When I was a kid not many people had thier own computer but video games were pretty popular in the arcade first then at home. If you did have a computer you could write your own games and the cool thing was they were about as good as the ones you were buying or renting for a quarter. Now that kind of copying for fun is out of reach. The best video games take jillions of man hours and except for mods you have no chance of making your own HL2 on your Home Pc just hacking around after school. Back in the day, It was way fun and way satisfing to get your little asm program to move the ship just like on Defender.
Sometimes I think that more kids would take up programming if video games were still like they used to be.
Interestingly, The other media we had, Music and Video were actually farther out of reach in my youth. If you were lucky you had a friend with a fostek four track, but you still couldn’t easily reproduce the sound of a major release record and no one even had a video Camera. You might get your hands on a Super 8 but developing was expensive, quality was crappy and editing involved sharp blades. Today basically any band of 16 year old kids has a CD and a music video even if they have never actually performed anywhere.
I think there’s no real point to this post besides the fact that it illustrates how music and video are a relatively fixed format so computer technology can optimize the ability to create them, whereas games are riding on the technology and so get more expensive rather than cheaper over time.
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