The Lost Art of Innocence
"Fifteen years ago, with our Wolfenstein-level games, we'd scrub out some tiles and wrap an entire level in a day. If someone said, "Wait, I wish I could get from here to here," you'd just take some tiles out, and all of a sudden, he's there." – John Carmack, "The GFW Interview: John Carmack"
When I was eight I wanted to be a video-game programmer. I'd get the latest issue of Compute! Magazine partly to read the latest review on whatever Infocom game was all the buzz, but mostly to delve into their programming samples, tutorials and guides. Chock full of BASIC's greatest hits, Goto, Gosub, If/Then, Dim and Rems, it was a secret language beyond that of my parents and peers. It was a realm where I exhibited control limited only by my imagination and determination; where I could perform miracles.
The beauty of a technology that allowed an eight year-old to produce at least passable code, and understand some meaningful portion of the process fueled my imagination. Outside of simply copying the text from Compute! I forged onward and experimented with programming languages to far less complex but equally invigorating ends. As I look back through the archives of my once-loved magazine I see in many ways how far this industry, which demands my attention, has grown, and how very far it has fallen.
Carmack's quote from the May '07 Games For Windows Magazine is laced with the tone of a man falling out of love with his life's work. Carmack, who is remarkable for being at the forefront of technology both at the beginning and what increasingly looks to be the twilight of his career, sounds disillusioned at a passion that became a mega-business with all the trappings and traps associated. In his own words, "Even if he works his brains out every waking moment, there's just no way one person can create a triple-A game on his own."
Which is a shame, because it's what inspired a generation to get involved in the industry.
In the world of video-games, I'm old, nearly Carmack old, and I realize that he and I share an old-man, in-my-day kind of vibe. Back in my day when we wanted to play a game we had to spend twenty minutes loading it up on a cassette tape-drive, and we were grateful to have it. When I was a boy we didn't have the internet to download games; we had to get our dads to drive us to the mall where we spent our allowance on Atari 2600 cartridges where animated squares fired smaller squares over rectangles at one another. Also we had to drive to the mall through pelting snow, uphill both ways.
But, it's true (not the uphill part). I remember a time when programmers were to kids like me what Gene Simmons was to kids who were most certainly not like me. There was a time when the Game Gods were the benefactors of digital joy, and to reach their deific status seemed not only reasonable but worth pursuing. It was a lifestyle fueled by creativity and the achievements of close friends working on a shared vision. Entire games of great renown were crafted whole from the efforts of one or two creative and talented programmers often independent of publishers, producers or shareholders.
Were the games actually better? Well, no, of course not. I may be nostalgic, but I'm not stupid. Today's technologically superior, multi-million dollar monstrosities are, in almost every way, superior to anything that even the most creative guy could do in his basement on an old TI. But, without the full spectrum of gaming to be measured against, the games of the day really did more to inspire and amaze on a more regular basis than today's demographic targeted, designed by committee with corporate oversight games. And the industry itself, young and largely ignored at the time, was the domain of the visionaries instead of the actuaries.
Look, I get it. The whole thing got popular; businesses realized there was money to be made while the press of technology rapidly increased the demands of consumers and publishers. We have the amazing games of the present because of capitalism, business management, investment and speculation of millions of dollars at a time. The dreamers became assets instead of leaders, and the rockstar designers became, well, Rockstar "… or Blizzard, or Valve. Publishers with cash-rich money to spend bought the creative process, and the minds of marketing professionals replaced four guys hopped up on sugar doughnuts and generic cola. So, how dare I be surprised that the price of today's gaming blitz is a little piece of last generation's soul?
I apologize for being maudlin, but sometimes I marvel at the difference between what gaming once was, and what it's become. Even the industry itself is no longer purely about games. It's about co-opting the entertainment space of rich nations. It's about providing a broad range of content direct and on-demand to the customer by offering the game console and then selling data at a profit. Why else would some of the biggest news from Sony be some virtual environment where you can see the avatars of other humans spew obscenities while consuming endless advertising? Gaming now is as much about selling you Burger King hamburgers and Dodge Durangos as it is producing great content.
