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I suppose you're looking for an explanation as to what the hell took me so long to get this latest column finished. Well, the explanation is simple. Nick Can, Hipkondo and I have been busily developing New New Games journalism, or Games Journalism 3.0 as we call it, to replace New Games Journalism after it becomes boring and uninspired. We even turned our apartment into a laboratory and bought whiteboards and pens and pointer sticks and graduation caps and everything, and go around complimenting each other's caps all day the way we're pretty sure professors and scientists do. We figure we'll get a jump on the pack so we can cruise right into Success Port and enjoy the same kind of riches and universal admiration as Tim, the father and inventor of New Games Journalism.

Now, I don't want to give too much away, but I think we're close enough to a patent to reveal a few goodies and tidbits for you to soil your drool-bibs with. Taking everything a quantum step further, Games Journalism 3.0 will be by wankers for wankers on wankers in wankers above wankers at wankers below wankers to wankers from wankers, which is even more great when you consider that Games Journalism 3.0 will replace all prepositions with a racoon tail that allows the reader to fly. Also, all verb conjegations will be swapped out for "or die". For example, "Yesterday I skate or die" instead of "Yesterday I skated." Or, "Tomorrow I eat or die. This morning I ate or die breakfast and then go or die to school."

Fuck we're going to be rich.

Today's column is about deleting video games from history entirely and the affect it would have. It seemed like a pretty good idea at the time.

[whatever date the 6th column went up, 20XX]

Author

As your attorney I advise you to drink this Draino

scratch monkey

a lot of games are going to have the same problem if they're 'eliminated', in that they're like a hydra - you can destroy the head, but a new one will just grow back eventually and take the same role as the first 'head'. I think Pong falls under this category as well. Sure, it was the first real 'mainstream' videogame...but there's not really anything about its design that distinguishes it, it was just 'first'. Only it really wasn't first, there was a whole foundation behind it for it to exist. If it wasn't made, then some other game would have, and it also would have been so extremely basic that it wouldn't really have a profound effect on game design other than being the 'first successful videogame'.

Yeah so. There you go. Much as the back of the Draino bottle gets right to the part about not drinking it, I'm going to post the most pertinent response first. A response that, so obvious in its nature, makes every other post so much idle speculation and reveals this topic to not be so great after all. I blame whoever's idea this was. I don't remember because that was like 5 months ago already. I'm not going to blame myself because then this will get all self-effacey and no one wants that.

Please submit all complaints to my GMail account where they will be read and I will laugh and laugh and laugh and feel like a desirable alpha male.

Author

Genesis and Madden

scratchmonkey

Hmm. While eliminating Madden would really shake up the modern sports gaming scene in terms of who would be the dominating market leader - assuming that there would still be a dominant company, I don't think it would have that big an impact on the popularity of sports gaming in general.

To do that, one would have to eliminate Atari's tabletop Football and those handheld electronic football games. Both of those were incredibly popular and helped set up a market that runs much deeper than Madden. If there's still a Tecmo Bowl, Ten Yard Fight or even that John Elway game (not to mention all the other sports games, especially baseball, which has a history of parallel development in the US and Japan), there would be a game developed that would be a general approximation of Madden.

l33t RUD13

Elminatiing Madden would cause drastic changes. The Sega Genesis would of lost one of it's main early selling points. I remember going to other's houses when I was young and they only gaming things they had was a Genesis and Madden.

Madden set a new standard for how football games and indeed how all sports games we're looked it. Causing the disapperance of Madden means less revenue for Sega.

There is the possibilty of NFL Quarterback club filling the void if Madden didn't exist, but if you look their first few games are Madden clones, except not as well done. That series wouldn't even had been started if their hadn't been such a strong base already for sports games.

Also no Madden means no Mutant League Football, and no one wants that. [[Gaming hipster Ironic English Phrase of the day: no one wants that. ~Ed]

How much mileage you get out of the Madden argument depends on how important, in the grand scheme of things, you think the success of the Genesis in North America is. Obviously, yeah, if Madden hadn't come along, somebody would have eventually invented the Great American Football Videogame. We're talking about a format that features, to wit:

A simulation of the experience of being... a mosquito
A roommate simulation which, seriously, is about living with a roommate
A game about working at Yoshinoya

...amongst other sterling examples. So yeah.

