"The new breed of non-game games isn't just about attracting women, of course, though there's no doubt that it's the most serious attempt so far at capturing a market game publishers have drooled wistfully over for years"
CTW Magazine has a story about the upcoming non-games boom... and it's from 1998!
4 comments:
I reckon Jeff Minter could claim the honour of being father of non-games. He is an eccentric British programmer/designer who is obsessed with llamas and has always created weird and innovative games.
He released a game called Psychedelia for the Spectrum 48k in 1984 which was described as "Swedish massage for the brain". It's basically a screen full of coloured boxes which you can control and make into swirling patterns. You were supposed to use it to enhance music you were listening to.
He did a series of follow-ups using this idea of a "light synthesiser". Here's a review for one of the Atari follow-ups called Colourscape.
http://www.page6.org/archive/issue_16/page_12.htm
Thank you for post. In fact, I can't remember any older non-game. Jeff Minter certainly deserves some credit (and more research) for that.
Plus, it's nice to see that, back in 1985, nongames already had good receptivity. "If you are into rock music, buy it without hesitation."
I can beat this by one year.
In 1983 there was an arcade game by Atari called I, Robot. When you put your money in the machine it gave you two options. One was I, Robot- which was a pioneering 3D polygon shooter and the other option was for something described as an "Ungame" called Doodle City.
Doodle City gave you three minutes to create shapes and moving patterns with the 3D poly graphics. A really brave idea but I doubt whether many people ever took option 2. Game is still available on MAME.
http://www.classicgaming.com/rotw/irobot.shtml
This includes a more detailed look of I, Robot's non-game.
http://crucialclassics_13.1up.com/
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