Things feel more and more like the pre-NES Era to me. With Nintendo making themselves irrelevant on their strange ‘creativity’ and ‘3d’ obsessions, and the Game Industry choking on its lopsided production values, the focus is on the smaller western games.
Back in 1983 or 1984, while Atari did crash, arcades were still healthy and PC gaming was booming. This time we do not have arcades with us (at least not in America, alas). So let me give you an idea of how gaming was before Super Mario Brothers took everything over.
The experience was you, a computer, and many, many, many small games. You only played one or two of these games regularly. Most were not played more than a few times.
On my beloved Commodore 64, I have around 600 games. They are still in my attic all boxed up. As you can imagine, not all those games were ‘legal’. However, many were.
My play session with the Commodore 64 was opening a box full of disks and saying, “Well now! What shall I play today?” If I played a different game per day, everyday, I would barely get through half of my collection of games. There were so many games, so little time. While I have fond memories of the Commodore 64, the games have not aged well. This is because the NES and Japanese direction of gaming took craftsmanship of games to a whole new level. You heard about how Nintendo limited third parties to only release five games a year on the platform which forced them to make sure their games were good. It didn’t matter if so many Commodore 64 games lacked the fine craftsmanship of the upcoming NES Era because you were playing new games everyday. Literally everyday.
Above: Arcade ports, 8-bit porn, endless parade of games, hot babes reaching for your joystick… behold the 80s!
There were a few games I kept coming back to. Ultima was life consuming. You could play an Ultima for months. Other great games were Jump Man, Paradroid, Archon, Adept, and M.U.L.E.
Above: In the Malstrom Mansion, there is a babe lying next to a giant Commodore 64 computer at this very moment!
From this time period going forward, there was a coalescing of game time becoming more and more centered around a few games, as if spiraling inward. This is what the ‘industry’ would later call the ‘franchise’. For example, people kept playing Mario more and more so Mario became a ‘franchise’. Where a gamer would play many, many games, the gamer began to play more of a few games. And we’re seeing this build up occur with games like World of Warcraft and Call of Duty/Modern Warfare’s multiplayer.
What it seems like what is occurring now is the UnFranchise. Everything seems to de-coalescing, as if it is spiraling apart. The gamer is returning to many, many ‘small games’ instead of a few ‘big games’. There will always be a few games the gamer will keep returning to, but the future of the gamer will present himself with a list of a hundred or two hundred games before each play session. He will feel like a Caesar as he gets to pick which one to play. It doesn’t matter if the games are of poorer quality. He will not be playing them as much. And, as such, the average price of video games will be coming down to match the actual value these games have. The average price will be around $10. The ‘old model’ games will release at $60 but come down fast to $30 to eventually $20 and lower.
When I was playing with things like Steam, I began to get flashbacks of this Commodore 64 era. What something that Steam is doing is making it easier to install and play your games all in one place, on one menu. Steam is 25% of where it actually needs to be though. We should be able to easily hook up the computers to TVs and play games, like those Genesis games on Steam, on your TV with a controller. (You can do this now, but with aggravation.) And where are all the women? PC gaming is dominated by the ladies, and there appears to be no women on Steam which is a huge problem.
But what I’m pointing out is that the new PC gamer, that Steam gamer, is someone who has, or will have, 100 games on their list. He may just play Civilization most of the time, but he will hop and skip through all the games.
Gaming is not headed toward the ‘blockbuster’ route any longer. It is headed towards the ‘unBlockbuster’, to the UnFranchise. It is a 1984-esque way of the gamer buying hundreds of tiny games.
I suspect this is how the gaming market is responding to the rot in the Game Industry and Nintendo. It is as if this is a self-corrective mechanism where the next era of ‘franchising’ will come from this ocean of small games.
I’d prefer the NES-esque era over other eras. But I’ll take the 1984 Era over the Fifth and Sixth generation any day.