The new century brought with it technology more advanced than anything we had seen before. For me, technology began to really blossom in the way that it became more publicly available. Digital technology became more reachable for the normal person, and much more advanced than it had been before. The market was flooded with high tech gadgets, computers, and consoles like the XBOX, Playstation 2, and computers with advanced graphics and memory capabilities.
Video and computer games started to be eye-candy for the masses. The advanced technology allowed computer games to be more sophisticated, beautiful, and even multiplayer. What started as a small wave quickly became a tsunami sweeping the public with its capabilities.
Looking back at the year 2000, it’s been only 10 years and technology again surprised us with its progress. Everything today is HD, or has the best hardware and software. Games have amazing graphic abilities because of such progress. It’s not only in games, but everywhere. More and more movies, for example, are developed in 3D, which I dislike because it kills a lot of the camera work, and nobody appreciates a good photographed movie or well scripted one. Everything is eye-candy and special affects today, but that is an entirely different subject
Genres in games, such as MMORPG - massively multiplayer online role playing games - and first person shooters became more and more popular because they held the buyer’s attention with advanced graphics and fantasy worlds which we hadn’t seen before. That is also because the cost of developing these games continued to increase. The more money the company had to develop a finished product, the better it usually was, but only sometimes.
There is a difference between game developers and game publishers. In one hand there are the game developers, people like myself, trying to create something new and intriguing for the public, something they themselves like, and that hopefully the people do too. In the other hand, the game publishers want to gain as much money as possible from the game sales. Often they try to suck as much as possible from a hit game, making more and more releases of it with sequels, that they turn the game from something extraordinary into something mundane. The game market also grew a lot because there weren’t quite so many titles back in the day. And almost every year, several great titles are released which bring millions – or in some cases billions – of dollars in sales.
Consoles have progressed massively over the last 20 years, from consoles that could barely run 8-bit games with a handful of colors, to machines on which you can run the latest in graphic games with ease. Today, we have the XBOX 360, Playstation 3, and innovative consoles like the Nintendo Wii. Even handheld games have progressed with an astounding rate, from black-and-white screens to displays that can run advanced games and even in the close future in 3D with the newest Nintendo product, the 3DS. Technology which can track your movement and allow you to control your game character with your body has been developed, though it’s still in its early stages, and doesn’t have much practical use, or fun games to go with it. The Sony Kinect may not be the first to come on the market, but it is definitely one of the most advanced.
Computers never slept and kept on growing. These days we have machines that have the computer power of a million of the most advanced computers we’d had no more than 20 years ago. Games in 3D have already been released for the computer and more are developed, becoming the newest trend in gaming.
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to think what will follow next in games in the next few years. With 3D advancing more and more, and movement detection, one day we may need a whole room for a game, nothing in but some sensors and projectors that will display the whole game world around us, giving us the sensation that we are actually inside the game. But we have lots of time until then. For now, let’s enjoy our favorite games, new and old.
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