Orson Scott Card on Games, 21 Years Ago

MilenCent writes "Long long ago, Orson Scott Card wrote a game opinion column for Compute! Magazine. In the November 1983 issue, he had some interesting things to say about the essential ingredients of a great game, all arguably still important today. He picked out one company that, at the time, consistently excelled in most of these areas--try to guess which one! Additional commentary over at Curmudgeon Gamer."

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What a debut!

[Yeechang Lee]

Yes, it's hard to believe that *that* company was once the unquestioned leader of innovative gaming.

Consider the company's first five titles [wikipedia.org]:

* Hard Hat Mack for the Atari 800 and Apple II
* Archon for the Atari 800
* Pinball Construction Set for the Atari 800 and Apple II
* Worms? for the Atari 800
* M.U.L.E. for the Atari 800

One is absolutely, bar none, one of the greatest games of all time [salon.com]. Two [wikipedia.org] more [wikipedia.org] are notable milestones in gaming history. Four, perhaps all five, are considered classics.

I like EA and its games. It's a tremendously-successful company, is (I think) the *only* videogame maker other than Nintendo and Sega to survive intact over the past two decades, and over the past 23 years has put out many other fine titles. But let's not forget that there was a time when it didn't depend quite so heavily on annual releases of Madden and NBA Live.

M.U.L.E. is great. See for yourself...

[Errandboy of Doom]

Read about and download M.U.L.E. here [the-underdogs.org].

Re:How the mighty have...

[kisrael]

Yeah, the ECA days...that cube, sphere, pyramid logo was damn clever.

And the games...man. Archon, Skate or Die, Realm of Impossibility...in those really cool "album cover" like boxes...plus the respect they gave to the game programmers as artists (hence, Electronic ARTS...) That was an amazing time.

Re:Worms?

[BDaniels]

Look here: http://www.gb64.com/game.php?id=8747&d=18 [gb64.com]

Re:Orson Scott Card's predictions

[SlashThat]

Cut the flame. If you think that these things were obvious in 1985, then you obviously don't remember it as well as I do. Of course, computer networks existed since 1969. But they were either defense or university projects. The internet was only opened to the public in 1990's. Nobody could tell then what it would look like and how (if at all) it would be used by wide public. As to blogging, it only gained public awareness in this millenium.
And where the heck did you come up that he only thought the network would be text-based??
Anyway, you missed the whole point. It was concievable that the technology would be developed to the stage that we see now (although the amount of small details that turned out to be correct is surprising). It is much more difficult to predict how the technology will be used, to what extent it will be part of our lives, and its social impact. The technological "atmosphere" described really captures the essence of what we only begin to experience today.

Re:End Game

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not like he single handidly coded the game. All he basically did was come up with some of the dialog for the first half of the game, and then they threw his name on the cover. He didn't come didn't come up with the overall story line or have ANYTHING to do with game play. He talked about all this during an interview at the E3:
http://media.psp.ign.com/media/714/714496/vids_1.h tml [ign.com]

I think he was just getting his feet wet in the gaming industry, but it's difficult to argue that he's fallen "flat on his face" when all he's did was write some fo the game's early dialog.