From Mechs to Mopar | Hacker News Reader

From Mechs to Mopar

filfre.net

33 pointsdoppp16 comments

For all the completely deserving bad rep Bobby Kotick has accrued over the years, the MechWarrior 2-era of Activision was fucking magical. Bobby clearly squeezed the fruit beyond recognition but boy was the juice magnificent.

The fertile lands that bore the Interstate games, I fear, are no longer. I can't imagine a name stay like Activision experimenting like this today. Though, the odd one leaks out, like Hi Fi Rush.

In many ways, the gaming industry (and the tech industry along with it) have already had their 60s-70s auto industry moment that Interstate monopolized so well. Now so much of what we see is boilerplate, repeating year after year because it works, rather than because it is good.

(We have indies and they're great, I love them dearly, but the net dilution effect can be tiring. If only companies could take a successful game like Baldur's Gate 3, and be somehow forced to spin out new fresh IP in short order, reusing as much tech as possible. Sadly the constraints simply aren't there. Engines are too powerful and flexible, perhaps. The genericism we experience appears to be a direct decedent of the genericism of the elements involved in their creation.)

((Don't get me wrong, I would not willingly travel back to this era and give up the modern comforts of gaming -- it's the best it's ever been in so many ways -- but boy does thinking about MW2 and I76 evoke a nostalgic, unscratchable itch in me that is simply infuriating.))

Some indies are great, but they suffer from the same problem; there's a lot of copying happening.

One developer may put out an early version onto Kickstarter hoping they can go full-time on it, an established game studio picks up on the idea, copies the concept and beats them to the punch.

ConcernedApe makes an hommage to the old Harvest Moon games, runs circles around an established franchise by making a game 10x as large and good, and suddenly dozens of farm games pop up left right and center, all cute, some 3d, some with waifus, idk.

Pixel art has a revival. Suddenly pixel art everywhere. Some really good and stylish, mind you.

ConcernedApe was willing to take the "risk" if it can be called such, of Harvest Moon on PC.

He was lucky in that he "won" but many indy games, even relatively well done ones, don't get anywhere near the reception.

It's often a bit of a safer gamble to copy something else.

This is true, and for every success story like Stardew Valley, there's a hundred failed attempts of equally passionate developers - a bit like startups.

Thought to be even more fair, there's also a thousand failed attempts that are absolute crap, too. Being "indie" doesn't make it good, but being "big commercial" at least usually ends up in something playable (though there have been exceptions to this!).

Failure because they were bad or just not popular? Are there games out there which are amazing but didn’t sell well?

It doesn’t feel like it. It feels like there are lots of games, all of which are known about by enough people to ensure they get globally discovered, and most of which just aren’t very good.

We’d have so many more good games if we had some sort of state level funding for projects. Games are art, art and craft go hand in hand, and craft is hard work. A game isn’t a simple painting, and painting is difficult and time consuming enough as it is. It’s more like an artwork on the scale of an office block, and for that you need a capital injection of time, labor, and money.

Interstate 76 was an amazing game and lead to me having a chance to volunteer with Activision as an external tester. It was high school, and the chance to test games before they came out, even for free, seemed very cool.

I wasn't there in time to test I'76, but was able to work on a few games and see my name in the credits before I moved into a more traditional software QA career and beyond. Truly a life changing game for me!

Thanks for the link

Damn, cool story. I never had a chance like that at that age, but I definitely would have thought that was the greatest thing ever. What a great experience.

I’ve played all of them. For some reason completely irrational warfare with giant robot exoskeletons is the only thing that makes me want to enlist in a land-war.

It was also Voltron, but we seem to have lost the fantasy of boarding your component mech on a freaking zipline!

It's interesting to read articles like this. I was there when this happened (worked on Return to Zork for the Mac while MW2 got finished, and i76 was starting) and knew Zach and Sean. There's nothing hugely inaccurate that I can tell, but it does simplify a much messier and rougher process. There's nothing outright wrong, but aha moments in the article actually played out over months. It's interesting to read articles about things I was there for, makes me feel old tbh, but also nice to know that the memories live on as stories.

I really wish there was something that caught the simple magic of interstate 76, today. as i recall interstate 82, the official sequel, was a total honker.

Never really did the story stuff; just the deathmatch. the bots were amusing enough but getting a couple others on a lan got to be riotous fun.

Deathmatch was always a blast! I remember playing with headphones on, the sound design was good enough to pinpoint where other players were hiding, and you could even shut off your engine to coast around silently.

I would recommend the story if you have a chance. It's a good revenge story and John de Lancie is a great sounding villain. The presentation is incredibly cinematic, which I feel was enhanced two things:

1) in-game cut scenes within the engine, good dialogue and voice acting, as well as the "car movie" camera angles 2) choosing to have even the pre-rendered cut scenes match the mostly flat polygon style of the engine avoided the gap between gameplay and cutscene. Not exactly the uncanny valley. The "why doesn't it all look like that?" valley perhaps.

Mechwarrior 2 was incredible, especially for its time

Yeah I wish more modern retro games would embrace the mostly flat shaded polygon aesthetic of mech 2 and similar games. There's a certain 80's future cool to early polygon graphics before it all became texture-mapped hyper realism.

I still have the Interstate '76 soundtrack in my music library, it was great. The gameplay may not have been the greatest but the style was off the charts. A modern remake could be a truly great game.

I still have the Mercator 2 CD. Just a tremendous ost that fit perfectly.

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