Maes
I like big butts!
Posts: 8662
Registered: 07-06 |
Many people ITT mentioned:
Nostalgia goggles
While there's certainly a degree of truth in that, it's also true that the video game industry as a whole has went through highs and lows in the course of three decades, and we're right in the middle of one.
There were several "golden ages" where there was plenty of technical innovations combined with gameplay enhancements or new types of gameplay not previously possible (e.g. it would not be possible to program a NEO-GEO quality fighting game or something with the action of Metal Slug on late 70s hardware, or a texture mapped FPS game on 80s home computers), and there were period of stagnation where no new genres were introduced and most games looked the same because they tried to capitalize on a few particular concepts or tropes that proved lucrative once or twice, but then got beaten to death with a stick.
In mild cases, you'd get something like the flood of arcade and console 16-bit brawling and platform games of the late 80s/early 90s. In extreme cases, you'd get something like the 80s video game market crash, or like the early 90s FMV/"interactive multimedia games" fiasco. So, nostalgia goggles or not, there definitively were and will be "dry spells" in the industry where you'd get more of the same, or where a not particularly entertaining trope was shoved into your face again and again (in the case of "FMV interactive multimedia", the relative ease of developing such "games" with authoring software rather than real programming was the main culprit).
If e.g. Doom didn't come along on PC compatibles to stimulate development and competition, we'd have probably waded through the 90s with mediocre ports of Amiga and console platform games, FMV/"multimedia" tripe or with polygon-based 3D games until Windows 95 drove the power-to-performance ratio (and the entry barrier for half-assed developers) even lower.
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11-06-11 18:36 