However, I agree wholeheartedly that Madden played a big role in the Genesis's North American success. If you think the Genesis was really quite important to video games as a whole, which can certainly be argued, then deleting Madden from the pages of history would indeed be a big deal. As far as I'm concerned, though, with a powerful graphics processor capable of simultaneously displaying 256 colors from a pallatte of over 32,000 and a vastly superior soundchip, the SNES/ Super Famicom is patently superior to the underpowered Genesis! If you disagree we can totally meet by the flagpole after school.

Blast Processing is a lie, people! DON'T BUY INTO THE LIE!!!!

Author

...and more EA/Madden

DeusJester

Someone is going to kill Super Mario soon in this topic, so I'll just nail him a bit farther up the tree: I'd get rid of Super Mario 64. That game made me hang on to the N64 far past any sense of reason would have dictated, and it remains one of the best games ever. I can't really imagine the impact it had directly on many games, but the impact it had on an industry was significant, and as the first true, well done re-imagining of a beloved 2D franchise into a 3D world, it broke a lot of new ground. That game and Ocarina of Time were the last "great" Nintendo titles, and I can't remember anyone ever getting as worked up over a game release as they did for those two. The furvor for Halo 2 is getting there, but it doesn't have that same level, and I doubt it's going to.

To hit the other side by the same logic, though, I'd get rid of Halo. Not just strike it from the record, but rip it right out from under Microsoft's well-heeled shoes at the last possible second and see if the Xbox could make it then.

I'll skip the Final Fantasy snipe and just say Dragon Quest 1 should be stricken from the record. Without DQ, there would be no Final Fantasy, and from there, depending on how you look at it, you've either got an entire genre collapsing entirely, or altering radically into a western-dominant form of entertainment a la Daggerfall, since that's where Ultima was headed. Imagine if that was the only kind of RPG? I don't think that would be bad at all, to be honest. Would there even be a Pokemon without Dragon Warrior?

Next up, Madden football has got to go. Sports games are a huge reason why games have become so mainstream oriented, and while that's probably inevitable, and it's not even something I really disagree with, I wonder what the public opinion of videogames would be today, in America, if the whole sports game thing had just never gotten off the ground.

And lastly, why not just nix Donkey Kong and kick the legs out from the entire video game industry, period? DK is the reason Nintendo invested in America in the first place, since after the great Atari crash, videogames were considered a financial death wish. If DK had never come along, Nintendo probably would have stayed right where they are, and what is now a multi billion dollar industry that all of us have been greedily sucking at the teats of for years would either be confined to arcades or radically different than it is today.

Author

PONG: IS GAY!!!!

Mr. Mechanical

I'd definately get rid of Final Fantasy, just nip the whole series in the bud and throw out that first game. I've played Final Fantasy games, and enjoyed them too, but lately it seems like they've held the genre back with the standards they've set. Since when did rpgs have to have FMV, prerendered backgrounds, and shitty nonsense stories? Since Final Fantasy said they did, that's when. But others have already made the point better than I have so I'll stop there. Not to say that there haven't been good Final Fantasy games, quite the contrary.

The next game I'd ditch would have to be Radiant Silvergun. I don't know why, I've never played the game myself, and everything I ever hear about it is how good it is. I suppose if Radiant Silvergun didn't come along we wouldn't have Ikaruga, or maybe shooters in general wouldn't have ever peaked and realized their potential.

I'd also get rid of Mario Bros. , the arcade one the precedes the classic we all know. If Mario Bros. didn't happen, would we have a game like Super Mario Bros.? And if we did would it have the same impact? Probably not, but we'd probably still have Super Mario Bros. 2. That wasn't even a Mario game to begin with right?

Let's see....... how about Zelda:Ocarina of Time? That was one of those mind shatteringly revolutionary games right? Toss that out and let's see how 3rd person action/adventure games today fair. They'd probably fair pretty well, but at least I wouldn't have to listen to fanboys argue about it being better than Final Fantasy 7.

