From 'Pong' to 'Next-Gen'

Pac-man and Fear are arguably two of the best games ever made. They are massively different but arguably massively similar! Both games still evoke the same kind of emotion. Pac Man: ‘’Argh I’m surrounded by four ghosts, got to get round the next corner, eeeeek so close’’. Fear ‘’ Argh I’m surrounded by four invisible ninjas, got to get to the shotgun ammo, eeeeeeek, quickly, use a health pack’’. You get the idea. Why spend millions on developing fear, spending such lengthy times on the design process to evoke the same reaction as PacMan, a game that took little money and time to create. Why? It’s simple. The audience need the best and the newest. To create the best and the newest you need money to be invested in the design process. No one’s going to spend £40 on PacMan, but they will on Fear. It is my opinion and I’m sure the opinion of many others that what it takes to create a blockbuster game that an audience will flock to is to have a solid and sound design process backing it.
Half-Life 2 took around 7 years to create. The game had a massive programming team behind it to create a realistic and working physics engine. Painstaking hours were spent on the level design process. They were hours well spent. The levels themselves set a realistic environment for the player to immerse themselves in. But the levels alone did not make HL2 what it is! Lots of teams of designers, animators, programmers, testers ect. Worked together, interlocking the process to come up with the final product.
What I look for in a game is a new experience. I liked the look of ‘Conflict Denied Ops’, but for me that game is basically the same as ‘BLACK’ but with better graphics. That’s why I did not buy it. My final conclusion is this. For a game to be good and sell well, it needs a good design process to back it, but it also needs originality and the ability to make the audience say ‘’Wow, I want that game!’’.