Atari founder: Revolution rocks, triangles are scary
Ah, Nolan Bushnell. The man that created Atari, sold it off and later established the lucrative Chuck E. Cheese line of restaurants. That last part especially had us dying to hear what he had to say about the Nintendo Revolution, a feeling undoubtedly shared by the attendees at the Digital Interactive Entertainment Conference recently held in Kyoto, Japan. He had very good things to say about it, actually, but in doing so may have revealed an underlying and deeply rooted fear of basic geometric shapes.
"If you look at today’s controller with triangles, Xs, squares and circles, it’s scary. It’s like a keyboard. People are interface phobic.”
Ignoring the fact that keyboards have neither squares nor circles on them and tend to feature approximately 95 more buttons than a DualShock 2 controller, does the man have a point? Are today's controller's really so frighteningly complex?
Bushnell's main point of praise lies in the Revolution controller's simplicity and how much more appealing it is than a normal gamepad with thousands upon thousands of buttons. While it's true that Nintendo designed the controller with such simplicity in mind, the fact that Gamecube controllers (also featuring a multitude of triggers, switches, knobs, buttons, dials etc.) are compatible with the Revolution and that Nintendo has promised traditional controller "shells" for the remote-like apparatus indicate that they're not keen on entirely leaving traditional control schemes behind. After all, is waving a strange device in the air any less scary to a casual gamer than a normal gamepad would be? Clearly, there's room in the gaming world for both types of controller and neither one is doing anything wrong.
The Pong pioneer further adds that complex controllers are the reason people have been turning away from gaming, accounting for a drop from 44 million gamers in 1982 to a current figure of 18 million. Uh, no. I do believe that bad and unappealing games are to blame for this, a good example being found in the great video game crash of the 80's, a crash which was instigated by a certain company flooding the market with rubbish games like E.T. Which company was that again? Atari? How trite of me.
It's good to see people recognize Nintendo's moves as being innovative, but innovation shouldn't force us into some twisted mode of hindsight where we reject what we had up until now. Was the Gamecube's controller so scary that it drove you away from gaming? Of course not. "Here's something new" does not necessarily mean "oh, you've been doing it wrong all along." With such a strong focus on backwards compatibility, it's clear that the Revolution will forge a new, alternative path without forgetting where it came from.