And the last I'd get rid of would be Pong. Seriously, just throw that shit out. Imagine the repercussions!! Oh no, no Pong means no modern videogames!!11!! LOLOLLLOLOOLOLOLOL

So I think those are the games I'd get rid of, just to mess around with stuff.

Author

As would we all, Mr. Aderack. As would we all.

Aderack

The most significant problem that the game fleshed-out into the form we see it now, is the one first popularized in Pac-Man: preference for a rigid pre-established world template, to explore and master, over a more complex series of dynamics, as in, say, many of the earlier works of Ed Logg, where the player's actions determine the nature of the gameworld, and thereby the future of the game.

I'm being simplistic, sure. There are plenty of counter-examples you could find, were you so inclined, of previous games with this structure. There is plenty you could provide to argue that this concrete storybook objectivenesss was the direction that games were moving in anyway, or that this is where they always sat. And for that matter, Super Mario Bros. is not so much a culprit here as is the whole design culture that it insipired. But there you go. Super Mario Bros. more or less shaped the modern videogame. Most of what exists now does because of the concepts in that game.

Of course, this is how games became popular. First Pac-Man, then Super Mario Bros. You give something obvious to latch onto, emotionally. There's nothing wrong with that in itself. It's a natural creative impulse. I just kind of wish that games had gotten a little further before this objective quality took over, overriding so much potential for abstract potentiality.

...

This is also, to a certain extent, why I so dislike the Super NES, and why the Zelda series has been a bore to me after the second game. I just wish developers would quit giving me overt toys to play with, within a specific framework -- action figures and playsets -- rather than a framework where my presence actually makes a difference.

I would like to matter.

I don't think it's Super Mario Brother's fault that fat pasty game designers have difficulty envisioning a world where their will has some impact on reality and their actions matter.

Ellipses!!!!!!

Jesus Christ that just might be the most jaded, imflammatory bit of crud ever put into anything related to videogames. Congratulations to me. To celebrate, I will buy a bottle of cheap whiskey, get drunk and get into a swearing match with a homeless man about the benefits of tin foil versus plastic bowls with jury-rigged headstraps in protecting one's self against alien spacerays. Again.

Author

E.T.: the intraterrestrial

NinjaBoyJohn

I'd get rid of E.T. for the Atari 2600.

Not because it was a godawful game.

Not because it ruined a lot of christmases.

Not because there are thousands of copies of it in a New Mexico landfill.

But because *everyone and their little brother* knows about that smidgen of landfill "trivia" and has to refer to it in every retrogaming or pac-man article ever. It's annoying. And yeah, I'm talking to YOU gamespy/ign.

This is exactly why I've been lobbying to have the games dug up and dumped into ponds for ducks to choke to death on for years.

Author

You can still totally see the blood streak from that hooker I iced!

Westacular

I think (or at least hope) that GTA3's demonstration of the immersive power of creating a living, active gameworld environment will in time outweigh the annoyance of having many blindly made clones.

If you think back carefully to when GTA3 hit, it was big, because no one had thought that a game that ambitious could actually work. GTA3, while it did cut some corners, proved them wrong and opened a lot eyes (err... I'd like to believe it did) to what could now be done.

Sadly, no one seems to be taking it to the next step yet: GTA3 is essentially amnesiac regarding what the player has done; knock over a street light, then drive around the block, and things are back to normal. Think of how much more a game could be if it took the template of GTA3, but added growth and persistence to the environment, such that it reacts over time to the player's actions, grows with the player, and perhaps even learns the player. Instead of just being "the city", it would become your city: "look, those contruction crews are finally fixing that street light I knocked over last week. This neighbourhood has become such a slum in the months since I started a gang war in it"

A game like that would be a truer modern role-playing game than almost anything released in the past few years. I just hope that developers are learning the right lessons from GTA3 in order to move beyond it.

Think of how much more a game could be if it took the template of GTA3, but added growth and persistence to the environment, such that it reacts over time to the player's actions, grows with the player, and perhaps even learns the player.

We would be back to where we were before Nintendo took over the medium.

More or less.

