Forum Overview :: Rants
 
My typo = your misreading by I need clarification 05/05/2003, 3:43pm PDT
Senor Barborito wrote:

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


I meant that Au reminds me of Roberta Williams famously stating that it is the fact that gamers are idiots that is bringing down the game industry, as Erik wrote so long ago. Not Romero. Romero does not remind me of Roberta Williams, he is the anti-Williams.

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.


That's ridiculous. People are able to make up their own minds. Doom didn't succeed because the cool kids said it was cool. It succeeded because it was a fucking fun game. The fact that Au doesn't think it's art doesn't change that, and it's like claiming McDonald's is only successful because more people don't appreciate foie gras.

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.


Doom succeeded because it was a well-made, fun game that was marketed well. There was no subterfuge or overabundance of hype on its release. Of course it launched a groundswell of popularity, but to reverse that and claim that it became popular at the expense of "better" games is a horrible damning of the very people responsible for its success; namely, those idiotic (in Au's eyes) gamers like myself and I'm guessing everyone else on this board who downloaded and played the shit out of it.

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.


He's a fucking moron. He has absolutely no understanding of the industry he's attempting to cover, from developers to the public. It's not my fault his roommates were playing Doom too loudly when he was trying to study his Foucault, but that doesn't give him the right to declare the entire industry "ruined" by Carmack et al. What an ass.

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

Shit.
--SB


I couldn't tell. Did you mention German men?
PREVIOUS NEXT REPLY QUOTE
 
Wagner James Wagner Au strikes again by I need clarification 05/05/2003, 1:51pm PDT NEW
    Login info? NT by FoK 05/05/2003, 2:06pm PDT NEW
    Actually by Senor Barborito 05/05/2003, 2:16pm PDT NEW
        My typo = your misreading by I need clarification 05/05/2003, 3:43pm PDT NEW
    Re: Wagner James Wagner Au strikes again by Jhoh Creexul 05/05/2003, 3:49pm PDT NEW
    Failed: OMM history 101 by Bunyip 05/05/2003, 3:59pm PDT NEW
    Something we can all agree on. by Fussbett 05/05/2003, 6:11pm PDT NEW
    Re: Wagner James Wagner Au strikes again by Monty Cantsin Messenger Service 05/06/2003, 3:58pm PDT NEW
 
powered by pointy