Pre-2000 Proofs of Decline?

[felipepepe]

BROS, I'm doing some research for an idea of mine and looking for "proofs" on the games industry's march towards wider audiences, popularization of games & the resulting dumbing down.

Examples:

"In the past, game designers have viewed making their creations as something like producing an opera… they want to produce something epic, titles that offer 30-40 hours of in-depth (and sometimes open-ended) play. Consumers are moving towards a desire for something more complete, and more exciting. It’s as if they want to make the move from opera into pop music.
A new generation of consumers is growing that wants quick, fast-paced entertainment that’s instantly gratifying. After all, dancing along to a pop song is more fun than watching a 3-hour opera, isn’t it?"
- Bruno Bonnel - Chief Creative Officer, Atari

"First of, we've been trying to expand our audience, make games more accesible to people, we've been trying to make then more cinematic, a.k.a. more Hollywood-like, therefore they wind up more linear; and finally, we wind up with the 'E3 syndrome', were everybody is not necessarly trying to make the best video-game, they are trying to make the most impressive stage demo, in order to win up one another. And again, guilty as charged, we are partially responsible for that."
- Cliff Blenszinski - Former Design Director, Epic Games

"I think around the Wii, actually, games got dumbed down even more. It was like 'we need everybody, we want your grandman, we want your babies, we want everbody in the family to be able to play and enjoy this games', and what that did was to took the real gamers and just... I mean, Nintendo just threw them away. But then, once they succeded, everyone else followe suit and just decided not only to dumb down the difficulty in just about everything, but also jumping on the bandwagon of appealing to all this different demographics."
- Edmund McMillen - Co-CEO, Team Meat

"Modern games are rarelly found to have the 'Game Over' screen of the past, these are more often than not traded for checkpoints or inexplicably temporary death states, so the players are never faced with a reason to stop playing. There will always be the sector of harcore gamers looking for a proper challenge in-game, but we're at a time in the games industry were is very important to publishers to entice a wider audience."
- Jess McDonell - Video games journalist, GameSpot AU

Modern quotes are quite easy to find, but I'm especially interested in pre-2000 ones; preferrably around the mid-90's console boom. Does anyone recall/has on decline.txt anything major in that sense?

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

I'm not sure there was any decline talk in pre-2000 years. Developers in that time were more thinking about hoepwr derp boobs and bigger levels and bigger guns.

 

[felipepepe]

I'm not sure there was any decline talk in pre-2000 years. Developers in that time were more thinking about hoepwr derp boobs and bigger levels and bigger guns.

Perhaps not with terms such as streamlining or dumbing down, but I'm pretty sure that there were a lot of developers angry on being forced to move from PC to consoles, making simpler games... I remenber Fargo talking about how Interplay suffered when the shift moved into consoles and dedicated PC companies lost focus...

 

[dnf]

Well, just read Cleve rants about Stones of Arhen.

"I think around the Wii, actually, games got dumbed down even more. It was like 'we need everybody, we want your grandman, we want your babies, we want everbody in the family to be able to play and enjoy this games', and what that did was to took the real gamers and just... I mean, Nintendo just threw them away. But then, once they succeded, everyone else followe suit and just decided not only to dumb down the difficulty in just about everything, but also jumping on the bandwagon of appealing to all this different demographics."
- Edmund McMillen - Co-CEO, Team Meat

Says the man who release the pseudo hardcore super meat boy

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

I'm not sure there was any decline talk in pre-2000 years. Developers in that time were more thinking about hoepwr derp boobs and bigger levels and bigger guns.

Perhaps not with terms such as streamlining or dumbing down, but I'm pretty sure that there were a lot of developers angry on being forced to move from PC to consoles, making simpler games... I remenber Fargo talking about how Interplay suffered when the shift moved into consoles and dedicated PC companies lost focus...

