marksabbatini, on Tue Sep 15, 2009 10:03 AM, said:
What it won't be, I guarantee you, is endless gushing about all things wonderful from the old days. Way too many people doing that already.
Way, way too much time is spent endlessly talking about how grand and glorious all sorts of stuff is, in the Classic Gaming World ... and after 30 years of hearing it, yeah, it gets old! Been there, seen that, got the t-shirts(s)!
The reality is that a lot of stuff sucked. Some stuff, it's hard to tell if it sucked or not ... because ads ran, but from the prices charged and other factors, it seems unlikely more than a handful of people ever shelled out the cash.
Sci-Fi author Ted Sturgeon once famously said something to the effect that yeah, ninety percent of science fiction stories were crud ... because ninety percent of just about anything is crud. (See Wikipedia for the exact quotes.)
In any given field or possible way of categorizing things, you end up with a small percentage of excellent items; a small percentage of absolutely awful ones; and a LOT of stuff that's just basically sitting there, in the middle.
This is why it's not only challenging, but d*mn near impossible to keep inventing (truly) new things to say, that are not only of a positive nature, and informative, but also entertaining. Something worth reading; let alone writing!
I like old games. I prefer the "one screen, forever" type of gameplay, most of the time. If you can win the game, then I'm probably not going to bother playing it. That's just me. That's just the kind of thing that I personally want.
But, brothers and sisters, I'm hear to tell you: it's a royal pain in the arse to keep trying to invent reasons why one obscure old console or home computer or other should have "made it big" in the marketplace ... but, for reasons some folks will jump up and down over and loudly chant (as if volume was interchangeable with facts or logic), and others will have a more skeptical outlook towards ... well, frankly, some systems basically deserved their quick, quiet deaths! (Or, some might argue, their long, lingering, "everyone know's it's coming" exits from the marketplace.)
I won't declare Classic Gaming dead, but it does occur to me to wonder if maybe it needs better health insurance. When three out of the last four CGE expo's failed to happen (if memory serves), and classic arcades are going under ...
Keep in mind that the people looking at the seedy underbelly of things, here, are writing about the smaller systems (in terms of popularity). Folks in the Atari Mainstream ™ may think we're just doom and gloom types ... because their insulated little world hasn't felt any major shocks (that I'm aware of?) ... but those of us who can hear the crickets chirping, over the din of all the fans clamoring for more games and more info about the "also ran" game systems ... in other words, to wrap this up quickly: we who inhabit the lower decks question moisture, when it's well past our ankles, and knees, and is rising above our chests. The folks on the upper decks don't even have their little toes wet, yet, perhaps ... but that doesn't mean that things will always stay the same.
For that matter, they never did stay the same. Guys like myself can remember back, just fifteen years ago ... and it'd take a small book just to set the record straight as far as what folks think happened then, that didn't; because the technology just wasn't advanced enough to allow the things that today's users take for granted.
Example: I was archiving the cartridge library for the VIC-20 before things like emulation existed, or web sites with pictures were the least bit common! Paul LeBrasse and I did what we did, over about a two year period; averaging about one new game or utility cart per week -- each, mind you; so, two per week total -- and that wasn't by just taking our personal libraries of carts, and dumping them. We had to literally search the globe just to find every one of those old carts ... because, it really seemed at the time, that if we didn't, most of that old stuff was going to Landfill City!
And people today probably just assume that we went onto eBay, and bid on stuff!? Ummm ... since eBay didn't exist, no, that's not how things happened. We exchanged literally thousands of e-mails with people all over the planet, trying to track down the truth behind whether Cart XYZ existed. Only to pay someone (via snail mail!) for that cart ... only to find that even the most knowledgeable people back then mistook an MPT-03 cart for a VIC-20 cart, and sold it to you as if it was some unheard of VIC-20 cart ... and once you figure out that's what happened, everyone involved has to sit around, scratching their heads, and wonder what the h*ll this odd-ball cart is, that looks like the same pin set-up as a VIC-20 cart ... but that, internally, isn't even remotely like a VIC-20 anything!
