Few Questions for Msrrs Crawford, Price, Davie and other Games Ind Veterans

[carmel_andrews]

As well as anyone else here thats been involved in the mainstream games industry either way back way or in recent times

 

 

Without further ado here goes with the questions

 

 

If you had the knowledge/skills and tools they have now but back when you first entered the industry, Do you think your games or creations would have been better or sold more

 

Of the modern games or game types/genre's, which ones would you have liked to have worked on, on your preferred system you developed content (games or non games software) for

 

What is your opinion of preserving the history of electronic enterainment (in software and hardware) or 'digital heritage' to using the preferred term (i.e emulation and non emulation based)

 

Do you think that the present crop of developers/publishers and product makers are doing enough to preserve our 'digital heritage' (i.e emulation and non emulation based)

 

 

Do you think that the present games industry offers better QUALITY product then the content you or the compa nies you were working with or their competitors were offering back in the day

 

Do you think the industry has made any inroads in tackling piracy or whether it will make any inroads in tackling said issue

 

If your preferred system you were developing content (games or non games) on was still available and supported now, would you consider supporting that system again

 

Do you think the present crop of developers/publishers and product makers are shooting themseves in the foot by ignoring the classic/retro market and also the emulation market and the possibilities and opportunities those markets offer

 

If you were given your time again (or had a time machine) which of your nearest competitors or which other system would you have liked to have worked for or develop content on

 

If you are still involved in the games business, what do you think of its preference to C development tools compared to old school Assembler tools you were using when you started in the business (unless ofcourse you did things in one of the variants of BASIC)

 

 

If the current homebrew scene for classic/retro platforms used an APX like distribution model for it's content (on or offline), do you think that more mainstream developers/publishers or product makers (software or hardware) would enter the retro/classic market

 

I think thats enough to be getting on with

[Magic Knight]

Blimey - bit off the deep end wouldn't you agree?

[carmel_andrews]

Blimey - bit off the deep end wouldn't you agree?

 

 

 

And your problem is what, exactly

[Magic Knight]

No problem at all - quite a heavy meal of in-depth questions and not easy reading for the target participants im sure...

Edited August 24, 2013 by Magic Knight

[+Andrew Davie]

If your preferred system you were developing content (games or non games) on was still available and supported now, would you consider supporting that system again.

My preferred system is Atari 2600. I like it for reasons unrelated to its support or commercial viability. If there were a system where it was possible to make a living developing games for, well, I probably wouldn't write for it.

Do you think the present crop of developers/publishers and product makers are shooting themseves in the foot by ignoring the classic/retro market and also the emulation market and the possibilities and opportunities those markets offer.

No. Just like music, people hang on to their teenage years and interests. But the rest of the world moves on. Retro is a very small market, and it's probably well enough serviced by the current crop of developers.

If you had the knowledge/skills and tools they have now but back when you first entered the industry, Do you think your games or creations would have been better or sold more.

It would have been less stressful for me, and I probably would have done better financially as I would have had more leverage to negotiate a better position. But I don't think the games would have been better or sold more. I think some people just make good games, and some don't. I'm more competent with systems and engine design; in hindsight my games aren't very good and I didn't understand what made great games and what didn't.

Of the modern games or game types/genre's, which ones would you have liked to have worked on, on your preferred system you developed content (games or non games software) for.

I don't know much of anything about modern games, so I cannot answer this. I like puzzle/action; so I'd prefer to work on something along those lines.

What is your opinion of preserving the history of electronic enterainment (in software and hardware) or 'digital heritage' to using the preferred term (i.e emulation and non emulation based).

I am glad this is being done. The genesis of an industry is interesting, and there is only a [/background]certain window of opportunity where this information is available to be preserved.

Do you think that the present crop of developers/publishers and product makers are doing enough to preserve our 'digital heritage' (i.e emulation and non emulation based).

It's not up to those people to preserve our heritage. Other groups must do the preservation.

Do you think that the present games industry offers better QUALITY product then the content you or the compa nies you were working with or their competitors were offering back in the day.

