ONM Remembered – #36
“When the game finally arrives, it’ll be like watching a movie!”
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 97 (October 2000)
An excerpt from the Nintendo coverage at Space World 2000. Hey, remember when the GameCube was first shown off and they had all these tech demos, except most of them were just flashy cinematics with no hint of gameplay, and the final product didn’t really resemble the preview movie much at all? Man, wasn’t that just SO HYPE?
Peeps always remember the Zelda trailer, it seems if just to whine and cry about how it never came to be, and they got lumped with the kiddy game Wind Waker. I could discuss that further, but the Zelda fandom makes my butt boil. They got their cel-shaded supposedly light-hearted game, and they got their more realistic allegedly dark-and-gritty game, too. Are people still raising a fuss over it?
I could rant about how a lot of this little GameCube preview basically boiled down to the staff singing praises over “our games are gonna look like movies!” Do we want that? Okay, popular consensus seems to suggest we want that, but I find it an uninspiring path to take.
I’m the last person to suggest video games are art (I PLAY ‘EM FOR THE BLEEP-BLOOPS), but shouldn’t video games be aiming to develop a unique identity? Films, books, comics, plays, poetry, radio… they all have their own identity, y’know? An exceptional piece of work works in the medium it is made for. Video games just seem to keep trying to pass themselves off as movies, and to me, that kind of dilutes its attempts for respect.
Also, jeez, I can’t look at Ganondorf without cracking up. I admit I thought it looked cool back then, but now every time I look at it he looks like a terrible racial stereotype who escaped from a bad political cartoon.