But, it's too easy to just blame it on big companies and the corporatization of video games. We gamers have changed too. Aside from the obvious negative elements within the video game buying public (see the majority population of any PvP server of any MMO) we've simply become jaded and endlessly suspicious of the purveyors of video gaming. We consumers are now skeptical of everyone, from executives to retailers to the guys in the trenches with an Us against Them mentality. We have become as cynical in many respects about gaming as we are mortgage lenders and telemarketers.
Eventually the boy I was, coding from Compute! on his Atari 800, became a realist and found that programmer was like doctor or airline pilot on the chart of jobs that used to be cool and now seem to very much suck. The choices were too polar, either claw my way into endless hours of coding for a big name company happy to take all the credit, or delve into the mod community struggling to put two nickels together as an independent artist largely ignored, if not openly mocked, by actual customers.
I look at the indie gaming scene, and I realize that these are the guys who are left to make a name for unrestrained creativity. Instead of faces like Cliffy B, who is incredibly talented, but seems to exits in the limelight as much for his fashionable style and relentless self-promotion as any remarkable ability, it is guys making games like Dwarf Fortress, Defcon, and Garry's Mod in their homes with shoestring budgets that are the real heirs to the pioneer's throne. And what's at the end of the line when their genius is recognized?
Carmack talks about how id poaches talent from the mod communities, but instead of the story that once was where the genius programmer goes on to earn a name and a Ferrari, now they hope for long-shifts under pressured deadlines as an element to a company within company within a corporation. It is the natural progression of the industry, the maturation of multi-billion dollar business that has exponentially grown in popularity for two decades.
I enjoy my video games, and despite occasionally bouts of pessimism I even like the industry most of the time. But something has been lost, an innocence natural to an industry's infancy, and I have no illusions that it will never be regained. But, I wonder as we move forward and faces like Carmack, Meier, Wright and others begin to ponder retirement, will it be individual genius or corporate marketing that replaces them?
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I highly disagree with this whole story!
I'm tempted to write a rebuttal article.
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Parody of yourself in color, giving it to everybody but your mother...
First, a point of agreement:
This is literally and exactly true, children. Seriously. We WERE grateful to have one. I had a really excellent portable tape deck to use with my TI... it was very sophisticated. It didn't just have the listen and record mini-RCAs, it had a THIRD plug so that the computer could turn the motor on and off. I wasn't just grateful, dammit. I was PROUD of it, it was so high-tech! I never lost a byte of data off that thing.
In retrospect, it's a little sad that I can't hear my programs loading anymore. I liked the "SQUEEEEEE.... squee squee squee chirp warble squeeeeee...."
But I sure liked the speed of the mighty 93K TI floppy drive a lot more. 
Note that I am not suggesting that this was in any way better, it's just that things have come a LONG way in *ahem* just thirty years. (my shocked look is because I realized it's now THIRTY years instead of TWENTY. Sigh.)
I think you're missing one thing here, Elysium... the rise of the Internet makes it perfectly possible for guys like Tarn Adams to reach an audience. I sent him money, and pre-Internet I'd probably never have heard of him. There's a market just growing up for simple, fun games... the little Flash toys like Grow. That's the kind of accessible fun stuff that mortals can still do. And you can easily and simply reach an audience of tens of millions of people in just hours if you write something really kick-ass.
And the corporate games have gotten complex and evil in many cases, but not always. C&C 3 is just thoroughly excellent, for example, it's a classic by any standard. And World of Warcraft, while I'm pissed at them and not playing anymore, was one of the biggest advances in genuine fun in just ages.
Yes, many games are becoming soulless corporate cash grabs; Guitar Hero on the 360 looks like the latest one. But despite all the crap, the garbage we're being given, there are still gems to be found. And, I would argue, there's just as many gems as there ever were, and this website helps a lot in sorting them out of the refuse.
Remember, in this modern nexus of evil, we just had Guitar Hero 1 & 2, Katamari Damacy, Okami, Disgaea (although that's kinda old now), C&C3, Company of Heroes and Dawn of War from Relic... and even Gears of War may qualify, although I'm not terribly fond of that particular one so far. (I hate the controller, mostly.)
If the lament is really that the single genius programmer can't sit in his basement and work up the next Ultima anymore, well.... yeah, that's true, and it's a shame. Team players are the future of the industry more than the lone eccentric. But I don't think the overall game quality is suffering as a result. As a creator, yeah it sucks a bit, but there are avenues available to be creative and reach tons of people very quickly.
