Hello Malstrom,
You’ve made me curious with that Pre-NES era post. See, what you pointed out about gamers going to smaller games is something I’ve been seeing this generation as well. I have witnessed many Xbox 360 gamers confess to enjoying the smaller games on XBLA more then the big releases. The same thing goes for PSN and even on DSiWare I found lot’s and lot’s of smaller games I enjoyed more then the bigger DS games.
What frustrates me however, is that this development is being taken as THE definitive end to the console of old. A few months ago I saw an Extra Credits episode dedicated to how the console was the new coin-up in that it’s rapidly becoming obsolete.
It’s a correction to where games should properly be around. When Final Fantasy 6 came out, that was considered an EPIC GAME. It’s play time was around 30-40 hours. I bought it for around $60 and enjoyed the hell out of it. Today, Final Fantasy 6 is considered a ‘causal game’, something only to be placed on handhelds. Final Fantasy 6 on a handheld feels absurd to me as if placing a juicy steak into a happy meal. Not that I’m protesting it being on handhelds, but I marvel at how the game industry no longer thinks that is ‘epic’ but now ‘casual’.
Super Mario Brothers 3 and Super Mario World are considered EPIC or MEGA games when they were released. With Super Mario Brothers 5, the game industry called it a ‘casual’ game. The mass audience, like me, saw Mario 5 as an epic game.
Arcade style games, i.e. stuff you see on XBLA and all, is the norm for games. The biggest games in the 16-bit Era were arcade games like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter 2 (ironically, Street Fighter IV and Mortal Kombat Whatever are big sellers today). The trend of the ‘bloating’ seems to have really gained steam during the 32-64 bit generation.
The reason why you see people say the ‘age of the console is over’ is because they do not know games. Many people who became big gamers during the 32/64 bit generation have been the ones who cannot fathom the Wii phenomenon. They think their so-called ‘hardcore’ games are the norm. They never have been. Much of the bloat has been propped up by favorable economic trends allowing such mediocrity.
Now that economic trends are in reverse, the market is far less tolerant. Gaming going to these ‘smaller games’ is not ‘changing’, it is ‘correcting’. This is what the Game Industry does not understand.
What nobody seems willing to confront however, is that the future of smaller games can easily repel many customers. You said that pre-NES you had a big selection of small games. Everyday a new game to play with your own way of choosing what you want to play. That’s nice and all, but I’ve noticed that when confronted with such a huge backlog, many gamers choose not to play at all. Call it a ‘hard disk space’ problem if you will in which you have a list of hundreds of games that don’t get played at all and yet it does annoy you everytime you get confronted with that.
The old game consoles’ libraries are interesting to go through because every game, including the bad ones, are hand crafted. Today, we have ‘machine made games’. EA seems more like a machine than a place where developers make games. The games do not have a Human touch but all feel machine made. They lack a craftsmanship. The so-called indie games, despite being ‘worse’, can be more interesting since they lack that feeling they are machine made.
Gaming, to me, is something that is finely crafted like silk from the Far East. The Game Industry is at war with craftsmanship and their business model is to replace this solid craftsmanship with assembly lines of ‘developers’ who are used and treated like cogs in a machine.
I suspect that most gamers are more like me in that they prefer their games to have craftsmanship.
Here is a prediction of what will happen. The Game Industry will switch gears to these smaller games. But they won’t see the sales. One of the reasons why people are attracted to the smaller games is because they have more craftsmanship than the ‘large’ Game Industry games. Minecraft is a far more interesting game than has ever come out of the Game Industry in quite some time.
My question with this is: how can a market grow like that? Such a huge collection of games without much indication of what to choose can easily repell a few customers no? Look at the difference between a shelf in a gamesshop and a list of games on Steam. In the shop, many games have different boxart to make themselves stand out. Often you can tell the quality of a game by looking at the box art. This doesn’t exist for something like Steam and other services which has always managed to repell me as a consumer.
The opportunity for growth and money comes to those who deliver a high craftsmanship game. In the Industry’s world, there are ‘too many games’, so many they overflow the shelves and digital download lists. This was true back in the pre-NES days as well (quite literally as in 1983, there was more software coming out than retailers could support). But in the gamer’s world, there are very few games. Despite all these games, there is nothing that seems worth playing.
People got very wealthy by putting out an above average game. One example is Randy Glover releasing Jumpman in 1983. Essentially, Jumpman uses Donkey Kong’s type platforming and physics. But the game goes so far beyond anything in Donkey Kong. The game was a huge hit. Randy Glover ‘retired’ a millionaire in 1985.
Above: The level variety is amazing to this day. I love that ‘Hot Foot’ level where an explosion takes place from wherever Jumpman leaped. Note how the game has a black background and uses sound effects and jingles without background music. This was 1983. It was only until 1985, with Super Mario Brothers, that caused a total change in games going away from black backgrounds to having background music.
Above: Montezuma’s Revenge was released in 1984 (and appears to be a proto-Metroid game with tons of backtracking). It made the creator into a millionaire. And by the way, the creator was only 16 years old. This is why I detest the ‘young men’ who hang out on gaming message forums all day when they could be millionaires today if they only began programming their own games.
