Although Kline had a lot of good observations, I think what interested me the most in the reading had to do with the parallels he drew between the video game industry and the industries of music and film, and what these parallels say about the roles of the various parties involved in video games.
In 1982, Kline tells us, Trip Hawkins modeled his company’s marketing approach after that of the music industry, by “packaging its games with album-like artwork and liner notes, and promoting its developers like rock stars in game magazines” (97).
Perhaps this is merely because I haven’t really spent much time studying the video game industry, but it seems to me that there is no clear parallel to a “rock star” in a video game, or, if there is, it is not the developer but rather a character from within the game itself. While musicians make music and Hollywood stars underlie the characters in films, the primary hero, name, and face behind Pac-Man is Pac-Man. And considering that by 1982, “revenue from the game Pac-Man alone probably exceeded the box-office success of Star Wars,” and the arcade game business grossed double the international sales of the pop music industry (103-104), I am really intrigued. A yellow circle with eyes and a mouth, existing only as an animated visual in a 2-D virtual reality, somehow made a greater impression than the combined forces of George Lucas, Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and a bunch of ridiculous (in a good way) special effects.
I guess what I’m really trying to get at is this: What made/makes the influence of video games, particularly in their appeal to consumers, so different from that of films and music? Is that influence centralized in a name, be it a developer or a character (like Pac-Man)? Or does the interactive nature of games, the “play” we’re so fond of discussing, cause players to view themselves as the “rock stars”? Also, where do designers (such as Warren Robinett, who created the first ‘Easter Egg’ to garner individual credit outside of the corporation) fall in our perception of video games today, and how has this perception changed from what it was 30 years ago?