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Just to point out the obvious: Macs in the 90s were very much not the main gamer platform. It was almost a joke, how few games got ported to the mac. I mostly used macs in school, where I think it was seen as a plus that the only "games" on the mac were educational games. Instead it had its own, somewhat artsy-tartsy culture. I've never heard of those games you mentioned, but i'm not surprised the platform might have attracted some games with more sophisticated writing than the mainstream of Nintendo and MS-DOS.
Overall I'd say, "game writing was never good." Most classic games barely even had writing, either because it was pointless for an arcade-action game, or because there just wasn't enough memory or disk space then to handle a lot of text. Japanese games had an especially tough time with text.
And, aside from technical issues, a lot of games just don't need a lot of writing, and made a design decision not to include it. They tell the story in other ways. Famously John Carmack decided to put only the bare minimum of story into Doom because “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie, he said. “It's expected to be there, but it's not important.". It's only in more recent years that it's just expected that every game must have some sort of story, with full-time writers cranking out the content. And so much of that content is just blatantly regurgitated from the limited Nerd Canon of Lord of the Rings/DnD/Star Wars/Star Trek, it's long since been exhausted, and the whole medium of "interactivity" just doesn't fit with having a fixed pre-written story.
Ahem
Ever heard of Sierra Entertainment or Lucasarts classic games? Star Control 2? Ultima IV? Fallout? Baldur's Gate?
yeah I've heard of them and I greatly enjoyed most of those. But looking back at them now as an adult, I don't see them as great writing. It seems more like stage directions to tell you what's going on in the game and keep you on track. Not to mention: it's all fantasy tropes that have been done a million times. Eg:
https://www.lemonamiga.com/games/media/screens/full/ultima_iv_-quest_of_the_avatar/ultima_iv-_quest_of_the_avatar_04.png Thanks for telling me it's a gypsy caravan, in case I couldn't have guessed just from the picture
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/YJC1C8Tm3S0s8JptmC0V3k01K35JRIp5r0j8buUXOi3Gih97ggYLbBGSVMOkbDOZf8CcTg7jcJAmOxknvnTghy2jak0XMPQkn7XnQoJMvEEHEJ4qojGOGmtCybaJ1xPhUw: Explaining that we're on the edge of the map and can't move any further
https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/baldur_s_gate_retro_4.jpg.jpg?width=1920&height=1920&fit=bounds&quality=80&format=jpg&auto=webp Is this dialogue? Or just random character lines to narrate the battle?
https://static1.thegamerimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Fallout-Harold-Dialogue-Cropped.jpg Infodumping the backstory
I shouldn't pick on these because the genre forces the writing to go a certain way. But still... you can see why none of this is exactly prizewinning literature, right?
This is like complaining that on page 83 of your printed book, there's the number 83 written in the corner and you think that nobody in the book has a reason to say "83" in character.
Even if it's a character who speaks the line (I can't access the link), that's a genre convention and has no bearing on writing quality.
It's a character, yeah. your magical owl companion in King's Quest 5 says "There's nothing a hot, dry desert further west. Most people avoid it, because there are bandits out there! If you insist on going, I'll wait for you HERE!"
It's just a very unsubtle way to tell the player "you can't leave the fixed game area," but dressed up in some fantasy cliches (why is the hot, dry desert full of bandits? How do they make a living if everyone avoids it...?). And most of the game writing is like that: engineering to serve the purposes of the game.
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I think this actually explains why game writing in the past was good compared to now; having barely any writing because they didn't need a lot of writing can be very good writing, if it serves it purpose exactly as needed. To build on Carmack's analogy, a film whose entire script is: "Did you order the pizza with extra sausage?" "Yes, but I'm afraid I don't have any money. How ever will I pay you?" or the like has much better writing than something like Rise of Skywalker. The writing in the former doesn't need to be any longer or deeper than that in order to accomplish its goals, and trying to accomplish more with the writing would likely be counterproductive. With the greater production values and focus on narrative in many modern AAA games, writers have a lot more degrees of freedom, which means more room for error and also more rope to hang themselves with. That's even without considering the overt attempts at injecting ideological messaging that has plagued much of modern writing, in games and other media, which was much less common in older games, in a large part just due to older games not having as much writing.
This I can get behind, and says better what I was trying to say below about game writing being load bearing. Game writing is, or was, engineering, just like making the rest of the game was. Both on the level of "How much room do we have on the screen/in memory to fit words" and also "What is the greatest economy of language we can use to maximally support the world being built?" Many times a lot of this writing was only found in the manual.
I'm going to riff off Diablo for a minute. Grabbing my ancient manual off the shelf, it has so many casual hints of a greater world. Like King Leoric sending the warriors off in a war against a northern kingdom of Westmarch. The rogue is from a mysterious order, who's purpose is never disclosed. The sorcerer is just one of many mage clans from the far east. And then of course the bestiary and the history, written from the perspective of an in universe character, vastly flesh out the world.
And what is the actual game? 16 levels of a dungeon in a singled ravage town. Unknown "black riders" recently came through devastating it. Lazarus had just lead a party into the dungeon to be trapped and killed by the Butcher. Now go. 95% of the lore in the manual doesn't directly come into play. It just builds a world hinted at. A world, IMHO, Diablo 3 largely ruins. Never bothered with 4. 2 did alright I guess.
It actually reminds me that a lot of my favorite fantasy novels or CRPGs emerge from home brewed table top RPG settings that the creator steeped in with his friends for years before he put pen to paper for the first time. I believe that's how Malazan Book of the Fallen got it's start. I think Record of Lodoss War as well?
You are reminding me of a childhood where I toted around Blizzard game manuals in my school backpack so I could read them on the tram and show them off to friends. I also played through D1 recently after maybe 15+ years or so, and found the writing and atmosphere holds up superbly even without all the extra worldbuilding from the printed pages.
When people say D1/D2 are better written than the following sequels, there's often some pushback that wants to eagerly point out how little story and dialogue were in those first two games. To which I say "Yes, and how did Blizzard manage to fuck that up so much".
Are you me? I got yelled at so much in my middle school geometry class for reading the WarCraft II manual instead of paying attention. There were some absolute gems among manuals back then. Blizzard had some of the best, but Interplay and Westwood tried too. I got this Encyclopedia Frobozzica with Return to Zork, had me howling with laughter despite not having played any of the games before. The diary that came with Zork Nemesis that may have been from a version of your character that time travelled into the past and got killed seeded the plot well too.
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Marathon was basically a Doom clone but for Mac (apologies to any Marathon fans offended by this, but not really). In fact it was developed by Bungie, the same Bungie that went on to make Halo.
And it was a big deal (on Mac) because back then Mac was basically shit tier for gaming if you wanted anything that wasn't educational, adventure or multimedia.
Back then? It's still the case today. Mac is the worst computer platform for gaming. Windows is king, Linux at least has Proton to easily run Windows games, and Mac gets the occasional crumbs that get ported.
It got better (both in ports and native games) in the early 2000s, but then got vastly worse after (ironically) the switch to Intel chips. Once you lost backwards compatibility, and it became clear that Apple had no wish to continue supporting devs, the entire market fell off a cliff. Now there's nothing.
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