It's hard to do a comparison. The modern platforms are more capable, so you can make things more entertaining. Modern games also have the benefit of hindsight and experience, and huge amounts of money to support development. So yes, modern games are probably better. But that doesn't mean that the companies or programmers are better? They're just different periods in history. Is a soldier from today a "better fighter" than one of the civil war? Of course; the equipment and training is far superior, but the people have the same inherent abilities.

Do you think the industry has made any inroads in tackling piracy or whether it will make any inroads in tackling said issue.

Make it more attractive to own an original copy than it is to pirate, and you don't have a piracy problem. I am somewhat partial to the idea that people have the right to do what they will with games they buy. So there's a balance there somewhere, and it will probably always be a fight between the two sides. Pirates will always be there.

If you were given your time again (or had a time machine) which of your nearest competitors or which other system would you have liked to have worked for or develop content on.

I would have done '2600 as early as possible, and C64 when that came out. Ignore everything else.

If you are still involved in the games business, what do you think of its preference to C development tools compared to old school Assembler tools you were using when you started in the business (unless ofcourse you did things in one of the variants of BASIC)

It's practical and sensible. Assembler is lovely, but hardly worth the cost or effort for most things.

If the current homebrew scene for classic/retro platforms used an APX like distribution model for it's content (on or offline), do you think that more mainstream developers/publishers or product makers (software or hardware) would enter the retro/classic market

I don't even understand the question. LOL.

[Jetboot Jack]

Kinda interesting topic..

 

If you had the knowledge/skills and tools they have now but back when you first entered the industry, Do you think your games or creations would have been better or sold more - to some extent, of course. making games for 26 years does mean you learn a bit about doing it better! And also using a powerful development environment means speedier turnaround and easier art creation (so using 2013 PC's to cross develop for atari 8bit or 2600 makes it FAR easier to do) - but I think the market at any snapshot moment is defined by the devices and the capability of them - successive generations of hardware have allowed us to be more creative because they have required less "hitting the metal" to get results.

 

Of the modern games or game types/genre's, which ones would you have liked to have worked on, on your preferred system you developed content (games or non games software) for - no I think modern games until the rise of the indie movement in the last few years have become very genre bound and for a large part of the 90's and 00's the commercial games development/publication industry was amazingly stagnant - and nothing like as creative as the early 80's.

What is your opinion of preserving the history of electronic enterainment (in software and hardware) or 'digital heritage' to using the preferred term (i.e emulation and non emulation based) - it's a good idea, for someone else to do!

Do you think that the present crop of developers/publishers and product makers are doing enough to preserve our 'digital heritage' (i.e emulation and non emulation based) - why should they? They are trying to make money not become digital librarians.

Do you think that the present games industry offers better QUALITY product then the content you or the companies you were working with or their competitors were offering back in the day - no just different with different technology.

Do you think the industry has made any inroads in tackling piracy or whether it will make any inroads in tackling said issue - nope, grubby little thieves will always steal however many walls you build around your stuff.

If your preferred system you were developing content (games or non games) on was still available and supported now, would you consider supporting that system again - no, as a commercial developer my aim is to communicate with as many people as possible, share my ideas and game experiences with the widest possible audience.

Do you think the present crop of developers/publishers and product makers are shooting themseves in the foot by ignoring the classic/retro market and also the emulation market and the possibilities and opportunities those markets offer - no, the market is expanding, new users are always joining and they have no relationship to games from 1977.

If you were given your time again (or had a time machine) which of your nearest competitors or which other system would you have liked to have worked for or develop content on - I would have skipped the ST/Amiga and gone PC a couple of years earlier. I would have avoided Saturn and Dreamcast development in hindsight.

If you are still involved in the games business, what do you think of its preference to C development tools compared to old school Assembler tools you were using when you started in the business (unless ofcourse you did things in one of the variants of BASIC) - that is a fairly pointless question, we still develop in assembler for microcode libraries etc. But the complexity of the devices and the software we build means low level languages are 100% unsuitable to develop modern games with. We do a bit more than C++ too, there are many other "languages" in use in a commercial development process - lots of scripting languages like LUA, PERL, MEL, HLSL, C#, PYTHON etc..


