8/3/2023 0 Comments Crush the industry game![]() ![]() Arcade games were meant to get as many quarters from you as possible.Ĭonsider the game “Dragon’s Lair,” recently repopularized by its appearance in the second season of Netflix’s 1980s nostalgic thriller “Stranger Things.” The hand-animated cinematic arcade game was composed of a series of button presses that correlated to a character's action. I realized that games back then were much harder than they are now. Some might complain that video games are too easy now, but looking at the current video game landscape, it makes sense that there was a general shift in difficulty. I recently spent some time in an arcade pumping some quarters into some classic games. Both kids and adults wanted to experience the euphoric novelty of the arcade: whirring sounds, flashing lights, screaming for joy when reaching a new high score, the clanking of the air hockey table and the sound of change hitting metal. The 1980s were the golden age for arcade games. It’s just that how it's made money has changed. Because of course, the gaming industry, even when it was much smaller, was always a for-profit industry. To follow the capitalistic arc of the video game industry, a brief history lesson is in order. Contemporary game designers are motivated to spend more of their time adding features that play into players’ psychology, manipulating them into opening their wallets. (Contrast that with the film industry, which had only $11.4 billion in box office receipts in the same year.) And while some games are still produced by small indie studios, the gaming world is much like Hollywood, with a few big players spending tens of millions to produce games that will reap that much or more.īut with big corporations controlling huge swaths of the gaming industry, the precepts of video gaming have inevitably changed – and the field’s artistry has been subsumed by the need for profit. ![]() When I say big, I mean really big: Forbes reports that in 2016, the gaming industry in the U.S. Since going mainstream in the 1980s, video games have evolved from a nerdy lark to a big industry. ![]()
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