Incline Chris Avellone Appreciation Station

[Trashos]

She's a bisexual chick that writes BDSM sex books..

So, is she available or what?

 

[Ninjerk]

Bah, when I was young of course. I was a nerd playing CRPGS on his C64. I formed a band to get some girls. But now I'm 45, it's been a long time since I don't give a damn about glory, pussy or money.
It just seems to me that the video game industry is quite weird: it generates more money than the music industry or Hollywood, but at the same time, their best creators are absolutely down played. I find it great that way, but also find it a bit sad.

Weird stuff aside, you're right about developers being downplayed in the industry. That's deliberate. The last thing publishers want is for their employees to become celebrities, otherwise they'd have to pay them a lot more and give them more authority.
Film and music industries are driven by personalities, which they also try to create all the time. A shitload of people working behind the scenes, of course, just like games, but the names make the difference.

A virtual world has its perks. As long as the game is good, it makes no difference to the average player if the whole team changed during development or in a sequel. In contrast, Robert Downey Jr. has a lot more leverage when negotiating his salary with Disney to play Iron Man, and replacing him could hurt their business.
In the video game industry, everytime you let a dev become a celebrity you could have a Kojima situation down the road. Even MCA, though in a smaller scale, caused an uproar.

This is one good thing about the Kickstarter trend. Celebrity devs are more than welcome.

I think it would be significantly harder to downplay e.g. Robert Downey Jr. because his impact on the quality of the product is immediately obvious early into the movie in a way that with developers isn't necessarily so.

 

[Fairfax]

Bah, when I was young of course. I was a nerd playing CRPGS on his C64. I formed a band to get some girls. But now I'm 45, it's been a long time since I don't give a damn about glory, pussy or money.
It just seems to me that the video game industry is quite weird: it generates more money than the music industry or Hollywood, but at the same time, their best creators are absolutely down played. I find it great that way, but also find it a bit sad.

Weird stuff aside, you're right about developers being downplayed in the industry. That's deliberate. The last thing publishers want is for their employees to become celebrities, otherwise they'd have to pay them a lot more and give them more authority.
Film and music industries are driven by personalities, which they also try to create all the time. A shitload of people working behind the scenes, of course, just like games, but the names make the difference.

A virtual world has its perks. As long as the game is good, it makes no difference to the average player if the whole team changed during development or in a sequel. In contrast, Robert Downey Jr. has a lot more leverage when negotiating his salary with Disney to play Iron Man, and replacing him could hurt their business.
In the video game industry, everytime you let a dev become a celebrity you could have a Kojima situation down the road. Even MCA, though in a smaller scale, caused an uproar.

This is one good thing about the Kickstarter trend. Celebrity devs are more than welcome.

I think it would be significantly harder to downplay e.g. Robert Downey Jr. because his impact on the quality of the product is immediately obvious early into the movie in a way that with developers isn't necessarily so.

Indeed. To know a speciif game developer's input usually needs research. Much like the discussions in this thread and the Codex in general.
Even people who look for these things can get the wrong idea, though. MCA clarifies all the time on his twitter that he didn't write much for FNV (base game), for example. Others think Inafune created Mega Man, or that Sid Meier still makes Civilization games.

 

[Prime Junta]

She's a bisexual chick that writes BDSM sex books..

So, is she available or what?

I believe she's poly, which would make it a yes.

 

[Beautiful Clown Painting]

If great writers or designers such as Paul Neurath, Warren Spector, Neil Halford, Tim Cain or MCA (...) were pushed in front for the genius of their vision, the quality of the games would improve, and so would the industry in its whole.
Instead of that, they're treated like hacks and forced at some times to work on shitty mobile casual games. Somehow, it's really depressing. But it was also like that in the movie industry in the beginning of the twentieth century, so hopefully, things will change.

 

[Immortal]

She's a bisexual chick that writes BDSM sex books..

So, is she available or what?

I believe she's poly, which would make it a yes.

Poly doesn't mean desperate...

 

[Excidium II]

If great writers or designers such as Paul Neurath, Warren Spector, Neil Halford, Tim Cain or MCA (...) were pushed in front for the genius of their vision, the quality of the games would improve, and so would the industry in its whole.
Instead of that, they're treated like hacks and forced at some times to work on shitty mobile casual games. Somehow, it's really depressing. But it was also like that in the movie industry in the beginning of the twentieth century, so hopefully, things will change.

They still manage to get all credit from projects that resulted from the efforts of a whole damn lot of people.

