Ubisofts and EAs (or whatever mass-media huge dev corp you want to invoke) either buy up the small devs or out-sell them and put them out of business.
Indie titles aside, there are fewer and fewer companies involved in game development as well.
That kind of corporate short-sightedness (we have a commanding market share - so we're fine) kills more good companies. Then again, the people who had been on longer would wait above the airports, and shoot newbies out of the sky as soon as their wheels left the ground unless they took evasive actions, so Air Warriors wasn't great, but it was light years ahead of anything Compu$erve ever had. Not like Air Warriors, where you could fly a P51 Mustang, with a photo replica of the cockpit in front of you.
You remember Space Wars? The game where if you had a fast modem, you could wait in a "star cloud" and then hammer the crap out of an opponent before they could figure out where you were? And the graphics? Your ship was a single character. GENIE was the most advanced - I remember asking my product VP when CI$ was going to get multi-player games like Air Warrior, and she said "We have Space Wars." Then AOL came and BAM - within a few years, they were all gone. They were never as good as the arcade games themselves.īut then came Nintendo (Now you're Playing with POWER) and the game changed.Ītari reacted slowly with a couple of products, and lost a market that they had owned for years. When I was a kid, we got the Atari 2600, and a bunch of cartridges. I appreciate your sharing it - it provides some insights into what drove the downfall of arcades.