If the current homebrew scene for classic/retro platforms used an APX like distribution model for it's content (on or offline), do you think that more mainstream developers/publishers or product makers (software or hardware) would enter the retro/classic market - huh?

Edited September 10, 2013 by Jetboot Jack

[TMR]

Go on, i'm not an "industry veteran" as such but i've been hanging around the periphery since the 1980s... =-)

 

If you had the knowledge/skills and tools they have now but back when you first entered the industry, Do you think your games or creations would have been better or sold more

Better yes because i'd like to think i know more about what makes the kind of game i like to make good after all these years (since i'm still making those games for 8-bits). If they'd sell more... probably not because the period i was sort-of-active commercially was when the industry was more about marketing licensed product than going off and doing something fun and hoping others enjoyed it.

 

Of the modern games or game types/genre's, which ones would you have liked to have worked on, on your preferred system you developed content (games or non games software) for

Probably none of them. The games i enjoy playing from the most recent generations of hardware are the kind of thing that 8-bits struggle at; even the 2D shooty stuff tends to be bullet hell and the CPU grind isn't there even on the 16-bit systems to do that properly. Look at the object counts for something like Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2, we're never going to get that out of something with a couple of MHz!

 

What is your opinion of preserving the history of electronic enterainment (in software and hardware) or 'digital heritage' to using the preferred term (i.e emulation and non emulation based)

It's a Good Thing.

 

Do you think that the present crop of developers/publishers and product makers are doing enough to preserve our 'digital heritage' (i.e emulation and non emulation based)

It isn't their job any more than it was Monet or Picasso's to preserve their artwork; anything these companies do to help is a bonus but we've no right to expect it of them.

 

Do you think that the present games industry offers better QUALITY product then the content you or the compa nies you were working with or their competitors were offering back in the day

It's probably about the same, there's always some cream floating on the top and something sludgy sinking to the bottom regardless of which era we talk about. i do miss the variety of the 8-bit era to a degree but at the same time it's easy to understand why the mainstream industry boiled things down in the way it did.

 

Do you think the industry has made any inroads in tackling piracy or whether it will make any inroads in tackling said issue

No and no respectively; if one person can protect it, another can remove that protection. Even if we end up with the cloud-based solutions like OnLive and nothing else i reckon there'll still be someone sneaking the games they liked most out on a Flash drive and posting them anonymously online.

 

And it's important to note that, if the companies do ever come up with a foolproof way to stop piracy, we're not going to be able to preserve that generation of software; i suspect that we're already due headaches on that front when the servers for the downloadable games on the Xbox 360 and Wii are turned off.

 

If your preferred system you were developing content (games or non games) on was still available and supported now, would you consider supporting that system again

i still write 8-bit code... =-)

 

Do you think the present crop of developers/publishers and product makers are shooting themseves in the foot by ignoring the classic/retro market and also the emulation market and the possibilities and opportunities those markets offer

No because these are teensy niche markets. You can appeal to people's nostalgia if it's done correctly but that'll only work on a small window of an already small potential audience; if Company A releases a version of Delta for example, former Atarians or Amstrad bunnies have no rose tinted memories of it and won't be interested for example.

 

If you were given your time again (or had a time machine) which of your nearest competitors or which other system would you have liked to have worked for or develop content on

i missed developing for the Atari 8-bit back in the day, in that situation i'd travel back to the early 1980s with a decent cross development rig and churn out games for it and the C64.

 

If you are still involved in the games business, what do you think of its preference to C development tools compared to old school Assembler tools you were using when you started in the business (unless ofcourse you did things in one of the variants of BASIC)

Assembly language is impractical for the kinds of project we're seeing released today; the development cycle for a GTA V or Saint's Row 4 would be significantly increased and probably to prohibitive levels.

 

If the current homebrew scene for classic/retro platforms used an APX like distribution model for it's content (on or offline), do you think that more mainstream developers/publishers or product makers (software or hardware) would enter the retro/classic market

All of the people selling 8-bit games now are doing so for beer money, even if they could be persuaded to work together in an APX-style way (and i sincerely doubt that's even possible) there's no way to resurrect the 8-bits to the point where the financial incentives would be there for a large company.

