CobraA1 Member Posts: 926 From: MN Registered: 02-19-2001 |
I ran across this while doing some surfing: http://www.the-underdogs.org/scratch.php Parts 1 and 3 seem particultarly interesting - part 2 is just bashing large corporations in general :/. |
D-SIPL Moderator Posts: 1345 From: Maesteg, Wales Registered: 07-21-2001 |
That's an interesting article. Back in the 80's if you had a good game (mostly written by hackers... and no i don't mean people that break into pc's, they are not hackers) then you would send them to people like On-Line (now sierra online) Broderbund, Sirius etc and would receive 30% royalty's, be given a home to live in plus a wage on top of that. Well gone are those days due to the greedy nature of this world, and the kind of beaurocrasy that makes you sick. So now these people have to publish on there own, or as many do now, open source there games. There is no room any more for real creativity. The hackers were the ones changing the world, they did it because they loved it. Not for money. The were innovators. And that is something we have lost. If only there were a publishing company, and sponsors that can back these bedroom programmers and teams and really promote them, it would drive the game industry forward imo. What do you all think? --D-SIPL ------------------ |
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Christian Member Posts: 400 From: Australia Registered: 09-15-2002 |
I agree with a lot of this in terms of what has been lost, but the sad fact is that nowadays, it takes too much work to write a game for any 'bedroom' programmer to end up with something marketable. The graphics on an Apple ][ game took a day or two to create, how much work could you do with less than 400 pixels ? |
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D-SIPL Moderator Posts: 1345 From: Maesteg, Wales Registered: 07-21-2001 |
Yeh, but there are groups of bedroom teams doing some great work. The open source community are doing some great things, and there not getting paid to do it. --D-SIPL ------------------ |
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Christian Member Posts: 400 From: Australia Registered: 09-15-2002 |
Yes, the open source community overcomes this problem by creating similarly large teams. Getting such a team together for a commercial effort would be much harder IMO. There is a site where teams are created to write commercial products, but I've not heard of anything good coming out of it. Really, with the power of the web to reach people, there is no reason a bedroom programmer could not promote a good product anyhow. It's hard without shop exposure, but the shops will come if the product is good enough and people want it. |