Retro Gaming Comunity

[Unknown_K]

Would there be a large amiga/c64 retro gaming community if all the games were not freely distributed these days?

What would the scene look like now if the games had an uncrackable protection so that if you didnt have an original you were out of luck?

[cv643d]

If the games where uncrackable there would be more people hyping old shit games because they thought it was fun in 1987 but cant test it out today and realize it was pure shit.

[Unknown_K]

The reason I ask is because one of the reason I originally got my c64 back in the 80's was because others had it, and they got it because they could trade games. At the time I did purchase quite a few games (wish I still had them), but also had alot of copies. I think one of the major reasons people are still in the c64 scene is because they can use an emulator (or the real machine since its easy to find and cheap) and play EVERY game out there for free. If you had to pay $20 for each old game today who would do it?

The same goes for the emulators running on the dreamcast and the xbox. The scene for those 2 systems was helped immensly because of the hacked hardware. I guess its the same for every hacked system.

[Hammy]

Gaystation beat the sega saturn because of easy to copy software
i wish saturn had done better.. but thats another story..

[Unknown_K]

Originally posted by Hammy
Gaystation beat the sega saturn because of easy to copy software
i wish saturn had done better.. but thats another story..

Well you had to mod your PSX (I did) but you could play saturn games via swapping with an original.

I remember quite a few people I worked with at the time bugged me to burn them sega saturn games they had rented. This was just after I purchased my first cdr 4020i hp burner at $1100 (early adopter with money to burn).

I thaught the saturn did worse because it was a pain to program multiple chips and the PSX was more powerfull (doing some 3d)

[Dastardly]

Originally posted by Hammy
Gaystation beat the sega saturn because of easy to copy software
i wish saturn had done better.. but thats another story..

I think Playsation beat the Saturn simply because it had Sonys marketing muscle behind it. It was marketed as a cool console and was seen in all the right places.

[Unknown_K]

Sony might know marketing but they never made a console before, while sega was a well known brand.

Look at Microsofts marketing compared to the nintendo gamecube and they are still neck and neck.

It all has to do with quality titles and good hardware.

[Dastardly]

Originally posted by Unknown_K

Look at Microsofts marketing compared to the nintendo gamecube and they are still neck and neck.

It all has to do with quality titles and good hardware.

Xbox and GC are neck and neck because they share the stragglers that havent bought PS and Nintendo fans are very loyal to their hardware.

If it was all to do with hardware and quality titles then the Playstation2 wouldnt be winning the console 'war' because 90% of the games are crap and the hardware is inferior.

[Unknown_K]

The hardware wasnt inferior when launched for the ps2. It has a huge library and if you ask 100 people who own one their 10% of the great games probably wont match your list. Still 10% of a huge library is the reason the PS1 and PS2 have dominated.

[Dastardly]

Hey dont get me wrong here. Im a ex PS owner and a present PS2 owner and Im a fan of both the machines and some of the games. I just think that its not the quality of the hardware that made the Playstation brand OR the quality of the games. As I said I think it was Sony deciding they wanted in on the games business and marketed the PS brand to success extremely well.

If its software and hardware quality that counts then why didnt the Dreamcast with its extremely high quality line up of games beat the Playstation?

[killergorilla]

You can't sum up why console X beat console Y with a single phrase!

It was a whole list of reasons, not all of them Sony's doing. Sega made some big mistakes with the saturn and Sony just seemed to take a lesson from all of them.

Sony learnt a lot and managed to market the PS to a different target audience and had a lot more money to go for exclusive deals such as tomb raider.

Electronic Arts also played a major role in the success of the playstation. Without them supporting the Saturn they lost a lot of sales to the Playstation.

The ironic thing is that Sega helped bring the older audience to gaming with the Megadrive/Genesis, and Sony stole it right from them.

[Djay]

I wish the Dreamcast had lasted a bit longer, IMHO the DC had better graphics than a PS2 (which i have), more PC-like if you see what i mean....

the x-box looks good cos of hacking potential????!?!?... yes/no? i might get one, as you can play divx, mpeg etc... etc.... and emulation sounds cool.... wadda u think?

PS2=Massive mainstream market
X-Box=Typical MS's lack of understanding of the underground scene makes it useful
N.Cube=Great for the hardcore gamers

????

[Djay]

Sony made the Playstation mainstream, you didn't mind owning up to the fact you played it.... hey its cool...

[killergorilla]

Sony seemed to attack the right market, knew that they had to appeal to an older audience and get people interested. They managed to get a hell of a lot of third party support before it was released, once they had the lead cemented it didn't matter what mistakes they made.

