Newswire - Industry Analysis

The Score
Everything Old is New Again
By Ben Calica
Gamasutra
February 13, 1998
Vol. 2: Issue 7


Past Scores

The Year of the Bottom Feeders
[01.30.98]

To Mac or Not to Mac
[01.23.98]

Muscle Cars vs. Subcompact - Take 2
[01.01.98]



Settle the Score?
[View Thread]

Haven't joined yet? [Join Now] 		Everything old is new again. As horrifying as the concept was, the Brady Bunch Movie didn't actually suck as much as it should have. On the other hand, Leave it to Beaver did. (Alright…I didn't actually see it…anybody who did and actually liked it…write me and I'll print a retraction in the next column. With your name next to it..of course.) Now I'd expect Hollywood to finally admit they were out of new ideas, but it just makes me sad to see the same lack of synapse firing in the game biz.

We talked about the unreal success of Monopoly a few issues ago, and then the same group has whacked one totally out of the park with the 3D update of Frogger. (I STILL say that a game premise in which a frog dies because he friggin' drowns when he hits the water is fundamentally flawed.) Now the buzz of the net is Activision's [www.activision.com] updated, multi-player version of BattleZone.

Don't get me wrong. I loved BattleZone. I mean big time. I stayed up till three am in a dark corner where they stuck the machine until the green lines were burned into my eyes like a trashed monitor and I could jump like a fly at the first sound of the buzzing of a smart missile. It was a lovely game; the crack of your screen in front of you sent an adrenaline jolt through your heart. There were all sorts of rumors that the military was using it to train the 18 year olds for the video combat of the future. (About 10 years before the Gulf war…hmmm?) The one thing that was dead-on true, was that when you stuck your face in the slot in the center of the machine, you were in an immersive environment beyond anything the Cyberthoners built, before or since.

So naturally, even though this whole notion that there are no new good game ideas makes me just a wee bit ill, when I heard they were doing a multi-player version of Battlezone, I grabbed all the bandwidth at work and downloaded the sucker as fast as I could.

And then depression set in.

Once again, don't get me wrong. But it gets ugly when this new trend (treating old games like beloved old sit-coms), collides with one of my least favorite old trends (you've got a great property, better recycle an old engine so you can make sure to ship it on time.) Note to the guys at Activision: I know you had it lying around, and I know you lost the license and all, but Mech Warrior is NOT Battlezone. If you are so void of new ideas that you decide to invest the current money in updating a classic, then pay attention to the soul of the classic. The reason that old farts like me (well, medium farts) get all lathery over getting a new version of an old game we loved, isn't the name. It's the game play. Sure, multi-player would be awesome, and if you want to give some of our old enemies some particularly nasty older brothers and sisters, go for it. But don't give a new game a classic title and expect us to be happy about the results. All you get is a bunch of pissed off old farts.

The Namco re-releases of classic arcade games for the PlayStation were wonderful. What we got out of that was two-fold. First, a lovely trip down memory lane, where the neural pathways have been eroded out forever. Second, we were reminded that games can have such good fundamental game play that they could basically cycle levels with a few more bad guys and a little more speed, and we would play forever just to see what colors Missile Command cycled to next. (Anybody remember the white level?)

Ah, for a world run by the gamers and not the business weanies….Boys take a choice: balls (something really new) or brains (spend some time and get to the soul of your players.)

Next thing you know, we're going to start seeing cross-overs. BattleZone meets Leave It to Beaver. (Acutally…that's not such a bad idea…heh, heh, heh.)

-B

P.S. If you think I'm full of it and wanna fight, I'm starting to hang out in the thread area. I love a good flame war, ya pansy loser boys n' grrls. ;-)

Unemployed with a Theater Degree from Brandeis back in 1984, Ben Calica has been making a living in the computer and gaming business in various incarnations since then, Including: Founding Editor of New Media Magazine, First Toys Editor for Wired, one of the few single boys to write for Parents Magazine. Product Manager for the multimedia authoring system, SuperCard Director of Production for CyberFlix; (design credits on Lunicus, Creepy Castle, and conceptual design for Skull Cracker) Product Manger for the ill-fated modem for the Sega Genesis, the Edge, for AT&T [which, by the way, we decided stood for All Tiny Testi---maybe I'd better tell that another time -BC]; Worked for NeXT long enough to get into real good argument with Steve Jobs; And recently was the guy behind Apple Game Sprockets...

He did a bunch of work on interactive drama (wrote script for MacWorld CD-ROM game of the year in 1993), before he decided it just didn't work. Spends a lot of free time now lecturing on multi-player/virtual world stuff. For a day job he works as Director of Product Development for ThinkFish, an artistic rendering company that recently merged with Viewpoint Datalabs. He could show you the secret desktop software he's working on, but then he'd have to kill you.