[sargie]

If you had the knowledge/skills and tools they have now but back when you first entered the industry, Do you think your games or creations would have been better or sold more

I hope so - otherwise I have learned nothing

Of the modern games or game types/genre's, which ones would you have liked to have worked on, on your preferred system you developed content (games or non games software) for

I love working on iOS software. It has a great development environment and average team size / development cycle is still relatively sane compared to what happened to "AAA product" in the console industry. This is going to change somewhat over the next few years as the mobile / tablet hardware becomes more powerful and more of the hard-core audience migrate to these platforms as their primary gaming device.

What is your opinion of preserving the history of electronic enterainment (in software and hardware) or 'digital heritage' to using the preferred term (i.e emulation and non emulation based)

I think Emulation is great! I know for a fact (as I've worked with some of these companies) that if this kind of work wasn't being done we would lose important works of art as the original creators (if they still exist) are not doing the job themselves. I find the fact that I can play a game like "Firefox" (a Laser Disc game from 1983) on my computer something of a miracle. It always brings a smile to my face firing up these old games that played such an important part of my youth. There is no way this would happen without dedicated volunteers because there is no real money to made from it. Therefore, it's a labour of love and bless the Emulation people for doing it… Having said that, I reckon if you use Emulators and then someone releases a decent package of old games for a system you do own, you should consider supporting that effort and buying it.

Do you think that the present crop of developers/publishers and product makers are doing enough to preserve our 'digital heritage' (i.e emulation and non emulation based)

No, but I can understand why. It's a question of time / money and capability. If you have one of these you might not necessarily have the other. I've seen this first hand… developers desperate trying to resurrect classic coin ops from old development systems and failing because the knowledge of how to use these systems has just gone...

Do you think that the present games industry offers better QUALITY product then the content you or the companies you were working with or their competitors were offering back in the day

Tough… It's tough to do an close comparison of things from different time periods (especially when what's possible technically in the medium has changed so much as video-games in such a short time) and it depends how you define quality. Obviously, Art and Audio is more detailed now but does that make it better? I'd argue the art in a game like "Tempest" cannot be "improved" upon and that's 30 years old… They have a unique style and suit the game perfectly - what more do you need? The control system in that game cannot be improved… It's still a fun game. I think something that was well designed and fun 30 years ago is equally as well designed and fun now. At any given moment in time most of the game are average, some are crap and a few are brilliant and will stand the test of time and that's the way it's always been.

Do you think the industry has made any inroads in tackling piracy or whether it will make any inroads in tackling said issue

I think the best way to treat a Pirate philosophically is as a customer who just isn't paying you yet.

Piracy is copying a game and instead of buying a physical disk / download...

Any real attempt to stop this activity is futile and it's basically pointless to try IMO. There's usually a way around it. If there isn't, **most** people won't use your system or buy many games - they'll find another form of entertainment that IS free / cheaper.

However, the issue now is different. A lot of games (check the top downloads on the App Stores) are intentionally "free to play" (at least at first). "Piracy" isn't the real issue with these games (although it still exists - people pirate the in-app purchases ). Getting people to pay to play is.

Perhaps the rise of these games is, in some cases and respects, a form of response to piracy by the industry? Making stuff free mostly eliminates piracy

In these games, people not paying to play still have a value… they can tell their friends about the game and their friends might pay to play it… So in these games, having a huge user-base is desirable because the larger the funnel of people coming into the game the more chance that some will spend money, either directly through buying content or by watching advertising or clicking on offer walls, etc. The correlation of people playing / paying is measurable through game being delivered by download then the analytics embedded in these games…

The irony is, IMO, that this is, in some ways, the same role Pirates have always filled. They've never really been the cause of huge "lost sales" as some in the games industry would say. They never would have paid for the games in the first place. Sure, I am sure they're SOME lost sales - just nowhere near the 1 for 1 correlation that the industry tends to use when quoting figures…

I think it's always been a case of the more people playing your game, the more likely some of them are going to pay for it. Either by eventually paying for it themselves or by showing a friend who ends up paying for it. I also think the ease of obtaining cheap (or free / pirated) software is a driver for hardware sales (which, in turn, increases software sales) I think that was probably as true when games were sold on floppy disks as it is now. You just couldn't easily measure the correlation between number of users / people paying for the game until now.

