So this week we’re busting out a new flashback of an old game: Ironsword: Wizards and Warriors II. We’re covering a bit about some gaming history and a few key news articles of the week including:
This weeks question of the week, what do you think is the top selling video game genre of all time, not just the last few years.
Lode Runner, a game many of us logged hundreds of hours upon. Lode Runner has a great deal of replay value thanks to its great map editor. The game was first published by Broderbund in 1983, but was first prototyped by Douglas Smith, an architecture student at the University of Washington.
The Lode Runner prototype was called Kong and was originally written for a Prime Computer 550 minicomputer on campus, but shortly after it was ported to the VAX minicomputer. Originally programmed in FORTRAN and utilized only ASCII character graphics (the most basic of characters).
In September of 1982 Smith was able to port it to the Apple II+ (in assembly language) and renamed it to Miner. In October of that same year he submitted a rough copy to Broderbund and he’s said to have received a one-line rejection letter, “Sorry, your game doesn’t fit into our product line; please feel free to submit future products.”
The original title had no joystick support and was developed in full black and white…not exactly exciting. So, Smith then borrowed money to purchase a color monitor and joystick and continued to improve the game. Around Christmas of 1982, he submitted the game, now renamed Lode Runner, to four publishers and quickly received offers from all four: Sierra, Sirius, Synergistic, and Brøderbund.
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This episode was going to focus on the Toyko Game Show, but a massive leak of Grand Theft Auto 6 trumped all conversation.
Meanwhile, TJ’s mic still makes him sound like he’s in the bathroom.
The news includes:
Let us know what you think.
Jonah considers Elden Ring too grind-y, and talks about the name of an infamous handheld console.
News items include:
Let us know what you think.
Greetings from Aus =)
@ Question of the week. I’m going to lay down my bets with paid MMORPG due to gaming has become so social accepted in more recent years. This Genre of games is the biggest Lure with money to be made on not only the game itself but in ongoing subscription fees, Micro transactions fees for exclusive / additional content (even I participated in spending $25 to get a shiny horse in WOW). The scale of Revenue these games like WOW, Runescape are bring in is unreal.
@Microsoft bans user because of town name:
Lol!
It’s funny though, they allowed the same word for sexual orientation. That’s a classical case of the left hand has absolutely no idea what the right hand does.
This reminds me of a stupid censoring mechanism: it turned the word “glass” into “gl*censored*” 😀
@John Romero doing casual games consulting:
This is a pretty interesting piece of news. Romero had the approach that “game design trumps everything”. This is the reason he left ID. So it makes sense for somebody to ask for consultancy from him.
Unfortunately, Daikatana didn’t turn out that great: designing is fun, team management is anything but fun.
I’ll keep an eye on what comes up on the subject.
@Sony fighting jailbreaking too:
While the majority owners of PS3 have enough money to buy legit games (heck, they bought a PS3), I do feel that a good deal of owners will not update.
Derrick, I like your point of view: “if we keep jailbreaking, we won’t be able to buy stuff from you”. I might add, and keep playing pirated copies 🙂
History tells me that piracy has a way of working around things.
@Apple taking a leap into social gaming with iOS 4.1:
I think Apple is running out of features to advertise their products. There’s also another way to read this: “Until now, iOS didn’t have support for social networking!” 😛
@QOTW: Lol, beats me!
If we’re talking in terms of number of copies sold, then I guess platformers, through Mario 🙂 I mean you can see it in both original and pirated consoles, on PCs, on next gen consoles etc.
If we’re talking revenues in USD, then I think it’s FPS, through MW2 : “After five days of sales, the game had earned revenue figures of $550 million worldwide”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_of_Duty:_Modern_Warfare_2#Sales_and_revenue
As for quiz questions, I am trying to come up with some.
@Not getting any email re:quiz for 200, I know I sent some in, and its there in my sent mail box fr proof, so maybe I got the address wrong?
@QotW – I think this is a very good one. WOW might have 11million (probably more) players, which means that it clearly “sold” 11million copies, but how many people bought it and later on gave up to pursue what some people call a real life?
Your FPS games like Modern Warfare 2 sold massively in bulk, but that doesn’t mean that it still pulls in sales now.
The point I think most people will miss is the demand in games like Angry Birds. So many more people can justify spending $5 or less on a game than they can on spending $50.
So what was the question? Biggest revenue (Modern Warfare 2), or most units sold (WoW)?
Oh, and just for a sidenote, I bough my PS Move on launch. It is much more responsive than the Wii even with Motion Plus. The Sports game just feels so much better with the HD graphics (Yes, cartoons lose to well rendered images), and you can’t beat the archery and the fact that you actually pull the arrows out of the quiver instead of simply draw the bow string like the Wii.