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Look at what motion control has accomplished so far: it has brought in hordes of casual gamers who would never have bought a console before. That uninformed new audience – coupled with Nintendo’s complete lack of third-party quality control – has turned the Wii library into a bubbling soup of one-note casual crap. And now, motion control is coming to both the 360 and the PS3 in the form of Natal and Move. These may not just be harmless lures for casual gamers, either, because once those potential PS3 and 360 purchasers show up, they won’t necessarily stick around for long. If enough of them come and go, the industry will expand, and then contract. Painfully.
Above:Computer Spacehad an f'in sweet cabinet, though
The next giant leap in videogame popularity came in 1980, with Pac-Man – a game that, despite many other games having already adopted the confusing “require the use of a button along with the joystick” interface, went all “retro,” threw out the button and said “Hey, look at my lonely joystick – don’t be afraid, I have no buttons to devour your helpless fingers.”
Pac-Man was so huge that there were literally arcades filled with nothing but Pac-Man machines. Let that sink in. Could you imagine an arcade with only Street Fighter II machines? And no, 80 percent Street Fighter II machines doesn’t count. Hardcore gamers would have played Pac-Man no matter what, because it was good, but the game exploded because even non-gamers could grasp it easily.
Above: "Whoa, whoa, whoa -WAY too many buttons"
Unfortunately, where there are innovators, there are also imitators. New companies sprang up with a cynical approach: copy the good games that grabbed the non-gaming audience, slap different graphics on them, and don’t worry about quality, since people who don’t know better will buy this crap. A flood of titles ranging from mediocre to garbage filled store shelves, and the public didn’t know what to buy. The real kicker came from the originator of quality games, Atari. According to Steven L. Kent’s book The Ultimate History of Videogames, Atari caught the “anything marketed as a videogame will sell” virus, and the industry paid the price.
Above: People who stopped playing games after Pac-Man still think our controllers look like this
Stemming from an influx of business-educated (but videogame ignorant) idea-men, Atari imitated the imitators, pooping out a horrid Pac-Man port for the 2600 and, of course, the now-infamous E.T. catastrophe. After people had been burned so many times by cloned junk, and then got duped into buying what appeared to be AAA titles (licensed properties hadn’t achieved the now-familiar stigma yet), they just stopped buying anything at all. Nobody could tell what was good, and it seemed the industry had hit a plateau of advancement. Without a sense of novelty, the casual gamers forgot about their brief affair with interactive home entertainment.
Sure, a tough kernel of hardcore gamers was still buying, but they weren’t enough to sustain the home console market. While arcades were still humming along and computer games successfully catered to the larval PC gaming market, the newly gigantic console market utterly imploded. The ensuing crash was so horrible, people were declaring videogames dead. Not just good videogames, but the whole goddamn medium.
