Re: [stella] POLL

Subject: Re: [stella] POLL
From: "Mike St. Clair" <mstclair@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 1997 13:30:43 -0500 (EST)
On Mon, 3 Mar 1997, Glenn Saunders wrote:

> At 07:56 AM 3/3/97 -0600, you wrote:

> I see the cartridge market as dead as a doornail.  I had always thought of
> the Supercharger CD as a way to make the 2600 an open-system whereby new
> games would either be freely distributed as .BINs (or shareware) or
> compiled on a non-profit or small-profit CD.  There are enough
> Superchargers out there to saturate the remaining userbase likely to
> consume new 2600 games, if they don't already own one.
> 
> There are only two reasons to still make carts:
> 
> Aesthetics
> Banked ROM/extra RAM

Ouch, I can't agree that the cart market is dead.  Collectors love carts.
The existing 2600 fanbase would jump on new carts so fast you wouldn't
believe it.  Bob Colbert sold 100 Okie Dokies without a public
announcement.  If there had been a public announcement on usenet, and in
the snailmail zines, and he was making an unlimited number of carts
available, it wouldn't have surprised me if he would have sold a thousand.
The whole thing was very low key, and the 100 went fast.

Some of the classic game collectors don't even care much about playing the
games they collect (sad but true).  And some love to play as much as
collect.  But a lot of the collectors of each type get really excited at
carts.  They look at them on a shelf.  I've heard one collector talk about
his 'pretty carts', and he was talking about how they looked just sitting
there, not how they played.  I know two gamers who are totally biased
against PSX and Saturn in favor of N64 because the Nintendo uses carts.
They don't care about the load times, they feel that CD games just aren't
as 'solid' and 'real' as a cart game.

I find a lot of this pretty damned silly.  Sometimes I have referred to
this phenomena as a 'cart fetish', and have even considered writing about
it at length.  I mean, to me, the gameplay is the thing, not the media.
Well, for the most part.  The media can still be pretty cool.  But one
thing I know for sure, carts are going to get a lot more collectors'
hearts racing than CDs or tapes.


***Mike St. Clair***mstclair@xxxxxxxxx***irc:SaintMick***


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