about the importance of well-known "creators" in game creation

[†††]

So we all have seen it multiple times; in this era of decline, some old game creator/development group who made several classics announces a new game in the vein of said classics; we all get hyped and when the game comes out, we discover that it's actually a turd and it almost seems like they misunderstood what made the originals so great. Then we tell ourselves that probably the conditions weren't the best, that they should be allowed a mistake, the next game surely will be great... and then it isn't.

We get it; game creation is a complicated endeavor and there are many people involved in it... but it also happens in cinema, and many directors can keep a consistent work that shows they're really behind it despite multiple personnel and technology changes through decades. Why doest it seem different when working with video games? of course many of these guys were glorified figureheads/execs (Fargo, Kenji Inafune) but many others were really involved in their creations, be it as ideas guy (Spector, Kojimbo), writers, designers, programmers... The last case is the funny disappointment that happened in the Codex with The Outer Worlds, where Cain & Boyarski will fall from heavens and become mere mortals again. Even when no hiatus takes place, they decline and become shadows of their former selves (Molyneux, Kojimbo again). Since I mentioned Kojima, many fans argue that the MGS series took a nosedive in quality because of the apparent change of personnel between MGS3 and 4. Is the secret really having a talented squad to work in group? what happens when an entire group comes back (like ex-RARE to make that banjo kazooie-like platform game whose name I don't remember) and the product still lets down? does game quality depend on more abstract factors, like being in the right time, right place? perhaps the commonly agreed villains (publishers) play a bigger part than we believe? can there really be vidya "auteurs" in this era? is everything a lie?

 

[Kitchen Utensil]

Nah, the thing is, franchises (and well-known creators) are there to keep old fans interested and to pretend to newbies that there's something of value, it's an illusion that the creators care about their babies. Successors to classics, be it games or movies, are promoted in a way that appeals to the core fan base just enough, while at the same time trying to lure in newbies by dumbing down everything that made the originals interesting in the first place and replacing it with some retarded shit that appeals to everyone (if possible without alienating the core fans too much).

It's all a fucking scam. As soon as something becomes successful, you can bet your life on the sequel/next iteration being a bland imitation of the original—in the best case. More often than not, it's a fucking mockery of what made the original great.

But the worst thing is, the normies will gobble it up and call it the best thing ever.

E: One factor in all of this probably is: people get old, even game designers and directors. They realise that a majority of the audience is retarded, and they decide (or get persuaded by investors) that making some money for a comfortable retirement is more important than producing some high-quality art for a niche audience.

 

[Steamboat Willie]

I've never bought in to the cult of hero worship when it comes to video games. Falling into that trap is what enables trash like Shroud of the Avatar and Mighty No. 9 to get funded.

 

[thesoup]

Video games have dozens if not hundreds people working on them. They are a team effort and no one man is the single guiding light in any of them. None of them ever replicated any success once they moved to a different studio to work with a different team. Sometimes not even the same team repeated the success or understood what made a game good (dx -> dxiw as the prime example).
Don't put much stock in video game developer celebrities, or even studios, at least not long term. It's a road to eventual disappointment.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Video games have dozens if not hundreds people working on them. They are a team effort and no one man is the single guiding light in any of them.

This is the case today, but it wasn't always so. Teams were much smaller 30 years ago, sometimes being just one guy in his bedroom.

None of them ever replicated any success once they moved to a different studio to work with a different team.

Ultimate Play the Game was a British video game developer and publisher founded in 1982. They released a series of successful games for various 8-bit platforms from 1983 until its closure in 1988. Ultimate are perhaps best remembered for the big-selling titles Jetpac and Sabre Wulf, each of which sold over 300,000 copies in 1983 and 1984 respectively, and their groundbreaking series of isometric arcade adventures.

By the time of the label's last use in 1988 on a retrospective compilation, Ultimate had evolved into Rare, and moved on to developing titles for Nintendo consoles.

And yes, they are pretty much the exception that proves the rule... until Microsoft bought them out in 2002, that is.

 

[Love]

I got my hopes up for Otherside because I thought Warren Spector would be able to do the things he has talked about and thaught for years now and that the other developers in the company would share some of this vision.

Peter Molyneux is a differnt case. He always had one good idea and then he would build a game around it, but mostly it was great because of that one gimmick he came up with. I guess that wasn't good enough in terms of playibility after the turn of the millenium when games had to be more fleshed out.

Reading the Codex made me at least change my mind a bit about Garriott. There are so many developers who got this thought in their head that online gaming would make solo play obsolote and a whole new gaming scene would arise. So many RPG developers had convinced themselves of this, that it makes me think they only produced our beloved games because there was no better alternative back then. Once the internet came they thought they could now create whole worlds for us to connect in and enjoy an adventure like they did with their friends playing tabletop.

perhaps the commonly agreed villains (publishers) play a bigger part than we believe?

That's one aspect too. Not all of our gems were top sellers when they were released. And since we have this great example of the creatives being in charge, what did Obsidian deliver us after their founding?

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Game developers are false gods; don't believe their lies.

 

[Anthedon]

Except Cleve.

 

[Lord Commissar Alexer]

I care only if it all if said "famous" person has done/said "problematic" stuff like insulting their fanbase or being greedy fucks, otherwise...meh.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

To give a better clarification of my last post: There are game developers out there who have performed Herculean efforts in order to make their games run.

Those same devs deserve all the praise they deserve, as more often than not they've had to move mountains to make their stuff work.

But their numbers are thin, and sadly Death has had forced his hand against too many of them. Regretfully we can't have them with us to share input/output.

tl;dr - Some game devs deserve praise and support for 'chipping in' on the path to greatness... game publishers less so.

