In a video interview with VentureBeat, Pong creator and Atari co-founder Al Alcorn talks about how much the gaming industry has changed in the last 30-odd years.
“If you look at our games – the earlier games – they were all really wildly different. We tried all kinds of things. It was a great time to experiment. Now, the money is so big, we’re afraid to take risks. We took a lot of risks and we had a lot of fun doing it.”
Big words from a guy who made a game where two rectangles bounce a square back and forth between them.
Asked if he has any advice for this generation of developers, Al concedes that “I’ve not been in the videogame business for a long time”, but adds that “I think just in general you’ve got to take some risks to do new things. We’re seeing some of it slowly with the 3D Kinect thing and the Wii. If you’re trying to compete with what somebody else has already done it’s really, really risky to do better than that. I think people are better off trying a new kind of game, and maybe they’ll get lucky.”
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