From: arsouth@watson.ibm.com
Subject: Re: The trend in adventure games
Date: Tue, 06 Oct 1992 23:07:13 GMT
News-Software: IBM OS/2 PM RN (NR/2) v0.12 by O. Vishnepolsky and R. Rogers
Reply-To: not me because @IBM won't let me receive mail
Disclaimer: This posting represents the poster's views, not necessarily those of IBM
Organization: IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

In  <BvGn8t.D60@unix.amherst.edu>  twpierce@unix.amherst.edu (Tim Pierce) writes:
> In article <Wcz-7m#@engin.umich.edu> positron@engin.umich.edu (Jonathan Scott Haas) writes:
===I'm starting this thread to talk about the type of game that seems
===to be the norm today. You know the type... big on graphics, big on
===disk space, short on puzzles, short on executable commands.
..
===What's happening? Do we, the adventure gaming public, actually
===prefer
===these dinosaurs of graphical adventures to the enjoyable text-based
===adventures of our younger days?
> Apparently so.  I hate to sound like the Grumpy Old Man, but I simply
> do not accept the New World Order of adventure games.  Apparently
> graphic adventures touched far more people than the original text
> adventures did, and seeing a potential new market out there, software
> companies jumped at the chance, leaving an empty market for text
> adventures.  It's too bad.

Has anyone stopped to believe that we are a minority, and companies
like Infocom could not make a profit off of us?  I'm sure the pirate
problem would not be as bad, because those 13 year olds in San Diego
would not be interested in games that take up less than 4M of disk
space...

I don't really want to believe that either.  LSL XXXIV and its
predecessors & (or is that && ?) contemporaries appeal to the Nintendo
market, the generation of computer users 10 years younger than us.
Sure, I've played some Genesis and Nintendo games, and have spent my
share of quarters in video arcades.  But the largest segment of the
computer game market is those 13-21 year old (gee, I'm 21...) boys,
who right now are the ones playing Nintendo too much.  People between
20 and 30 probably don't have enough money to buy all the Nintendo
games they want (at $50 a pop), so its the kids' parents buying those
games.  We were left alone with Apple II's, Atari 800's, Commodore
64's, and original IBM PC's, which did not have enough power to drive
the kind of graphics we see now.  We were the early adopters of PC
games, and I would guess more intelligent (or geeky) than the current
group of 13-21 year old game players.

There is a big market there for the Style-but-no-Content games that
the younger market is eating up.  As a professional developer wanting
to make money, are you going to write IF, or something that has 100
times the audience?  IF would cost less (don't need all those artists,
programmers to figure out the 1200 different display adapters for the
PC, hackers to generate 3D rendering code, etc) than the flashy
graphics games, indeed!  Higher profit margins, I would guess, too.
But I really don't think that the market for IF is as big as the
market for graphics-intensive games.

Now what about Underworld, just as a side note?  There is a story
there, as well as flashy graphics.  Not many choices when talking to
people (the responses are rather polarized), but would this meet
requirements for IF?  Not up to Infocom standards, either...

Also, I really enjoyed Ultima IV, so I bought V.  It was too much like
IV, so I didn't buy VI, but I did buy VII.  Ultima VII was,
graphically, a great experience.  Loved it.  Needed a faster computer
to run it on, though!  The interface was improved (easier to move
things around, but I really did like U6 better), and conversations
were more straightforward.  You could say it is more honest, by
explicitly telling you what you can talk about.  It was nice to see
three-way conversations!  Lots of role-playing, but it was all on the
computer's side!

Do I miss Infocom-like games?  Not really.  Things like SIEGE, Ultima
Underworld, and Spaceward Ho! have kept me busy (as well as working,
going to college (yeah, right!), and programming).  There is a lot
more technology out there for IF games to explore.  Take a text-based
game, and add in graphics; or add more interaction to the "movies"
that Sierra is coming out with...

---Line 77---
Andrew R. Southwick (no net address; see respond-to above!)
IBM, by virtue of the contract I signed (I think), owns my soul, but
they are not responsible for anything I do.

Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction