those days, there where two types of games:
never ending games (pacman,tetris, just get the highscore and be bether than the rest of the world)
unfair games (horribly difficult passages, about impossible to master, see r-type, or some cheat-regions in supermario games, etc).
those are both about gone. today, an unfair game (means a game that cannot be mastered by a stupid child in 2 days) will get flamed for that. those days, those games where the best. even master gamers nearly could''t win in those games, and where stressed over weeks to master it just by luck. that was fun. the feeling of not yet seen it all in a game. that is gone today, thanks to too short production times.

games need to give the feeling there is more. never ending games and games with nearly impossible to master passages suggest those feelings, and let you continue to play. both simply aren''t hip today, they get flamed. but wasn''t it exactly _that_ what made you sitting hours in front of the screen? the "there is something there and i know it and i wanna get it" ?

i remember at least my father playing tetris night and night to beat my high score. once he had done so, it was on my turn.. up to about 400''000 points we pushed eachother, on gameboy that was.

"take a look around" - limp bizkit
www.google.com

I do agree that game graphics often take up more time and money than they should, but I''m not really sure the industry could have evolved anyway else. Think about it, the easiest thing for human beings to do is describe the world we live in visually, we do it all the time with art. The caveman drawing on a wall knew "graphics" possibly even before language. Sound is probably the second easiest thing for us to master. But more abstract things, like gameplay, fun factor, and AI are much more difficult to create. To make a truly intelligent AI that can handle almost anything the player throws at it is extremely difficult. How do you code something to act they way we act? We can approximate it with neural nets and other techniques, but it is still nowhere close to actual thinking.

I don''t think turning things back to Quake days is the answer either. Yes, things like gameplay and AI would go back to getting a much larger chunk of the time/money pie, but I do not think we are able to advance toward a more real world without getting the easy stuff (graphics and sound) down first.

I imagine sometime in the future the rapid pace of graphics development will slow down, and then developers will spend more time on mastering AI and gameplay.

-Chris