The Saturn was aimed at completely the wrong audience. You need to appeal to the mainstream, then the hardcore, not the other way round. The Saturn was underpowered, rushed out, the western pads where useless, the lack of 3rd party support, the ridiculous $/£400 price tag.

Sony managed to cement the lead so well and completely tarnished the Sega brand that when the DC was released it didn't stand a chance. Hell, Sega even hid the word Sega on the dreamcast!

The Dreamcast deserved better than it got, but with protection so poor, the pirate market killed it before it got started.

Damn shame if you ask me. Some of the best games ever appeared on the Dreamcast.

[Djay]

The Dreamcast deserved better than it got, but with protection so poor, the pirate market killed it before it got started.

v.true...
i would imagine that sony did quite well because of chipping (well selling their machine anyway)... but i think they are still doing well with the PS2 and that is a right bitch to chip, where as the x-box is easy to chip and still the PS2 is out selling it (well, as far as i know)...

nintendo shot themselves in the foot with mini-dvd media, as well as making the same old games (good games thou)... people want "the next big thing", not just the old thing with better gfx

[FromWithin]

Originally posted by Dastardly
Xbox and GC are neck and neck because they share the stragglers that havent bought PS and Nintendo fans are very loyal to their hardware.

If it was all to do with hardware and quality titles then the Playstation2 wouldnt be winning the console 'war' because 90% of the games are crap and the hardware is inferior.

Here's the way it was/is. Sega split their market by bringing out the Mega-CD. It didn't sell many and the CD games for it were pretty bad. Sega then split the market again by bringing out the 32x. So now there were three different variations of the Megadrive to risk writing games for, and there were even plans for the release of CD 32X games. These got dropped pretty quickly and they went ahead with the Saturn, which had been through some quick hardware changes after Sega had found out the specs of the Playstation. People were a bit sick of feeling conned by Sega and their dodgy new bits of hardware.

The Playstation was by far the most advanced piece of hardware available. Not only that, it came with a bunch of libraries making it really easy to program. The Saturn was technically inferior and was rushed together with multiple processors and no software support making it very difficult to write games for. On top of that, the Playstation had it's killer app right from the start: Ridge Racer. It was common knowledge among developers that it only took Namco six months to write it, and that got a few people drooling for it. We at Psygnosis obviously had some of the very first playstation hardware. The first development machines were like huge office photocopiers with racks of fans all along the bottom, but even the capabilites of the very first machines were amazing, running with some of the demo code from the Japanese developers (the dinosaur head, for example). I remember when they managed to combine the GPU and processor onto one chip and doubled the speed of it. It was simply unbelievable. Even more so when we got proper hardware chips, instead of stacks of reference boards, and suddenly all of this power was in this tiny little box. Most of us were aghast when Ridge Racer arrived (this was a month or two before launch). None of us could stop playing it. Seriously, the Saturn was laughable in 1995. Conversions from playstation games were lower frame rate with stippling because it didn't do transparency, and the good Saturn-only games were relatively few. We still supported it though, bringing out Wipeout and a couple of other games for it (Sony were not happy about that. Nor were they happy with us creating the Psy-Q development system at an eighth the price of the official Sony one, or us doing a PC conversion of Ridge Racer that was completely finished and ready for release until they put their foot down).

Another important factor in its success was that it was a 100% games machine. For years people had harped on about multimedia (most boringly 3DO, but Sega had been the same with the Mega-CD), and then Sony said "It's a games machine. You use it to play games. It not designed for FMV, you can't view your Kodak PhotoCDs on it, you play games". Most people forget what the industry was like at that time. This attitude was a breath of fresh air.

It also had cool black CDs that no-one had ever seen before, and a revolutionary pad design. The box itself was small, grey, and simple, again distancing itself from everybody else doing "cool" black machines.

Piracy had nothing whatsoever to do with the success of the Playstation. When it was released, a CD-writer would have set you back over £1000 (not to mention the SCSI PC you would have needed), and blank CDs were about £15 each. The ability to copy games was out of pretty much everybody's reach. Even though the swap-trick became well-known quite quickly, piracy was not a problem except for commercial copiers.

The Playstation was successful because it was technically an Amiga-sized step over everything else, it had superb games from the outset (Ridge Racer & Toshinden being first in Japan, but having a lot more by the time it was over here), it was cheaper than the Saturn, it was easy to program and Sony had superb developer support.

The Saturn was the ST, the Playstation was the Amiga. The Saturn had a head start on release, but developers realised that the Playstation hardware was far superior and eventually forced it out of the market.