 

[octavius]

I get the impression that so many classic games where great due to technical limitations. With no technical limitations they would have been real time mobile phone games instead,

 

[CryptRat]

So true.

- Clearly the game they've always wanted to make is totally different from what we want to play, as you suggest.

- I'd say it's even worse because it's not only bad taste but also self-imposed technical limitations which prevent any possibility to make a good game. Full voice acting, gfx requiring 10 persons to make and 50 persons to make the game at all, the game being playable by everybody ..., no way you can make a good game with such high constraints. These things limit the gameplay, you can only make a very accessible and very simple game, I can only imagine how any iteration or trying any new mechanism just to see the result is just a nightmare. 32 colors, 1.44 Mo disks and 500ko of RAM are very low constraints compared with those.

 

[Excommunicator]

I think game projects are even more collaborative than movies (at least in how most projects are run), and that's something that actually deters auteurs.

There are also more factors in game development that affect the success of a project. Movie making is significantly below it when it comes to a game's dependence on things like technology, release dates, bugs/errors, user platforms etc. With so many extra factors it's inevitable that success is harder to reproduce but I still think that's a small part of it.

Either way I think we should put more weight into auteurs and big names on projects but all developers should be encouraged to be more clear and forthcoming about what exact work they have done on a project. Part of the reason we end up with these big name devs who can never "recreate the magic" is because we are attributing things to them that they probably never had a hand in. When an article says something like "X was the director of such games as A and B" everyone will make assumptions about what a "game director" does and suddenly those become accepted facts. But these guys wouldn't get away with taking credit if all the developers on the team were clear about what exact things they worked on.

They only get away with it because no one else is volunteering the information.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

If a developer can consistently put out good games, then he is indeed good dev.

Some of you guys might be saying "it's a team effort", but don't forget the director is ultimately the guy with the final word, the vision and the authority to guide the team.

I like to compare the game director position to that of a army commander. The soldiers might be the ones that fought, but the commander was the one responsible for the results. Some commanders were successful because they had good counselors others because they were actually good at what they do.

So for example like OP said, Spector and Kojimbo. Both of them only made 1 great game in their career's. So I wouldn't consider them good devs. They only either had some good ideas that then the people around them knew how to use or they were just competent in managing a team.

Now let's take some good devs in comparison:

Starting with Hideki Kamiya. This guy hasn't one bad game in his life, despite being in constantly different teams - games such as Devil May Cry, Resident Evil 2, Bayonetta, Okami, Viewtiful Joe (some of them as you can see are not only classics, but also spawned entire new genres). The games he directs are unmistakable his vision, and his vision alone. This is not apparent by the all the development documents and reports, but also by the way the game plays.
Hell, when he was directing Resident Evil 2, there was a point in development he wasn't satisfied what has made so far and so he ordered the team to erase all shit until when because they were starting over.

Shinji Mikami directed Resident Evil, Resident Evil 4, God Hand. In 2002 he went back to his first project as a director's (RE) and improved his vision resulting in the best survival horror game of all time - REmake.

Devil May Cry 2 turns out a piece of shit game because of it's incompetent director. Then Hideaki Itsuno in 2005 directs Devil May Cry 3 which turned out to be the one of the best action games of all time. 7 years after that he directs Dragon's Dogma, a game he had already started working on back in 2002. 7 years after that comes Devil May Cry 5.

Shigeru Miyamoto + Takashi Tezuka: Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bro. 2, Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, Yoshi's Island, Super Mario 64 (still the best 3D platformer ever made), The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Wakening, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.


So in conclusion I do believe the director can have a huge impact on the game he's developing (more than any other member of the project). If that impact is for the best or not, obviously depends on his competence.

 

[J_C]

Nah, the thing is, franchises (and well-known creators) are there to keep old fans interested and to pretend to newbies that there's something of value, it's an illusion that the creators care about their babies. Successors to classics, be it games or movies, are promoted in a way that appeals to the core fan base just enough, while at the same time trying to lure in newbies by dumbing down everything that made the originals interesting in the first place and replacing it with some retarded shit that appeals to everyone (if possible without alienating the core fans too much).

It's all a fucking scam. As soon as something becomes successful, you can bet your life on the sequel/next iteration being a bland imitation of the original—in the best case. More often than not, it's a fucking mockery of what made the original great.

But the worst thing is, the normies will gobble it up and call it the best thing ever.

E: One factor in all of this probably is: people get old, even game designers and directors. They realise that a majority of the audience is retarded, and they decide (or get persuaded by investors) that making some money for a comfortable retirement is more important than producing some high-quality art for a niche audience.

Exactly. Although the old guard is there to make a spiritual successor, but they don't want to make another copy of their old game, they want to modernise it to a new audiance. Of course they say that while doing so, they try to be as faithful as possible to the old games, but that is BS, to make the old fans happy.

But I'm almost sure that these guys still have it in them. If I had 10 million dollars, and told Cain and Boyarsky to make a new Fallout, which looks and plays just like the original, they could do it. Maybe they wouldn't be comfortable with it, because they think that the UI and the system need some upgrade, but if I told them that I only give this money to you, if you make a really old school game, they could do it.

Although one has to consider that while developing this retro Fallout, all the press and the modern audiances would be shitting on them for years, which would be hard on the mentally. Which is another reason while these developers making declined games. The market expects these games from them.

 

[Tehdagah]

I don't know who directed most of my favorite games.

Starting with Hideki Kamiya. This guy hasn't one bad game in his life, despite being in constantly different teams - games such as Devil May Cry, Resident Evil 2, Bayonetta, Okami, Viewtiful Joe (some of them as you can see are not only classics, but also spawned entire new genres). The games he directs are unmistakable his vision, and his vision alone.

I wish people stop pretending Okami is good.