Re:New iPhone Agreement Bans Flash-to-iPhone Compiler & Others
by trrll on Sunday April 11, 2010 @08:54PM
(#1258059)
I think that it is entirely a myth that the video game crash of '83 had anything at all to do with a decline in the quality of games. The fact that a couple of anticipated games (ET and PacMan) turned out to be dogs is coincidental. There had been dogs all along. What actually happened was that the videogame fad had finally run its course. For a while, videogames were novel enough that consumers were willing to buy just about anything that they could play on a video screen. Then, as invariably happens with fads, they were old hat. It wasn't just console games that hit a slump--it was arcade games and computer games as well. Videogames had to rebuild a market based not upon novelty of playing games on a video screen, but upon the quality and features of the individual games.
(First my credentials: I was an avid player of Atari 2600 games at the time, so I remember the period in question first-hand.)
My take is not that there was a decline in quality due to any sort of technical reason, it was due to a drop in the quality of the gameplay design and playtesting. That, in turn, I'm guessing was due to the number of Atari 2600 game creators increasing past the threshold of GOOD game designers & playtesters available. After all, it was a relatively new field at the time, video game design. Perhaps it reached a point where there were say 50 new games being "designed" concurrently but there were only 20-30 good designers. Whereas before, it was under that threshold.
This was my theory because I've heard your position stated a few times in the web, but from direct experience I remember it being more a drop in the quality of game play rather than in code quality or technical polish.