These games may not seem that good to you today, and they may not be. But they were better than what was around. In the same way, a modern game like Terraria I think is horrible and doesn’t have any chance of pulling off a Minecraft type success. But that doesn’t matter. Terraria offers more ‘play’ than the dreck of indie games. Terraria doesn’t have to be ‘good’, only rise about the sea of garbage, in order to make its creators into millionaires.
Think about that for a moment. Games that aren’t that good are creating millionaires. Now imagine a game with the Far East craftsmanship of Nintendo, Capcom, Konami, Epyx, and Square games of the 1980s. You can see why, despite having inferior graphics, Japanese gaming disrupted Western gaming. Super Mario Brothers created a revolution and single handed made Nintendo grow faster than anything.
If someone wishes a similar sales explosion, it is not enough to make a ‘good game’. It must be an extremely high crafted game that performs a job. Nintendo, interestingly, restricted game companies to only release five games a year in order to force them to be ‘good’. At the time, people could make a new game in a couple of weeks. This brought gaming up from flash game level of non-craftsmanship. This policy eventually bit Nintendo in the ass later on, but high craftsmanship made sales.
Second question a have for this: Now that we are entering a Pre-NES era of games in which many franchises are going to die, I take it that that means that sooner or later an equivelant to the NES will arise and disrupt the established business model of small games all over again? What I’m wondering is what are your speculations on how this will go down. It may be sometime before it happens, but mind you, now that Nintendo is looking to destroy themselves, I’m looking into getting into the business myself (as a business man BTW, seeing as that there are plenty of game designers in my own country already). I could use some advice.
The reason why there was a NES was because of Japanese Civilization. Centuries ago, Europeans and their investors did everything they could to reach the Far East for spices, silk, cotton, and various goods. There was always far more demand than supply. The rise of the Ottoman Empire came due solely to the revenue collected from the land-based trade between Europe and the Far East.
Because the Ottoman Empire became the ultimate middle man, investors wanted to find a new trade route to the Far East. Instead of land, why not try the sea? Portugal sailed around Africa to get to the Far East. Spain, seeing Portugal as a competitor, hired Christopher Columbus to find an alternate sea based trade route (by sailing around the world). Of course, Columbus’s career was destroyed by the fact there was a continent that wasn’t supposed to be there that prevented him from reaching Japan (Columbus’s destination).
The story of Europeans desperately clawing their way to the Far East is very important because the events literally shaped the modern world and it was all due for thirst for high craftsmanship. The NES could only come from the Far East. The NES would never have been made in the West. In fact, the West wrote off game consoles as obsolete because home computers can also play games (exactly identical to people saying handheld consoles are obsolete due to smartphones). Some Western companies have realized the lesson of craftsmanship. A Western third party on the Super Nintendo, Silicon and Synapse, became Blizzard and merged with the original third party called Activision all in a decade or two. Why? High level of craftsmanship. Despite some western companies learning the lesson of craftsmanship, I think the ancient roots of civilization run deep. Westerners still cannot grok the ancient tradition of Far East craftsmanship.
Therefore, another NES would have to come from the Far East. There are three nations that primarily come from the Far East: Japan, China, and India. China is a communist nation that cannot feed its own people. I do not expect great games to come from there. (“But Tetris came from Soviet Russia.” True, but that was only one game.)
India is an interesting candidate. They already speak English. Their society has a context on myth and fantasy that is beyond the West to understand (and would be very exciting should games be churned up from that). India is also rapidly growing. But the problem with India is that they are not high admirers of the West as Japan is (and the West is high admirers of Japan). Something with rebuilding Japan after World War 2 might be a reason for the shift in Japan’s view. China is hostile to the Western perspective. India I’m not as sure. The Far East has traditionally been a closed society and many places are today. It is why the ancient Europeans called the Far East the ‘New World’. They didn’t call America the New World but the Other World (or to be more precise, “WTF is this big ass continent doing here?”).
I think it is most probable for the next NES to come from Japan. And for it to come from Nintendo. One day, Nintendo will tire of losing. They will want to win. They will do things like throw ‘creativity’ overboard and get serious. But in order to do that, they are going to have to throw out many of the employees at Nintendo that aren’t supposed to be there (think of the ones who keep trying to put a story into Mario games). Nintendo’s reluctance to remove people is the greatest harm to the company. When Yamauchi took control, he fired almost everybody. The cancer affecting Nintendo is not superficial but runs deep. I expect, one day, that Far East hardened determination to win will re-emerge, and Nintendo will identify and carve out the cancer. And then you will see another NES.
Here is my advice to you:
Never accept free advice because it is the most expensive. And don’t listen to anonymous people on the Internet. Since I fit both, it is most prudent that I do not give you advice. “Then why are you making this site?” I wish to hold a mirror up to gaming so everyone can see its true image. Then, I trust the movers and shakers will place gaming back on the correct course. Gaming is suffering from major contextual blindness. For example, the 3DS is a contextual blindness present within Nintendo. The system was made with the incorrect context of what gaming is supposed to be.