Hacker News Reader

Comment by thomasz | Hacker News Reader

Even his greatest successes were never the breathtaking, revolutionary advances he promised. Populous, Syndicate, Themen Park, Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper were nothing but a fairly simple game play idea, executed well.

But for some reason, games journalism always repeated his wild and completely impossible ideas for the next product like a gospel. That is the core of the problem, and not a thirteen year old boy trapped in the bod of a grown man talking about the game he’s going to create once he has read through c++ for dummies.

View on HN

> a fairly simple game play idea, executed well.

tbh that is all you need for a truly exceptional product, not just in gaming. And it's insanely hard to do that.

Dungeon Keeper is still one of the best games I played after all these years and I will die defending it on this hill.

Yes. But strangely, he always promised wide simulations of worlds with fascinating emergent behavior. But even his truly great games were never like that. But it took journalism roughly 25 years to notice.

I wonder if it might have been more than that: maybe the problem wasn't games journalism repeating, but games journalism listening? Every piece of entertainment that is a multi-person effort has a little more thought put into it than visible on the surface (the opposite seems to be true for most solo art). That's nothing special. But when journalists start digging for more, trying to outdo each other in deep questions at interviews, the interviewee will be flattered and try to deliver more of that. Perhaps he would have continued doing well executed simple ideas if he never got that "the big ideas guy!" spotlight pointed at him. Remember how the matrix sequels felt like force-fed intellectual posturing? Same effect I think, inability to resist the flattery of attention, and as a consequence all the subtlety of "there might be more beneath just the explosions" gone.

I have to hard disagree with you here on a personal level, a lot of my formative years I spent playing his games and they mean a great deal to me. But I wish he would take a step back to look at the market today and make something that's really needed, not try to relive the old glory days.

Populous, Syndicate, Theme Park, Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper were nothing but a fairly simple game play idea, executed well.

Sure be they were executed well enough that they all make the list of some of my favourite games of the time.

My all time favorite games can be described as "fairly simple gameplay idea, executed well".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com