As consumers, we're getting better games than we ever have before.... at least if we're careful about panning out the gold and leaving the mud behind. That's always been true... there's more mud going by, so we have to pan a little harder, but we also have little communities just like this one, all full of prospectors sloshing away.
The maturity of the gaming industry to some extent just reflects the maturity of the software industry at large. When I was in junior high, one or two guys in a room could conceive and ship a commercial software application for a fairly large audience. These days that's pretty much impossible.
With the large teams that are now necessary, we have lost a certain amount of singular vision... but in trade we have suites of applications that do more than anyone could have imagined back when I was in school. Real type typeset quality text in your text editor/browser? Crazy!
Through the glasses of nostalgia the early days do seem simpler and somehow more compellng. But I doubt it's actually so.
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Oh yeah. I used to type in programs from Compute! I became a programmer anyway.
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Oddly enough, I find that I agree with everything written above. Both the loss of innocence and the new opportunities today. I don't want to give up modern interfaces, for starters, because no matter how bad a given game's interface is today, you can bet that ten years ago it would have been worse. But at the same time, there's a definite loss: I'd love to have a type-the-program-in feature in a magazine, if only to introduce new kids to the experience, but there's no market for it.
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My childhood was similar but instead of Compute! I had The Bytes Brothers and another children's programming fiction series instead. Man was I ever excited the day Dad brought home a Vic 20 tape drive for our c64 along with a Commodore approved "teach yourself programming" kit. Peeks and pokes abound!
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Pipe Threader Manual wrote:
Yeah, that was fun. Compute! magazine used to come with a game written in BASIC every month, and they would have listings for all the major computer types. (all the machines at the time used different dialects of BASIC, but they all had it, so they could do one overall design and then port it to the different machines.) I typed many of them in and enjoyed them a lot.
There was one I particularly liked, a mining game where you could get flooding and all kinds of nasty stuff... and the water would actually behave somewhat realistically, filling in the mine from the leak point down. It moved pretty fast, but not quite as fast as you did, so you could usually get away. And just seeing it move across and down was pretty cool... kind of advanced for the time.
Sadly, no typable program these days is going to be of much interest... inputting a relatively simple game like Bejeweled would probably take a solid week. Remember, you've gotta type in the textures too.
I to remember fondly going down to my local Complete Strategist to discover that a new Ultima had been released... there on the shelf was a copy of Ultima 4 for the Apple //. The sense of awe and amazement.. the reading of the manual 5 times before I got home on the bus.. knowing full well that my homework that night had zero chance of getting done because I was going to be playing that game until 1am probably. (and I'm sure I did).
I don't think I've nearly come that close to that level of excitement for a game.... age and the overwhelming amount of info and availability of gaming has taken that away from everyone.. not just me. None of my friends kids have that level I had when it comes to new videogames... its just another game.
Aint nothing new about the world order..it's been playing since the day they put George Washington on a quarter
85's face the truth you're too dumb.
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Guru gets it.
"I think Elysium has the right of it" - Certis
I have almost the exact same memories of getting my first Ultima game (also Ultima IV). Of course, my local game shop then was a Waldenbooks (you gotta go back pretty far to remember the day when they sold games), but the reading of the manuals (er, spellbook and Guide to Britannia) five times before even launching the game (and wanting to do it), still stick. Hell, somewhere in my home I still have the little pewter ankh they packaged with it.
---Todd
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Ah, Compute! Boy, does that ever take me back. I also used to get Run magazine, which was dedicated to Commodore machines. Though more than transcribing the Basic games, I remember the article on how to manually realign the heads on the old Commodore 1541 floppy drive. Few things are more alarming to a parent than a 10 year old kid digging around in the guts of computer hardware with a big screwdriver. It worked out though. Mostly.
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baggachipz: Who cares about Japan, let them have their silly pointless dog games and countless re-hashes of anime-based dragon princess super lucky crapitty crap.
I used to have Ultima IV for my ol' c64. A friend gave me these ascii maps dutifully printed out on our old dot matrix printer and taped together. I think they stayed on the wall above the computer for a few years at the very least!
Heck, if I had access to a dot matrix printer I'd print 'em out again. Would make an interesting piece of "art"
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Pipe Threader Manual wrote:
I dunno. I was still getting just as excited about new games back in the mid-late 90's as I did in the garage company, C-64 Basic programming days. The only difference was that in the 90's, I'd nearly get into wrecks driving home while trying to read the manual.
