The 3DO: The birth of my cynicism
gamasutra.com
gamasutra.com
It sounds to me like he is just cynical in general. I am mid-thirties, have been playing video games since the 80s, and still love them with the same enthusiasm as when I was a kid.
Sure, I play a lot less. I don't have nearly as much time, with a full time job, a wife, and a kid. It is still my go-to free time activity, though.
My buddies, married with children themselves, and I play together online one night a week. It is our way of maintaining our social bond through families and living far apart. We are closer because of games than we would ever be otherwise.
He not only saw the 'value' of his console drop more than 90% he saw that he had 'lost' a bunch of things he cherished (his collection) which he would still have had he kept them.
The economic reality that he had essentially sold his 'collection' for $50 really affected his self image. And rather than say "Gee, that was stupid! I sure learned my lesson!" he finds he has to take it out on the video game industry that 'tricked' him into giving them all of that personal wealth in exchange for what was now perceived as crap.
Some people don't recover from that sort of shock, some do. Hopefully at some point the author will forgive himself for allowing his love of the vision that 3DO presented to cost him so dearly.
Why does so much of society today equate cynicism with maturity? As a grown man with 3 kids, 4 houses, 3 cars one wife, I like to think I’m fairly mature, yet I find cynicism to be a thief of joy.
Well, ask people with 3 kids, no house, no spouse and no car about the value of cynicism.
It feels a little bit like we are in a little golden age of video games.
I’ve just finished up BotW (amazing), maybe 50% through Mario Odyssey (amazing again), I’ve got Rayman Legends to play through and Splatoon 2 to get stuck into, in between the odd game of Rocket League. That’s just on the Switch!
On the PC I’ve got countless games I’ve bought for next to nothing in steam sales to find time for, Cuphead, Just Cause 3, Metro, Wolfenstein to finish and highly acclaimed indy titles galore...
Then I have tons of retro games I’m eager to play for the first time, or play through again, easily accessed and for next to nothing.
My biggest complaint is also the lack of time I have to digest it all.
I was a little worried I would be let down because of all the hype, but it's delivered so far. I haven't even really started Mario yet, but I loved Mario 64 so I imagine there's a lot to like there too.
That and the DS/3DS is probably the richest game console to date in terms of sheer volume of quality content. If you can't find a game you like on the DS, you might not like games.
For example, I'd say 1999-2005 was a quite crappy age. Dominant consoles were Playstation 1 and 2, the first XBox and the Game Cube, which of course had some fine outlier games but nothing compared to the mind-blowing catalogs of e.g. the SNES or the Neo Geo, which were brimming with gems, many of them are still widely considered among the best games of all time.
In the PC, after breakthrough games in the previous years like Daggerfall, Quake, Master of Magic, Doom, Civ II, Ultima Underworld, Fallout, Warcraft, Starcraft, GTA, etc., most of what dominated the market in that decadence period were sequels of those and others, and unoriginal games.
This opinion is not just due to my being a cranky old timer wanting people to get off his lawn. I do think the situation improved a lot from 2006 onwards. Team Fortress II, the Wii, Portal, Minecraft... were truly revolutionary concepts in the late 2000s in different ways, and indie games began to flourish with titles like World of Goo or Braid (or said Minecraft). Fast forward to now, and we have the Switch, Pokémon Go (geolocation games), and a blooming indie universe. I do think we are at a golden age, it would be a great time to be 15 again and have lots of time for videogames.
The Playstation/Saturn/N64 generation wasn't even mentioned despite being the one to introduce 3D games which are still being perfected and laying the foundation for the mechanics that are still the basis of almost every single game coming out today.
Edit - and am currently wallowing in nostalgia after downloading Oolite.
- BF1942. The Desert Combat mod was a blueprint for the “dudebro” FPS boom
- Counter-Strike, DOTA two mods for other games. Both took aspects of other genres (FPS duels and RTS) and made them more accessible to non-hardcore players.
- GTA3 and sidequels. Vice City really anticipated the 80s nostalgia boom of the mid-late 00s. San Andreas was unlike anything I had ever played before in terms of pure scope.
- MGS2. Insane production values (Kojima described it as a “Hollywood game”) mixed with an interesting story and subverting player expectations. The shitstorm surrounding it reminds me a lot of “The Last Jedi”.
I'm not asking about their sequels and follow-ups, like DotA 2. People still enjoy The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past (1991) today when many more good Zelda games exist. But it appears to me that not even nostalgia would compel someone to play an early-2000s PC game.
