The plastic world has won. Nearly

I looked through the list of games purchased in the "Steam", that's what I thought.

Looking back into the past, you unexpectedly come to the conclusion that the mid-to-end of the 90s of the last century is a short “golden age” of computer games. Which will never happen again.

At that time, a lot of stars came together:
1. personal computers were rapidly gaining popularity, the market was growing at an unprecedented pace;
2. The Internet was in its infancy, there was no competition from today's network services and social services. networks, consuming customers free time;
4. computer hardware was inefficient. The success of the game is much more dependent on the successful idea / plot / gameplay, and significantly less - from the technical "advancement";
3. as a result - the cost of developing the game was relatively small (this is not 100 million for Starcraft 2);
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These four points are enough to explain the unprecedented flowering of the time and everything that happened to CI later. And then there was this:


1. The market is settled, large players have come, the audience has spread out over the niches. In place of innovations and attempts to create a new genre came clear business rules and long-term investments that chronically do not digest revolutions.

Over the past 10 or even 15 years, no new genre has appeared. On the contrary, many genres were either dead or driven into reservations: quests, turn-based strategies, war-games and tactical games, serious simulators, etc. Only interactive genre with different variations is flourishing, in fact, war epic (Battlefield, Call of Duty), sci-fi (Mass Effect), fantasy (Dragon Age), sitcom / soap opera (Sims), detective (Alan Wake ). The funny thing is that this genre was invented in the 90s.

And no need to say that the Dragon Age, for example, is a “true old school RPG”. I really love DA, but this is just a good interactive movie.

2. The development of the Internet has influenced CI so much that you can write books about it. But the greatest of all the ills that he brought is the attention deficit. In the era of Twitter, it is impossible to imagine a person reading this essay before the end of the game with complex game mechanics. Such that it could not be sorted out in 20 minutes. Too long, skipped. The last difficult game was released in 2003 - Sim City 4.

3. Ugly by today's standards, pictures in the resolution of 320 by 240 looked great 15 years ago - the imagination made up for the lack of technology. In addition, from the computers of that time, no one expected visual beauty. Scheme was perceived as a given, as a standard. From chess, for example, no one requires real bloodshed on the board, no matter what Joan Rowling wrote.

The rapid development of technology has led to the fact that on computers it has become possible to do various clever things; gradually they became mandatory, and genres in which innovations remained unclaimed or difficult to implement - died. In the same genres in which good graphics, sound and AI were in place, there was a replacement of values. The “picture” outweighed the plot, the shell exceeded the filling in importance (the first one, moreover, is much easier to sell). Add here the twitter effect (see above), and we get the degradation of all components of the CI, except for graphics and sound.

4. At the same time, the need for high-quality graphic (first of all) design naturally increased the complexity and cost of creating games. Small studios and lone developers are forced into the niche of casual toys "for-five-dollars-for-one-evening." The CI industry is more and more like cinema: masterpieces sometimes appear with a relatively modest budget (Plants vs. Zombies, “Ninth District”), but in general the threshold of entry is too high.

So, the Internet, technology and big money killed interesting games. What remains?

* * * * * *

Remain (thanks to incentives, Amazon and torrents) diamonds of the past, which no one will ever surpass.

Unfortunately, most of them just look horrible or do not work at all on new computers with new operating systems. You can try to somehow adapt the "old men" - the same Steam, for example, sells X-COM with a pre-installed DOS-BOX. At first glance, the ideal solution would be to simply update the graphics: some hypothetical Valve, having gained access to the source codes of old games, could have put a team of artists and programmers to redo only graphic engines, increase the resolution to Full HD, leaving logic intact ... unfortunately, even if you do not take into account licensing issues. How, for example, can we add support for modern textures in 16-bit code, the size of which does not fit in 16 bits?

The solution lies on the surface. We have already compared the CI industry with the cinema, so why not take the first one into a second such remarkable invention as a remake? The same story - new technology. With regard to games, the same gameplay. All that is required is one single publisher or developer who guessed simply to re-release his old hits - not Starcraft 2, for example, but Starcraft HD, not Dragon Age, but Baldur's Gate Remastered. The result, with well-conducted advertising campaign, will be amazing. Old masterpieces already have their audience - those who are now 30-45 years old. These people will buy a remake to remember the youth and show their children what they played when they were boys and girls. The only condition - it should be the same game, without improvements and rework. Children's books (let us turn to another analogy) do not correspond with modern realities with each new generation.

It remains to wait until this thought comes to mind to someone with money. Amateur remakes have existed for a long time, but none of them was successful - the threshold of entry, I recall, is too high. Need money and a professional approach.

We wait.

PS The point, as it turns out, is still moving in this direction - Monkey Island has been reissued, only the graphics have been updated.