Fans and media have that tendency to pretend games were made by a single genius. Then they go to kickstarter, crowdfund a piece of shit and people wonder wtf was that about.

 

[Beautiful Clown Painting]

It's the same thing in every art form that requires a team work.
I really think that if MCA would be put in front of the gamebox (even if in reality, it's a team work) like Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, the games would be better.

 

[pippin]

That would be cute if games were art. But they aren't. Games aren't just pretty pictures. What defines a game is the mental operations you make to solve problems, compete against opponents, etc. That is, the games' rules and systems. That's why we have chess and checkers when they are, apparently, the same game. You need something to tell each game apart, and that's only related to the internal rules of said game. The relevance given to the secondary aspects of videogames, like music or graphics, are only an effect of the process of normalization that happened after games started becoming popular. People who weren't there at the beginning find it hard to relate to games if they aren't presented in a way they can accept as normal.

 

[Jasede]

So you're saying games don't contain music (a form of art,) 3D models (a form of art,) writing (a form of art,) or voice acting (a form of art?)

Or are you saying that a product that, in addition of what you listed, music, 3D models / graphics, writing and voice acting, which are all without doubt art, is, somehow, through some odd magic, not art?

Doesn't make a lick of sense.

I mean, I get what you are saying - but games now aren't games back then. Games now have certain merit. Some have music that's certainly more artful than mainstream pop. Others have beautiful artwork. Others are written well or tell engaging stories. Sure, this might just be window-dressing...

But it's art all the same.

Like it or not, games are more now than just their mechanics and systems.



Here, I got a good analogy:

Imagine your own argument about chess and checkers.

So if I make an ivory chess set made by some master craftsman, is that not art? Sure, I get your point: the -game- itself is still not art, just the medium. But is the difference really that important? When people say X is art they don't mean all of X, they refer to the part that is artful. Sometime that's all the parts, often it's not.

Games are craftsmanship, and like making a table or forming clay, that, too, is art.

 

[MRY]

The relevance given to the secondary aspects of videogames, like music or graphics, are only an effect of the process of normalization that happened after games started becoming popular. People who weren't there at the beginning find it hard to relate to games if they aren't presented in a way they can accept as normal.

I don't know when "games started becoming popular" in your view of history, but the quality of graphics and, to a lesser degree, audio has been discussed from at least the 1980s forward. For example, check out this article comparing the consoles in 1982 (what a great name is "Randi Hacker"!). It talks extensively, almost exclusively, about graphics, especially when discussing the shortcomings of the console Pacman clone. Just scroll back to the start of the magazine and you'll also see that the first ad, for Star Strike, describes it as an "exciting new space game complete with brilliant colors, gripping tensions, and special effects so realistic they appear three-dimensional. . . . [C]ompare it to other space games. We think you'll agree that color, excitement, and special effects make Star Strike the clear winner." Similarly, if you flip through the first issue of Eletronic Games magazine, you can find an ad for Intellivision's console, which starts: "It's obvious how much more realistic Intellevision graphics are [than Atari's]. But take a closer look. Notice the Intellevision players. They've got arms and legs like real players do. Look at the field. It actually looks like a real baseball field. If you compaer the two games, I think you'll find that Intellivision looks a lot more like the real thing." The remainder of the ad also talks about gameplay, but graphics are the lede.

Obviously, there's a problem here which is that there's no way to figure out what people thought about games without a record like a magazine to inform us; but a video games magazine will exist only "after gaming started becoming popular" because, otherwise, there'd be no market for such a magazine. That said, if you read about the development of, say, Spacewar!, it's clear they cared a lot about graphics even then (i.e., the 1960s). From the very beginning, creating graphics was such a technical challenge that it was important in its own right (if you're old enough to remember the demoscene, you'll be familiar with this). So when gamers were primarily hackers/nerds, the trickery required for graphics was itself something to be impressed by from an engineering standpoint. Thus, I'd be very surprised if you could actually find a time when gamers didn't care about music or graphics.

I think there's a degree of, ahh, I don't know the right word -- but maybe like "confusion of perspective." Looking at the graphics of older games from the standpoint of today, they look horrible, so you might infer that people didn't care much about graphics back then. "They cared about gameplay!" But at the time, those graphics were actually achievements on par with whatever the CryEngine can put out, and people cared about them enormously. And there were many games with shit gameplay that nevertheless moved units based on impressive audiovisuals (like Cinemaware titles).

