GCA Staff Notes by Malcolm – 3

Part 3 of Malcolm Stuart Grant’s notes from GCA. Parts 1 and 2 were here.:)

10:00-10:50 “Games of the Future and lessons from the past”

Don Daglow (Interactive Entertainment)

Don, somewhat like Chris Taylor, had an inform style slides’n'talk. Having somewhat longer time in the industry, he had a lot to tell everyone. He wrote the first Baseball game ever (1971), porting it to the apple and adding graphics in ‘82. He also invented and added multicamera in a game for a baseball game for the intellivision. Basically he was showing how short the time between printing out on paper with a computer the size of a room in 1975, to gaining TV graphics in the early 80s.

His point was that in this short time, you couldn’t predict that people would be playing games at home on their tvs, and by actually predicting the future is limiting. He said when he was making the first RPG, he wasn’t out to make a game and be the inventer and take everyone to a new place, he was just making a game. Similar with the split screen for the baseball game, they were just making games for their friends. Passion is the key, not some devious other motivation.

His next set of slides were about trends, people follow trends. After there were lots of consoles making pong and intellivision and atari fighting over their respective graphics, these wars are still going on today. 16 bit is better than 8 bit, 32 bit is even better. When the Sony Playstation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360 were announced, they were heavy duty.

One of the important things to do now is to break rules:

He put up a slide with a picture of the Nintendo Wii on it. It’s underpowered compared to the Ps3 and 360, it was over half the price of either during it’s launch window. Instead of a joypad, It used a new method of control, Wii Remote and Numchuck.

Next slide, guitar hero.

Selling games over $60,00 in America. Expensive peripherals. Previously all the games that the team had made hadn’t really done very well. They had been told numerous times to quit. They liked making music games. They don’t need to worry now.

Last slide, World of Warcraft.

After 3 years of delay, they managed to release the game. Stability of the product, a good early game, constant updates and now they have 12 million subscribers.

He summed up with a few last points. That the last three companies went for different thinking, without limits and thought about what would be fun.