Who here doesn’t like the Revolution?

Well, if you don’t then congrats on being one of the very few single minded people out there that isn’t completely praising this innovation in game design. Though this really has nothing to do with the controller or the specs of the system; It is more along the lines of the respect and I think it is worth posting about.

Ever heard of a guy named Nolan Bushnell? Well if you haven’t than you should have because this is one of the innovators and fathers of the gaming industry, not to mention the founder of Atari. In a recent interview he was heard praising the Revolution Controller for it’s original as well as simple design. However the talk about things like the PS2 Dual Shock controller pushing consumers away because it’s to complex is rather far fetched if you ask me. But as the book says(the book title has slipped my mind), “Remember the viewer is the dumbest being on earth.” Harsh words of truth, though that was written in terms of designing for a website I think it carries over well to what Nintendo was thinking when they designed that controller.

However an interesting fact that was stated in the article really got me wondering because I highly doubt the validity of it, “He claimed that there were 44 million gamers in 1982 - a figure which stands at just 18 million today.” To think that only 18 million people game? Maybe it is on a more hardcore standpoint, because last I checked the PS2 just sold it’s 100 millionth copy so someone must be playing games.

However I don’t doubt the validity of this statement: “Complexity lost the casual gamer; violence lost the woman gamer,” Bushnell said. I found that to be extremely true, though I think that the women gamer is evolving from the simple lovey dovy girls of the past and even now can be rather violent… not that that’s a good thing though.

Either way I found it very interesting that Bushnell had so many good things to say about the Revolution and this just adds on to the countless publishers that are just drooling over the possibilities of this controller.