3/31/2023 0 Comments Civilization ii cd![]() The poster child for the category is Microsoft’s Flight Simulator series, the most venerable in the entire history of computer gaming, being still alive and well as I write these words today, almost 43 years after it debuted on the 16 K Radio Shack TRS-80 under the imprint of its original publisher subLogic. Throughout the 1980s and well into the 1990s, the technology- or systems-driven sequel was largely confined to the field of vehicular simulations, a seemingly fussily specific pursuit that was actually the source in some years of no less than 25 percent of the industry’s total revenues. ![]() These sequels rather promised to do and be essentially the same thing as their forerunner(s), only to do and be it even better, taking full advantage of the latest advances in hardware. It was the domain of games that were less interested in their fictions. Unsurprisingly, the fiction-driven sequel was most dominant among games that foregrounded their fictions - namely the narrative-heavy genres of the adventure game and the CRPG.īut there was another type of sequel, which functioned less like a blockbuster Hollywood franchise and more like the version numbers found at the end of other types of computer software. Gamers also wanted to get the next bit of story out of them, wanted to do something new in their comfortingly recognizable worlds. And yet this was only a part of the reason people stayed loyal to them. As anyone who has observed the progress of those series will readily attest, their technology did advance dramatically over the years. Some of the most iconic names in 1980s and early 1990s gaming operated in this mode: Zork, Ultima, Wizardry, King’s Quest, Carmen Sandiego, Leisure Suit Larry, Wing Commander. ![]() Game sequels likewise promised their players a continuation of an existing story, or a new one that took place in a familiar setting with familiar characters. Like so much else during gaming’s formative years, fiction-driven sequels were built off the example of Hollywood, which had already discovered that no happily ever after need ever be permanent if there was more money to be made by getting the old gang of heroes back together and confronting them with some new threat. It seems to me that game sequels can be divided into two broad categories: the fiction-driven and the systems-driven. How do you make a sequel to a game that covers all of human history?Īt the risk of making a niche website still more niche, allow me to wax philosophical for a moment on the subject of those Roman numerals that have been appearing just after the names of so many digital games almost from the very beginning.
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