{"id":9359,"date":"2011-01-13T00:46:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-12T22:46:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-29T22:00:00","slug":"pong-creator-says-today-s-devs-are-afraid-to-take-risks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/business\/9359-pong-creator-says-today-s-devs-are-afraid-to-take-risks","title":{"rendered":"Pong creator says today\u2019s devs are \u201cafraid to take risks\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a video interview with <a href=\"http:\/\/venturebeat.com\/2011\/01\/12\/atari-co-founder-al-alcorn-talks-about-creating-pong-and-modern-game-industry\/\" target=\"_blank\">VentureBeat<\/a>, Pong creator and Atari co-founder Al Alcorn talks about how much the gaming industry has changed in the last 30-odd years.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;If you look at our games &ndash; the earlier games &ndash; 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&#8217;re afraid to take risks. We took a lot of risks and we had a lot of fun doing it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Big words from a guy who made a game where two rectangles bounce a square back and forth between them.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Asked if he has any advice for this generation of developers, Al concedes that &ldquo;I&#8217;ve not been in the videogame business for a long time&rdquo;, but adds that &ldquo;I think just in general you&#8217;ve got to take some risks to do new things. We&#8217;re seeing some of it slowly with the 3D Kinect thing and the Wii. If you&#8217;re trying to compete with what somebody else has already done it&#8217;s really, really risky to do better than that. I think people are better off trying a new kind of game, and maybe they&#8217;ll get lucky.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/forum\/showthread.php\/10449-Developers-today-are-afraid-to-take-risks-says-Pong-guy?p=349035#post349035\" target=\"_self\">Are game developers afraid to take risk these days?<\/a> &lt;&lt; Share your views in the forums<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Presumably isn\u2019t a Call of Duty fan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9359\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}