Comments on: An online game, made in U.S., seizes the globe

"World of Warcraft" has become the first truly global video-game hit since Pac-Man in the early 1980s.
The New York Times

[teeter3000]

cultural...

Had to comment... it's fun when non-continuous gamers (i.e. mainstream media) usually comment on the quality of the gaming industry, they pull only the most recent examples...such as Grand Theft Auto, for instance.

Because of all the games released during the past 25 years, it's only Grand Theft Auto that matters. With all due respect, games have sold better before Grand Theft Auto, and they've certainly sold better after Grand Theft Auto. What about cultural significance?

What about Super Mario? Just because killing prostitutes and stealing cars are replaced with saving the princess and magic mushrooms (ooh, call the PTA) doesn't mean the game, or the series for that matter, is any less significant. Even some 20+ years AFTER the release of the first proper title, the series continues to be the most viable in the entire gaming industry, with the newest entry (New Super Mario Brothers) either the most successful title of the year or one of them...

The speeches about technology deciding the console war? Puh-leeze...perhaps in the PC-games industry there's some truth to that, but as for consoles better power has NEVER equaled market supremecy...EVER. From the days when an underpowered NES destroyed the 16-bit Genesis to the 'slow CPU' SNES dazzling 32-bit competitors the console market has always prided itself on software quality and quantity (unfortunately, not always in that order).

Case in point: the spectacle of this year's E3, with the Sony behemouth expected to make the biggest splash...only to have the mainstream media 'alarmed' that it was Nintendo's 'severely underpowered' console grabbing nearly all the attention. Heaven forbid that a company relying almost entirely on ingenuity and 'fun games' would be what people TRULY want...even if it can't push the most pixels. The day this industry is soley decided on marketing and raw processing power is the day I quit...we've been mighty close to that day for awhile now, so cross your fingers that this next-generation will be a little more proper.

[djcaseley]

Wow

You really like Nintendo.

That aside, however, you do make good points. The mainstream media rarely takes (or is it 'has'?) the time to delve into history and draw meaningful comparisons of playability and cumulative players of games throughout gaming history.

Often articles like this crop up. They do serve a purpose - I had no idea WoW had grown that large. This one, however, appears to consider that 7m players means its the only one ever to match PacMan. I can't believe that there weren't 7m who played Super Mario World on the SNES, Sonic on the MegaDrive, or even the lesser-adopted games like Virtua Fighter and Tekken. I actually know very few people who *haven't* played these games. With WoW, however, as I mentioned, I had no idea was that big.

Other articles make similar comparisons of course. I'm not accusing this article of a one-off crime. It happens frequently. Perhaps they are at fault for attempting to dumb-down for the masses. Perhaps it is we, for looking at a tech-news site for an indepth comparison of gaming history, instead of going somewhere game-specific for that kind of thing.

[JJWhitney]

The real story is touched on

"I don't watch TV, I play video games".

Entertainment for a whole generation was based on interactivity and done in a social context of playing against or with real people.

We grew up playing video games with our friends and classmates on consoles, now we are grown with jobs, homes and families. We would rather do something then see something and in 15 years when todays teenagers are where we are TV is going to wonder where all the viewers went.

The story on WoW is that it is the first MMORG to get it right. Past MMORGS were based around how much pain and tedium could you take before you smashed the CD over your knee. What will be interesting is that now that WoW has shown the way what kind of other MMORGS will we see in 2-3 years when the current batch of new games of this type come out.