How We Got Here - Game Design Theory - page 83

for video games. I know many people whose first games were Ocarina
of Time , Final Fantasy VII , or Metal Gear Solid . The world of 2012 is a
world with a generation of people who think that the fifth generation was
the era of the classics, and it shows.
Staying the Course (Sixth Generation, 1998-?)
Around the turn of the millennium we saw the creation of new con-
soles from Sony and Nintendo. We also saw the addition of a new player
in the video-game market: Microsoft and its Xbox console. The sixth
generation of video games began around this time, and besides the fact
that Sega was out (its Dreamcast console did not do well after its North
American launch in 1998) and Microsoft was in, there isn't much for us
to talk about in this era. The reason is that this period represents a new
low point in innovation in digital games. In some ways, the sixth genera-
tion is one in which the new consoles were the least needed yet, in that
the number of possibilities was increased by the smallest amount. Most
of the hit games were just updated versions of games that came before.
The popular Xbox FPS Halo: Combat Evolved was a massive hit, but re-
ally brought very little new to the table. It was essentially introducing a
new generation to mechanisms that PC FPS gamers had been playing
for years. Sony's big hit at the time was Grand Theft Auto III by Rockstar
Games (formerly DMA Design), which was a 3D version of its Grand
Theft Auto franchise. And, while the beautiful visuals of Nintendo's latest
Zelda incarnation, The Wind Waker , seemed to capture everyone's at-
tention, in terms of gameplay it was much like the Zelda games before it.
Innovation on the Wrong Axis (Seventh Generation, 2004-Present)
By 2004, it seemed that even the console manufacturers understood that
the industry was stagnating. The lead designer at Nintendo, Shigeru Mi-
yamoto, has been quoted in saying that he personally found the fifth and
sixth generations to be “very sad times.� Correctly, he pointed out that
games were becoming more and more about technology, and he said that
he “didn't know who was designing his games anymore.�
As it became more and more clear that simply increasing the graphi-
cal abilities of consoles was becoming less and less of a safe business plan,
Nintendo started to look elsewhere for its seventh-generation console.
The problem is, they looked in the wrong places. While the Xbox 360
and PlayStation 3 consoles pretty much stayed the course, the Nintendo
Wii took a dramatically different approach. Essentially, the graphics ca-
pabilities of the Wii are the same as those of Nintendo's GameCube, but
the selling point was the motion-sensitive controllers. Now you could