So, this is my post for my Game History class, in which I had to answer the following prompt:

What failures do you believe were the most important during the beginning of the industry? What changes do you see now in the industry and its games from these failures?

Enjoy!

In my opinion, the failures I have seen in video gaming’s past were the lack of innovation and more copying from the innovators. Technically, it started during the pinball years by having other manufacturers pilfer ideas used in other machines, but they generally had different layouts and themes for their games. For this article’s purpose, it started with Nolan Bushnell’s use of Spacewar as an arcade cabinet instead of innovating a new idea. While he was creating a cabinet for mass consumption for the public, due to Spacewar still needing a really expensive computer to play the game at the time, it was still very much a stolen idea. This need to innovate finally hit Bushnell after the release of Pong. Pong, which in itself was not a new idea to the video game market, did have innovations in it, but for the sake of the argument, it was also a copied game.

Innovation, in this case, can be a reuse of an idea repackaged as a different way to play the game. For example, Breakout (Atari) was basically Single Player Pong, without Artificial Intelligence, against a destructible wall. This was still an innovation, yet it still borrowed ideas. We can see this in today’s games, as well as games before now. They all borrowed aspects of gameplay, story, controls, etc. to drive their game. Even games of today borrow ideas from games of the past. The recently released game Batman: Arkham Asylum is basically a fighter game with adventure game elements, and even some hide-and-seek puzzles thrown in for good measure. What makes it truly different than the rest of the games is how the game uses the ideas for play. Even games of the past can be broken down and analyzed as to where they got the basis of design. For example, Sonic The Hedgehog is a speedier version of Super Mario Bros., in which Super Mario Bros. is a slower and more in-depth version of Defender.

Innovation actually helps the industry, while straight up cloning would kill it. The reason for this, as was the reason why Pong copiers didn’t see much profit in the end, is that no gamer wants to play another inferior version of a game. My best example for this would be when Pac-Man was released for the Atari 2600. No one wanted to play a blockier, possibly haphazard version of Pac-Man than what they could play in the arcade version with higher-resolution graphics.