Having said that, I don't have much time for people who SELL pirated software. Sure, by my logic above they are increasing the number of people playing my game but I don't want some greedy person who had nothing to do with creating the work to profit from it.

That's my opinion. Not sure how many people in the industry would agree with it

If your preferred system you were developing content (games or non games) on was still available and supported now, would you consider supporting that system again

If 50 million people owned and used it, yes!

Do you think the present crop of developers/publishers and product makers are shooting themseves in the foot by ignoring the classic/retro market and also the emulation market and the possibilities and opportunities those markets offer

Not yet, although I think if you're a developer sitting on a truly classic title there is value in getting it out there on a service like Good Old Games for sure. It's probably not going to fund your next magnum opus but as it's basically money for old rope what have you got to lose? I hear some games have done very well on GOG. For those publishers sitting on large back catalogues of titles they still have the rights to I think you'll find that a large number of them DO release retro collections. Nintendo have an online store that offers 100's of their legacy titles (and those from other companies like Sega). Atari release compilations every so often, so to Capcom, Namco, Konami, Activision, Intellivision, etc… I think that these kind of releases are going to be easier and cheaper to produce as physical media dies… So I'd expect more of them in the coming years.

If you were given your time again (or had a time machine) which of your nearest competitors or which other system would you have liked to have worked for or develop content on

I would have LOVED to have worked on an arcade machine back in the early 80's. The hardware was so much more powerful than anything else you could develop on at the time. The Williams hardware that ran Defender, for example...

If you are still involved in the games business, what do you think of its preference to C development tools compared to old school Assembler tools you were using when you started in the business (unless ofcourse you did things in one of the variants of BASIC)

While there is a certain fondness in remembering how we used to do things it's mainly in telling all the young guys how easy they have it now because it used to be so bloody terrible Give me a Mac, Xcode and Objective C any day! I wouldn't want to contemplate working on our current projects in Assembler…

If the current homebrew scene for classic/retro platforms used an APX like distribution model for it's content (on or offline), do you think that more mainstream developers/publishers or product makers (software or hardware) would enter the retro/classic market

No, because there is absolutely no money in it.

[pixelmischief]

I'm not altogether in agreement with what seems to be the consensus presumption that the retro gaming market is not thriving or being supported by the mainstream gaming industry. All of the current stock of consoles support the digital download of emulated, ported, or otherwise honored retro games. The XBox 360 invested heavily in the XNA platform to support indie development. Apple's development kit for iPhone is 100% free for indie development and the platform has a path by which indie developers may publish. Android is completely open. All of this support has led to an enormous amount of development in the retro genre. Emulation continues to receive development support and each new platform generation almost immediately gets a full suite of emulators for all of the previously relevent commercial gaming platforms; so much so that the console manufacturers are providing their own emulation of retro classics; i.e. the Wii, on which I can play Golden Axe from the Genesis, Mario 64 from the N64, and Bonk! from the NEC TurboGrafx 16. Is this not heavy commercial support for retro gaming as downloadable content?

Edited September 11, 2013 by pixelmischief

[SeaGtGruff]

I'm not a game develop, but I'm an opinionated arse and like to express my opinions , so I'll comment on some of the questions.

 

If you had the knowledge/skills and tools they have now but back when you first entered the industry, Do you think your games or creations would have been better or sold more

The tool sets we have today certainly help make development faster and easier, but that doesn't necessarily translate into better games or better-selling games. Creativity and imagination, not tools, is what makes good games.

 

On the other hand, with better tools it's faster and easier to try out different ideas to see if they'll work, which sort of implies that "bad" (unworkable) ideas will be discarded more quickly-- but again, that really just helps accelerate development, not improve the results.

Of the modern games or game types/genre's, which ones would you have liked to have worked on, on your preferred system you developed content (games or non games software) for

I basically agree with what Andrew said, or implied-- the systems that offer the greatest challenge are the ones that are ultimately the most satisfying ones to develop for. But this depends on what your personal goals are. If your goal is to make money, then you'll want to work with more advanced systems that are easier and faster to develop for, since you want to produce more games (hopefully games that sell well) in less time, such that you can make more money. But if your goal is about feeling a sense of "Holy crap, I pulled it off and it sure was tough," rather than about making money, then you'll probably want to work with more "primitive" systems that are harder and slower to develop for.

