How We Got Here - Game Design Theory - page 80

line between digital games that met the design standards of traditional
games (such as Tetris and Spacewar! ), and games that really set out to
do something very different (such as Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy ).
If we had drawn that line in 1990, I don't think I would have had to write
this topic today. It would have been a very diferent—and I mean bet-
ter—world of digital games. So why didn't we draw that line? We simply
didn't have the time. The medium was young and immature, and at the
same time rocketing to stardom. Things were too good, too exciting, and
too profitable for anyone to go about asking potentially destructive ques-
tions. And things remain that way, in large part, today.
The Perfect Storm (Fourth Generation, 1989-1999)
By the early 1990s, the video-game industry was healthy and strong, and
actually began to settle down. Rivalries between companies formed, but
what was particularly interesting about this era was that the modern lan-
guage of digital games began to harden.
Improvements in technology, and hence potential gameplay possi-
bilities, was very easy to see in moving from the first generation to the
second. However, this had begun to slow a bit by the fourth generation.
The technological advancements of the fourth generation largely allowed
for things such as more colors onscreen, images with higher resolution,
and higher sound fidelity In other words, most of the games that came
out during this period on the Super Nintendo could have worked on
the original Nintendo with lower visual and audio fidelity But that was
not at all the case for games from the first and second generations: you
couldn't have expressed the gameplay of Pitfall! on the Magnavox Odys-
sey, but you could have done A Link To the Past on the NES.
This was a source of concern for hardware manufacturers who, like
most corporations, knew that defeat was only a mistake away from suc-
cess. What resulted was a massive PR campaign that focused on the
technological prowess of hardware. It's a basic tenet of advertising to talk
up your weaknesses and turn them into strengths, so just as the newer
hardware was becoming less useful, we were told that it was more im-
portant than ever. And we bought it. The games of the fourth generation
were mostly higher resolution extensions of games from the previous
generation. We began a sequel loop that we are still stuck in today, pro-
ducing new Final Fantasy games, new Mario games, new Zelda games,
and new Dragon Quest games. This situation sounds very familiar even
to someone reading this topic in 2010, 20 years later.
What's important about the fourth generation is that we begin to
see games moving in a new direction during this period. Games started