Caltrops - Rants - Actually

Forum Overview :: Rants

by Senor Barborito 05/05/2003, 2:16pm PDT

I need clarification wrote:

Why do I cringe every time I see his byline?

Will this guy never get the game industry?

No: while gamers were scraping the floor with "Wayne's World" bleats of "We're not worthy!" whenever Romero swaggered by them at game conventions, the industry's real Nirvana, Blue Sky Studios (which later became Looking Glass) was holed up in a New England studio, quietly putting out its genuinely innovative games in relative obscurity. Blue Sky could have overthrown the status quo. But for many reasons, most of which have little to do with talent, id would always overshadow its betters.

Did everyone catch that? id should never have succeeded on the level it did, and only did so because gamers are TEH STUPID. Why does he even bother writing about the games industry anymore?

He reminds of no one so much as Roberta Williams.

He's complaining about how much attention and fanboidom Roberta Williams and her ilk (John Romero) get, which cost us the company behind Thief, System Shock, Terra Nova, etc. when Eidos kept pouring some $30 million into an Ion Storm-shaped hole rather than toss LGS a few scraps to keep them alive. I assume you know all this already, but it's worth repeating for everyone chiming in

This is not to say that id doesn't have a fuckload of talent (duh) or that the Blue Sky story didn't end happily (Ion Storm . . . Austin, I believe, is where almost all of LGS's former employees are now employed), but there's some legitimacy behind the complaint. Gamers, for all their smartey-man nerdishness ignore a lot of solid obscure games in favor of whatever's "hot" this month. We make idols instead of addressing the reality of how good various games are or aren't objectively. I agree with Au that this is a problem, but I'm not stupid enough to pretend that this is exactly the fault of anybody involved - we're fucking human, duh. We have a gaming media (surprise!) that ignores a lot what's happening in favor of the cocksucking that fans want to hear. That's their job, right there - to sell magazines and ad impressions. Not to sell truth. A Tale in the Desert deserves every bit of that attention that Shadowbane ever got. Planetside deserves all the attention that SW:G and whatever the next EQ installement will be are getting.

You can either make like Au and sit on your ass and write articles for Salon.fag, or you can help start up your own goddamned media effort that tells people what you see as the truth, and try to get that critical buzz that OMM really started to nail with Serious Sam.

Fuck, I just let an intensely gay mission statement slip, didn't I?

Shit.
--SB