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Both. As the video game industry matures, I'm predicting we'll see a commercial model similar to what other artistic industries have: mainstream products and art-house products both supported by large corporate entities. Fox is the same corporation that puts out stuff like the Die Hard movies and Little Miss Sunshine. There's no reason Epic can't develop the Gears of War franchise and smaller projects for digital distribution (XBLA or Steam or whatever). And any of these projects, while not influenced by a single programmer, can be sculpted by the hands of a talented director. Again, the film analogy holds true.
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recovering ti994a programmer here. I did type some games in from mags, but i had much more fun making my own stuff. I made an animated smiling mr. T, and other little graphical oddities.
and am i mad, or do i recall a radio station 'playing' a program? maybe that was just some local stunt, but i remember holding my ti cassete deck up to the speaker. i don't think it worked.
I eventually decided that graphics were whack (or whatever we called it back then), and created a large number of horribly complicated text adventure games on an apple 2e.
Nothing could ever compare with the excitement of a 12 year old boy getting his hands on a copy of the 1987 classic, Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. Add to that the fact that he got it on the very same night that his parents are leaving him alone with his older brother who won't even check on him once due to his friends coming over and doing bong hits all night while they listen to Master of Puppets.
Nothing.
Now if only I could've figured out a way to remove that bouncing black censored box!!!
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Word.
Apple II represent! I also had the experience, sitting in the living room with the apple ii hooked up to the TV, loading some crazy game about bees taking over the US on my cassette drive. Being totally confused by assembly, then writing some simple basic lines and the joy of seeing them work. Why i didn't become a programmer, i'll never know.
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Wasn't Compute!'s Gazette the one for C-64?
I was too lazy to type in many of the machine-code programs myself, but my brother and I had a ton of fun making adventure games of the simple command line interface variety that were basically 5923 nested IF-THEN-ELSEs.
My dad got stationed in Germany in the mid-80s right after I got my C-64. I had a similar experience to GameGuru's, except it was Ultima III, and I got gyped because I did NOT get the cloth map that was promised on the box. I also sucked beyond measure at that game, but that didn't stop me from playing into the wee hours nightly for ages.
The other advantage to living in Germany as part of the DoD was the weekly Saturday computer "club" on base. This amounted to 30 or so 18-25 year old army guys (+ 13 year old me) showing up with boxes of blank 5.25" disks and copying large quantities of disks that each held 100 games. Man, those were the days. I read some thread here or on another forum recently where someone asked how many games people had played in their lifetime. Someone had some number over 1000 and a bunch of other people didn't believe him. Um, dude, please. I had several shoeboxes jammed pack full of disks that each had 20+ games on them. I won't say I played many of them extensively, but they most certainly got booted up.
Lords of Midnight. What the hell was up with that game? Maybe the crack messed up the game, or maybe I just needed documentation, but I could never get anything to happen in that game. Speaking of documentation, documentation in those days amounted to starting the game, then hitting each key on the keyboard in succession and noting what happened with each key press. Ha! It makes me laugh when I read people pissing on some game like Silverfall because the interface is perhaps a little rough around the edges. Gimme a break!
I think some of the games really weren't as good as what we have today - I stayed up late many nights playing Wizard's Crown (ah, those old SSI CRPGs! How I loved thy turn-based splendor!). I don't know how many of you played that one, but you basically went into the wilderness and moved your party back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, across the screen just trawling for random encounters. I actually finished that game, somehow - my list of newer games that I have not finished far outweighs my list of games that I have. I ran it under emulation a year ago or so for nostalgia's sake - needless to say it did not hold up too well. Tedious doesn't begin to describe it.
But then I remember all those old Electronic Arts games -- before they became the corporate salt-vampire they are today. You know, the ones that came in record-style packaging? Man those games rocked. Such creativity. EA should release every single one of those as XBLA games - the Atari joystick was the primary input device in those days anyway, lack of a mouse wouldn't be too big a deal. What a string of hits they had: M.U.L.E., Archon, Archon II, Pinball Construction Set, Racing Destruction Set, Adventure Construction Set, Mail Order Monsters, ... I forget the rest. But damn if that wasn't a special feeling when you loaded a game and saw that color-changing shape logo on the white background (at least until you realized the crack didn't work and EA had somehow outwitted the German pirates).
