I don't quite follow the point the author is trying to make. He had an experience where something he paid a bunch for turned out to be nearly worthless, so now he hates all video games? But not really, he just doesn't like the industry?
It sounds to me like he is just cynical in general. I am mid-thirties, have been playing video games since the 80s, and still love them with the same enthusiasm as when I was a kid.
Sure, I play a lot less. I don't have nearly as much time, with a full time job, a wife, and a kid. It is still my go-to free time activity, though.
My buddies, married with children themselves, and I play together online one night a week. It is our way of maintaining our social bond through families and living far apart. We are closer because of games than we would ever be otherwise.
I took it as a story about his journey to maturity. As a young lad he saw only one aspect of gaming, the part that focused on entertainment. As he got older he saw more of the 'cost' of that entertainment, and it was summed up by taking the majority of the video games he owned and their consoles and selling them, to buy one super console, only to have that choice turn out to be shockingly expensive.
He not only saw the 'value' of his console drop more than 90% he saw that he had 'lost' a bunch of things he cherished (his collection) which he would still have had he kept them.
The economic reality that he had essentially sold his 'collection' for $50 really affected his self image. And rather than say "Gee, that was stupid! I sure learned my lesson!" he finds he has to take it out on the video game industry that 'tricked' him into giving them all of that personal wealth in exchange for what was now perceived as crap.
Some people don't recover from that sort of shock, some do. Hopefully at some point the author will forgive himself for allowing his love of the vision that 3DO presented to cost him so dearly.
I doubt the 3DO ever developed an extensive enough games library to begin to match all that he had lost. He was cheated out of a lot of games and memories. By society.
It’s not as if somebody held a gun to his head and made him sell. He got burned in his own quest for material. Blame the human condition rather than society.
> I took it as a story about his journey to maturity.
Why does so much of society today equate cynicism with maturity? As a grown man with 3 kids, 4 houses, 3 cars one wife, I like to think I’m fairly mature, yet I find cynicism to be a thief of joy.
I don't equate cynicism with maturity, I equate a more nuanced view of the world with maturity. I know people who are both immature and cynical, in some cases a bit of maturity would mitigate their cynicism.
I bought loads of silly machines over the years - CD32, CDTV, CDi, 3DO, Jaguar...
It feels a little bit like we are in a little golden age of video games.
I’ve just finished up BotW (amazing), maybe 50% through Mario Odyssey (amazing again), I’ve got Rayman Legends to play through and Splatoon 2 to get stuck into, in between the odd game of Rocket League. That’s just on the Switch!
On the PC I’ve got countless games I’ve bought for next to nothing in steam sales to find time for, Cuphead, Just Cause 3, Metro, Wolfenstein to finish and highly acclaimed indy titles galore...
Then I have tons of retro games I’m eager to play for the first time, or play through again, easily accessed and for next to nothing.
My biggest complaint is also the lack of time I have to digest it all.
I'll second that. Just got a switch, BotW and Mario Osyssey for the family for Christmas, and I've been logging a lot of time with Zelda at night when the kids are in bed. The game is massive and dense, which is awesome in an adventure/exploration game.
I was a little worried I would be let down because of all the hype, but it's delivered so far. I haven't even really started Mario yet, but I loved Mario 64 so I imagine there's a lot to like there too.
Is it a golden age, or do games get generally better as technology improves? They are bigger, smoother, more complex, better connected, and so on. That's why I don't quite follow this article either. Games are objectively better. Perhaps he doesn't find them as fun or as engaging, but that's less to do with the games and more to do with the person.
That and the DS/3DS is probably the richest game console to date in terms of sheer volume of quality content. If you can't find a game you like on the DS, you might not like games.
This is highly subjective so probably some people will strongly disagree, but I do think there have been significantly better and worse "ages" in videogames. It's not been constant progress.
For example, I'd say 1999-2005 was a quite crappy age. Dominant consoles were Playstation 1 and 2, the first XBox and the Game Cube, which of course had some fine outlier games but nothing compared to the mind-blowing catalogs of e.g. the SNES or the Neo Geo, which were brimming with gems, many of them are still widely considered among the best games of all time.