Let's put it this way. At this moment on Twitch, there are:
- 4 people playing Warcraft 3 (any mod)
- 0 people playing Half-Life 1 (any mod)
- 1 person playing GTA 3 (any mod)
- 21 people playing A Link to the Past (any mod)
- 13 people playing Super Mario 64 (any mod)
So I am totally on board with Al-Khwarizmi's claim. The role of even the best early-'00s games was to show us what better games could be made. Once those better games were made, the '00s games were abandoned, in a way that '90s games weren't.
Eg. the authentication servers for online play (which I'd argue is the main component of HL/CS/WC3/...) are down.
It's impossible to play these games now, so how there could be anyone playing them?
On the other hand, I grew up with a SNES emulator with more than 300 games, I played a lot of them, and despite the unusual gem like TloZ, most SNES games were totally unmemorable, to say the least.
My point is, that I don't see a fundamental difference between SNES-era games and the early 2000's, both were markets saturated with crap, and a few gems that have stood the test of time.
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/
There were lots of trash games for PC in the early 2000s, but I think that is normal for any console.
Games like GTA3, really popular MMOs (WoW, Lineage, RO etc all had subscriber numbers many times over the previous generation of UO and EQ), online play accessible to normal people (before Halo and SOCOM you had to lug your Xtr33m g4mIng PC to some "LAN party" with other geeks), piles of unique yet well made games never done before like Katamari Damaci, Ico, Rez, music and dance games, MGS, 3D metroids, crazy shit like voice controlled pinball or bongo-operated Donkey Kong or Tekki with a giant controller etc. etc. This was not a crappy age by any measure you'd like to apply other than extreme bitterness.
GTA3 is a sequel and the vast majority of gameplay ideas were already in GTA (1997). WoW indeed is popular but a grindfest and tremendously shallow compared to UO. Halo has nothing original with respect to e.g. Quake and you will still find many people playing HD overhauls of Quake I, you'll have a hard time finding anyone playing Halo. The dance games started AFAIR in 1998 with DDR. MGS is from 1998 and in the early 2000s we only saw sequels. Metroid Prime, yeah, that was an outlier!
By the way, it isn't elitism either, few games were more mainstream that e.g. Super Mario Bros, World, Kart or 64 and I count those as masterpieces.
As I say it is subjective, probably there's many people that like games from that generation, but I can perfectly see where the game journalists you mention are coming from. It was a boring period of sequels and incremental ideas. For someone who hadn't ever played a FPS, yes, Halo could be good because it was their first, but those of us who had played Wolfenstein, Doom, Duke Nukem, Blood, Quake, etc. were like "So what?" But it's not elitism. I can see the worth in many mainstream games from other periods when they are really good and original, e.g. I see Pokémon Go as revolutionary with all the elitist bashing it gets! But the vast majority of games of the early 2000s were just reskings of things done earlier, and often better.
My main point, though, was about the impact. GTA3 was a revelation for millions of people who have not even heard of GTA1 and GTA2. Saying it's "a sequel" is as meaningful as saying FF XI is a sequel. Millions of people first online shooter was Halo (2), not Quake. Millions of people first MMO was WoW, not UO. MGS2 was the game people could not believe it's real time, it was nothing like MGS1 on PSX.
In the 6th generation games became mainstream. I dare you to name a movie, where adults play games, made before 1999. I don't recall a single one. After 2000 it's a common scene where young and not so young adults play games. The main guy in House of Card plays games. This alone makes the 6th gen special even if you don't care about all the original games it produced.
PS. Actually, an adult plays game in Clerks, though the scene is to show how nerdy he is.
It boiled down to the notion that the gaming industry have a (bad) habit of resetting itself whenever there is a solid change in hardware available. Resulting in years of glitzy but shallow games as devs spend time showing of what they can make the hardware do more than making deeply engaging game.
So it may well be that recent years of lagging Moore's Law payouts have resulted in game devs having to refocus their effort on something other than graphics prowess to get their games to sell.
Ultimately all successful platforms are a collective ecosystem experience, but they start just between the user and the first party developer.
Teams like Occulus are falling down the same trap as 3DO, promising lots of new expertise’s but demonstrating little to no day-one practicality.
That exactly describes why I can't stand the MVP trend.
Did you try any game like Lone Echo? It's so good it's the only game I broke my "not buying exclusives" rule with (I have a Vive). I paid for about 30-40 VR games in Steam, so it's not exactly a 3DO.
It's spelled Oculus, by the way.
The whole thing of children being socially incentivized to invest huge amounts of money in devices that might fail for fear they'll be out of the loop with children slightly richer than them is a huge bummer. This problem doesn't really exist for TV, movies, books, and card and board games. I'm starting to wonder if PC and mobile gaming really should win out against Nintendo and Sony, morally...
