Why Traditional Retail and Niche Games Don't Work

[Kamog]

Ah, the good old days of the 80's... fun games on the Commodore 64, Intellivision, Apple IIE... Back then I did not have my own computer or game console, and I visited a friend often and we played a lot of games. Sometimes we'd stay up all night playing games. It was around 1990 that I got my first game console, a Sega Genesis, and really got addicted to games. Life was simpler back then...

Also, the games back then were easy to learn. Combat games like Kung Fu Master only had three or four moves: walk, jump, punch, and kick. So you could learn it in thirty seconds and play. Now, games are so complex it takes a week to learn all the controls; fighting games have dozens of special moves and button combinations and things you've got to memorize.

I remember the first turn-based space strategy game I played: it was Galax on the Macintosh. Back then Macintoshes had small monochrome screens and you had to boot up from a floppy disk; it was a Macintosh 512E that I played it on. In the game Galax, you start off as humans on your home planet, and you have to defeat two other races called the Gubru and the Czinti or something like that. I seem to remember that there was only one type of resource that planets produced, and only one type of ship you can buy.