In the PC, after breakthrough games in the previous years like Daggerfall, Quake, Master of Magic, Doom, Civ II, Ultima Underworld, Fallout, Warcraft, Starcraft, GTA, etc., most of what dominated the market in that decadence period were sequels of those and others, and unoriginal games.
This opinion is not just due to my being a cranky old timer wanting people to get off his lawn. I do think the situation improved a lot from 2006 onwards. Team Fortress II, the Wii, Portal, Minecraft... were truly revolutionary concepts in the late 2000s in different ways, and indie games began to flourish with titles like World of Goo or Braid (or said Minecraft). Fast forward to now, and we have the Switch, Pokémon Go (geolocation games), and a blooming indie universe. I do think we are at a golden age, it would be a great time to be 15 again and have lots of time for videogames.
Some important early 2000s games off the top of my head:
- BF1942. The Desert Combat mod was a blueprint for the “dudebro” FPS boom
- Counter-Strike, DOTA two mods for other games. Both took aspects of other genres (FPS duels and RTS) and made them more accessible to non-hardcore players.
- GTA3 and sidequels. Vice City really anticipated the 80s nostalgia boom of the mid-late 00s. San Andreas was unlike anything I had ever played before in terms of pure scope.
- MGS2. Insane production values (Kojima described it as a “Hollywood game”) mixed with an interesting story and subverting player expectations. The shitstorm surrounding it reminds me a lot of “The Last Jedi”.
I'm not asking about their sequels and follow-ups, like DotA 2. People still enjoy The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past (1991) today when many more good Zelda games exist. But it appears to me that not even nostalgia would compel someone to play an early-2000s PC game.
I do enjoy some early-2000s games today more than recent AAA titles (PlayStation 1,2 Gamecube, and I'd throw the Sega Dreamcast in there too).
On the other hand, I grew up with a SNES emulator with more than 300 games, I played a lot of them, and despite the unusual gem like TloZ, most SNES games were totally unmemorable, to say the least.
My point is, that I don't see a fundamental difference between SNES-era games and the early 2000's, both were markets saturated with crap, and a few gems that have stood the test of time.
That seems orthogonal to what I asked. ALttP has player-made mods (randomizers) too.
Let's put it this way. At this moment on Twitch, there are:
- 4 people playing Warcraft 3 (any mod)
- 0 people playing Half-Life 1 (any mod)
- 1 person playing GTA 3 (any mod)
- 21 people playing A Link to the Past (any mod)
- 13 people playing Super Mario 64 (any mod)
So I am totally on board with Al-Khwarizmi's claim. The role of even the best early-'00s games was to show us what better games could be made. Once those better games were made, the '00s games were abandoned, in a way that '90s games weren't.
That’s apples and oranges, though. Super Mario 64 wasn’t a PC game. For a better comparison, how about Super Mario Sunshine (2002; not as popular as 64 but pretty popular), or perhaps Super Smash Bros. Melee (2001; currently one of the most popular competitive fighting games)?
I find that statements like this serve only to reflect the writer's nostalgia.
The Playstation/Saturn/N64 generation wasn't even mentioned despite being the one to introduce 3D games which are still being perfected and laying the foundation for the mechanics that are still the basis of almost every single game coming out today.
And perhaps it's fueled by nostalgia, but games like Super Mario 64 and Final Fantasy VII are still acclaimed today despite their aged tech and the creation of better successors. And in some ways they are timeless, in the same ways NES or Atari classics are.
3D ganes were introduced in the 90s, before the dark age I described. I did mention 4: Doom (OK, pseudo-3D), Ultima Underworld (full-fledged 3D in 1992, almost modern controls and has aged better than many games 10 years newer), Daggerfall (extremely ambitious full 3D with a world of a size and scope never since seen) and Quake (full 3D, essentially the same game gameplay wise as most of the later FPSs released until today, just with less detailed textures, and a breakthrough in scriptability and moddability). In the console world I could of course mention Star Fox of the SNES, and Mario 64 of the N64, which were also seminal games, but quite prior to the age I'm criticizing. The 3D games of the 1999-2005 era didn't really introduce significant new elements that weren't in these, they were mostly variations of the same thing, sequels or incremental improvements.
