The Shareware Scene, Part 5: Narratives of Doom
filfre.net
filfre.net
What? Doom looked already fantastic when it came out, much better than hordes of 3D games that games before it. (Check out Midwinter just a few years before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxHd2dnpIqU)
And we did not have to wait for long for 3D games to get even better - Comanche in 1992 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snWmPWfeS6Y) and Quake 1 in 1996. A drastic evolution in a very, very short time, even before GPU videocards became mainstream.
> Gamers would have to accept jagged edges, tearing textures, and a generalized visual crudity in 3D games for quite some time to come. A freeze-frame visual comparison with the games the industry had been making immediately before the 3D revolution did the new ones no favors: the games coming out of studios like Sierra and LucasArts had become genuinely beautiful by the early 1990s, thanks to those companies’ rooms full of dedicated pixel artists. It would take a considerable amount of time before 3D games would look anywhere near this nice
They're probably the best examples in the history of the medium of great design. Capcom and Nintendo are still making 2D Megaman/Mario games with the old graphic design and there are new retro FPS games coming out every year. SuperHot actually looks worse than Doom in most aspects other than the resolution and particles.
Sierra/LucasArts games, while beautifully drawn, suffered from unclear walking paths, confusing verbs, frustratingly slow interactivity, and nonsense puzzles. From an industrial design perspective, they were a mess.
Out of this World and Prince of Persia are probably the most prominent example of games that excelled in the two dimensions of graphics and usability, while Myst is probably the most extreme example of form over function in games that were successful.
The only people I've heard describe more than a handful of old games as "beautiful" have been those old enough to have experienced them before newer games came along. The original article doesn't seem to have examples of what the author considers beautiful, but let's talk about Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, a Lucasarts game from 1992 (since this is one I played in the early 90s). The art is ... fine. It has a lot of constraints (low resolution, not a ton of colors available in its palette) and it's well executed within those constraints, but it's not beautiful. I also played Myst around the same time. I didn't then, and still don't, see any way in which the 2d pixel art was "more beautiful."
The cross-genre comparisons to shooters are also unfair. Compare something like Madden 95 on SNES to Madden 64 on N64. They both have jagged edges and visual crudity; the "pixel art" nature of the former does it no favors.
The other day I saw a comment on YouTube mentioning that the EGA (16 color) version of The Curse of Monkey Island looks better than the VGA (256 color) version, and I agree! Beauty to me is mastery of the art form within its limitations. The limitations often make better art (the quintessential example to me is how the original Star Wars looks better, for example in its minimalistic depiction of a barren Tatooine, than the remixes or the prequels; once George Lucas was free of technical and budget limitations, his "boundless" imagination turned out to be disappointing).
I even think some games look better in pixelated monochrome glory. Is it because I am an old fart? Maybe. But I'm not wrong, either.
Citation needed? This feels like fuzzy language used to protect an unverifiable claim. What is a "shocking percentage?"
Looking at (say) Wikipedia's list of notable games from 1998 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_in_video_games) I see a reasonable mix of genres. In fact, "shooter" games (searching the page for the number of uses of 'shoot') seem to share the top spot (21 results) with "role-playing" and "sports" games, the latter genre being neglected entirely in the article. (Noting that some games are listed as multiple genres)
From the article's earlier longing for the simpler time of gorgeous, hand-crafted 2D art, I wonder if the author simply misses classic-style adventure games. In response to that idea, however, I point out the Old Man Murray article (https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html) on the death of adventure games: in brief Murray argues that the genre became so wrapped up in its own puzzle conventions that it became impenetrable to new players.
If you read the blog, you'll also note that that the author makes no secret of his fondness for graphical and text adventures, and the blog has covered both extensively, including their declines.
Interestingly, particularly since you brought up 1998, the Old Man Murray article you linked to was written by Erik Wolpaw, a well-known game writer who later worked with Double Fine (founded by Tim Schafer of LucasArts fame, the designer of 1998's Grim Fandango, basically the swan song of the LucasArts adventures) and Valve, purveyor of 1998's acclaimed FPS Half-Life.
That's true, but on the other hand the article quotes a Sierra executive as saying:
> “What we think of today as a computer or a videogame system,” wrote Ken Williams of Sierra that year, “will someday assume a much broader role in our homes. I foresee a day when there is one home-entertainment device which combines the functions of a CD-audio player, VCR, videogame system, and computer.”
... which exactly describes a console. Not quite the consoles of the late 90s, but 2000's Playstation 2 was price-competitive with stand-alone DVD players. It feels selective to lament the path of the game-industry as a whole while defining that industry to exclude the systems that look like the supposedly-unfulfilled prediction above.
Perhaps this is just a problem of context, since I'm coming to this series of articles in medias res through with this 'part 5' link.
> There is a bit of a tendency to overlook sports games in most "gaming" discussion, I'd say, despite their significant popularity, but they've also never been as much of a force on the PC as on consoles or arcade.
Honestly, I think if we're going to name overlooked genres, the elephant in the room is the hidden-object genre. These games aren't often included on _lists of games_, but as I understand it they're quite popular and profitable, especially on mobile platforms.
Something that really does need covering, though, is the context of sports games in the early 90's, when they were starting to portray the gameplay in full, in real-time, for a mass market. The sports had always been there, but they were generally categorizable into management simulations(on computers) or simple arcade interpretations(coin-op and consoles), with only a little bit of crossover. That changed in the 90's, as sports games started to boast increasingly comprehensive featuresets while maintaining an arcade become-the-star-player feel; they represent a path that is clearly "outreach" and yet distinct from interactive movies, from puzzle games, and from Doom.
Also, the numerous claims over the origins of Madden NFL make for an amazing tale.
They kind of should be overlooked, if you're talking about a particular year in gaming. They don't follow the same release cycles as other games. Most of the time, the only prominent change from year-to-year is the update to team rosters and player statistics. In that sense, sports games are more like an annual subscription to a single game (with the occasional engine update or refresh) than a series of games.
Of course, there are some (non-sports) game sequels that are little more than a content refresh but they are the exception and often receive negative criticism unless the content itself is really good.
It only takes one or two sentences to explain this more accurately, and I think we should all prefer that over saying something that is about 90% wrong but slightly shorter.
I also cringed when the article said that we couldn't really know why the Columbine kids went on a murder spree when other people who played Doom didn't. That is a totally ridiculous thing to say; We know exactly why, and it's because one of them was a bonafide psychopath and the other was clinically depressed. Again, something explainable in a sentence that was misrepresented in the article.
Historians should be more concerned with accuracy than word count.
And spectacle was one of the biggest sellers of games.
Funny thing is that when they developed this feature, they made a bug so if you scroll down to the year before, the years appear, but now dates from the current year are wrong as they appended the year before. That's what you get for trying to be a smartass.