Trip Hawkins: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah, that's going to be quite validating because well, it seems obvious now that sports video games are, I mean, a huge and ridiculous market. At that time, it wasn't even clear that it could work because no one had really done it before. It had to be incredibly validating that you ship that title, literally ship that title, and people play it, and like it and you get good feedback. I mean, that had to be this like sigh of relief almost. You're noticing that there's an audience that wants a more authentic sports experience. Again, you're noticing that there's an audience that wants a more authentic sports experience, a more accurate simulation of the real thing. As compared to say, the other treatment that it was generally getting where it's like a form of amusement. Pong is a great game, it's a great form of amusement. You could say that it has something in common with tennis, but it's not a simulation of the game of tennis. Anyway, I didn't want to have some simple, action-arcade mechanic that allowed you to swing at a pitch, and hit a baseball or run it around as a football player and have it not be the real thing. Of course, with football, you got 22 guys running around the field. I didn't realize at that moment—and this is like 1984—this 16-bit technology, it's already coming, it turns out it was going to be a while, and in 8-bit, it wasn't really quite good enough now. We thought, "Okay, this will take a year. " Of course, it took four. To make a really effective game, you're going to have to do it literally like a football play where the offense is at the bottom, the defense to the top and you're moving up the screen. Of course, you're going to want to try to present that with a little bit of a 3D view that's a little bit like it's behind the quarterback. Two incredible things about this. One, it's still the visual metaphor used to this day in the most popular gaming franchise or one of the most popular gaming franchises in the world and two, they literally fly a camera now on the field. That is that angle.…

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