Messofanego
Banned
Thank you. I didn't know these games used to be the biggest thing in the 90s. The people being in more lucrative businesses who used to be fans makes sense. I understand now that this is considered the saviour for the genre, like how a few of adventure game crowdfunded projects have been for that field (Broken Age, Broken Sword 5, Dreamfall Chapters) or computer RPGs (Torment: Tides of Numenara, Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland 2).
People must have seen that now that the middlemen are gone and there was no need to cater to the mainstream audience that led to these games vanishing, they are willing to spend money on bringing back this genre in a big way. At least that's what I gather from Alec Meer's RPS post on Elite Dangerous:
I come and go on old franchises and old ideas being resurrected by rich old men for rather less rich and old men and women. Sometimes it seems like a roadblock to fresh invention, other times it seems like returning to roads that games were forcibly and unfairly turned away from as forces of marketing and demographic-chasing decided they werent suitably commercially viable. For example: space sims didnt all but die out because the possibilities were exhausted. Though there have always been survivors, they all but died out because they required huge budgets to pull off well, but could not command the sort of easily advertised-at mainstream audience required to earn their keep. What remained turned inwards, servicing the very particular demands of a passionate few, and making themselves all the more inaccessible to those who were interested but not quite so fervent about it.
The comeback, thanks to the removal of almost all middlemen and the ability to engage directly with an audience large enough but spread far and wide, is something I find incredibly exciting. After having barely touched space games for years, I now find myself owning a £120 joystick and obsessed with Elite 4.
I peer back into the mist of early teenage years stranded in the countryside with a 486 as almost my only companion, and space games were so important to me. Elite: Frontier, TIE Fighter and X-Wing, Privateer Then, around 1997, it stopped, or at least seemed to. Part of that was me, as the earliest stages of an alcohol-orientated social life flickered into being, and part of that was the genre becoming less exciting and more elaborate though it meant I missed out on some of greats, such as Freespace, I-War and the last worthwhile Lucasarts efforts.
Look to the turn of the century and the writings on the wall. Plenty of space games, yes, but what a mess: a split between poorly-received licensed drek and deep-dive sims with narrow appeal. Wheres the seat of the pants stuff? Wheres the fantasy of it all? Wheres the game that makes me want to stick a cardboard overlay on my keyboard, or buy a new joystick? Wheres the space game that matches the thrill and escapism of the first-person shooters of the time? Years later still, I dallied with Freelancer, but much as I liked it, somehow it wasnt quite there.
