The High Definition Video War Part 1 January 29, 2012

Are you guys ready for another history story?  Back in 2005, the world was itching to bring High Definition TV into the mainstream.  While PCs had enjoyed HD content for years prior, it was finally started to be adopted into the home theater market.  DVD was not a sufficient technology and the movie studios knew it.  With the choice to use a red laser in DVD players, there was not enough bandwidth to support high-definition playback.

While HD televisions were finally being sold to the mass markets, the install base was still quite low, only about 20% of homes had a HDTV in their house, and very few of them had any content to use for it.  Not all of the next generation consoles had been released.  The time had come for DVD’s HD successor to be released, a new video format capable of displaying movies in high-definition video and audio, and show HDTV owners the full potential of their new TVs.

The problem was that like with any large group, the manufacturers couldn’t agree on how they wanted to go about making this new format and who would be the ones to make the standard.

Sony had a product in mind to meet this demand.  They had a new optical disc format with storage capacity of around fifty gigs.  Dubbed Blu-Ray Disc (BD for short) for the blue laser the player would read the disc with, Sony believed that with the extra storage capacity of the discs, it would do well for containing large series, loads of special features, and completely uncompressed surround sound audio tracks.  The problem with it was that it was so dissimilar to what was currently on the market, new facilities would have to be built to mass produce them.

Toshiba had their own ideas.  They had a disc format of their own in mind that, while it did not have nearly as much of a storage capacity as Blu-Ray did, it had a full list of features and software ready to go for it that Sony didn’t.  At launch, their format would be able to support picture-in-picture commentary, as well as allow any users with internet access the ability to download new content to their players.  Toshiba called the format HD-DVD and unlike Blu-Ray it could be mass produced using currently existing technology.

Each side believed they had the superior product, but everyone knew that there was a major elephant in the room.  Sony was also producing their next generation console alongside their new high-definition format.  The Playstation 3 was the third in Sony’s highly successful gaming division, which had twice prior won the gaming wars by a landslide.  The decision to include DVD playback in the PS2 at launch had been an enormous success for the initial sales of the PS2, as they sold it as not just a gaming platform but an entertainment device, and Sony was banking that the choice to include a Blu-Ray player inside of the PS3 would be just as big an advantage to them as it had been in the previous generation.  None of the other consoles would support Blu-Ray out of the box, but there was some musings that Microsoft may include an adapter to allow HD-DVD playback on the Xbox 360 after the 360′s launch.

The sides were chosen.  Universal Studios would be an HD-DVD exclusive provider.  20th Century Fox and Disney both decided to join Sony Pictures and exclusively support Blu-Ray Disc.  However, not all the studios were willing to choose a side in this fight just yet.  Paramount and Warner Bros, who probably had the biggest studio catalog of all the studios, would remain neutral and support both platforms.

However, completely independent of whoever was going to win or lose this format war, the true loser of it was going to be the home consumer.  With an only twenty percent install base to go for, both Sony and Toshiba were going for a small portion of a niche market, which was probably one of the worst business decisions anyone could make.  It also would mean that with studios exclusive to certain platforms, there were going to be movies released that would not see a release on the alternate format.  If a consumer chose to buy a Blu-Ray player, they would be forced to buy the DVD of anything released exclusive to the alternate format.  They also knew that whoever would end up buying the eventual losing format would be forced to buy the winning format after the fact, and possibly rebuy their movie collection.

There were rumors of an 11th hour meeting of the minds to stop the format war before it started, but it fell through.  The war, it seemed, would be decided by the consumers.

A Perfect Platform for FMV Game Resurgence, The iPhone January 22, 2012

Back in the early 00s I was reading an article which listed various classic games from the various gaming genres and what at the time were considered the best most recent games of those genres. In that article, instead of listing a modern game alongside King’s Quest, they simply had the headline “Adventure Gaming is Dead.” Now in the early 2000s that certainly may have been true, but it sure isn’t anymore.

In my opinion, adventure gaming saw a resurgence in the latter half of the last decade primarily fueled by the episodic gaming experiment of 2006. While it was expensive and time-consuming to make a shooter and release it episodically, there was something about adventure games that lended itself well to an episodic formula. Telltale Games were probably the only survivors of the episodic experiment that I can think of, and it is still their preferred business model. However, they weren’t the only ones doing well with this new generation of adventure games. New adventure games started to see retail release and not only see decent review scores but sell pretty well. Quantic Dream released Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheit) and started a whole new model of adventure games and called them interactive movies. They followed Indigo Prophecy up one generation later with Heavy Rain, which also saw great sales, had very high review scores, and personally convinced me to be an early adopter of the Playstation Move controller system.

However, in the 90s the adventure game was a staple of the PC platform before the FPS craze took over. There are a lot of classic adventure games that people have been talking about for the past twenty years that some people were never able to play. A lot of them were shot in Full-Motion Video (FMV). While the FMV trend was universally hated after it left us towards the end of the 90s, there are a lot of people talking about these games again, and inspired by internet personalities like The Spoony One, want the chance to play these games. Boxed copies of older games (especially unopened ones) can cost large amounts of money, or you could hope that they could see a downloadable release through an online service like STEAM or Good Old Games, but there’s still the chance of compatibility issues. You could have an older computer still lying around that could play the game, but the chances of them having long since broken down is very high. You could try to emulate the older operating systems that the game requires, but that would require either having a copy of the older OS in your archives still or buying a new boxed copy off eBay or Amazon.

All these problems beg for these games to see a re-release on a new platform better suited to handle an adventure game’s interface. When you think about what translates a mouse’s point and click interface the best the answer becomes obvious, it’s the touch screen. A modern iPhone nowadays has more processing power than a computer made at the time these classic adventure games were released and the downloadable marketplace can take advantage of the low filesize of some of the older games, and their expanded internal storage capacity can certainly fit the large filesizes of the larger games that used multiple CD-ROMs.

Adventure games are already out for the iPhone and iPad. In fact I remember shortly after the app store launched someone released the original game Adventure from the Atari. The tilt sensor translated perfectly as a control system in lieu of the lack of a directional pad. Telltale releases many of their adventure games to the iPhone/iPad since the third season of Sam & Max.

Older adventure games like Myst and The 7th Guest have already been ported to the platform, where they have access to a wide customer base with no fear of running out of product. There’s been a demand over the past two years to see more of these games get re-released for the iPhone, I think the most vocal demand has probably been to Konami and Kojima Team for a Snatcher iOS re-release, but I can think of a bunch of more games that would work perfectly ranging from Policenauts, to The Daedalus Encounter. Also I think a lot of people want the chance to play some of the games that reviewers have been bringing back into the limelight like Ripper, Phantasmagoria (and it’s sequel), and Johnny Mnemonic.

Having played (or seen played) some of these games personally I can attest they would work perfectly with a touchpad interface, and could probably be remade with just some minor tweaking to the game’s interface (like occasionally bringing up a keyboard/keypad). While its possible that many of the companies that made these games originally have long since gone out of business, someone must have those original game assets lying around in a vault somewhere. While these developers may not exist anymore the publishers certainly do, or have had their assets absorbed by other currently existing publishers. It would be a lot more profitable to work with already existing assets and release them to guaranteed sales in a market where they can’t sell out than build more full priced retail games from scratch.