 90s of the last century is a brief “golden age” of computer games. Which will never happen again.
At that time, a lot of stars came together:
1. personal computers were rapidly gaining popularity, the market was growing at an unprecedented pace;
2. The Internet was in its infancy, there was no competition from today's network services and social services. networks that take away free time from customers;
4. Computer hardware was inefficient. The success of the game depended much more on a successful idea / plot / gameplay, and much less on technical "advancement";
3. as a result - the cost of developing the game was relatively small (this is not 100 million for Starcraft 2);
These four points are enough to explain the unprecedented heyday of that time and everything that happened to CI afterwards. And then there was this:
1. The market settled down, large players came, the audience crawled into niches. Innovations and attempts to create a new genre have been replaced by clear business rules and long-term investments that do not chronically revolutionize revolutions.
Over the past 10, or even 15 years, not a single new genre has appeared. On the contrary, many genres were either dead or driven into the reservation: quests, turn-based strategies, war-games and tactical games, serious simulations, etc. Prosperous, in fact, is only the interactive movie genre with different variations - war epic (Battlefield, Call of Duty), sci-fi (Mass Effect), fantasy (Dragon Age), sitcom / soap opera (Sims), detective (Alan Wake ) The funny thing is that this genre was invented in the 90s.
And it is not necessary to say that Dragon Age, for example, is a “labor old school RPG”. I really love DA, but this is just a good interactive movie.
2. The development of the Internet has influenced CI so much that books can be written about this. But the biggest of all the troubles he brought was attention deficit. In the era of Twitter, it is impossible to imagine a
3. Pictures that were ugly by today's standards in the resolution of 320 by 240 looked great 15 years ago - the imagination made up for the lack of technology. In addition, no one expected visual beauty from computers of that time. Schematicity was taken for granted, as a standard. From chess, for example, no one demands real bloodshed on the chessboard, no matter what Joan Rowling writes there.
The rapid development of technology has led to the fact that on computers it became possible to do various tricky things; gradually they became mandatory, and genres in which innovations remained unclaimed or difficult to implement - died. In the same genres in which good graphics, sound, and AI were out of place, values were replaced. The "picture" outweighed the plot, the shell outranked the filling in importance (the first, moreover, is much easier to sell). Add the twitter effect here (see above), and we get the degradation of all the components of the CI, except for graphics and sound.
4. At the same time, the need for high-quality graphic (primarily) design naturally increased the complexity and cost of creating games. Small studios and lone developers have been squeezed into the niche of casual toys "for five dollars for one evening." The KI industry is more and more reminiscent of cinema: sometimes there are masterpieces with a relatively modest budget (Plants vs. Zombies, “Ninth District”), but in general the threshold for entry is too high.
So, the Internet, technology and big money killed interesting games. What is left?
* * * * * *
Remain (thanks to Steam, Amazon and torrents) diamonds of the past, which no one will ever surpass.
Unfortunately, most of them look just awful or do not work at all on new computers with new operating systems. You can try to adapt the “old people” in some way - the same Steam, for example, sells X-COM with a pre-installed DOS-BOX. At first glance, the ideal solution would be to simply update the graphics: some hypothetical Valve, having access to the source codes of old games, could put a team of artists and programmers in it - rework only graphic engines, increase resolution to Full HD, leaving the logic intact ... It’s almost impossible , unfortunately - even if you do not take into account licensing problems. How, for example, to add support for modern textures, the size of which does not fit in 16 bits, into 16-bit code?
The solution lies on the surface. We have already compared the CI industry with cinema, so why not the first to adopt from the second such a wonderful invention as a remake? The same story - new technologies. In relation to games, the same gameplay is also. All that is required is one single publisher or developer who guesses just to re-release his old hits - not Starcraft 2, for example, but Starcraft HD, not Dragon Age, but Baldur's Gate Remastered. The result, with a well-conducted advertising campaign, will be amazing. Old masterpieces already have their own audience - those who are now 30-45 years old. These people will buy a remake to remember their youth and show their children what they played when they were boys and girls. The only condition is that it must be the same game, without improvements and alterations.
It remains to wait until this thought comes to someone’s head with money. Amateur remakes exist for a long time, but not one of them was successful - the threshold for entry, I remind you, is too high. Need money and a professional approach.
We wait.
PS The case, as it turns out, is still moving in this direction - Monkey Island has been reissued , only the graphics have been updated.