Miyamotos at it again. Weve just seen the Revolution controller propaganda that Iwata-san screened at this years TGS. And now, heres Shiggy at the podium, wrapping up his presentation and talking about all the possibilities the remote control offers.
you could use that extra peripheral with the controller for numchukus, he says, gesturing. I feel like Ive heard this sale a million times now. Yes, numchukus, cool for FPS, cooking games, I got it.
Theres another secret, he says. I perk up. But Im not going to go into that here. Thatll be for a later date.
He sweeps into an abrupt closing and before I know it the gaming legend is off the stage. A picture of Mario flashes on the screen. A polite arigatou gozaimashita is written below.
No Shiggy, thank you.
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DIEC: Ataris Founder Slams Sony, Praises Nintendo
That slides not right. It shouldnt read 100 megabytes, Nolan Bushnell says. We didnt have 100 megabytes back then.
He should know. Hailed as The Father of Video Games, Bushnell is responsible for taking Pong to the masses. And unlike today, he didnt have the luxury of endless memory and oodles of polygons that young game developers take as a given.
The first element of design is timing.
Timing seems to be something he knows well. Bushnell helped spearhead the gaming boom of the 1970s and early 80s, making a mint and getting out right before business got bad. Bushnell instead got into the restaurant business, creating Chuck E. Cheese, cashing in on pizza and arcade games.
The second element is clear objectives.
He comes off more as a businessman than a pure designer or developer. He even brings graphs and charts to show which market segments could be exploited today. In 1982, he tells us, there were 44 million gamers. Today, there are 18 million. Whered they all go? Complexity lost the casual gamer, he says. Violence lost the woman gamer. He ventures into Nintendo territory, even slamming the PS2 controller.
The 3D controller that Nintendo is onto is a very good idea, he says. If you look at todays controller with triangles, Xs, squares and circles, its scary. Its like a keyboard. People are interface phobic.
The third element is predictability.
All I could read was machinma. Bushnell skips the slide before I even have a chance to register the rest of it. This isnt very interesting, he says. Instead, he finishes up his speech with a slide of his latest business venture: uWink. The Father of Gaming is getting in the dating industry. Hes planned a series of pizzerias that have simple tabletop games, which supposedly open up communication between the sexes. The idea itself is intriguing, but I fear that its a case of something looking better on paper than in practice. I guarantee you if I can help guys meet girls, I will make a lot of money, he says. He wraps up his speech and exits the stage to thunderous applause, while I check my watch to see if hes gone over his allotted speech time. It seems he has.
