5200 Galaxian

[Zonie]

What supposedly happened in 1983 to make people hate games overnight?

The $159 Commodore 64.

[Paranoid]

 

That is so much bull. Tell me how many "Asteroids" movies and action figures and comic books were made. Street Fighter is about 15 years old and new toys are still hitting the shelves. Mortal Kombat might have sold a few toys and movie tickets as well. Don't try to tell me that the gameplay didn't kick ass as well.

 

You have no sense of perspective about that time period. Do you realize how small the video game audience was back then? Modern games like Tetris and GTA reach far more people and gain far more mainstream recognition than any classic other than Pac-Man.

 

 

 

And, actually, again you illustrate my point. We're talking about broad social impact on one sense. How many people from their 80s to their early 20s have a good idea about Pac Man? Now, how many people know squat about Mortal Kombat outside a narrow band of males who are also the game's fan-base? I suppose some uptight Christians who wanted to ban the game over the fatalities skewers the numbers, but outside of that, NO ONE but pre-adolescent, adolescent and young adult males gave a RAT'S ASS about Mortal Kombat. Just because they made a B-Grade movie to exploit that demographic doesn't make it a social phenomenon. Space Invaders and Asteroids were the shot across the bow, and Pac Man was the critical inflection point where society *changed*. Mortal Kombat was a footnote. WHO is more recognizable to a wider portion (and far larger number) of the population regardless of gender, age, religion, race... Scorpion or Pac Man? Just answer that. You know damn well what the answer is. We'll use someone even MORE recognizable with a certain set of er, appeal... Laura Croft. Yup. Pac Man would still whup her tiny little khakki-colored daisy-duke wearing ass in being broadly recognized by more people.

 

But... where you illustrate my point is by admitting how relatively TINY the market was. Yup. It was tiny enough that when the first generation went off to college and started hitting the books, the second generation started experimenting with things other than arcades, and the third generation showed a lack of interest and apathy, the social ramifications of that helped contribute to the video-game market crash. Everything hinged on a narrow age range and gender... males between about about 9 and 24... and the market didn't retain enough of those.

 

What came out afterwards was uniquely different. The NES and Super Mario World changed everything... and brought a title that had more widespread gender appeal, as well.

 

You know, I'd even go as far as to say fundamental differences in generic business models, especially in media, had a significant impact on the rebirth of the video-game industry. Globalization and consolidation of media industries (with product placement, cross-promotion, and tie-ins), distribution models... everything changed in the mid 90s. Things became far more intense. Things could get FAR more exposure and reach much larger audiences, but have less actual *impact*, because there were so many MORE things getting the same kind of attention. If Asteroids was a single man yelling at the top of his lungs in a crowded room, Mortal Kombat was a single man yelling at the top of his lungs in a crowded high-rise building, where 2000 other people were ALSO yelling at the top of *their* lungs.

 

Wow... I really like that analogy... and I predict you won't get it.

[Paranoid]

I dunno...kids generally could care less if something is deemed controversial (sure, some do in an effort to piss off authority). All most people want to do is play a game. We never played Space Invaders or Pac-Man with that mindset, although classic games such as those were denounced as being morally-corrupting in their day as well. For the most part, those button-mashers were equally popular among young adults as kids anyway. So I dunno if controversy fueled them much in the arcades.

 

I wasn't saying that the -players- cared about the controversy. If the game had been bad, it wouldn't have been popular. It clearly had a good engine and certainly has a place in the history of video games. I'm saying that mainstream public consciousness of the game was *simply* over the controversy. If you took away the fatalities and gore (but left in unique, innovative, but non-graphic and less violent final moves), you would have still had a successful game, but one that would not have gotten any mainstream media attention.

[NovaXpress]

I predict you won't get it.

I totally get it. I just think that you're blowing smoke out your ass.

 

If you insist that Pikachu doesn't have more cultural recognition than Pac-Man or Mortal Kombat doesn't have more cultural recognition that Asteroids then your persepective is terminally fucked.

 

You're an oldster? Me too, but unlike you I have a clue about what the youth has been doing for the past 20 years. Because it's my job, you know? I knew that you were completely oblivious to one era or the other.

