Cliff Notes – I had a Commodore Amiga as a kid and this is not the gaming future I imagined
- The gaming landscape has shifted dramatically, with younger audiences gravitating towards free mobile games and live services, leaving traditional gaming behind.
- A notable decline in the diversity of game development has occurred, with fewer unique titles and a predominance of American-style games dominating the market.
- The nostalgia for the imaginative and varied offerings of the Amiga era contrasts sharply with today’s focus on realistic graphics and monetisation strategies, leading to a perceived loss of creativity in gaming.
Reader’s Feature
The future has been difficult to predict (Sernot/Wikipedia)
A reader compares his childhood dreams of what the Amiga era of video games would evolve into with the current day and its very different priorities.
There were two things that depressed me in the news this week (the gaming news – there’s far more than two in the actual news) and the first was the proof that I’m old, since the Commodore Amiga has turned 40 this month. The other was that the average age of gamers is getting older and older, so that even most Nintendo players are in their 30s.
Apparently younger people just aren’t playing ‘traditional’ video games anymore, just free mobile games and live service stuff like Fortnite and Minecraft. Video games don’t seem to be of any special interest to them and as companies, most obviously Sony, rush to try and appeal to them… well, you’ve all seen the release schedules the last few years.
This generation has been a disaster, as far as I’m concerned, for PlayStation and Xbox, and as we reach the end of it I’m seriously wondering whether video gaming as I know and love them will even survive for much longer. Suffice to say this is not how I imagined things back when I was playing my Amiga as a wee lad.
Back then, when the whole idea of video games was still new, it was hard to imagine what they’d become but I definitely remember talking to a friend about a game in which you could do anything and go anywhere. I think we imagined it as being all our favourite games combined into one, with driving and flying and so on. Little did I know we were basically describing GTA.
I’m not sure we had any more specific ideas beyond that, other than the graphics would get more and more realistic and things like Starglider 2 and Frontier: Elite 2 would be expanded upon to a point beyond our imagination. Little did I realise at the time that these games would basically die on the Amiga and never be made again.
Looking through GC’s list of the 20 best games there were plenty of others I would’ve added, like James Pond 2: RoboCod, Turrican, Pinball Fantasies, The Chaos Engine, and Superfrog. But overall it was a good list and none of my picks change the point I’m about to make: almost all the games on the list were British.
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The tragedy is that the only two American games on the list (Civilization and Monkey Island) are also the only two franchises that are still going today. All the other ones are gone or on life support (I think Elite Dangerous is still going on PC, but they stopped updating it on console) and not only are they unlikely to come back but there’s nothing like them to take their place.
The only thing similar to Elite is the dreadful Starfield, which genuinely feels like a bad Amiga game in terms of its lack of originality and ambition. And there’s been nothing else like that for years anyway, so its failure is going to guarantee that doesn’t happen again.
I haven’t got anything against American games but one of the great things about the Amiga was you got games from all over. There were American imports, Japanese imports (although a lot of the arcade conversions were done by British developers), and European games. Nowadays European games either don’t exist or are indistinguishable from American ones. Would you know Ubisoft were French if someone hadn’t told you?
The lack of variety in the types of games that are being made, and the people making them, is truly depressing and it’s only going to get worse, as the more games cost the less risks and the less big budget games in general.
A lot of games on the Amiga weren’t very good but there was always something weird and unexpected round the corner. I’m not sure you even get that with indie games today, which always seem to be just Soulslikes or Metroidvanias.
The dream of ultra realistic graphics has come true but at such a terrible cost that it’s just not worth it. All the franchise I used to love are dead and most of the companies making them are too. Worst of all their imagination and ingenuity is dead too, where today more effort is put into cosmetic DLC than the actual games.
By reader Johnson
Little of the Amiga’s portfolio has lasted to the modern day (Metro)
The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.
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