Ah, Sierra On-Line. I spent innumerable hours as a kid playing all the Kings Quest games. (My uncle also gave me a copy of Leisure Suit Larry but let's not dwell on that).
It makes me sad to consider that the old Sierra games don't seem to inspire modern game makers any more. Everything is so "instant revenue" focused. These old games referenced all kinds of interesting literature and movies.
Nowadays, it's all just blood and gore. I may be in a camp of one, but that makes me sorta sad.
Sorry, let me clarify: everything even remotely mainstream is blood and gore. Or, if it's not totally blood and gore, it's been dumbed down significantly to appeal to the masses.
Good list of games, but...
- Sam and Max is cheating because it was conceived during the Golden Age. (One of my all-time favorites).
- Plants vs. Zombies is great game, but doesn't do much to broaden my horizons. And it definitely has a focus on fighting. That said, one of my all-time favorite games is the original XCOM. You really had to think hard to play that game. Had great atmosphere as well.
- Machinarium...okay, it's a great game and currently installed on my machine.
- Minecraft: also a good game that's doing something innovative.
However! None of these games (as far as I know) appeal to a big mainstream audience. I really doubt we'll see Zynga, Blizzard or EA doing anything like these games in the near future. Maybe EA would.
But I'm glad to know that I'm not in a camp of one. :)
Does it matter that non of Sierra's games would appeal to a 'mainstream audience', either? Back then, the audience was different. I'm not sure there were enough of us to even call us 'mainstream', even.
Now, everyone under the sun is playing games. There are more gore-only gamers now than there were total gamers back then.
There are still plenty of games in the style of Sierra's... It's just that that same limited audience isn't the loudest voice any more.
It's worth mentioning that Minecraft has over 15 million registered players and almost 4 million sales, and it isn't even out yet. That's way better than a whole lot of "mainstream" games do.
The market is there, and the landscape is shifting. The reason $60 AAA titles from giant monoliths all feel like they're imitating each other is that they don't know how to do anything else. But small, innovative developers are finding a lot of success.
As someone who loves the indie scene, it's hard for me to think of a better time to have been a gamer, and I too have been playing since the days of 5.25 floppies.
Wow, don't recall Mystery House but definitely remember the era of small-self-publishers, diskettes-in-ziploc-bags.
And I recall being stuck in some later Sierra On-line game – by then with color hi-res graphics, but still vector drawn slowly on the screen as if retracing an artist's lines and texture-fills – where I had to throw a rock at some cobra.
And I recall a similar crude black-and-white hi-res mode game, Richard "Lord British" Garriott's Akalabeth, which begat Ultima and the Origin empire. Check out the screencaps:
It makes me sad to consider that the old Sierra games don't seem to inspire modern game makers any more. Everything is so "instant revenue" focused. These old games referenced all kinds of interesting literature and movies.
Nowadays, it's all just blood and gore. I may be in a camp of one, but that makes me sorta sad.