>Another thing to remember about the shelflife of games at the time was that
>the PC didn't have a whole lot of them. IF you landed a game that was good
>it could survive for ages. This is still true today in many respects with
>games like Quake still going for $30 in some places.
I'd personally say being a "popular" game is more a factor than being a
"good" game... everyone pretty much agrees on what's popular, even if we
have differing definitions of good.
To use your example, I've never been particularly impressed by Quake...
to me, Quake is Doom with better graphics, and Doom is Wolfenstein 3-D
with better graphics. But it's hugely popular, so retailers can still get
away with charging $30 or so for a copy. Similarly, manipulation-puzzle
games like The 7th Guest and Myst have never excited me, but you can still
find them sold for over $14.95 despite the fact that they're nearing the
10-year mark (which is long past midlife crisis for the typical computer
game).
Now look at what's probably my all-time favorite graphic adventure, The
Last Express by Interplay / Smoking Car. This game has the best story,
best characters, best voice acting, and best surprise ending of ANY game
I've ever seen. Yet you rarely see it on store shelves anymore, and when
you do it's always in the $10-and-under bargain area. IMHO, if there were
any justice in the computer gaming industry, TLE would be the revered
classic, while 7th Guest and Myst would have been highly heralded at the
time of their release, then quickly forgotten as advances in technology
made all their graphics obsolete. There are lots of good games that get
unfairly ignored.
>This is probably the right post to start this line of questioning in, but
>should we be making a distinction in value for the format (ie computer
>system) the game came on? I mean we mostly agree its about the materials,
>but should a C64 version of AoA be worth the same as the PC version?
I charge a bit more for PC versions, because there appears to be a
significant percentage of collectors looking for them specifically.
Some titles are just plain harder to come by in that format, such
as the Scott Adams adventures, Synapse/Broderbund electronic novels,
and countless other obscure adventure titles. PC versions of early
Ultima titles were fetching $100+ for awhile, until Origin released
the Ultima Collection CD-ROM, at which point they dropped drastically,
because at that point they became of interest only to collectors.
Also, selling PC means I have to try the game out and make sure the
disks work, as opposed to selling to someone who just wants the package.
>And
>what about games were there were drastic differences in quality between
>versions.
I'm not sure how qualified I am to answer here, since I'm mostly text-
adventure oriented, and there's barely any difference software-wise
between Zork 1 on the PC and Zork 1 on the TRS-80. Different interpreters,
same game file. Though I have noticed that versions of some games with
graphics seem to be more desirable than text-only (for instance, the
Magnetic Scrolls games for Apple were all text).
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