I certainly didn't remember that when the PS2 was around, but as soon as the Xbox launched everything slowly gravitated towards shit. It was Microsofts aggressive policy and marketing muscle that persuaded publishers to follow suit. After the break-away success of Halo or GTA3 and the ultra-flops of Daikatana, publishers knew where to put the money into, without actually knowing what they're doing. Look at DX:IW or Thief Deadly Shadows that got Xbox ports, and thanks to those, the overall sales were lower than they'd have been were these just games made PC exclusive.

 

[made]

The decline started when Galaxian came out, with its focus on colorful gfx to appeal to the eye-candy whores and dumbed down real time button-mashing gameplay. It all went downhill from there.

 

[dnf]

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/what-happened-to-gaming.78085/

lots of theories, someone will say Win 95, others will blame the audience, etc,etc...

 

[zeitgeist]

In this article you'll find a pretty accurate prediction of the next decade (from 1998), up until the last paragraph where he either completely fails to grasp the full implications of everything he's written above or ignores them deliberately.

 

[Infinitron]

felipepepe Search for quotes from the folks who started making FMV games, perhaps.

 

[Infinitron]

As it happens I'm quite interested in any evidence you can find for the causes of the "mid-90's decline of RPGs". Other than that one quote from Brenda Brathwaite it is in fact quite difficult to find any record of a developer from that time actually saying that "RPGs don't sell enough anymore".

 

[DraQ]

Pre-2000 decline?

Quake 2?

felipepepe Search for quotes from the folks who started making FMV games, perhaps.

That's actually a good idea. There are many parallels between interactive movies of now and then.

 

[Dexter]

There's not much talk of decline because there was not much to go around at that point.
Some of the games considered best and/or most diverse ever came out 1998/99

1998: Half Life, Starcraft, Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate, Grim Fandango, Thief: The Dark Project, Starsiege: Tribes, Might & Magic VI
1999: Counter Strike, Quake III: Arena, Everquest, Unreal Tournament, Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings, Planescape: Torment, System Shock 2, Homeworld, Alpha Centauri, HOMM III, GTA II, The Longest Journey
2000: Deus Ex, Icewind Dale, Diablo II, Thief II, Soldier of Fortune, Baldur's Gate II, Sacrifice, Giants: Citizen Kabuto

Even the console fags had their titles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_in_video_gaming
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_in_video_gaming

If you want to look for the definite point of the decade-spanning decline I'd look into November 15, 2001

 

[someone else]

My theory then was the move towards MMORPGs. With the success of UO in the late 1990s leading to the focus of MMORPGs and neglect of single player games esp rpgs. This is almost 2000 though.
I remember being quite annoyed at the MMORPG explosion then, was I wrong?

 

[felipepepe]

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/what-happened-to-gaming.78085/
lots of theories, someone will say Win 95, others will blame the audience, etc,etc...

We had tons of those threads, and I agree that the 90's decline was probably the sum of Win95 acessibility, consoles rise and bigger developments costs that killed small creative teams and favored huge poublishers. Not to mention marketing devils starting to be summoned.

But I need some facts & proofs on this, I do not wish to go into dialetic mode without some quotes to back me up, it's too douchey & arrogant.

 

[Infinitron]

I'm not sure how big a factor consoles (ie, the Playstation 1) were back in the 90's. My impression is that Western, PC-exclusive developers generally ignored the Playstation and saw it as beneath them, until maybe the very end of the decade. (some of them would bitterly regret that, see Interplay)

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Yeah, I am gonna say Quake as well.

Quake, as a single-player game anyways, is piss-poor. To me, Quake is a techdemo that just happens to have an awesome multiplayer mode included. By comparison, Duke3D was the better game, even though it used an inferior engine. So I kept an eye on the Quake engine, to see what other developers would do with it. Some brilliant multiplayer mods were released, but as far as single-player content goes, only the unofficial (and taboo) Alien Quake mod was any good. The Nostromo level in that mod was awesome, it was the defining Alien-related gaming experience until AvP was released in 1999. Quake 2 was a more refined version of the Quake engine, and a half-decent singleplayer game was included, but it was what others did with the Quake 2 engine that caught people's eyes. Half-Life and Anachronox, just to name a couple of examples.

