This from an interview on the WarCry Network about EVE Online's expansion:

The title of the next expansion - revealed here for the first time - will be 'The Empyrean Age,' the same as the EVE novel by Tony Gonzalez also slated for the summer. The reason is simple, this is the first EVE Online expansion where the story of the game and its universe will play a key role, a lot of it based off the novel.

That sound familiar? How about The Dark Wheel, released with Braben & Bell's Elite years ago. I'm not sure if I've ever read all of mine (though you can read it all right here), but it was in there to try and create a little plot to go with the randomly created planet names.

I've always wondered about plot in MMORPGs. In WoW, there's really no requirement to understand the plot of your quests nor does Blizzard create the quests so that you have to learn it, which bugs me. "Why am I killing X of Y and giving you N Zs from their loot, again?" In UO, you were, for the most part, supposed to create your own. I hope EVE pulls it off, even if you don't bother to read the latest scifi space trading [almost] pack-in novel.

Labels: history, story, UO, WoW

--ruffin at 20:43

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We need videogame history yesterday

I'm too tired to go through it in detail right now, but the headline on this piece convinces me that most people writing about videogame companies haven't spent enough time reading their history.

Labels: business, history, media

--jvm at 21:28

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30 years, 30 defining events

An article of mine on events that defined the industry is up on Next-Gen this morning. I actually thought we'd go through some revisions, but the editors apparently worked with the draft I submitted. So imagine my surprise finding it in my RSS reader this morning.

After I wrote it, I noticed that Sony shows up in a few places throughout, but does not claim any defining event for itself (in my view, natch). I wonder if that's because Sony's contributions are so diffuse that it's difficult to point to any one and say "There! That's it!" or if it's my personal perspective.

Feel free to note events you think I missed or corrections in the comments.

Update (19:47): There was about a 30 minute discussion of the list on the Game Theory podcast today.

Labels: history, nextgen

--jvm at 10:45

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Videogames are toys

While doing some research for a project I came across this quote (my emphasis):

"I think the mistake Wall Street made," [David J. Londoner, an analyst with Wertheim & Company] said, "is that they viewed this as a proprietary electronics business. It's the toy business. And the toy business does not get 24 to 25 percent pretax margins."

That's an analyst quoted in the New York Times in a 10 December 1982 article by Andrew Pollack on the diminishing profits of videogame companies. It made me chuckle.

Labels: history

--jvm at 12:33

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When did the original PlayStation drop in price?

My friend Kyle was asking me when the original Sony PlayStation -- the PS1 or PSX as we called it back then -- dropped in price. I had looked when I did my recent piece on console price cuts, but hadn't looked in the right places. With a bit of Lexis-Nexis hunting, I came up with the following:

Sony PlayStation launches on 9 September 1995 at $300 (i.e. $299.99).

The first price drop is from $300 to $200 and it happens on Thursday 16 May 1996, according to an AP news item that day titled "With Rollout of New Systems, Upturn Begins in Video Game Industry" written by Evan Ramstad. Quote:

The Nintendo machine, along with Sony's Playstation and Sega's Saturn, stand out from their predecessors in graphics, speed and game-playing features. Sony lowered the price of its system from $ 300 to $ 200 on Thursday, beating the $ 250 price level of Sega and Nintendo.

The second price drop is from $200 to $150 (i.e. $149.99) on Monday 3 March 1997, according to an AP news item that same day titled "Sony slashes prices of PlayStation, Nintendo says it will not follow" written by Rachel Beck. Quote:

Sony Computer Entertainment America launched a price war in the video-game industry Monday when it slashed the cost of its PlayStation system and accompanying software by over 25 percent.

Sony's popular PlayStation will now have a suggested retail price of $ 149, down $ 50, and its games will sell for $ 49.99 and under from the previous price of about $ 70.

Rival video-game maker Nintendo said it would not immediately match the cuts, although analysts said the Japanese company may have to pare prices soon to compete.

If someone has the dates for later drops, let me know and I'll add them.

To my knowledge, the precise dates of these drops were not available out on the generally available internets, but there they are now.

Labels: business, history, psone, sony

--jvm at 21:43

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On game preservation and GameTap

Simon of GameSetWatch has posted excerpts from a recent email conversation he and I had regarding GameTap and similar services, especially with an eye toward game preservation. You can go read it yourself.

I'll only add here that I meant to get in a mention of Save the Whales, a game which was reportedly distributed online-only and was almost lost to the digital abyss. Did I mention it was an Atari 2600 game? That's right, a game distributed through a modem to an Atari 2600 over 20 years ago. Anyway, it apparently wasn't a great game, but it didn't have to be fun to be important.

Ok, I'll add one more thing. That is not a picture of me in Simon's post. Honestly.

Labels: atari, business, copyright, emulation, gametap, history, online distribution, steam, virtual console, xbla

--jvm at 00:50

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Gates: No strategy for a console (in 1996)

While I'm recovering use of my thumb, I've been doing some reading. I ran across this fun bit in a Next Generation interview with Bill Gates from June 1996.

We don't have a strategy to do a $200 game console that is a direct competitor to what Nintendo, Sega, and Sony are doing, and our business model isn't to charge software developers money. So if you compare a Nintendo game, where you've got to have that big ROM that's very expensive and pay a royalty, versus a CD-ROM on the PC, where there's a zero royalty, it's quite different.

Just over a decade later and:

• Microsoft has released two consoles, one of which essentially was a Windows PC.
  
• Microsoft charges to develop for and publish on those consoles.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you. I'm just noting how quickly things changed when Microsoft realized just how much money could be made doing those two things. Quite fitting, then, that earlier in the same interview we find this exchange:

NG: So are the games Microsoft is developing primarily designed to showcase Windows 95?

Bill: No, it's to make money.

Labels: history, interviews, microsoft, xbox, xbox360

--jvm at 22:42

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