Has Nintendo Set The Stage

For the crash of '83 to repeat itself???????


Once upon a time, there was a game called Sim City. It had no story, no score, no rewards, and no win conditions. Game publishers were so uncertain how it would be received that its creator struggled to bring it to market for four years. When it was finally released in 1989, it was often described in interviews as a "software toy." In other words, it was so casual that the people behind it actually hesitated to call it a game.

Yet Sim City not only made a pile of money...
Sim City not only won a whole truckload of awards...
Sim City not only spawned a series of successful sequels...
Sim City not only launched an entirely new genre of games...

Sim City actually changed the way a lot of us thought about games. After Sim City, beating a game meant more than just escaping from Castle Wolfenstein or making Ma Tsu with the Elder Brother Wu exploit -- it meant deconstructing a game and seeking to master its hidden rules and patterns.

Turned out Sim City was about as hardcore as it gets.

The moral of the story is that nobody, and especially not anybody in the gaming industry, knows the difference between casual and hardcore games. Thus, it's entirely possible that The Next Big Thing (or, failing that, at least a few diamonds in the rough) will emerge from the industry's current fascination with casual games. However dismaying the minigame collections and My Little Pony expansion packs might seem, in the grand scheme of things, casual gamers are a welcome and perhaps even necessary addition to the gaming ecosystem.

--

Then, I somehow ended up watching a documentary on the history of video games instead of actually playing video games on Christmas night. Perhaps the most interesting part of the program concerned the crash that struck the industry in 1983, when the market collapsed under a glut of terrible games.

And suddenly my story doesn't have a happy ending anymore. Of course the bad signal to noise ratio will drive casual gamers to give up and let their little white boxes gather dust -- they're casual gamers! Plus, there's no shortage of anecdotal evidence around here that the hardcore types are migrating to the Xbox or PS3, and I was moved to start this ra -- er, thread after seeing the ruminations of yet another underwhelmed gamer in the Wii Experimental? thread... Doubtless we can expect a whole new round of "Should I sell my Wii?" threads now that the holidays are over and there are, what, four or five million new Wii owners out there? Yikes.

So, if the Wii is the gateway drug for new hardcore gamers, has Nintendo sown the seeds of its own downfall when the casuals lose interest because they can't find the wheat amongst the chaff?

Certainly, there are a lot of differences between the environment leading up to the crash of '83 and the current situation -- perhaps most notably, there's no glut of competing video game consoles alongside the $#!+storm of shovelware currently afflicting us. And, of course, Nintendo is the company that resurrected the industry after the crash, so they should certainly be wise to the possibility that a new customer base may be alienated by a market saturated with poor quality products.

Still, I can't help but be struck by the way the Wii is selling like gangbusters despite the bad economy... Kinda like the Atari 2600