Those systems introduced 3D gaming, like the Atari 2600 and it's contemporaries introduced home video games. However, there's not that many great games from either of those times. I enjoy playing the Atari generation games because of the intense focus on gameplay and immediacy of the platform, but it's hard to get others interested. I expect the same is true outside of a very few 3d titles from that era between load times, poor textures, bad cameras, etc. (But maybe I'm just old and grumpy)
Over at filfre, an article held a quote from one of the game devs from back around the C64 era.
It boiled down to the notion that the gaming industry have a (bad) habit of resetting itself whenever there is a solid change in hardware available. Resulting in years of glitzy but shallow games as devs spend time showing of what they can make the hardware do more than making deeply engaging game.
So it may well be that recent years of lagging Moore's Law payouts have resulted in game devs having to refocus their effort on something other than graphics prowess to get their games to sell.
Are you a game journalist by any chance?
I am asking because this is the opinion I used to see on the gaming sites when I still read them. I suspect it's because the 6th generation made games mainstream and brought in "normies" to their despair.
Games like GTA3, really popular MMOs (WoW, Lineage, RO etc all had subscriber numbers many times over the previous generation of UO and EQ), online play accessible to normal people (before Halo and SOCOM you had to lug your Xtr33m g4mIng PC to some "LAN party" with other geeks), piles of unique yet well made games never done before like Katamari Damaci, Ico, Rez, music and dance games, MGS, 3D metroids, crazy shit like voice controlled pinball or bongo-operated Donkey Kong or Tekki with a giant controller etc. etc. This was not a crappy age by any measure you'd like to apply other than extreme bitterness.
I'm not a game journalist and have no specific interest or reason to be bitter about a particular age, as I have been playing games quite uninterruptedly since the 80s to now, including those years I don't like. Which were in fact quite good years of my life that I don't have any reason at all to be bitter about. And in which I played a lot of videogames, but mostly from the 90s because the games of the time weren't just hooking me in that much (even though I tried many).
GTA3 is a sequel and the vast majority of gameplay ideas were already in GTA (1997). WoW indeed is popular but a grindfest and tremendously shallow compared to UO. Halo has nothing original with respect to e.g. Quake and you will still find many people playing HD overhauls of Quake I, you'll have a hard time finding anyone playing Halo. The dance games started AFAIR in 1998 with DDR. MGS is from 1998 and in the early 2000s we only saw sequels. Metroid Prime, yeah, that was an outlier!
By the way, it isn't elitism either, few games were more mainstream that e.g. Super Mario Bros, World, Kart or 64 and I count those as masterpieces.
As I say it is subjective, probably there's many people that like games from that generation, but I can perfectly see where the game journalists you mention are coming from. It was a boring period of sequels and incremental ideas. For someone who hadn't ever played a FPS, yes, Halo could be good because it was their first, but those of us who had played Wolfenstein, Doom, Duke Nukem, Blood, Quake, etc. were like "So what?" But it's not elitism. I can see the worth in many mainstream games from other periods when they are really good and original, e.g. I see Pokémon Go as revolutionary with all the elitist bashing it gets! But the vast majority of games of the early 2000s were just reskings of things done earlier, and often better.
Sure, all the SNES RPGs, fighters and platformers were extremely original, every single one of them :) And Nintendo first party games of course. So many original games. Mario Party 7 was a blast and nothing like Mario Party 6!
My main point, though, was about the impact. GTA3 was a revelation for millions of people who have not even heard of GTA1 and GTA2. Saying it's "a sequel" is as meaningful as saying FF XI is a sequel. Millions of people first online shooter was Halo (2), not Quake. Millions of people first MMO was WoW, not UO. MGS2 was the game people could not believe it's real time, it was nothing like MGS1 on PSX.
In the 6th generation games became mainstream. I dare you to name a movie, where adults play games, made before 1999. I don't recall a single one. After 2000 it's a common scene where young and not so young adults play games. The main guy in House of Card plays games. This alone makes the 6th gen special even if you don't care about all the original games it produced.
PS. Actually, an adult plays game in Clerks, though the scene is to show how nerdy he is.