In Quake, you can see clear signs of decline, but for all the right reasons. Doom, despite all of its achievements and fun gameplay, was a 2D game seen from a first-person perspective. Quake was full 3D, so it was natural that some limitations were in place while the software was being developed and improved. But sadly, the elements that made the 2D (and pseudo-3D) games so much fun never did reappear in a true 3D engine. Doom could have dozens of enemies on-screen at once, just to name an example. Quake would break down and cry if you tried to have just one dozen enemies on-screen at once. It took Serious Sam in 2001 to bring back the mobs of enemies, but by then the "less is more" approach was a de facto standard.

Another example is the development process of Quake. Quake started out with a Norse warrior as the protagonist, wielding a big hammer during the Dark Ages and doing stuff that Thor is doing in the Hollywood movies. No guns. No futuristic crap. But somewhere along the way the focus changed, the plans were dropped. In favour of making Quake a Doom clone. I wonder why they did that...

And when "graphic accelerators" (also known as 3D graphic cards) were taking their first steps, the gaming industry was strangely harmonic to the development (and marketing) of those cards: Graphics became the focal point of games. This was apparent as early as 1997, possibly earlier. Up to that point, and that explains FMV games to a degree, the objective was simply to try to make games be on a level with the images and sounds you saw on TV, "multimedia-capable" was the buzzword IIRC. Sadly, far too many developers thought that the content should also match that of the television, which explains why it takes effort to name even 3 FMV games worth a damn.

 

[Infinitron]

Another example is the development process of Quake. Quake started out with a Norse warrior as the protagonist, wielding a big hammer during the Dark Ages and doing stuff that Thor is doing in the Hollywood movies. No guns. No futuristic crap. But somewhere along the way the focus changed, the plans were dropped. In favour of making Quake a Doom clone. I wonder why they did that...

That's not a secret. Read Masters of Doom. Quake suffered from a tortuous development cycle and shit had to be cut.

but by then the "less is more" approach was a de facto standard.

An insightful observation.

 

[Renegen]

I think people need to get their priorities straight. The Japanese developers for example many of them made buckets loads of money from arcade games, that's what their business was at first. So did Atari and other such manufacturers. Arcade games are a scam, their design as bad as a F2P game that tries to keep you addicted and take as much money from you. Then these builders of industry had the bright idea of selling their shitty arcade games for $60 and thus the console business was born. The incline was probably always a counter-movement to the trend.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

I'm not sure how big a factor consoles (ie, the Playstation 1) were back in the 90's. My impression is that Western, PC-exclusive developers generally ignored the Playstation and saw it as beneath them, until maybe the very end of the decade. (some of them would bitterly regret that, see Interplay)

Well, people seem to forget that actually quite a lot of PC smash hits got ported to PSX - some examples from the top of my head would be UFO, Theme Hospital, C&C, Diablo heck, even Panzer General got a port. It's just that in those times the marketing culture of "every game should be for everybody" was only fledgeling and so these games went virtually unnoticed, pc gaming and console gaming were two separate things, as they should be. The first game that was really treated as best thing ever by the media after being ported to another gaming platform was probably Final Fantasy VII.

 

[DraQ]

1998: Half Life, Starcraft, Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate, Grim Fandango, Thief: The Dark Project, Starsiege: Tribes, Might & Magic VI
1999: Counter Strike, Quake III: Arena, Everquest, Unreal Tournament, Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings, Planescape: Torment, System Shock 2, Homeworld, Alpha Centauri, HOMM III, GTA II, The Longest Journey
2000: Deus Ex, Icewind Dale, Diablo II, Thief II, Soldier of Fortune, Baldur's Gate II, Sacrifice, Giants: Citizen Kabuto

You missed Unreal.

