It's the nostalgia, isn't it?
Ah, the days of Bloom County, having an hour and a half between school and supper, and those monster arcades on the New Jersey boardwalk. So, yes, somewhat. But there are also people who wistfully remember He-Man and that Nintendo robo-buddy thing and GI Joe accessories, and, well, it's easy to become pathetic.
So what other reason is there besides nostalgia?
At one time I wanted to be a cartoonist, then a writer. Then I got into programming games. In 1982 all of these endeavors had much in common; they all fit the "lone creative lunatic building things" mold. Only game design didn't stay that way.
Um, where is this going?
When Jordan Mechner created Karateka entirely out of his own mindstuff, or when I played a stunnngly different game like Necromancer with only a solitary credit on the title screen--ah, perfection. A new medium. Raw creation. There was a connection between the author and his work that hooked me. I care who writes the books I read, but I don't care who puts the fizzies in my Dr. Pepper.
Okay, but thousands of games have been written since then. They have longer credits, but does that matter?
Sure it matters. If someone gave me a few millions dollars and told me to write a game that would earn back that development cost and then some, I'd be worried about trying something different. It would be hard not to stick closely to a game in an established genre and just try to do a better job of it. The risk would be immense otherwise.
And this bothers you?
No. What bothers me is that garage game developers who have all the freedom in world to do something wild and different seem to have lost all desire to be creative. Search out web sites of people writing games as a hobby, and you'll find endless variations of Breakout, "worm gets longer" games, Tetris, aborted attempts to outdo Quake, and retro remakes of favorite Commodore 64 titles. I realize this sounds overly negative, but I'm always looking, and I'm not finding anything. Nothing. There should be clones, yes, but there should be hundreds of easy examples of quirkier designs. linuxgames.com is a case in point. What a wonderful platform for a game designer Linux is. Not only is the slate practically clean, but anything that you do is guaranteed to get mentioned on web sites like linuxgames.com and others. But all you see are variarions of Asteroids, Tetris, blah, blah, blah. Why is this? Some people should want to go their own way, but it isn't happening.
You're living in a dream world.
Why? In the music world, there are always bands doing their own strange things, not wanting to keep reliving the glory days of music from ten years ago. Some of them eventually get recording contracts and get that wonderful adjective "underground" assigned to them before finally (or maybe never) hitting it big. Look at acts like Cake, Laura Love, Donna the Buffalo, Chemical Brothers, Anders Osborne. I have CDs or cassettes from local musicians like Amber Tide, Dave Conant & The D-Rangers, Tim Keller, Wolfie, and Josh Alan. Support local music!
Games, man, talk about games!
Didn't I already?
Uh, you're lamenting the lack of a garage game scene?
Yup. But as there isn't one, I can revel in the days when there was such a thing. And, like I said before, there's certainly some nostalgia.
You're crazy.
Birdies! I see the pretty birdies!
So how long are you going to keep working on the Giant List?
That's a good question. I keep thinking that fully documenting the classic era is within sight, and then I realize how far away I am. I ran into someone recently with his own database of 2000+ Spectrum game programmers, and at least half of those aren't on my list. I could keep at it forever. But at some point I'll need to say "That's it!" and move on to something else. But I'm still having fun right now.