Repeat sending out dozens if not a hundred e-mails, by yourself, for every VIC-20 cart that I or Paul LeBrasse tracked down and archived, and then, after that week's (totally unpaid!) "work" ... repeat the whole process a hundred times.
Then have some rude (insert two hours of cussing) individual tell you, after a couple of years of work like that, that if you hadn't have done it, someone else would have ... and you'll have some TINY idea of why guys like me "are angry".
Not to make things too unpleasant for previous posters, but when a person like me writes something genuinely new, and gets it published for all and sundry to read ... only to be met with one person mistakenly believing there's nothing of interest in regards to what you just wrote, from a certain era ... well, that bites, but to then have several other folks agree with that mistake (that there's nothing of that sort in the issue in question; even though there is!!!) ...
I don't know whether to laugh or cry, at situations like that. Guess I'm just glad I'm 99% retired, these days! (My other hobbies take nowhere near as much work, and the appreciation factor is orders of magnitude greater / faster.)
Folks, if you want genuinely new stuff to read, THEN START ACTUALLY READING EVERYTHING THAT'S HANDED TO YOU!
(I'll just say that I find that younger people's attention spans can be measured in milliseconds, these days. Sigh.)
People have already forgotten the answers to things that only happened ten years ago. (Like why the VIC CD-ROM project had started: because most people had never seen the actual carts, or ads, or whatever; and suddenly things like full color photos were possible -- albeit only after expensive computer upgrades! -- on a person's personal computer. And flatbed scanners got down to the price range that average mortals could afford, without hocking all they owned.)
Back then, a single picture on the front page of a small web site, had people whining (that it was fat-ware). Just a short fifteen years later, we're in a world where sending small-format movies to one another, over the Internet, is absolutely common; and people with fast connections can download whole music libraries, or even full studio movies. But guys like Paul and I were using e-mail and FTP services, over telephone lines -- I still remember mounting an external 9600 baud modem in a spare drive bay slot, at one point -- and we were paying for our internet time by the hour, mind you! -- and all because that's all that the average nerdy person had available to them, at that time. (And even then, it wasn't easy: I can remember one month's phone bill costing me $200 USD!)
Too many people, these days, substitute what is true, today, for what they mistakenly think was true then ... which is fine, except that when they're calling themselves historians as they do it, it takes on an unintended comic tone!
People think that the earliest I'net archiving efforts happened because of emulation; and that web sites existed. Not true! Back in the early days -- just 15 years ago! -- guys like me, that were going out of their way to wait to see if Windoze 95 was going to be all it was advertised to be, and who were still clinging to Windows 3.1 as their basic OS (I actually still considered DOS to be my main operating system, in the early to mid 1990s) ... well, anyway, most of what I hear being discussed today isn't even remotely the situation that existed, or why folks like me did what we did. So, I find it easy to believe that folks that were doing their thing back in the 1980s are very misunderstood, as well.
Truthfully, there are times when I feel like the thousand incorrect assumptions with the other person's questions or comments would take so d*mned long to break down and "fix," before I could even "simply" reply to what they said -- well, it gets to be too pointless of busy work; and, these days, I simply shrug and don't bother replying. It's not that different, in a sense, from waking up one day to find out you're one of the only people left, from some old race of beings; and the new beings don't understand anything you try to tell them. Sooner or later, you quit trying.
Guess that makes me a dinosaur. C'est la vie! (In my other hobbies, that's not the case at all; which is fabulous!)
In any case ... you racka-frakkin' darned whipper-snappers don't know the pain of having to walk to school in huge snowstorms ... miles and miles of endless walking, I tells ya! ... and uphill, both ways!
-- Ward Shrake --
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A new issue of Retrogaming Times Monthly is now online. Highlights from the September 2009 issue (#64) include:
