Ok, cool. I would imagine that, developing it, you’d be aware, but King’s Field 1 is sparse and crude and odd enough that I could see it springing from several places without having design referents. Game knowledge in the industry isn’t necessarily holistic, though; a steady diet of Galaxy Oddity creates a comparatively encyclopedic gamesman.
I love the decision to omit drawing faces; our new 3D skeleton maze is populated only by fleshy echoes, imperfectly seen. It seemed to be a popular style choice in early 32-bit days; Granstream Saga did it and I’m sure I saw magazine scans of another game. I guess that was back when characters were mostly untextured and they’d subdivide polygons if they needed patterns (did Sony update their devkits with a faster texturing method around mid-1995?)
KF was definitely experimental and definitely had ancestry in the various dungeon crawlers of the time. The nerdiest ones knew all about Dungeon Master and Wizardry and other western stuff.
I remember for awhile the WiiU was to have 2 control pads. I thought this could make for great gamin possibilities along with a certain digital board or card game aspect that never happened.
c’n I just say that the only ultima game that I have any experience is (1/3 of) Ultima Underworld. It is only 1/3
because initially I thought that UU seemed like a charming 3d game where you fight giant spiders and pick up cheese and bread from the ground of this disgusting and musty underground labyrinth. (totes unhygenic) But then the game draws your further in and the dungeon becomes a terrible place instead of a atmospheric backdrop for fightin monsters. This not Wolfenstein 3d. Quite soon into exploring the game wants you to participate in the fiction that there are multiple communities of lizard men, who speak their own different languages, engage in petty internecine squabbles instead of cooperating to find a way out of the Underworld, and generally live a wretched existence subsisting on dunegon cheese and spider carcass as a literal underclass in this terrible place and as a youngster with odd sensibilities I decided ‘dats enuf of dis game’ for a while and never went back.
Therefore I have nothing to contribute to the nevertheless interesting ultima discussion.
One other thing i thought of: if 90s pop megastar Michael Jackson hadn’t [TRIGGER WARNING] been accused of child molestation then 90s megagamecompany SEGA would have had no reason to cut short their nascent working relationship, and their combined pop culture aura may have carried SEGA past whatever went wrong with Dreamcast and…
If Sega Japan listened to Sega America and either not made the 32X or let it have a 2-3 year life span, then introduced the Sega Saturn using the system architecture America wanted, which was for a more 3d-processing heavy machine, then it could’ve competed both in technology and in pricing to the PSX instead of being a 2d powerhouse with slapdash 3d superglued on at the last second and then rushed to market to beat the PSX’s launch by a year + $100.
If Sega Japan listened to Sega America at all after the Genesis, Sega might’ve been alive in more countries than just Japan and Europe through the 32 bit era and beyond.
But, Japanese game companies, shrug
.
For a more modern version of this, if Konami Japan let Castlevania games be funded and produced by the western divisions, maybe the series wouldn’t have fallen into cheaper and cheaper portable games, eventually being gutted and replaced by european studios and then thrown in a pachislot and fitness center fire along with the rest of Konami.
I wonder what if Nintendo had made a deal with proto-Id when they pitched them a PC port of Mario 3? The potential repercussions for the FPS genre could have been immense.
My guess… is that if we walk back, D&D comes out of tabletop wargames. Tabletop wargames come out in the early 20th century (H.G. Wells is cited as an early writer!), so before that, we didn’t have a culture of adults playing games for non-self-improvement reasons. In the same way that reading for pleasure was passe until the late 18th-century, creative shared storytelling might have been considered frivolous.
On the other hand, card and bar games have been around forever. I’ve heard people complain that they weren’t interested in roleplaying because they aren’t ‘creative’, but that may be an accultured response to the nerdy image it has.
I’d be interested in learning more about community theater and folk storytelling traditions – like, did people engage in these for entertainment purposes before modern society, or was it focused on religious education?
The Rand Corporation played “simulation games” in the 1950s and 60s that were basically rpgs set in the cold war where each player played a different world leader.
Which led to a direct influence on Wesely, the person who ran the Braunstein games (the first actual RPGs as we know them) which led to Arneson’s Blackmoor games which led to Gygax’s Greyhawk
The rand corporation had nothing to do with ayn rand. Research and Development.
They were/are a thinktank for the us govt and military.
Dave arneson and gary gygax’s beef was about money and credit for d&d. Arneson and Gygax co-created every edition of D&D until Advanced D&D 1st Edition, which was actually less deep/more convoluted than BECMI D&D at the time and was mainly created by Gygax to deny Arneson royalties.
I’m thinking of the birth of novels in the 18th century. Why did authors hide behind pseudonyms for a good 50 years unless they were writing ‘morally upright’ material? Nonfiction was fine as was religious fiction (Pilgrim’s Progress was huge) but fiction literature was still stigmatized.
This is a very anglocentric view of course but I don’t know near as much about cultural history of other cultures.
It’s funny that we can think that you need a broad consumer base that is literate as a precondition but communal storytelling really doesn’t require it.
There’s a group of ex-submariners that runs wargames at GenCon. Players are assigned cabinet positions in one of several nations and the gamemasters inject scenarios several times over the course of an 8-hour day. Fascinating but I was kind of lost in a crowd of people for whom knowing the fleet distribution of the US Navy obviously meant every problem could be solved through forceful application of the US Navy.
I think it’s woz don’t decide to leave Apple and steve jobs leave it after APPLE II release. Maybe we could have a whole different computer gaming culture, like the DND community or the wargaming community instead of the big CROP and AAA race.