Higher-tech games are not objectively better, though that's a very common fallacy among "hardcore" gamers and hardware devs. You can do things you couldn't before, which opens up new kinds of gameplay, and it's certainly nice when games are extremely pretty, but the indie revolution of the last decade should have conclusively killed the idea that tech trumps gameplay. Just for one example, Spelunky essentially founded the "roguelikelike" genre and played a huge part in kickstarting the indie surge, and it (at least in its first incarnation) could just about have run on the SNES.
And in 30 years, you won't regret having sold your entire console collection for even $50. It will have been taken from you when the various services you have to log into to access it become inaccessible. The golden age of consoles has past. PC games are obviously not immune to the issue, but at least there's not a single point of failure for every game ever made for it.
I agree. It’s a pretty ridiculous perspective to develop out of a fairly common experience. How many people that bought Betamax developed a deep loathing of the home video industry? Not many I am thinking. Ultimately every person has to come to grips with the fact that money or material or “what’s next” will eventually disappoint them.
This is typical gonzo-style new games journalism which was popularised on the Insert Credit forums, Brandon Sheffield’s pre-Gamasutra gig. The main thrust is to share the thoughts and feelings you had when experiencing some game-related event in prefence to a logocentric review.
Atari Jaguar, 3DO, Neo-Geo, and WebOS and other assorted platform failures along with the successes of OSX, Android, iOS, Xbox, psx, and nintendo left a strong imprint on why and how I develop software platforms. I learned you can’t just promise radical new opportunities, you have to have them ready and usable on launch day. This allows users to buy in on day one and be generally happy. Then this motivates third party developers which then snowballs into more users and then the platform achieves takeoff velocity.
Ultimately all successful platforms are a collective ecosystem experience, but they start just between the user and the first party developer.
Teams like Occulus are falling down the same trap as 3DO, promising lots of new expertise’s but demonstrating little to no day-one practicality.
Properly practiced, the MVP concept should narrow your product direction to achieving pretty much only the day one practical functionality, with any promises beyond that being cut. But practically I see that many can’t quite get there and end up with real functionality promised down the line and useless features delivered in an mvp.
> Teams like Occulus are falling down the same trap as 3DO
Did you try any game like Lone Echo? It's so good it's the only game I broke my "not buying exclusives" rule with (I have a Vive). I paid for about 30-40 VR games in Steam, so it's not exactly a 3DO.
This sort of story just happened en masse with Destiny 2 players. The game ($60) as a social multiplayer space kind of hit a dead end after everyone beat the campaign, with further milquetoast content gated behind DLC and loot boxes (all paid of course)
The whole thing of children being socially incentivized to invest huge amounts of money in devices that might fail for fear they'll be out of the loop with children slightly richer than them is a huge bummer. This problem doesn't really exist for TV, movies, books, and card and board games. I'm starting to wonder if PC and mobile gaming really should win out against Nintendo and Sony, morally...
There was a time when card games were about how much money you had rather than how good you were. Many games have introduced rotation, which has helped, but it's still an ongoing investment in the game and it's still a few hundred just to be competitive on Magic night at your local shop. But they did find the balance point that seems fair. I think video games haven't found that yet.
I'm really torn on DLC, game expansions and the like. On one hand, $60 for a new game every year is lots when I could spend $25 on a game I already enjoy. But on the other, it's an excuse to limit content up front in order to milk users. I think it's a matter of perception and companies that find a fair balance will be successful.
Magic's price point, for Modern and especially Standard, is still a bit too high for most people...the most popular MTG YouTuber (Tolarian Community College) firmly believes current entry prices for all the popular formats should be lower (except Pauper) and has been talking about it for months or years now.
I love the idea of LCGs; I thought Epic or Ashes: Rise of the Pheonixborn could be new Netrunners (which I missed completely) but they didn't end up getting popular. So lately I am more interested in trying standalone board games, and MTG draft/cube.
I think Blizzard has a userbase satisfied with their DLC/loot box systems and the industry should learn from them
Continuously buying booster packs is only a problem only with games like Magic.
There are lots of card games where you just buy a base set and an expansion now and again. And the vast majority of board games don’t require constant investment.