 

[Excidium II]

There's less care for grafics, if anything. Multiplatform focus killed this idea of videogames being state of the art of computer technology.

 

[Beautiful Clown Painting]

And let's not forget the genius Philip Price who was crushed by the industry:
http://www.usgamer.net/articles/origins-of-the-open-world-alternate-reality

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

If great writers or designers such as Paul Neurath, Warren Spector, Neil Halford, Tim Cain or MCA (...) were pushed in front for the genius of their vision, the quality of the games would improve, and so would the industry in its whole.
Instead of that, they're treated like hacks and forced at some times to work on shitty mobile casual games. Somehow, it's really depressing. But it was also like that in the movie industry in the beginning of the twentieth century, so hopefully, things will change.

It's the same thing in every art form that requires a team work.
I really think that if MCA would be put in front of the gamebox (even if in reality, it's a team work) like Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, the games would be better.

In the 1980s, individual game designers frequently were promoted to the gaming public as the face of the games they developed. Publisher Electronic Arts, for example, created a record sleeve-style game package that included photos of the developers as if they were rock stars, and also published advertisements touting developers in connection with their games. Microprose would eventually attach the name of its star designer/programmer, Sid Meier, to the title of every game he worked on. As games have become larger in terms of budgets and the number of people working on them, this sort of star treatment has faded away.

 

[pippin]

So you're saying games don't contain music (a form of art,) 3D models (a form of art,) writing (a form of art,) or voice acting (a form of art?)

Or are you saying that a product that, in addition of what you listed, music, 3D models / graphics, writing and voice acting, which are all without doubt art, is, somehow, through some odd magic, not art?

Doesn't make a lick of sense.

I mean, I get what you are saying - but games now aren't games back then. Games now have certain merit. Some have music that's certainly more artful than mainstream pop. Others have beautiful artwork. Others are written well or tell engaging stories. Sure, this might just be window-dressing...

But it's art all the same.

Like it or not, games are more now than just their mechanics and systems.



Here, I got a good analogy:

Imagine your own argument about chess and checkers.

So if I make an ivory chess set made by some master craftsman, is that not art? Sure, I get your point: the -game- itself is still not art, just the medium. But is the difference really that important? When people say X is art they don't mean all of X, they refer to the part that is artful. Sometime that's all the parts, often it's not.

Games are craftsmanship, and like making a table or forming clay, that, too, is art.

A piece of chess made of ivory and gold made by a master craftsman has the same function than a piece of chess made of wood by me. On their own, signs have little to no meaning. However, they must be understood in context and this is where they have a certain value. It's like a rubik cube, you'd expect that painting the sides would be something you could understand as "art", but its true goal is to serve as a reference which adjust itself to the rules of the game. Even in other areas accepted as art, like music, painting or even video, the people creating content knows there's ways to manipulate the viewer's perception of the final product. There are colors, chords, and takes that are made with the explicit purpose of creating an emotional answer in your brain, and that's why successful art often follows certain patterns, but the pieces on their own don't have a proper meaning. Besides, the main objective of art is contemplation and observation, while in games, the main objective is interaction and problem solving. A game having art is not the same than games being art. That's why the development of games is known as "game design",really, because no matter how beautiful this piece of art is, if we put it in our game we need it to be useful when it comes to the general gaming experience.

I understand what you're saying, and I don't necessarily disagree, but I feel that's the excuse non-game makers and corridor designers use to justify the value of their games. From the top of my head I can remember games like Mass Effect or Bioshock Infinite where you had to push a button to look at what was happening, and they had to do it because the gameplay was getting in the way of the "art", that is, they made the game to do A, but in order to experience the art you had to do B and this wasn't a natural answer. In the end people still goes back to games with actual gameplay instead of the usual artsy excuse which ends up being more like a "look at me!" kinda thing, which is making today's games so dull. On the other hand, I think the usual hipster pixelart gaming crap with its supposedly "retro" style are an attempt to recreate this, the sort of illusion that tells you to buy the game because it looks like the stuff you used to play before, but I think people are slowly getting to a point where they just don't care about certain stuff, like having great art or big marketing campaigns with big trailers and shit, when the game is just another run of the mill kinda stuff. Fallout 4 wasn't the only game to be received with a kinda bland reaction recently, it was def. not in the way the marketing makes you want to believe. I might be talking out of my ass, which is something I usually do, but these kind of reactions might become more common in the future.

