New Technology vs. Old Gamer Classics

I think its time we all reflect upon what games got us to where we are today and what we all expect from the future of gaming.

Although many of us experienced gaming at different ages from 25 years old to 80 years old we can all probably pick a handful of games that made us what we are today: a gamer.

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What was it about those old classics that drew us as a moth to a flame? Did it all start on November 16th 1952 with the birth of Shigeru Miyamoto and his destiny to create some of the most wonderful game settings of all time: Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., Legend of Zelda, and Pikmin.

It is expected with any new game that hits the market that a patch may exist for that game before you ever put it into your PC or console.

Why? Has the market degraded to such buggy software that we have to download a few megabytes of game fixes before it’s even usable?

How many patches did we have to get with Super Mario Brothers or Zelda? How many crashes did these games have besides your typical game lock up due to dust on your cartridge? Were games more solid ‘back in the day’?

There are handfuls of readers that probably believe games were solid and robust in the early 1980’s with birth of Nintendo of America or even Atari.

Although these now classic games did break new boundaries and road the bleeding edge of technology they were of a simple time when a game may have one or two developers working a project.

This was a time where music was composed by the developers. The dialog, the storyline, and the animation were all designed by the software developers.

Internationalization of a game was the job of a handful of very inexperienced folks (or developers) that barely spoke the target language (i.e. “all your base are belong to us.”).

So why are today’s games ridden with bugs and imperfections? Are the developers less experienced or do they just not caring about the customer needs and desires?

Well realistically we’re not talking about a “few developers” but a team of software engineers working with a team of quality assurance engineers across one or more divisions of a game development empire.

Have you ever taken the time to sit down and read through the credits of a game at the end of a manual (or read the manual at all)?

There is a team of documentation folks just to compose that manual, add screen-shots, edit and re-edit and internationalize in four plus languages.

But I digress. Read the credits for your manual of Call of Duty 2 and you’ll notice a layer of test teams at parent companies, and contracted companies, and at the core development centers.

You may notice that they also give thanks to the groups of ‘regular folks’ that play tested the game while software folks watched behind closed doors to see how gamers experienced the game from the ‘common man’ perspective.

The game even takes full video shots from the Military Channel and gives credit to them for the footage (old games had a string of still photo’s with text footers).

All this and we’ve not even discussed the music scores composed by real musicians or the cinematic, post-production, and hired character voices recorded in sound proof rooms for best quality.

This sounds very much like the behind the scenes footage for BraveHeart or The Lord of the Rings?

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With all these teams working together to make a top of the line game of today there will always be chances for error.

We’re all human and for every engineer we drop on the scene we add more layers of complexity and more chances for bugs or tech support calls.