R.O.B, asking himself where his Virtual Boy’s at.
Fantastic Ian Bogost’s article on the Wii U. I like the fact that Ian demystifies Nintendo’s history and shows that as all companies do, they’ve been ferocious and merciless as they’ve also been innovative, genuine and honest with things like this Wii U kind of saying “sorry, we don’t know where gaming goes but here a new box to play with”.
Other game companies did the exact same: MS made console development a reality for anyone, they did the Kinect experiment, Sony totally understood developers and an entire generation of gamers with the Playstation, Apple discovered the App Store magnet and touch devices etc and they all did some terrible shit too from greedy corporation-ish stuff to totally missing the boat. I like seeing this human side in massive corporations. Nobody’s perfect, even entities.
Developers argue and defend their worshipped brand -as usual- but the point to me in this Wii U case is more about whether or not Nintendo is getting better at what they were bad at: third-party support, online distribution. Better but still shitty. Whatever happens with this new console, things will probably benefit Nintendo and only Nintendo like the past 30 years.
A comment caught my eye:
Atari crap may have caused the downfall of consoles but not computer games. The glut of crap crushed the game industry but not people who loved to make games. The mainstream may have become disenchanted with consoles, but computer games defined the core. Nintendo was vital to re-establishing the industry and the mainstream, but without them, computer games would have continued to spread.
I saw that. The 8/16bit console era was exploding but so was the PC. It’s the start of darlings like ID or Epic who was in the 90s making over $100,000 selling and shipping games on floppy discs. There was money outside the console market and the best were doing fine, both in the US and Europe: Japan is the exception, not the norm. Looking at Japan as the future for games elsewhere is wrong: FPS never worked there and F2P doesn’t do so well here. Consoles became big in the West but PCs stayed and are getting stronger everyday.
Unfortunately, their childish game themes entrenched a cultural meme, that games should not be taken seriously. Whereas, computer games continued to produce a variety of mature content. I think Nintendo was good for the industry, but not for game culture.
Pretty much the opposite for Sony! It’s funny how culturally the childish visuals never took over older generations, it always grabs the youth though. The problem is we have more and more old people, the average gamer is now like 33 year old. But consoles and app stores are terribly narrowing what subjects we can explore in games because of censorship. Even Steam doesn’t allow Adults Only games. It’s weird!
And this is where the paradox lies: we used to make games for adults when money was really coming from kids and now we make child-looking, teenager-ish games when money really is coming from much older and mature crowds.