I guess I'll end by saying that these experiences definitely led to my affinity with computers that led me to my current profession as well.
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See, I used to feel the same way about getting those old games as I did about getting a new album or comic book.
I wanted to be a designer, musician, and comic book writer/artist, but soon realized that, because most kids did, there was too much competition to get into those fields. I'm really just not that competitive (see, e.g., my leaving law school). These days to become a success in anything terribly desireable, you have to have the same drive as for the traditionally desireable jobs (doctor, president, etc.)
So I grabbed myself a cubicle and got into the poetry scene. Also, I grabbed a beer and took a nap.
Elysium: The democratization of the web ... has installed an illusion of a digital first amendment that protects speech no matter how poorly spelled or stupid.
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That gave me a chilling Fahrenheit 451 vibe. Great article overall Elysium. One day I'll marry you, whether you want it or not.
Agent: "Why do you think she's known as the Black Widow ?"
Chuck: "Because... she's African American and her husband died ?"
Elysium: The democratization of the web ... has installed an illusion of a digital first amendment that protects speech no matter how poorly spelled or stupid.
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I don't feel sorry for Carmack. He has made the same game every day for 15 years. Only family can give that kind of bottomless repetitive enjoyment.
We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all.
I can completely relate. There really was a time when it was easy to feel much closer, much more personally connected to the hobby. I wouldn't know exactly how to put it into words, but this article certainly brought those feelings back.
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Ah, the old days. My first program that ever ran correctly was a pong-type my best friend had gotten written out longhand by a friend-of-a-friend for her Vic20. Thank god for her tape drive or I'd probably still be typing. I remember when we used to code and hand off our own elaborately bad text-based adventures to each other.
I miss that.
I did end up a programmer after a few zigs and zags, but until XNA came out the closest to game programming I've ever gotten was convincing Wingcommander I to run on my old XT clone or something like that. I didn't have the required sound card and it took a bit of midnight requisitioning to get it working. I don't count modding or using level generators or coding systems like RPG Maker. Those are cool and all, but that's like saying knowing how to run Paint means you're Picasso. I want to write my own like I did back then.
We'll see how I do with XNA. So far it's been pretty cool. Not quite as cool as watching those white lines and squares render for the first time on that scratchy black-and-white TV, but that might just be a function of the intervening years. We'll see how it feels once I actually get my own game to render.
Duoae wrote:
Momgamer, don't you know that all ladies are supposed to pretend they are 29? You're supposed to say your first program was on a Pentium 1 and refer to Doom as "the old days" in a painfully naive way
I don't get this 30-something hate. I remember seeing my first Pong arcade game (table top, baby) back in the days when a console with color meant you stuck a plastic sheet on the TV screen. And I'm 35.
Just the other day Danjo and I used Crackdown to built our impression of the Bush Administration out of exploding barrels and see what happened if yellow gas tanks representing Iraq were added to the equation; in other words, we made a big shapeless mess that blew up in our faces.
We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all.
I am 29 and my first real program was written for a black-and-white home computer with 32k of RAM. Also, Doom 2 came out when 486 DX2-66 was the machine of choice. Doom 1 came out in the 486 SX-25 era. I hated those Pentium elitist bastards... until I got one. A Pentium that is, not a bastard.
Agent: "Why do you think she's known as the Black Widow ?"
Chuck: "Because... she's African American and her husband died ?"
My first program was in Logo, on a Commodore 64. I soon afterwards graduated to the awesomeness that was BASIC on the Atari 800.
Fedaykin98 wrote:
wordsmythe wrote:
READY
LIST
10 PRINT "/==!==\"
20 PRINT "OH NOES ! TEH UFO !!"
30 BEEP
40 GOTO 10
RUN
Agent: "Why do you think she's known as the Black Widow ?"
Chuck: "Because... she's African American and her husband died ?"
Of course I'm dating myself. Who else would?
(two drums and a cymbal fall off a cliff)
It's a totally different sort of world. I had an iron-assed old teacher in college who made us do the first project in Assembler class with punch cards. I have touched neither since. By the time the Pentium rolled around I was doing LISP to build custom AutoCad functions, and using C+ and ObjectPal to build database applications.
Duoae wrote:
My father programmed on punch card using a vacuum tube computer which took up an entire room.
We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all.