Where Have All The Game Gods Gone?

GameDailyBiz's media coverage article examines the absence of newly-minted 'game gods' from modern design. The article stems from PC Gamer's look back on the occasion of their 150th issue. One of the covers they show off is one proclaiming 'the game gods', well-known designers such as Will Wright or John Carmack. Modern game design, often with large teams, would seem to preclude elevating many new designers to such lofty heights. From the article: "Aside from a smattering of recognizable names like Naughty Dog's Jason Rubin and David Jaffe of God of War, renowned developers don't spring to mind like they once did. Even worse, Media Coverage would have trouble recognizing these two 'game celebs' if they showed up wearing matching shirts that said 'I'm with Jason Rubin' and 'I'm with David Jaffe'."

Re:We still have them

[Surt]

RTFS. Not even RTFA. Just the summary. ;-)

It's about the lack of new 'game gods' being created by new titles. Sid Meier is well established. Since ... 15+ years ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_(compute r_game) [wikipedia.org]

Re:CliffyB

[scaryjohn]

If your CliffyB is Cliff Bleszinski, he was one of the three primary designers of Unreal back in 1997, and the driving force behind its sequels.

I don't know if that means he's not a new Game God, or whether it means it takes ten years for them to percolate to that status.

Re:CliffyB

[El_Muerte_TDS]

You forgot Jazz Jackrabbit (1994). That's also something made by Cliff.

Re:Easy Answer:

[cliffski]

"Nowadays like 1,000 people work on every game."

Bullshit.
The last 2 games I bought were 'Masters Of Defence' and 'Lux', both done by teams of under 6 people. They both have low system reqs, can be bought online, and are great fun. They both start in less time than battlefield 2 takes to show its first splash screen.

There ar loads of high quality games being done by lone develoeprs or small teams. Ive been doing it myself since 1998
(http://www.positech.co.uk)
The 'hype' only occurs for the 100+ team games, because the jourbalists get flown to miami and given free drinks when they are shown the 'hands-off' demos of the big budget stuff to ensure glowing reviews. The little companies cant afford to shower journos with presents, and the website owbers with banner-ad revenue, so largely they get ignored, but we DO exist, and we DO sell games.

Re:Because they're not all American

[Jeffool]

Fumito Ueda - Ico, Shadow of the Colossus

Tim Schafer - Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Psychonauts
Yu Suzuki - Virtua Fighters 1, 2, 4, and the upcoming 5; Shenmue I & II
CliffyB - Unreal, ummm... Jazz Jackrabbit? The upcoming Gears of War

And they don't mention that we now know 'more' designers than we did previously. The spotlight shined on the 'Gods' has been diluted a bit by the shoving of more people into the spotlight, without said light growing relatively. At least it seems that way.

Re:Nostalgia Trumps True Skill?

[ClosedSource]

"That's a major result of the rising complexity of the technology. Back in the 1980s, one geek could stay up all night and crank out an Atari 2600 game in raw machine code."

Actually, we used assembly language. If you think that current game systems are technically more complex than the 2600 or that a decent 2600 game could be programmed in one night, you obviously never tried it.

I know this will sound like your grandfather's story about walking to school in the snow but the 2600 had no interrupts, no BIOS or OS, 128 bytes of RAM, video registers that had to be reloaded every scan line (at least) by your code, time-based horizontal positioning, video blanking performed by your code, etc.

The days when video games were primarily a software writer's achievement ended with the first video game crash. That's a good thing because most of us weren't experts in game design, graphics, or sound.

Re:Nostalgia Trumps True Skill?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could package up something like Nethack or M.U.L.E. for the 360 and it would play just fine, but don't expect EA to publish it for you.

  I know what you mean, but man, that's one bad example. Have you SEEN the devteam credits for nethack? That's fifteen years worth of work. (And it shows.)