Loved this article. SFII was so huge when I was about 13-20... that game had such a long tail. I remember seeing it for the first time and being blown away, it was rather amazing when all you'd seen up to that point was NES and PC games on a 286 or so.
Funny thing is I'm pretty darn sure I have no desire to work in commercial game development these days, but would have loved to back then. The creativity around limitations was amazing back then and it seemed like so much care was put into making games fun. These days it seems like addiction mechanisms, getting people to spend more money, obsessiveness with graphics over gameplay, etc.. are ruining everything.
>These days it seems like addiction mechanisms, getting people to spend more money, obsessiveness with graphics over gameplay, etc.. are ruining everything.
Couldn't be further from the truth, especially when it comes to Street Fighter... People complain about microtransactions today and don't even think to consider that the original microtransaction was the arcade machine. Games back then were specifically designed to extract a certain amount of money per hour from players and their difficulties were adjusted to maintain that rate.
It's never been better to be a game developer then today. The number of platforms available to you, distribution options, variety of studios/publishers are much greater today than ever before.
> People complain about microtransactions today and don't even think to consider that the original microtransaction was the arcade machine
I couldn't disagree more. The arcade machine did not feel like a microtransaction at the time. We were glad to spend the coins on them. Now, even with presumably much more funds than when we were kids, the microtransactions feels very exploitative!
If people "dont even think to consider" then that means there isn't much of a similarity
Funny thing is I'm pretty darn sure I have no desire to work in commercial game development these days, but would have loved to back then. The creativity around limitations was amazing back then and it seemed like so much care was put into making games fun. These days it seems like addiction mechanisms, getting people to spend more money, obsessiveness with graphics over gameplay, etc.. are ruining everything.