| Before we delve into the murky depths of game design, I feel a brief historical overview of the games industry is necessary for the readers who are not familiar with the rapid growth and current state of our fast-paced industry.
The games industry is relatively young compared to most other industries, but it is one of the fastest growing industries in the world, and revenues are about to exceed that of the movie industry. It’s difficult to determine when it truly began. Pong was the first home computer game I can remember – two white blocks, representing bats, that moved up and down the left and right sides of the screen in a desperate attempt to hit a white square, symbolising a ball, that moved horizontally across the screen. The simplicity was bliss! For me however, it truly began with the Commodore 64. I still have my original machine and it still works, although I hesitate to play the games of old and would rather harbour the fond memories I have. Great games such as ‘Paradroid’, ‘Mercenary’ and ‘Elite’, to name but a few, conjure sentimental memories of 24-hour gaming sessions and 30-minute load times. The very first game I bought was for the Commodore 64, entitled ‘The Hobbit’ by Melbourne House, and it was published on a cassette. It really did take 30 minutes to load! Can you imagine gamers today waiting that long? The worst thing about cassettes was the unreliability of them. You never knew if your game was going to kick in at the end of the 30 minutes; then some bright spark invented flashing borders to inform the player that their game was in fact loading, but that didn’t improve the quality of loading from tape! |