Quote: It’s probably the industry's best kept secret that many of the most entertaining new adventure games these days are being designed not by the major studios, but by amateurs—fans of the genre working alone or in small teams to do something that we’ve all wanted to do at one time or another: create our own adventure game. Beginning this month, I’ll be taking my first steps down that road as well. I’ll report on everything I learn along the way, from choosing a game engine and deciding on a story idea to writing the plot and, eventually, even beta testing and completion.
So true. Large Publishing houses are game-design's #1 enemy, in my opinion. The problem is, video games have become too much of an "industry". The creativity/originality has largely been sucked out of games and we see so many copy-cat, or what I call "me-too" games because the whole "business" side of the industry doesn't allow for creativity in most cases anymore. It's too risky to the bottom-line to be creative.
Think about it.. who were the companies to come along and introduce these new genres that were then copied and cashed-in on by the larger developers/publishers?
Well.. let's consider a few:
Tetris: developed by a single person. How many clones has it spawned?
MYST - originally developed by some guys working out of their garage. Again, how many derivatives of its style/gameplay do we *still* see come to market to this day?
Wolfenstein/DOOM/Quake - A little indie company formed by friends working at SoftDisk, called iD Software, developed this 2D side-scroller series (Commander Keen) and published it through Apogee Games (now 3DRealms). One day, its lead programmer, John Carmack, realized he could create a real-time "2.5-D" scanline rendering engine and subsequently went on to create an entire new genre. Eventually the 2.5D was escalated into full 3D. How many clones/derivatives of those games can you name since the original Wolfenstein?
So there you go... 3 hugely successful genres (though I wouldn't call Tetris a "genre") that were created by humble, little companies working with indie budgets - or less - that are now copied shamelessly by larger companies with budgets of millions more than their originators had... and they rarely ever even hold a candle to the original. To these companies, having a higher poly-count, or more DX9 eye-candy makes theirs "better".
This is why the older video games.. for early Arcade machines and consoles like the Atari 2600, Vectrex and such were so much more original.. they had to be to stand out.
