N'Gai Croal
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Nov 15, 2007 12:15 AM
The Atari 2600 Video Computer System controller
In last week's debut of the Monday Morning Quarterback Highlight Reel, we cited some insightful comments made by Bill Harris over at the blog Dubious Quality. We first became aware of Harris' blog during the February DICE conference, where a longtime Nintendo employee suggested that we check it out, which we did. Soon thereafter, Dubious Quality became an essential addition to our RSS newsreader for the smart and often caustic assessments of the business of videogames and the personalities behind it as delivered by the 46-year-old Austin, Texas-based analyst. [Note: Harris--whose all-time favorite games include Guitar Hero II, Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly (Director’s Cut) and Ultima IV--does not cover the videogame industry professionally.]
After reading Harris' alternative explanation of why the critically maligned Carnival Games had become a hit--a "fundamental disconnect between how the people who review Wii games play them and how everyone else plays them"--we asked him to expand on his remarks for our guest post series P2P. He agreed, and the resulting essay is a thoughtful look at how Street Fighter II kicked off an evolutionary path for videogame controllers that has contributed to the shrinking of the industry's reach, and why the Wii remote and nunchuk--even as the games built around them continue to confound the critical establishment--are beacons of hope for a stagnant medium. An excerpt:
If you’re wondering if I can actually remember what it was like when Street Fighter II came out, here’s your answer: hell, yes. Nobody who went to arcades in that era could possibly forget, because it was a thermonuclear blast. There was no reason to have any other machine in the arcade, really. There was a seething mass of kids around the Street Fighter II machine from the minute the arcade opened until it closed eleven hours later. And they poured in quarter after quarter after quarter for eleven hours straight. Every single day. At one point, I believe the arcade at Northcross had three Street Fighter II machines, and they were still being played all day, every day.
With the success of that one game, I believe game design philosophy went from accessibility to complexity. The definition of play changed entirely. There was just way too much money being made to ignore.
Street Fighter II, in the video gaming world, was a disruptive technology.
There was a momentous shift in terms of how developers approached the gaming demographic. Street Fighter II went deep instead of wide--it drilled down into that 14 percent instead of trying to broaden it. It drilled way, way down. Street Fighter II didn’t convert a bunch of non-gamers--it just made the gamers who were already playing spend a hell of a lot more money.
To read Harris' post in its entirety, click on the link below.
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