You know, I really expect the next GTA game for the next-next-insert-the-number-of-nexts- appropriate-to-how-long-you've-been-gaming generation hardware will be precisely that. Say what you will about the Rockstar boys being pandering, lowbrow, or what have you, but they do have vision for their cash cow franchise. Maybe we'll see something of it at E3. That would be super neato.

Author

Preacher man

Somebody

Ok. I'm going to talk about five games now. Most of them are repeats. Too fucking bad.

Dragon Quest

KILL IT DEAD!

I like DQ. I think it probably deserves the respect it's gotten in Japan. I like it's cultural impact. I have nothing against it. I just want to see what would have happened to Japanese gaming in the 16-bit era had the RPG genre not been a million times more popular than anything and everything else. RPG"s would've still been around, of course. Phantasy Star would've existed. Plenty of companies would've picked it up. But Japanese developers essentially stopped trying once they figured out they could make Dragon Quest, pretty it up a bit, and throw in some sort of anime storyline. Japan DOMINATED the 8-bit generation, and they did so because they tried things. Even when they were copying Mario, they were giving us interesting titles, playing with level structure and premise. They birthed a culture. Now, Japanese games still owned the industry in the 16-bit days too, but they were doing so by default. And so they stopped trying, content to ride on the residuals of the eighties. American developers didn't much care for consoles, and when they did, it was usually either in close association with Japanese partners, or crappy mascot drivel.

And now mainstream Japanese gaming is dying. Sure, there will always be the quirky indie games and staunch genre titles we all love, but the rest is fucking buried. And I'm blaming Dragon Quest.

Lets go ahead and fuck America too.

Wolfenstein 3D.

Someone else said Doom. I'd agree, but I think that with Wolfy in place, things would've developed they way they did anyway. And if that's going to happen, I'll stick with Doom, because I still think it rocks. So Id gave rise to the extreme popularity of the FPS, which in turn gave rise to the my-dick-is-bigger-than-yours technology driven PC industry we see today. Put a game in the first person, throw in some guns, create a very pretty engine with physics and sparks and such, and you're fucking set. PC gamers will love you forever. They don't even bother talking about the game. John Carmack is still the modern day PC god, and he barely even gives a shit about video games anymore. Go to QuakeCon, and you'll hear him talk about a few nuances of programming that no one in the audience has ever heard of before quickly moving on to space ships. Cliffy B is a rockstar because he designed levels for game that got the shit kicked out of it by Half Life before moving on to a Quake wannabe that people liked better because it had one new mode and a few quirky guns. Fuck that.

PC gaming killed itself.

I wonder what would've happened without Wolfy and Doom? Would Myst have led us to a second age of adventure games? Would Will Wright have turned the mainstream PC gaming industry into a dominating field of experimentation fueled by the desire to turn user friendly gaming into the PC's unifying "killer ap" (like Korea, really)? Would Baldur's Gate have shifted the industry back into the imaginative depths of the nerdy eighties? Would Ultima Underworld and Marathon have led to a revolution of first person adventure-ish games capable of providing us the rewards of Half Life much earlier, and without any of it's boring trappings to boot? All I know is whatever happened would be a lot better than what we've got right now. In case we want to kill the current PC mindset off a little later in it's development, let's go ahead and nuke Counter Strike.

I fucking hate the military. I hate this multiplayer-or-die fad. Whoever decided the ultimate gaming experience was one that provided the most realistic way to shoot a terrorist in the face like a real god damned hero while shouting macho-sounding commands to your drinking buddies was probably a Counter Strike player. He was probably a frat boy looking to pass the time before he dropped out of school, stole one of his dad's suits, and fellated some office big wig for a job pushing paper before marrying his daughter. Or some skinny gun nut locked in a basement in Texas cursing because the military wouldn't take him unless he went to boot camp. Or maybe an EB salsemen on a power trip that thinks a random WWII game is totally sweet because it has "the best particle effects in the industry" and you can completely hear the screams of your squadmates when they get shot. This person is not a person, but a people, and a great many of them. They are the face of the "hardcore" gamer to mainstream America, and they should fucking grow up. I think all gamers in general are being pegged into this stereotype, and as such the military is smiling very widely, looking to recruit us all for their super death squads with propaganda games and advertising on G4.