The Playstation didn't become cool until we went to town with Wipeout. Games were the anti-christ to the people in the dance music scene, but most of the more vocal people at Psygnosis who worked on Wipeout were severely into dance music. The licenced music came about because those same people had just got into the Chemical Brothers (well mostly Nick Burcombe actually) and realised that the music fit. It was actually supposed to be 100% licenced music but it all fell apart toward the end and Tim (Wright) had two weeks to write about 10 tracks! After release, we started out doing a night with Cream where we setup some Playstation consoles which didn't get used much at all because it was too geeky. But it got the familiarity going. With some more of those nights, along with getting into the news pages of dance magazines because of the licenced music, the momentum started to gather. Then we had some really good adverts like the one with the guy and girl looking zonked out with bleeding noses that got banned because people reckoned it looked like they had been snorting Coke (their noses were supposed to be bleeding because of Wipeout's speed). Any "bad" publicity for the Playstation took the edge of geekiness off it.

In 1996 we released Formula1 which even got the F1 geeks turning their heads away from their PCs. And it had Murray Walker, who once complained to one of our marketing girls to stop sending cover sheets with the faxes because it was wasting his paper.

By the time of Wipeout2097, some came up with the genius idea of getting Red Bull into it (our payment for putting Red Bull logos into 2097 was a RedBull-shaped fridge of Red Bull. Of course, nobody had really heard of it at that point and it was either free Red Bull, or 10p for Coke, so we were drinking Red Bull like it was water. I remember Tim had five in one afternoon and sat there shaking ). Red Bull got very involved in the dance scene, keeping things going nicely. Sony got right into it too with some good marketing compaigns from them. Mainstream success was only around the corner.

The Playstation had sold so many by now that they were in many homes and non-gamers were seeing games and finding them interesting (including my Mum who got really into the first level of Wipeout. Only ever the first level, she never played any other track). Thus, for the average Joe, the Playstation became synonymous with games. When the PS2 came out it was a case of "What's a Gamecube? What's an XBox?". There was really only one choice if you were a casual gamer (which is the majority). And it can also play PS1 games.

Even people who bought an N64 bought a PS2 because of the lack of releases on the N64. This has unfortunately followed through to the Gamecube with developers now dropping Gamecube support in droves.

The Xbox is by Microsoft. Microsoft make Windows. This does not compute in the average brain. Games console? Microsoft? Er...don't really know what you're talking about, I'll just have the Playstation2 thanks. And I can play my old games with it? Yep, definitely a Playstation2.

So it was about the best hardware and best games. Now it's not that at all. It's about branding. The XBox hardware is far superior to both the PS2 and Gamecube, but it's got no chance against Sony because it's brand means almost nothing in comparison.

Nintendo have definitely lost the arrogance of being on top (Sony are on top and are now every bit as arrogant as Nintendo used to be), but still have their paranoia with developers. It was a big mistake for them to keep their cards too close to their chest, choose their "golden developers" and not let anybody have a go early on. The best thing that ever happened to the Gamecube was Sega. No MonkeyBall? No sales.

Microsoft have always had an uphill struggle. It remains to be seen what happens with the next set of consoles, but the indications are that the PS3 is going to take the piss.

[Unknown_K]

Originally posted by killergorilla
Sony seemed to attack the right market, knew that they had to appeal to an older audience and get people interested. They managed to get a hell of a lot of third party support before it was released, once they had the lead cemented it didn't matter what mistakes they made.

The Saturn was aimed at completely the wrong audience. You need to appeal to the mainstream, then the hardcore, not the other way round. The Saturn was underpowered, rushed out, the western pads where useless, the lack of 3rd party support, the ridiculous $/£400 price tag.

Sony managed to cement the lead so well and completely tarnished the Sega brand that when the DC was released it didn't stand a chance. Hell, Sega even hid the word Sega on the dreamcast!

The Dreamcast deserved better than it got, but with protection so poor, the pirate market killed it before it got started.

Damn shame if you ask me. Some of the best games ever appeared on the Dreamcast.

I think the dreamcast was out for a year or a year and a half before it got cracked, so it had plenty of time to gain a market before piracy did it in.

[Frootloop]

FromWithin,

Excellent, excellent post! This is what makes reading EAB so worth it. Thank you.

And Ridge Racer PC was completed but never released! Wow, I wonder if a copy still exists.

[Fred the Fop]

I agree Killer. From, you have made stunning points. Whats your take on what happened to the N64?

[FromWithin]

Originally posted by Frootloop
And Ridge Racer PC was completed but never released! Wow, I wonder if a copy still exists.

I always wondered that as well. It's probably gone forever, unfortunately. I did find the textures for it the other day among my Stack of Floppies though. Maybe I'll find some of the models and stuff as well.