
Ripper: Story of the Egregiously Bad Videogame - headalgorithm
https://www.wired.com/story/ripper/
======
JohnBooty
That was a dreadful time to be a fan of video games. It _really_ felt like the
industry was swinging irrevocably in the direction of turning out nothing but
these lame attempts at "interactive movies."

News outlets like _Wired_ breathlessly covered these things and lots of folks
from outside the game industry were pouring money into them.

These full-motion abominations were the absolute antithesis of _everything_ I
loved about video games: smart and tightly crafted design, fast and responsive
action, and the fact that games in general were an alternative to the low-IQ
crap turned out by (what felt like) the big bloated corpse of Hollywood and
the rest of the mainstream entertainment world.

In hindsight, we know that most of those games were huge critical and fiscal
failures. And that was somewhat evident to me at the time. Still, I worried:
were the powers-that-be going to pour sooooooo much money into these things
that they might achieve some level of respectability and actually become the
new norm? There are countless examples of this happening in the entertainment
world, such as the music industry's longstanding preference for marketing
bland one-size-fits-all music. etc.

Games like _Ripper_ may have been comically bad, but perhaps they were like
early Hollywood movies... "quaint" efforts that paved the way for a new and
emerging dominant art form that displaced some of its predecessors?

Of course, in retrospect, those fears were laughable.

Turned out those FMV games were a true evolutionary dead end, and in the long
run they were probably responsible for the game industry recalibrating itself
and embracing the things it _actually_ does well.

~~~
AstralStorm
So instead we get remakes and sequels to sequels.

At least sometimes a reasonably new game happens by accident and it's
successful.

~~~
JohnBooty
Wow, I think history (and public, and critical opinion) disagree with you.

I don't think sequels are a bad thing in the gaming world, since games are
software and software is iterative!

A lot of times the 2nd and 3rd iterations surpass the originals... the first
title in a series is where all the design and technical challenges are worked
out, and then the sequel is where they're able to finetune and really hone
things.

Check out the top-rated (both by users and critics) games of all time. Nearly
all sequels.

[https://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/score/metascore/all/...](https://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/score/metascore/all/all/filtered)

(Note that one of the top-rated games, SoulCalibur, is indeed a sequel as
well... Perfect Dark is also, while not a sequel, certainly a "follow up" to
Goldeneye in a technical sense)

Any thoughts?

------
Vizarddesky
Oh man, I remember watching a Let's Play of both this game and Phantasmagoria
2. Awful games but great for a laugh

~~~
JohnBooty
In retrospect, it's hard to imagine how anybody thought this kind of game
would be fun or enjoyable.

Everybody in the game industry got so caught up in the fact that they _could_
produce video-heavy titles that they never stopped to consider the fact
that... almost literally nobody enjoyed playing these things.

All I can think is that...

1\. Myst's massive success showed that there was a market for this kind of,
uh, cinematic non-real-time puzzle game?

2\. There was a notion that this sort of game would appeal to "regular folks",
who outnumbered "hardcore gamers" by roughly a zillion to one.

3\. Perhaps everybody involved knew that these games weren't very fun, but
there was a sense that they had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get in on the
ground floor of what _might_ have been "the next big thing," akin to getting
in on the ground floor of Hollywood in the 1920s or somesuch. In other words,
that these primitive early titles were a necessary stepping stone to producing
something better.

One very minor thing I'll say in defense of these FMV games is that they were
generally played on small (think: 13-17") CRTs. The small screen size masked
_some_ of the terrible video qualities, relative to viewing them today on our
giant 1080p/4K screens. But they still looked pretty bad back in the day. It
was quite obvious that most/all of these titles were shot by amateurs in front
of a green screen.

------
pavel_lishin
> _Martin moved to Pittsburgh, where he ran a tattoo parlor. In 2008, he
> started teaching online classes in game art and design and is also an
> instructional designer at Seton Hill University, a small liberal arts
> college about 30 miles east of Pittsburgh. “I think about the work I did,
> and it’s just bits. There’s nothing tangible.” Now a father of seven, Martin
> tells me he doesn’t play videogames anymore. “They’re too much of a time
> suck. I can see the schematics right away, the illusion of choice, and
> honestly the games all look alike now.”_

> _For the last seven years Martin has spent his free time in the impressive
> barnlike workshop he built behind his house where he has found his passion
> in smithing metal. He wanted to craft something with his hands, something
> that lasts. “Now,” he says, “I make knives.”_

This is such a common refrain.

~~~
JackRabbitSlim
A common refrain from people who can afford it. For the vast majority that
don't have a barnlike workshop, video games are the only real escape from the
existential nightmare of modern life.

------
Y_Y
> the Take Two team was just getting started on the almost Sisyphusian task of
> post-production.

Did anyone else get tripped up by that monstrosity of a word? Even google
responds with:

> Did you mean: Sisyphean

~~~
justinjlynn
It's like a weird attempt at a portmanteau of Malthusian and Sisyphean.

~~~
Y_Y
"The belief that population tries to increase exponentially, but is inevitably
dragged down by disease, famine, or war. Widespread poverty and frustration
inevitably result."

------
auiya
An article of egregiously bad video games from the 90's and not a single
mention of Superman64?

~~~
AstralStorm
The point is, these weren't bad games by execution, but because of idea.

Adventure games were never really meant to be big budget, because games rely
on volume to bring profit - and competition kills it. And gameplay possible in
pure adventure games is very limited. Even pure puzzle games fare better.

Yet here was an attempt to make them expensive while not bringing compelling
gameplay with it.

