Quote:
Originally posted by Undertoad
That's a WAY cool idea jl.
I love it when gaming and technology and life come together like that. As more and more kid gamers grow into adult gamers, I bet this is the wave of the future.
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A while ago, Slashdot and others linked to a story about a California high school that incorporated DDR into its phys-ed curriculum.
I watched the kids going nutzoid on the pads at the mall, and figured I'd give it a try a while ago; I downloaded (arrr! arrr!) the Japanese DDR 2nd Mix for my Dreamcast, got my hands on a PS1 pad and adapter, and plunked the game on the easiest settings. I got to where I could get a decent rating on the first or second song before the novelty wore off and I went on to some other games. (The versions being played now are simply ludicrous; the arrows fly by at warp speed, to the point where I can't imagine anyone finishing a level without tearing both ACLs.)
The kid gamer -> adult gamer paradigm is THE reason why Sony currently rules the home gaming universe. The first generation of mass-market cartridge-based consoles (Atari, Intell, Coleco, Odyssey^2, Astrocade, Vectrex) ruled the roost from around '80-'84; the NES was at its peak later in that decade. Lots of people who were kids or teens in that period were firmly in their twenties when the PlayStation debuted in 1995... but unlike previous generations, they'd grown up with video games and thus still had an interest in them.
The PlayStation was a mass-market console capable of appealing to more sophisticated audiences (though also capable of kiddy fare), brought PC CD-ROM game capabilities to the living room in an affordable closed box, and also eliminated the need to visit arcades to play arcade-quality games. The PS1 was the console that Moore's Law caught up to; what you played in the arcade was often identical to what you played at home, but without the annoying kids buzzing around or any need to wait in line to play. Even at their best, accuracy in 1:1 conversions was something that could rarely be said for the Genesis or Super Nintendo (except when rehashing older games), let alone older consoles.
The Saturn had many of these advantages (I have a friend who paid big bucks for one specifically to play arcade-quality Virtua Fighter 2), but Sega didn't have Sony's aggressive marketing or anywhere near the number of third-party developers. Ditto for the 3DO, which was an ambitious failure in its attempt to do all of the above, but was older than the others and thus cripped by lesser design specs.
Once Sony ruled the home, attracting older gamers became even easier for them, because that opened the door for niche titles that many kids wouldn't be interested in. Developers could take advantage of the huge console base to make games for limited audiences, knowing that a smaller chunk of the console base was still a vast number of potential sales. And so it goes to this day.