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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28889 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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I have a very strong association between obvious political choices in games and shit games

Well, yes. It's a very clear indicator of priorities, isn't it? It's the difference between a group of passionate people making something they'd want to play, and a group of cynical and jaded 9-to-5ers ticking off the checkboxes their corporate overlords have foisted on them. As the industry has generated more and more money, more corporate vultures in suits who have never played a "vidjeo jame" in their lives have moved in to extract that money. They don't know what makes a good game, and frankly, they don't care; end of quarter reports are what matter, so do all the things our market research department says people want and that are popular now, and jam this monetisation system into it because our reports say that it improves revenue by 8%. And shove all the god damn anti-piracy measures you can in to stop people STEALING money from us! Oh, and remove that, and this, and can we make this character black and/or female to appease the DEI screechers? No it doesn't matter if those things fit the game or actively make it worse, just do your job and do as I say!

The best example of this to me comes all the way back in the 90s, actually, courtesy of Naughty Dog developing Crash Bandicoot. To hear Andy Gavin tell it;

But the Universal Marking department (of one) thought differently. They had hired one of those useless old-school toy marketing people, a frumpy fortyish woman about as divorced from our target audience – and the playing of video games – as possible. This seems to be a frequent problem with bigger companies, the mistaken idea that you can market an entertainment product if you aren’t also an enthusiastic customer of said product. (...) In any case, this obstacle (the marketing woman) wanted to call the game “Wuzzle the Wombat,” or “Ozzie the Otzel.”

Jason Rubin elaborates;

If Andy and I deserve credit for anything name related, it is for viciously defending our character from the ravages of the Universal Marketing Death Squad. I remember the name mooted by Universal to be Wez or Wezzy Wombat, but as I said things were very confused, and frankly it doesn’t matter what the alternate name was.

When Universal stated that as producer and they were going to pick the name, Andy and I walked the entire team (all 7 of us!) into the head of Universal Interactive’s office and said, “either we go with ‘Crash Bandicoot’, or you can name the game whatever you want and finish the development yourself.”

I cannot think of very many dev teams that would have the sheer balls to do such a thing today.

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