The relevance given to the secondary aspects of videogames, like music or graphics, are only an effect of the process of normalization that happened after games started becoming popular. People who weren't there at the beginning find it hard to relate to games if they aren't presented in a way they can accept as normal.

I don't know when "games started becoming popular" in your view of history, but the quality of graphics and, to a lesser degree, audio has been discussed from at least the 1980s forward. For example, check out this article comparing the consoles in 1982 (what a great name is "Randi Hacker"!). It talks extensively, almost exclusively, about graphics, especially when discussing the shortcomings of the console Pacman clone. Just scroll back to the start of the magazine and you'll also see that the first ad, for Star Strike, describes it as an "exciting new space game complete with brilliant colors, gripping tensions, and special effects so realistic they appear three-dimensional. . . . [C]ompare it to other space games. We think you'll agree that color, excitement, and special effects make Star Strike the clear winner." Similarly, if you flip through the first issue of Eletronic Games magazine, you can find an ad for Intellivision's console, which starts: "It's obvious how much more realistic Intellevision graphics are [than Atari's]. But take a closer look. Notice the Intellevision players. They've got arms and legs like real players do. Look at the field. It actually looks like a real baseball field. If you compaer the two games, I think you'll find that Intellivision looks a lot more like the real thing." The remainder of the ad also talks about gameplay, but graphics are the lede.

Obviously, there's a problem here which is that there's no way to figure out what people thought about games without a record like a magazine to inform us; but a video games magazine will exist only "after gaming started becoming popular" because, otherwise, there'd be no market for such a magazine. That said, if you read about the development of, say, Spacewar!, it's clear they cared a lot about graphics even then (i.e., the 1960s). From the very beginning, creating graphics was such a technical challenge that it was important in its own right (if you're old enough to remember the demoscene, you'll be familiar with this). So when gamers were primarily hackers/nerds, the trickery required for graphics was itself something to be impressed by from an engineering standpoint. Thus, I'd be very surprised if you could actually find a time when gamers didn't care about music or graphics.

I think there's a degree of, ahh, I don't know the right word -- but maybe like "confusion of perspective." Looking at the graphics of older games from the standpoint of today, they look horrible, so you might infer that people didn't care much about graphics back then. "They cared about gameplay!" But at the time, those graphics were actually achievements on par with whatever the CryEngine can put out, and people cared about them enormously. And there were many games with shit gameplay that nevertheless moved units based on impressive audiovisuals (like Cinemaware titles).

What you are saying is true. My uncle owns a book on computer games dealing with programs of the 80s. But media is something really sketchy, especially in the entertainmet business, since there's always a big chance that people was bribed to sell you stuff in a certain manner. However, and while the graphics battle was always something to consider, I'd say games still had lots of substance to them as actual games with systems and stuff like that. I think gaming stopped being something of an underground hobby by the mid 90s, when computers and consoles really started to collide instead of being two separate entities. I particularly remember how people thought stuff seen on consoles was too advanced for computers or something like that, and for a moment it was true, but it was also true that games for both systems were also different. After all, you had to reconcile the logic of a system that used a few buttons against another that allowed to use the keyboard and the mouse as primary sources of input. That means you have to design games where one side does not get as fucked as the other when it comes to reactivity, and that's why games won't "go further" if they keep doing the multiplatform stuff. Graphics being limited, as Excidium says, is not the only issue here. In fact, it can be a problem, especially if you do photorealism: dating something to this day makes it outdated tomorrow. That's why people are still drawn to the cartoonish style of WoW but chuckle at games that were "realistic" 15 years ago.


Sorry if I rambled too much, but even though I'm interested in this kind of subject, I def. not have enough knowledge about it, especially from a tech perspective. This is what I feel as a player, mostly.

 

[MRY]

I think that something happened to the game industry in the 80s/90s -- but figuring out what exactly it is, and how it happened, is tricky, especially because naturally our nostalgia and elitism distort recollections.

For example, I was prepared to go on a rant about days when guys like Mike Singleton or Jordan Mechner or Richard Garriott or Sid Meier or the Williamses or the Murrys had these fantastical visions that they built with these amazing feats of coding, not to mention polymathematic skills where they not only coded under impossible limitations but also designed brand-new genres, created great visuals, etc. But to be honest, is that really so different from what Notch did with Minecraft or Derek Yu did with Spelunky or the Yavuzes did on Mount and Blade or random mapmakers did in creating DOTA for Warcraft III? The truth is, there's actually still quite a bit of utterly implausible feats being pulled off by small developers all the time.