I don't know. Maybe I'm crazy, but I see this country trying to use gaming as the way to plant the hatefull seeds of neo-conservatism into the traditionaly liberal minds of the young. That sounds wacko, yes, like politics are my life and I see enemies and corruption everywhere. I guess what I'm really trying to say is games are often about killing, gamers like to shoot things, and I think we're maybe unintentially indoctrinating a generation by infesting their culture with the wrong ideas about what shooting and killing really are. If games define your lifestyle, and you think a game about peace or...not shooting things in the face would be "boring" and "no fun", you are more inclined to be interested about shooting people in the face as a soldier. And even if you're not interested, it certainly isn't going to bother you. Killing arabs is just "necessary" for our freedom, and the people doing it are honerable and courageous for running through mine fields, sniping bunny hoppers, and capturing that god damned flag of justice. I mean, just try talking about politics or the military with one of these types of gamers. They'll tell you to shut up. They will be angry, most likely. Yes. Kill Counter Strike. I'll stop talking now.

I already covered Madden.

The fifth game would be either Sonic, Tomb Raider, Pac Man, Ocarina of Time or Mortal Kombat, I suppose. You can think of the reasons.

I really like this response. I'm a big fan of a man who can preach. In a world of greys where everybody's got their say and we're all just one psychotic, rambling letter away from a talkshow appearance, if you believe something loudly enough, other people will begin to believe it too. Let's hear it for soapboxes!

Author	Sim heading
Aderack	This is, at best, a tangent. Over the last week, a couple of Agnes's cousins, from Poland, were staying here. Maybe it should have been stranger than it was; I am becoming used to everyone around me speaking a foreign language; to existing in my own little bubble. They quickly became bored with our tendency to sit still and do quiet things by ourselves. So the male cousin -- some Slavic variant of "Christopher", best I could make out -- began to shuffle through the still-kinda'-scant videogame collection I have here. It was obvious early on that neither of them played videogames. It was obvious because they asked, with a bit of confusion, how many systems we had. Only four. Or five, if you count the PSOne. It was obvious later on, because the first game that he chose to play was an embarrassing licenced thing based on Terminator 3, that I just happened to receive with my Xbox. I have been intending to get rid of the game for months; I just haven't bothered, as I figure I wouldn't get much for it. Out of all the games I have -- and although I have few, I have some pretty good stuff here -- he chooses that. And, well. I guess it's clear why. At least he had heard of The Terminator. Later, he made another attempt. The next game he chose: Sega GT 2002, off the combo disc with JSRF. Another game I would never have bought, mostly because I don't give a damn about cars. I have tried playing with it a bit. The most fun I have had is screeching around the test track at night, trying not to crash, with Oingo Boingo playing from the hard drive. It is clear, however, that Agnes's cousin chose to play the game for exactly the reason I would never have bought it: because it was a car game. And hey, what man doesn't love cars! ... I suppose all of this is obvious, particularly in retrospect. It's just. I had never received such an example of why the videogame industry is as it is, at the moment. ... Here's another note. I keep seeing blurbs on Craigslist, asking for gamers to participate in market research. They pay fifty dollars, just for asking you questions for an hour or two! I have yet to make it into one of these sessions. Perhaps because I don't quite fit the criteria. On the survey form that you have to fill out, they always ask which of the following games you have played for more than twenty hours. And the choices area inevitably WRESTLING GAME A, or LICENSED CAR DRIVING GAME B, or X-TREME FOOTBALL GAME C, or -- well. Basically nothing anyone intimate with the medium would spend his time with. The only game of merit I have yet seen on one of these lists is GTA3 -- and you know why that's there. There are only a few major game developers around here. One is Sega. Another is EA. I wonder what entity most of these focus groups are held for.
DeusJester	Again with the tangent, but I say Good. Let the industry appeal to the lowest common denominator until it buckles under the weight of its own gluttony and its knees explode. People only buy shit for so long. Then they stop buying it, and the industry based around it begins to crumble. Kind of like the music industry. All those layoffs, all the pissing and moaning and lawsuits and crying over the fact that the industry was going down the tubes, and the only people that gave a dead dog's dick were the employees of the industry itself. If you didn't read about it specifically, you probably didn't even notice, because while the industry was "exploding", musicians went on making music, and their fans kept right on buying it. The only thing that was lost were the hordes of teenyboppers weaned on shit who gave it up. If games did the same thing, I'd be ecstatic. Nothing like watching EA have to feed on itself and degenerate into a paranoid, starving animal.
Extralife	I think we're already there. For years I was all for the mainstream pop culture feasting on gaming because it seemed when things reach a certain level of popularity, they can finally grow, even if what causes that popularity is shit. Things that are large can specialize. So now we're here. I guess. But it's not really working out so well. Instead of opening up new venues of creative expression in the niche areas of gaming, all we've got is what used to be popular is now niche, with EA-ish shit (and macho military crap) becoming the face of gaming. We haven't seen an explosion of experimentation in American now that gaming has become viable, and we haven't seen a growing community of people interested in bringing us Japanese indie games. Instead, Japanese mainstream titles, which, as we've all pointed out, are kind of dying and sucking and all that, have become the niche. There seems to be little room for expansion. I'm already wondering if gaming has its saturation point here in America. If it hasn't, are we going to see some meaningful expansion, or is the industry going to turn into Hollywood? Some of you guys have brought up the music comparision, but I just don't see it. I'd fucking love gaming to be that healthy. Music fans can and do ignore all the shit surrounding the recording industry. There are other places to go, and popular culture is begining to embrace them. We don't have that in gaming. We need the mainstream American companies to not suck. We need them to try things. Like Deus said, we need the EAs and Rockstars to give us more things like Riddick, and less things like Driv3r or Harry Potter. We need people to take gaming seriously. That's what's really at the center of all of this. We need gaming out of the tech and business pages, and into the arts and entertainment field. We need an American Kojima, and less Cliffy B's. The New York Times needs to talk to Warren Spector and Peter Molyneux, not Larry Probst and Bruno Bonnel.