 

Think of it in terms of playing a game. Would you rather play a game that's more challenging, or one that's less challenging? Different people will have different opinions, and these may even change from time to time-- sometimes you just want to play a quick and easy game, but other times you want to play a tougher game because it gives you more of an adrenaline rush to win it or to get a high score before inevitably dying. If we relate that to game development, the tougher systems are the ones that give you more of an adrenaline rush. So the question is, are you developing games to make money, or to get a sense of accomplishment ("adrenaline rush")?

What is your opinion of preserving the history of electronic enterainment (in software and hardware) or 'digital heritage' to using the preferred term (i.e emulation and non emulation based)

Emulation will always be "inferior" to the actual, original systems, simply because it isn't the same-- it's a "simulation," or one system "pretending" to function like another system. I'm speaking in general terms here, not about video game consoles being emulated on computers. If you're emulating the Apple OS on a Windows computer, or vice versa, it isn't the same thing-- it's an attempt to reproduce essentially the same thing as closely as possible, and therefore is (necessarily) "inferior" to just using the original thing rather than the emulation.

 

On the other hand, emulation of classic systems is "A Really Good Thing"^TM, because that classic system won't be around forever, or might still be around but be so hard to come by-- and possibly even so "incompatible" with the rest of modern technology (the issue of using older game consoles with modern TVs comes to mind here)-- that emulation may very well be the *only* way that the average person can ever play and enjoy the games that were produced for those classic systems. Sure, some classic games are eventually recreated for the modern systems-- but only the ones that were popular enough, which is a rather small percentage of all the "heritage" games that were made. So in that sense, emulation seems absolutely essential to preserving that "heritage."

Do you think that the present games industry offers better QUALITY product then the content you or the compa nies you were working with or their competitors were offering back in the day

That depends on what you mean by "quality." To use a different subject, consider a circle drawn by a computer versus a circle drawn freehand by an artist. The computer-drawn circle is more "exact" and is therefore a "better quality" circle than the one drawn freehand. But this doesn't mean that the picture the circle appears in is "better quality" if it's drawn by a computer versus drawn by a human. So as far as "quality," we have to ask, what "quality" are we measuring? A game that is graphically of the "highest quality" may be totally un-fun to play, and a game that looks like crap may be extremely fun to play. So are we talking about the "quality" of the game's appearance, or the "quality" of the gameplay and the overall gaming experience?

Do you think the industry has made any inroads in tackling piracy or whether it will make any inroads in tackling said issue

What a depressing topic. There will always be piracy, and no matter what high-technology methods are developed to combat piracy, someone will always try to find a way to "crack" those methods. So it all boils down to personal ethics. The *only* way to stop piracy is to change everyone's personal ethics such that no one would ever dream of pirating anything-- and going down that road ultimately leads to the issue of "mind control," in the sense that you can try to *teach* people about morality and ethics, but you can't guarantee that they'll actually *behave* in the desired moral or ethical manner unless you essentially control their thoughts, which has a scariness factor of 25 on a scale of 1-to-10.

 

But that isn't why I say this is a depressing topic-- rather, I find it depressing to know that some people have the technical knowledge and creative thinking that's necessary for finding ways to get past security and steal things or otherwise cause malicious mischief, yet they choose to apply that knowledge and creativity toward "negative" goals rather than using it to do something "positive."

This is also a "sticky" question for other reasons. If I "rip" a CD to my computer, or scan a book into my computer, then technically I'm "breaking the copyright law" because I'm making a copy of the original and storing it on another medium. But sometimes this sort of thing seems "necessary" to the individual because doing so adds "value" or "usefulness" to the product. "I'm not hurting anyone by it, and I'm not profiting from it" (other than the intangible "profit" of the music or text being more "useful" or "accessible" in that new form). So this whole question is sort of a black hole, and there's no way to shine a light on it, because the light just gets sucked into the black hole.