In my opinion this is a brilliantly put together list.
The nostalgia that comes flooding back to me from my childhood almost brings tears of joy to my eyes.
It's truly staggering to read at the start that there were ten times as many titles (15,000) than there are for the DS or GBA.
I do wonder if the children of today will feel nostalgic about the software of today in 25 years time?
For some reason it doesn't feel like as much love and passion goes into a lot of games being produced at the moment. So many of those Spectrum titles were labours of love by single people working for months on their own in bedrooms.
> It's truly staggering to read at the start that there were ten times as many titles (15,000) than there are for the DS or GBA.
It makes sense that there will be a lot more games on a open platform than on a platform from company that is notorious for not attracting 3rd party titles.
> For some reason it doesn't feel like as much love and passion goes into a lot of games being produced at the moment. So many of those Spectrum titles were labours of love by single people working for months on their own in bedrooms.
Step outside the world of Call of Duties and Battlefields and you will find lots of games that are very much labor of loves from bedroom developers.
The author probably just picked that as an example of a very popular platform - the DS (2072) has double the titles of the PS3 (1026) according to Wikipedia and isn't far off the total titles of the PS1 (2355) or PS2 (2468).
I know there are plenty of indy titles on Steam and the other app stores that are remarkable games and immense labours of love, but I wonder how many really get under the skin of a lot of children today for a long period of time?
So many games I see my nephews playing are freemium titles that seem to drift in and out of their lives on a day to day basis (especially on iOS). I certainly don't see them building a connection like I did with Manic Miner or the Dizzy games anyway. One exception I can clearly think of though recently with kids would probably be Minecraft. Others miles may vary I guess.
I did all the programming, graphics and level design myself and created the game I would want to play. I only hired some musicians to create music for it, the rest is really labor of love made in my basement.
Team size is very relevant when we look for cool, original, cohesive games. Back in the day, a team of 3 could do something that had never been attempted before, and compete evenly in the marketplace.
Today we still have the indie scene, and find games like Paper's Please, which are subversive, refreshing, and clearly a sign of a mind that knows where the game is going.
But when we want to compete on graphics, we need games to be finished in two years at the most, so hundreds of people have to be involved to make anything big. With over a hundred people, it's very hard to manage that cohesiveness and remain even mildly quirky. Even something like a Mario game builds different levels in very different ways, minimizing the costs of cohesiveness.
So if we want that spirit alive, we need to see more work building engines for indies. If what you need is already in Unity or Unreal, it's far easier for game creators to just focus on what makes their game special, instead of rendering polygons or writing collision detection.
I think another part of it was the effort required to try out new titles; I got very attached to the Dizzy series because I had to save up my pocket money and actually go to the computer shop to buy the tape. And that shop certainly didn't stock 15,000 different games :) Kind of the same way music discovery used to be, only with demo tapes instead of the radio. (I still wonder if the demoscene could come back somehow.)
With the barrier to entry being that of downloading a Minecraft mod or free app, it's harder to get anywhere near as attached, in my opinion; but I don't have kids, so I wonder what they do spend their hard-earned pocket money on instead?
For a similar nostalgia trip I recommend reading Only You Can Save Mankind by Terry Pratchett.
This is how I feel about music, which I used to buy on vinyl/CD/cassette up until music became 'free'. I would but a record without hearing it first, paying £4 to £8 for a 12" single or 'EP'. Provenance was important, if I already knew of the artist/label/producer then that was enough information for me to base my purchase decision on although radio play mattered too at times. Invariably the 'best' records would not always be stocked, you would have to get them when they came out or 'special order' them later (again probably unheard). In some ways there was no point in buying a record by a major artist (as you would have heard it already and a copy would not be too far away in a friend's collection etc.).
The nostalgia that comes flooding back to me from my childhood almost brings tears of joy to my eyes.
It's truly staggering to read at the start that there were ten times as many titles (15,000) than there are for the DS or GBA.
I do wonder if the children of today will feel nostalgic about the software of today in 25 years time?
For some reason it doesn't feel like as much love and passion goes into a lot of games being produced at the moment. So many of those Spectrum titles were labours of love by single people working for months on their own in bedrooms.