And all of this segues very nicely into the topic for next time! It's almost as though I put stuff like this in the last spot on purpose or something.

Closing comments:

So I'm going to go ahead and post the topic right here and have all y'all send me emails, old-fashioned like, this time around. And your topic is: the future of games.

Japan is in dire straits. Japanese developers, once paragons of originality and experimentation, now consider "fresh" a love sim with elements of, like, three other love sims! It's not just games, of course. This is a country of media creators with so little confidence in their own product that they will put fantastic anime series on at 2 AM in the morning and charge the equivalent of 90 American dollars for a one or two-episode DVD because they simply don't feel anyone beyond the present fanbase of hardcore fanatics would be interested.

This is a country with media publishers so cynical and removed from the products they peddle that the latest Dragon Quest sold for about 100 American bucks because the company simply sat a bunch of number crunchers down with some man-on-the-street statistics and had them find the magic number where the number of people willing to pay the price would mean maximum profits.

This is a country where the format has became a whirring, clicking machine just like every media format to precede it and all that will come, forever and ever amen. Just as is the case with the North American games industry, the problems with which have been mentioned at good length above.

Which leaves the dark horse: South Korea. In a country where everything is cheap, creative developers are willing to take the risks Japan has shied away from with increasing quality and success. If anybody is going to make "online the future", it would be Korea. The mention of "Kentia Hall" doesn't elicit a grin and a chuckle anymore.

Then, of course, there's the format itself. I'll level with you. I hardly play games these days. It's not because I believe some smug bullshit about how I've grown up and games haven't and how there isn't enough originality and blah blah horph Snickers Bars, because I don't. Games are evolving at a steady, logical pace. Instead, I can't remember the last time I played a game for an extended period of time without feeling guilty about the hours I just wasted for zero gain whatsoever.

So there you go. Plenty of food for thought. How can Japan and North America get their shit together? How important will South Korea be to the future of gaming? What can clever developers do to woo new gamers into the fold and respark the fire in the hearts of older, jaded gamers? Etcetera. Email me since I even went ahead and gave you the link twice for God's sake.

-Drew

It was a good day to be depressed, and Tokyo's a good town to be depressed in.