I bought Dropmix for my niece for Christmas. It's an NFC-based card game made by Harmonix and Hasbro. It's actually an interesting music mixing game that works really well... but..
While it comes with 60 cards, the biggest criticism that I've seen about the game is how expensive the booster kits are and how they are packaged. To get all aspects of a song, you may have to buy multiple booster packs. I get that the song rights are built into the cost, but they cost as much or more than individual songs do off iTunes, and one card usually has only one part of a song (i.e. vocals, guitar, percussion, etc).
With netrunner I'm not continually buying packs, but rather data sets and expansions. Plus with rotation I need to keep that up. There's no randomness, but there is ongoing cost.
It's not just well written, it's actually quite ballsy too as I am currently acknowledging to myself how I would never ever have the courage to come clean and come up with a blog post explaining how I bought the Atari Jaguar in the 90s, and ended up basically in the same situation.
> It really is kind of irresponsible and sort of dumb in a way to buy a console really early in its lifespan. But maybe that's what it is to like things. Being a little bit dumb - believing in something, even when maybe you know you shouldn't.
The author shows us how he felt, and tells us “this is what it’s like to like things.”
But that doesn’t seem right at all. I like reading books, and I like watching some shows and playing video games. I’m not invested in owning them, or in the community experience of watching what everyone else recently has. This is what it’s like to define your identity by what you own and by what you participate in. Like a Cubs fan, maybe—you can do that, and you can care about winning, and you can care about having popular opinions, but maybe you should pick one of those three.
Reading the title I though it would be talking about 3D0, the team behind Heroes of Might and Magic, and how they screw up the HOMM3 steam remake because they lost the source code.
I could have related since it's one of my favorite game ever :)
On the other end of this emotional spectrum I have always loved watching games evolve with me and what you think is now the best is kids stuff compared to what comes next. Mortal kombat and doom enraged parents at the time and now the stuff we can render at 60+ frames a second would blow people away in the 80s. Part software evolution and part hardware coming together each year to push the envelope, more sprites, more triangles more pixels more frames. I can afford whatever system I want now but when I was a kid a 180$ sega was like winning the lottery.
> now the stuff we can render at 60+ frames a second would blow people away in the 80s
It has blown away people who got started on '80s hardware. In particular, I'm pretty sure that Jeff Minter has made comments specifically saying how amazed he was at the sheer per-pixel computational power on the Xbox 360.
I remember a time when the only way to play video games on my computer was, if I programmed them myself. Like, there literally wasn't any other way .. the system I'd chosen to hang my chops on (Oric-1/Atmos) wasn't that well supported by the nascent industry at the time, and so .. it was either write my own shit, or forget about it.
So, I grew up a coder.
While, in the meantime, my C64- and Amiga- using friends, with all their amazing software choices, didn't have to do anything but consume, consume, consume. And, eventually,
"upgrade to a Nintendo" for their gaming needs.
See kids, this is what happens when you ship computers that no longer have development tools/compilers/REPL's onboard!
Seriously though, I think the "3DO Moment" for me was when I realised I always preferred to spend time with computers if there was a compiler onboard, or some other way to build software for the thing. Anything less is just a door opener.
Some video games are great. Video game culture is... not great. I think this guy is upset with the culture and companies in gaming rather than the games themselves. Surprised he didn't say anything about loot boxes.
He did say that many games are great on their own. But isn't it an inherent feature of console gaming itself, that young people need to invest tons of money to keep up with their peers, taking on the potential risk of the console's failure?
If you have (nearby) friends who play, and you're dealing with physical games; if you get a console around when they do, you can share newer games and reduce the risk of buying terrible games at full price. You'll probably buy some of the great games at full price so you can do multiplayer games though.
If you don't hang out with people who play, you can just buy a year late, and get the benefit of lower prices, more finished games, and a clear indication of what's cool and what isn't. You might miss out on online features/community, but that really depends.
Was it stupid to buy the 3DO for $700? Probably. But, it wasn't much more than the Neo Geo home console, and the games were probably cheaper?
