In the 1990s, there were a number of Star Trek and Star Wars games, that really nailed the subtle atmosphere, appeal and identity of those franchises.
This used to be a special skill of developers like LucasArts, Interplay and Microprose. Doesn't leave much time to engage in depth with any outside interests or have interesting life experiences that might form the basis of a creative spark.Īlthough it's a bit different from examples like Tomb Raider 1, with it's atmospheric environmental storytelling of an original world, I was thinking about games that capture the specific environmental 'feel' and 'tone' of a popular pre-existing franchise. Studying to enter a specific field in your teenage years and into young adulthood is mentally all consuming. If they do have pretensions towards a cultural sensibility it'll be the prestige midwit drivel du jour recommended by the glossy magazine in a legacy newspaper. Having spent much of my life around university-educated professionals I'd also add that they tend to be artistically illiterate.
RESIDENT EVIL REMAKE 4 INFERNAL MOD TORRENT
Hence the torrent of technically competent risk-averse cultural sludge we all drown in. This is then compounded when they enter the corporate world where success is defined solely by the amount of profit you extract. Modern creatives are all likely taught and tested on certain 'correct' ways of moving a camera or designing a progression system with the ever looming threat of punitive failure on any deviation. It doesn't work in creative industry because you can't teach artistic inspiration. This works for normal professions because they have all have (mostly) objective standards of competence required to work in that field. Broadly they learn about a defined curriculum and are tested on their ability to retain that information.
RESIDENT EVIL REMAKE 4 INFERNAL MOD MOVIE
People now train to be movie directors or game designers like people train to be doctors or engineers i.e. I'd expand on this and argue that the increasing professionalisation of creative industries is to blame. They were inspired only by other computer games. On the other hand, later devs (Crystal Dynamics) just wanted to make "Prince of Persia - Sands of Time, only with Lara". So, original TR devs (Core Design) wanted to make "Indiana Jones game, but with a chick, recreating Montezuma's Revenge feel, but in 3D, with some levels in Egypt, etc." - mixing inspirations from different media. These people can only "remake" things (for example games), they can't "make" new ones. Hence the constant recycling and lack of originality. They know cultural "tropes" only as memes, concepts used in video games and Disney adaptations. Unfortunately newshit devs (and millenials / zoomers in general) have been fed only with "second-hand" cultural artifacts. "firsthand" - they experienced those in their proper, original medium. These people knew things like The Odyssey, Moby Dick, Citizen Kane, X-men, etc. They grew up reading books, watching old and new movies, reading comics, playing tabletop games, etc. IMO the main reason of the golden era (except of what Glop_dweller wrote) was the fact that the devs came from different backgrounds, but mostly academic / nerd mix. Weirdly, I feel like these type of "normal person suddenly placed into a life-or-death situation" plots in videogames are best served by a silent protagonist - the Hacker from System Shock, Gordon Freeman from Half-Life, Gina/849 from Unreal, all somehow feel much more relatable and sympathetic to me than modern movie-like videogame protagonists, despite having no characterisation, never saying a word, and being represented entirely by a viewmodel of a gun. Same for Amicia, the hero of Plague Tale she's killed more people than AIDS and has been placed in more lethal situations than Johnny Knoxville but somehow she still can't handle it. I think she even keeps flouncing about and panicking even after her not-girlfriend is placed in mortal danger, which you'd think would be the ultimate catalyst to stop panicking and start moving forward with unshakable focus, especially since she's armed to the teeth by that point. Surely after the first big shootout you'd be eerily tranquil, even if only as some kind of trauma response or whatever.
It's especially dumb in a lot of these games because, if I remember TR2013 right, nu-Lara is still going "uguuguhh I'm scared it's too hard" for several hours even after she's picked up an assault rifle and killed like a hundred and fifty mooks. First time it happened I found myself ignoring the guy's yelling and instead just thought "he really looks like someone but I can't figure out who" (realised later he looked like some kind of inbred Al Pacino body double).
Now that you mention it, I've been mugged at knifepoint twice and on both occasions I remember being almost totally calm in a way that I'm not in regular life, and almost finding it kind of funny.
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