Still, even if I try to convince myself of that, it still seems to me that there was something different back then -- more experimentation, more ambition, maybe. Maybe just so many barriers to entry that designers were much more likely to be super-high-IQ eccentrics rather than ordinary folks. Hard to say. I don't think it's so much that customers' tastes become more decadent, though. People always loved cutting edge audiovisuals, nice interfaces, "cinematic" experiences, "realism" and so forth. The difference (I think?) is that as storage media got way bigger, it became practical to have larger teams making larger games -- a couple smart guys could make the best graphics in the industry back in the 1980s: hell, all it took for Mechner to pull it off was a rented videocamera and some clever tricks. Nowadays that's just not possible any more. Pushing the graphical envelope requires a bigger team and a bigger budget, and, as I noted in another thread, once size gets past a certain point, "eccentric genius control-freak" goes from an asset to a liability. In some ways, the miracle is not that Garriott made the older Ultimas largely by himself but that anyone could suffer under him to make the later Ultimas as a team. :D

 

[Beautiful Clown Painting]

The problem is that video games became a huge industry, in the eighties they were already guys like Ocean in the UK who harassed coders and artists, it was already driven by greed (the guy who coded Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy became mad because of that), but now it's blown out of proportions, it has become the entertainment industry which generates the more money, and everybody plays video games. Even some movies tend to adopt the codes of video games.
If there was a politic of authors, the level would be higher, as for now, it's catering to the lowest denominator.

 

[Beautiful Clown Painting]

I'll repeat what I said before: by being a micro-celebrity in the rock'n'roll business in Paris, I have access to a lot of girls that are incredible, much more than Avelonne, it seems (but then I don't know, perhaps they are his friends).
And he's the greatest writer in a huge industry. That's not normal. Great artists should have access to social perks because they bleed themselves to death.

 

[Jaesun]

Games became business, instead of a passion for making great games.

 

[MRY]

"The problem is that video games became a huge industry."

It was a big business even back in the 70s and 80s. In that Electronic Games magazine issue I linked to, it claimed that Space Invaders had made $600M in Japan alone. Another article claims $600M a year. Both of those numbers seem impossible to me -- possibly a confusion of yen and dollars. If it's true, though, we're talking about $2.3 billion in today's dollars, off one arcade game. Many Atari games sold millions of copies (Pac-Man sold 7 million). Zork sold a million copies, and Simon & Schuster offered to buy Infocom for $28M (declined) in 1984. That's $65M in today's money.

[EDIT: Wow, maybe the $600M a year figure is possible. Per Wikipedia, Space Invaders grossed $2.7B (unadjusted), Pac-Man $2.5B, Asteroids $800M. "By 1981, the arcade industry was worth $8B ($20.8B in 2016)."

 

[Jaesun]

Troika was passionate about making good cRPG's (they sucked at being a business). Obsidian does good business and continues to make games.

 

[Fairfax]

I think that something happened to the game industry in the 80s/90s -- but figuring out what exactly it is, and how it happened, is tricky, especially because naturally our nostalgia and elitism distort recollections.

For example, I was prepared to go on a rant about days when guys like Mike Singleton or Jordan Mechner or Richard Garriott or Sid Meier or the Williamses or the Murrys had these fantastical visions that they built with these amazing feats of coding, not to mention polymathematic skills where they not only coded under impossible limitations but also designed brand-new genres, created great visuals, etc. But to be honest, is that really so different from what Notch did with Minecraft or Derek Yu did with Spelunky or the Yavuzes did on Mount and Blade or random mapmakers did in creating DOTA for Warcraft III? The truth is, there's actually still quite a bit of utterly implausible feats being pulled off by small developers all the time.

Still, even if I try to convince myself of that, it still seems to me that there was something different back then -- more experimentation, more ambition, maybe. Maybe just so many barriers to entry that designers were much more likely to be super-high-IQ eccentrics rather than ordinary folks. Hard to say. I don't think it's so much that customers' tastes become more decadent, though. People always loved cutting edge audiovisuals, nice interfaces, "cinematic" experiences, "realism" and so forth. The difference (I think?) is that as storage media got way bigger, it became practical to have larger teams making larger games -- a couple smart guys could make the best graphics in the industry back in the 1980s: hell, all it took for Mechner to pull it off was a rented videocamera and some clever tricks. Nowadays that's just not possible any more. Pushing the graphical envelope requires a bigger team and a bigger budget, and, as I noted in another thread, once size gets past a certain point, "eccentric genius control-freak" goes from an asset to a liability. In some ways, the miracle is not that Garriott made the older Ultimas largely by himself but that anyone could suffer under him to make the later Ultimas as a team. :D