Another good personal story about how we interface with videogame: https://www.polygon.com/2017/7/12/15958318/the-5000-decision...
I'm really torn on DLC, game expansions and the like. On one hand, $60 for a new game every year is lots when I could spend $25 on a game I already enjoy. But on the other, it's an excuse to limit content up front in order to milk users. I think it's a matter of perception and companies that find a fair balance will be successful.
There are lots of card games where you just buy a base set and an expansion now and again. And the vast majority of board games don’t require constant investment.
While it comes with 60 cards, the biggest criticism that I've seen about the game is how expensive the booster kits are and how they are packaged. To get all aspects of a song, you may have to buy multiple booster packs. I get that the song rights are built into the cost, but they cost as much or more than individual songs do off iTunes, and one card usually has only one part of a song (i.e. vocals, guitar, percussion, etc).
Not to be gender normative, but that probably doesn’t help you.
I love the idea of LCGs; I thought Epic or Ashes: Rise of the Pheonixborn could be new Netrunners (which I missed completely) but they didn't end up getting popular. So lately I am more interested in trying standalone board games, and MTG draft/cube.
I think Blizzard has a userbase satisfied with their DLC/loot box systems and the industry should learn from them
So true.
But that doesn’t seem right at all. I like reading books, and I like watching some shows and playing video games. I’m not invested in owning them, or in the community experience of watching what everyone else recently has. This is what it’s like to define your identity by what you own and by what you participate in. Like a Cubs fan, maybe—you can do that, and you can care about winning, and you can care about having popular opinions, but maybe you should pick one of those three.
I could have related since it's one of my favorite game ever :)
It has blown away people who got started on '80s hardware. In particular, I'm pretty sure that Jeff Minter has made comments specifically saying how amazed he was at the sheer per-pixel computational power on the Xbox 360.
So, I grew up a coder.
While, in the meantime, my C64- and Amiga- using friends, with all their amazing software choices, didn't have to do anything but consume, consume, consume. And, eventually, "upgrade to a Nintendo" for their gaming needs.
See kids, this is what happens when you ship computers that no longer have development tools/compilers/REPL's onboard!
Seriously though, I think the "3DO Moment" for me was when I realised I always preferred to spend time with computers if there was a compiler onboard, or some other way to build software for the thing. Anything less is just a door opener.
If you have (nearby) friends who play, and you're dealing with physical games; if you get a console around when they do, you can share newer games and reduce the risk of buying terrible games at full price. You'll probably buy some of the great games at full price so you can do multiplayer games though.
If you don't hang out with people who play, you can just buy a year late, and get the benefit of lower prices, more finished games, and a clear indication of what's cool and what isn't. You might miss out on online features/community, but that really depends.
Was it stupid to buy the 3DO for $700? Probably. But, it wasn't much more than the Neo Geo home console, and the games were probably cheaper?
Remember when gamers were upset the PS3 was $600 even though it was also a Blu-ray player? Remember when the Xbox One tripped out of the gate because it was $500 and not $400 like the PS4?
$1200.
There were other mistakes. You’re right development was expensive. It wasn’t as powerful as the PS and Saturn that came later much cheaper (the Saturn was also considered too expensive at $400... which was $300 less than the 3DO). They didn’t have pre-built franchises to lean on like Mario or Sonic.
But MAN was it expensive.
FIFA and Road Rash were vastly better on the 3DO than they were on 16 bit machines at the time. I remember being in awe of how great FIFA was on the 3DO, and the 3DO version of Road Rash was easily my favorite version of that game.
If I'm not mistaken, Need for Speed was first introduced on the 3DO. I remember there being quite a few good games on 3DO (mostly from EA and Crystal Dynamics), including what might have been the closest thing to an arcade version of Super Street Fighter 2 turbo.
But yeah, the 3DO was ridiculously expensive. Having said that, so was the Neo Geo home console. I had a few friends who were really into the SNK 2d fighting games at the time, and they'd be plunking well over $100 per cartridge.
NeoGeo at least had an argument, it was literally an arcade board you could buy at home. To the group of gamers who wanted that stuff there was a strong reason for it to exist and an explanation for its cost.
If they had gotten a couple of killer titles maybe it could’ve done better. Or if the price had fallen faster before the system was declared “dead“ by the public. But by the time that happened it was just too late.
$700 was three SNESes and a game or two at the SNES launch price. But this was three years later so you could probably buy a few more games.
It was just an obscene amount of money, especially for what was still considered a “kids toy” until more into the PS2 and XBox.