[Paranoid]

So the teenaged boys who have played video games for the past 20 years never developed any other interests. No one has experienced the onset of adolescence since 1983? Okay.

 

I was there and I can state for a fact that none of us teenaged boys in the 80s stopped playing video games. We just had trouble buying them for a couple years. Maybe that's why the C64 with all the available pirate games became the default system of choice until Nintendo pulled it together. We still went to the arcades. We still had the Ataris hooked up. This consumer exodus you speak of simply never happened.

 

Once again get a grip on the fact that more money was spent on games in 1983 than in 1982. The industry was so fucked up that they crashed while on an upswing!

 

Maybe you and all of your friends kept your Ataris hooked up... It was an exodus in my neighborhood. We did still drop some quarters in the pizza parlors and 7-11 and wherever else... but we spent a lot more time doing other things... like, the aforementioned getting high and getting laid... and occasionally bullying the nerds who still *had* Ataris or C=64s...

 

Which isn't just my subtle way of implying that I think you were probably a greasy-haired, badly dressed loser/loner in the mid 80s... I think there was a diminished market of nerds who hung on fiercely, but that a huge portion of this market that you described just a post ago as "tiny", simply LOST INTEREST. Which was too much of a loss for the market to bear.

 

As to why it hasn't had an impact again, I've been illustrating (and you've been so busy hangin' your meat and declarinig yourself infalliable that you haven't actually READ), it was a unique situation with the first 3 "generations" (which were really one generation) of gamers... The re-birth of the console, my Nephew (he would be the generation just a bit younger than I am, yet still old enough to remember the first waves of video games in the arcade and home) and I had both just grown out of the idea of console games, and really weren't very interested in computer games, either. Our *nieces* (several years younger than my Nephew), got a NES... and Super Mario World sucked us back in, and we've generally always had one console or another floating around since. The important fact here is that it was our NIECES who rediscovered console gaming, that they were between I'd say, 7 and 12... and they were *nieces*. Why didn't the market ever collapse again? Because they diversified their user base... they started figuring out how to pull in people other than males between 8-24. Granted, that demographic came right back alive and has remained a dominant demographic in gaming to this day... but it is a FAR broader market spectrum than it was before the crash.

 

And there have been *lulls* in console gaming since the NES. It is an industry that has had it's ups and downs, it's periods of general apathy and absolute fanaticism, since. If the market had consisted JUST of one small slice of society, the crash may have happened again.

[Paranoid]

I predict you won't get it.

I totally get it. I just think that you're blowing smoke out your ass.

 

If you insist that Pikachu doesn't have more cultural recognition than Pac-Man or Mortal Kombat doesn't have more cultural recognition that Asteroids then your persepective is terminally fucked.

 

You're an oldster? Me too, but unlike you I have a clue about what the youth has been doing for the past 20 years. Because it's my job, you know? I knew that you were completely oblivious to one era or the other.

 

 

You're such a fuckin' waffling, changing your story piece of work...

 

No... you, Mr. Marketing Genius who is in TOUCH with "how people think and what makes them tick"... thought I was a KID who had *no* concept of the 80s. You didn't think I was "completely oblivious to one era or the other".

 

Of course, it has been my experience that people in marketing generally have no CLUE as to what REAL people actually think.

 

Pikachu absolutely has more cultural recognition than Pac-Man and Mortal Kombat more than Asteroids... No question about that.

 

It isn't because of their root video games, though. I'd bet 9 out of 10 people who know about Pac Man *know* his character originated in a video game, and most of them could DESCRIBE the mechanics of the video game.

 

I bet 6 out of 10 people who know about Pikachu think he is simply a sunday morning cartoon, maybe a trading card game, and very few could describe the actual mechanics of any game that gave birth to the Pokemon phenomenon.

 

One is recognized because of shameless cross-promotion and media oversaturation, an ARTIFICIAL cultural phenomenon CREATED by stuffed shirts in marketing departments. The other was a true cultural phenomenon, not artificially enginieered and promoted.

 

 

See the difference? Yeah, I didn't think so.

Edited March 29, 2006 by Paranoid

[Paranoid]

Ok... one last post, and I'm done with this, and this post will explain why.