My two cents:
1. It took less time to make experiments, which means they were cheaper. Cheaper experiments are easier to pitch.
2. The market had a shitload of small and mid-sized publishers. They couldn't compete by simply doing what everyone else was doing, they had to stand out somehow.
3. Game development was not mainstream and required knowledge that wasn't easy to access, which is why I think we got the eccentric geniuses you mention.
4. Cutting edge games were relatively cheaper and developed faster than they are today. This allowed devs to make "AAA" games that still managed to experiment and break new ground. The other advantage is that other studios can pick up on trends much faster.

The post-Wolfenstein/Doom period really caught my eye when I read about it. The rate at which devs made progress in the genre was astounding when compared to modern games.
Doom came out on December 10, 1993. By December 1994 we had Descent, which added six degrees of freedom, (almost) full 3D graphics and advanced lighting. Marathon came out in the same month, with a bigger focus on storytelling and adding freelook, dual-wielding and alt-fire modes. In February 1995 there was Dark Forces, which featured cutscenes, crouching, platforming, etc.
June 1996 Quake comes out and kills the sprite-based FPS. Less than 4 years after Wolfenstein and Ultima Underworld and the genre was completely different already.

I think WoW is a good example on the opposite end. Huge hit in 2004, many major publishers decide they want a piece of that pie. The most ambitious WoW clone was TOR, which took 5 years to make and was released 7 years after WoW. Not to mention it was the most expensive game ever at that point. TESO, the other major competitor, was started in 2007 and released in 2014, a full decade late. By the time it came out the subscription-based business model was already dying and WoW was in decline.

The 90s had the best of both worlds, because the more creative and experimental projects were still on par with the big hits, so they were more accessible. It had some things that won't happen again anytime soon.
To use MCA as an example: which modern publisher would give 2 years, free rein and 50 people to a young developer so he could lead an ambitious narrative-driven PC-exclusive RPG based on a cult D&D setting? That's without considering the right proportions. A game that could be to 2015 what PS:T was to 1999 would need at least twice the money and the team size. If it sold the same ~400k, the young director would probably get fired or demoted.

A game doesn't have to be pretty and have AAA production values to be just as good today, I know. I'm also aware that it's easier than ever to make or modify a game nowadays. However, games back then had both things going for them, a luxury 2016 indie games don't have.
On one hand, the small and mid-sized publisher graveyard doesn't help. On the other hand, the industry has changed in positive ways, too. We have crowdfunding and digital distribution, so who knows...

 

[Hobo Elf]

Troika was passionate about making good cRPG's (they sucked at being a business). Obsidian does good business and continues to make games.

I wouldn't say Obsidian is good at doing business since they are always hanging by a thread when transitioning from one project to another. They're good at surviving, though. And they are the dindu darlings of the RPG community.

 

[Curious_Tongue]

"The problem is that video games became a huge industry."

It was a big business even back in the 70s and 80s. In that Electronic Games magazine issue I linked to, it claimed that Space Invaders had made $600M in Japan alone. Another article claims $600M a year. Both of those numbers seem impossible to me -- possibly a confusion of yen and dollars. If it's true, though, we're talking about $2.3 billion in today's dollars, off one arcade game. Many Atari games sold millions of copies (Pac-Man sold 7 million). Zork sold a million copies, and Simon & Schuster offered to buy Infocom for $28M (declined) in 1984. That's $65M in today's money.

[EDIT: Wow, maybe the $600M a year figure is possible. Per Wikipedia, Space Invaders grossed $2.7B (unadjusted), Pac-Man $2.5B, Asteroids $800M. "By 1981, the arcade industry was worth $8B ($20.8B in 2016)."

I think there's a Matt Chat video with an Atari guy about how much more popular casual gaming was back in those days.

 

[Duraframe300]

Troika was passionate about making good cRPG's (they sucked at being a business). Obsidian does good business and continues to make games.

I wouldn't say Obsidian is good at doing business since they are always hanging by a thread when transitioning from one project to another. They're good at surviving, though. And they are the dindu darlings of the RPG community.

I'm not sure they're in as bad a position anymore. If something big happened they probably would have to downsize again, but it wouldn't be as life threatening.