Diablo 2 was already decline (even assuming that Diablo 1 was not) with its MMO-lite gameplay.

SoF was a p. shitty game and actually a proto-CoD of sorts. Armor mechanics and locational damage was nice, but all the game had going for it was shock value from fairly realistic (for its time) dismemberment and mutilation.

Well, people seem to forget that actually quite a lot of PC smash hits got ported to PSX - some examples from the top of my head would be UFO

Which should therefore be forever discussed in "made for console popamole" section by Codex's logics.

 

[felipepepe]

And when "graphic accelerators" (also known as 3D graphic cards) were taking their first steps, the gaming industry was strangly harmonic to the development (and marketing) of those cards: Graphics became the focal point of games.

Yes, marketing is the harbringer of decline, and that's exactly what I'm trying to investigate here. I wish precisely to track down the invisible hand of satan marketing making it push towards the popularization of games as a cultural industry, always trying to reach wider audiences. While 2001 was when Microsoft unleashed hell on earth, the devil's horns were making their move more than a decade before.

I definetly won't find a document saying "In 95 big publishers made a deal with hardware companies to always make more demanding games, so the customers would have to upgrade" or stuff like that, I hope to at least be able to find some quotes on what the guys in suit were asking from developers at that time...

Also, lol:

Spoiler

Even marketing was more fun at that time.

 

[Infinitron]

EDIT: in fact, there's also Bethesda deciding to develop Moronwind for Xbox after both Battlespire and Redguard flopped miserably. This may or may not have to do with Zenimax purchasing the nearly bankrupt company in 1999.

As as I've said before, the formation of Zenimax is more correctly viewed as an extensive corporate restructuring Bethesda underwent in response to their near-bankrupcy. It was not truly an independent, separate entity that "purchased" them.

 

[Renegen]

Actually there was an official alliance between Microsoft, Intel and other such hardware and software makers to continuously provide reasons to upgrade and buy more of their shit. I remember that during the 90s, the biggest reason to upgrade was to make your PC internet-ready. Funny to think that you needed an expensive PC to be fast enough to open Internet Explorer.

 

[zeitgeist]

I definetly won't find a document saying "In 95 big publishers made a deal with hardware companies to always make more demanding games, so the customers would have to upgrade" or stuff like that, I hope to at least be able to find some quotes on what the guys in suit were asking from developers at that time...

You probably know of this interview already, it's the one where Robert Sirotek blames the demise of Sir-Tech as a publishing company mostly on retailers/distributors (and mentions big-money Hollywood companies in passing too).

 

[DraQ]

Yeah, I am gonna say Quake as well.

Quake, as a single-player game anyways, is piss-poor.

Actually, I wouldn't agree.

Quake is atmospheric and features good, dynamic, if simple gameplay. Sure, it doesn't make much sense in terms of plot or setting but Doom never has either.


Build engine generally couldn't compete with Quake engine in terms of raw power, so while Quake branch attempted to simplify everything to increase gameplay dynamics (like removing 'use' and 'inventory use' functions) the Build developers went with increased complexity of games which was good. Too bad that a lot of it (though not all of it) was purely cosmetic and didn't influence the actual gameplay.

As for Build engine games themselves, Blood is where it's at.

Now Quake 2 was really some serious decline. Somewhat more involved plot-wise but still uninspired, with vastly inferior stylistics, poor atmosphere and enemies nerfed to the point of near harmlessness.
Sure, hub system and general level layouts were good, but they didn't help:

Quake 1 was dark, atmospheric, fast and deadly.
Quake 2 trite, boring, clunky and harmless.

And that's in SP where Q2 was supposedly the more refined one.

And when "graphic accelerators" (also known as 3D graphic cards) were taking their first steps, the gaming industry was strangly harmonic to the development (and marketing) of those cards: Graphics became the focal point of games.

That's actually a fair point.

I knew I was doing something right when praising Unreal 1 for it's state of the art graphics even without the acceleration back then.