Was just reading about the 3DO because I was gonna write an emulator. Wikipedia and others point to steep price tag, the spec-only-third-party hardware approach, and that they didn't collect many royalties from the games as the reasons for the downfall of the 3DO. But as I looked around and read, it seemed they were super proud and stingy with the tech (expensive devkits iirc), and the tech was about 2 years too early and just a bit before the 3D revolution that came with 5th gen consoles.
There’s just no getting around the price. It was (inflation adjusted) $1200 plus games.
Remember when gamers were upset the PS3 was $600 even though it was also a Blu-ray player? Remember when the Xbox One tripped out of the gate because it was $500 and not $400 like the PS4?
$1200.
There were other mistakes. You’re right development was expensive. It wasn’t as powerful as the PS and Saturn that came later much cheaper (the Saturn was also considered too expensive at $400... which was $300 less than the 3DO). They didn’t have pre-built franchises to lean on like Mario or Sonic.
It didn't have Mario or Sonic, but looking back, you could argue that it laid the foundation of next generation of EA (like 'em or hate 'em) titles.
FIFA and Road Rash were vastly better on the 3DO than they were on 16 bit machines at the time. I remember being in awe of how great FIFA was on the 3DO, and the 3DO version of Road Rash was easily my favorite version of that game.
If I'm not mistaken, Need for Speed was first introduced on the 3DO. I remember there being quite a few good games on 3DO (mostly from EA and Crystal Dynamics), including what might have been the closest thing to an arcade version of Super Street Fighter 2 turbo.
But yeah, the 3DO was ridiculously expensive. Having said that, so was the Neo Geo home console. I had a few friends who were really into the SNK 2d fighting games at the time, and they'd be plunking well over $100 per cartridge.
It was affectively EA’s console, they tried to support it well. And it was obviously WAY more powerful than the 16 bit machines.
NeoGeo at least had an argument, it was literally an arcade board you could buy at home. To the group of gamers who wanted that stuff there was a strong reason for it to exist and an explanation for its cost.
If they had gotten a couple of killer titles maybe it could’ve done better. Or if the price had fallen faster before the system was declared “dead“ by the public. But by the time that happened it was just too late.
$700 was three SNESes and a game or two at the SNES launch price. But this was three years later so you could probably buy a few more games.
It was just an obscene amount of money, especially for what was still considered a “kids toy” until more into the PS2 and XBox.
IIRC, I grabbed the 3DO in 1995 for around $500 CAD (and the dollar was weak against the USD at that point). This was just prior to the North American release of the Saturn and PS1. It's been so long but I think I got a Japanese import of the PS1 prior the North American release for about the same money a month or two after getting the 3DO. At the time, a friend and I had opened up a video game shop, and until the PS1 releases really started ramping up, the 3DO games were actually pretty popular with the kids who came into our store.
I remember seeing them in stores before and after the PlayStation came out. I was always kind of interested in it and liked playing with Gex some of the other games, but it was totally academic because I knew that even after price drops ($500, or $400) it was never going to happen for me.
The machines used a fairly sophisticated OS. It was an evolution of the Amiga OS, which originally was meant for a console, too, although they kept adding bonuses and abstractions that a game machine didn't need. Compared to its predecessor, "Portfolio OS" also added memory protection, although that was more to implement their copy protection and royalty scheme than for security or reliability.
Would you happen to have any links to machine docs for the 3DO? I have scoured the net and haven't found official docs about e.g. their graphics processors like I have with consoles like the Saturn.
Not that I know of, sorry. Perhaps it might be worth petitioning some of the original developers. I doubt Matsushita/Panasonic would have the information anymore, although they would retain copyrights.
It would be interesting if this could be quantified into a hard number- the damage hype does to the overall market, by disillusioning players.Seems marketing is not a victimless crime after all.
It sounds to me like he is just cynical in general. I am mid-thirties, have been playing video games since the 80s, and still love them with the same enthusiasm as when I was a kid.
Sure, I play a lot less. I don't have nearly as much time, with a full time job, a wife, and a kid. It is still my go-to free time activity, though.
My buddies, married with children themselves, and I play together online one night a week. It is our way of maintaining our social bond through families and living far apart. We are closer because of games than we would ever be otherwise.