 

You've actually been pushing the "secret fatality combo" that is your achillies heel in my face for the past 4 or 5 posts, and I've been missing it, caught up in the actual argument. You, on the other hand, keep dropping words like "credibility" and attacking ME personally while *ignoring* the actual arguments.

 

So, let's focus on your *credibility*, for a second, Nova.

 

You ADMIT you are a professional *marketer*. That is how you make your living. And anyone with a drop of common sense knows that the only people LESS likely to tell the truth than someone in marketing are lawyers and politicians. And all three groups of professionals are SO good at their lies that they actually *believe* them. They're not telling untruths, they're simply looking at the positive of a certain situation. You represent a group of professionals who exist to convince me that I want and *need* a Roomba. That a Geo Metro is a desirable automobile to own... that Coke is IT. You're a *salesman*. Your credibility should be slightly higher than the politician telling me to read his lips, there will be "no new taxes", or that he "did not have sexual relations with that girl".

 

The only one in this discussion who is remotely "on your side" is a guy who probably still doesn't have hair on his sack. And when your position gets undermined ("You're too young to know what you're talking about")... you'll quickly latch onto his argument as your own, ("You're too OLD to be in touch"), acting as if you ALWAYS were saying this.

 

Your cedibility is *shot*. This is an exercise for you in trying to sell the unsellable, seeing if you can convince people of the unconvincable. You're trying to sell freezers to Eskimos, just to see if you can. It totally explains why you are *so* argumentative in so many threads. It is your job, your life's passion.

 

But, it is OBVIOUS who is so full of it that their breath stinks, here... it isn't me, buddy...

 

Flawlessly executed fatality, Paranoid rips Nova's spine from his body. Game over.

[+FujiSkunk]

Can somebody lock this thread before I asphyxiate myself laughing?

[NovaXpress]

Flawlessly executed fatality, Paranoid rips Nova's spine from his body. Game over.

How much time did you spend on that embarassing screed?

 

Just get over yourself, Methuselah.

[ZylonBane]

He does like to ramble on, doesn't he?

 

I'm more a "brevity is the soul of wit" type, myself.

[Lord Helmet]

Meanwhile...to get back on topic, I'll quote myself:

 

I enjoy 5200 Galaxian quite a bit. The sound is lacking a bit, and it's not a spot-on conversion (the Colecovision port is closer IIRC), but it is a lot of fun to play.

 

I'll even respond to myself:

 

 

Yep, played the CV version last night...it's a much better conversion, still the 5200 version is fun to play IMHO.

[Paranoid]

I don't know if I actually have ever played the Colecovision version. I'm assuming it was released later, though. I did have a number of games for both systems, actually. But your point is really my point. The 5200 version gets a lot of negative reviews, and it is actually pretty decent. The fact that it preceded the Colecovision version (if this is true), would still support my argument that at the time, it was the best bet going for playing at home.

Edited March 29, 2006 by Paranoid

[NE146]

I'm more a "brevity is the soul of wit" type, myself.

 

Yeah no shit.. some of you guys gotta learn to condense your thoughts.

 

I mean, you gotta think... does anyone read more than a few lines on an internet board?

[Bryan]

I mean, you gotta think... does anyone read more than a few lines on an internet board?

 

I sure don't when it comes to this crap. If you're gonna kick someone's ass, please do it in 2 sentences so I can watch.

 

-Bry

[JB]

From now on, I will begin all my posts with "*delivers a swift kick to so-and-so's backside*"

[Paranoid]

Those with two sentence attention spans should stick to something more their speed, like television.

 

Was *that* brief enough?

[Paranoid]

LOL...

 

Tonight I was watching a TiVO of an old Malcom in the Middle... they mention Mortal Kombat, the final level, and SubZero, with Hal telling Reese, "C'mon, no one gets by SubZero"...

 

I thought the timing was somewhat ironic.

[Bryan]

Those with two sentence attention spans should stick to something more their speed, like television.

 

Was *that* brief enough?

 

Huh... what? I lost you after "stick."

 

-Bry

[Paranoid]

Heh... that really *did* make me laugh out loud.

[Zonie]

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