From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=0.6 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_40,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,9c776e3cc19d3176 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Richard Riehle Subject: Re: $500 <= chump change, was Re: Port I/O Date: 1996/11/20 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 197739162 references: <01BBD13B.2E702E00@idc213.rb.icl.co.uk> <56ffmj$pko@top.mitre.org> <328F5D46.7DBC@bix.com> content-type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII organization: National University, San Diego mime-version: 1.0 newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-11-20T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: On 17 Nov 1996, Robert Dewar wrote: In response to Tom Moran's notion that high-schoolers and other "amateurs" could introduce any new game ideas into the market. > I think you are creating a fantasy world here, and not the kind of > fantasy world that we are interested in! Methinks you dismiss this notion with excessive haste, Robert. I still live here in Silicon Valley and lots of high-school, community college, and university students are experimenting with ideas for new games. > These days, sucessful video games cost well into 7 figures to develop > (they can gross hundreds of millions if they are successful, so that's > not out of line by any means), but the days when high school students > could do interesting things in the game market is long gone! I disagree with this. What first comes to mind is Tetris. A simple game, hugely successful, and continuing to be popular. The 7 figures you mention is true of the elaborate games with sophisticated graphics, but some high-school student somewhere is going to invent some clever game with the simplicity of Tetris that will be every bit as successful as the games from established game publishers. Moreover, with the growing use of Internet-based games, and other telecommunications services, games programmed in Java will become more important. And those fancy graphics that cost millions, will be, for the near term, more of a nuisance than a blessing because of the slow transfer data rates still in use in the average household. The advent of telephone-based computing provides fertile ground for a completely new set of games that we cannot even imagine -- but some eighth-grader is already planning. Richard Riehle