rlxideology

RLX is an experiment in independent game development—the first in a series.

I'm a former video-game industry employee who is disillusioned with the way games are made and distributed. In the last ten years I've watched all the creative and original game development houses go out of business or be snapped up by large corporations, never to produce anything of interest again.

The industry is creatively dead for many reasons, but much of the malaise is due to the dominance of dedicated, proprietary gaming consoles like the PlayStation and the XBox.

The megacorporations who manufacture these consoles are really in control of game design now. When you are developing a game for PlayStation, the drones at Sony will periodically play your game for a half-hour and then write a petulant two-page document telling you all the very superficial things they think are wrong with it. There isn't enough detail on the main character's hair. Not enough blood on so-and-so monster's arms. And so on. When you read these secret documents, you realize there is nothing to distinguish them from a game review by a 14-year-old boy posted on some website forum.

Any developer who fails to obey Sony's nit-picking, brain-dead, corporate-driven, soul-sucking, creativity-destroying reviews will face revolt from their publisher, or failure to get their game approved for manufacture. The enormous labor cost in producing a "modern" title leads to risk-aversion that reaches all the way back to the concept stage of game development. This cost problem would not be so bad if game developers were not forced to use such primitive tools—but I digress. The fruit are strangled on the vine because the tree is dying.

Even PC games are getting dumbed-down to Sony's level, because so many PC developers are "going console" to gain access to the larger market and developing games that play on both PC and one or more of the consoles. This leads to PC games designed around the (in my view severe) limitations of consoles, not the least of which is lack of a keyboard or mouse.

This is really stupid, because the freewheeling, nobody-in-charge PC gaming world is exactly where the console developers have been stealing their ideas from for decades. Do you think Resident Evil invented survival horror? No, the design is copied almost verbatim from a French PC game called "Alone in the Dark." What about the ubiquitous Japanese-style CRPG? No, this was invented by Richard Garriott on the personal computer with his Ultima series. First-person shooters? The PC again, with Ultima Underworld and Castle Wolfenstein. Go-anywhere, do-anything gameplay like in Grand Theft Auto 3? Any number of PC games pioneered this, years before consoles had the processing power or storage even to support it: Starflight and Ultima 6 are just a few examples. Think there is anything original about the mega-seller Diablo? No, it is simply an impoverished remake of early Rogue-like games.

I hope RLX can make a dent in this problem by providing a platform to create portable, high quality, independently developed games in the powerful language known as Emacs Lisp.

But just making a dent is not enough. The real goal is to replace the proprietary video game console with something else.

It appears this nearly happened once, back in the 1980s. It was a Microsoft-sponsored multi-vendor home computer standard called MSX, and it sold about 5 million units worldwide. Like most home computers of the era, it had a cartridge slot and doubled as a games machine. Unlike modern game consoles, it was made largely of off-the-shelf electronics components, and anyone could write software for it. Unfortunately it never went anywhere in the English-speaking markets, so Americans like me can only experience it through emulation.

Perhaps the free software community could design such a standard, for a GNU/Linux-based games console and home computer that would double as a DVD/CD player and personal video recorder.

I already built a GNU/Linux box that does all this and more.

I'm aware that the company Indrema had a roughly similar idea, and failed miserably. However, they failed not because they created a product that nobody wanted, but because they did not actually create a product.

We GNU/Linux users already have the product in our hands! But we can't compete with the proprietary consoles, because we don't have hardware standardization, a consistent interface, interest from mainstream games developers, or an all-in-one solution you can just buy off the shelf. What we need is a compact PC with the following characteristics:

• Hooks up to your TV or a monitor
• Four USB jacks on the front, like the Dreamcast
• Includes 2 controllers, keyboard, mouse, and infrared remote as part of the base package—each with a standardized layout so that games developers can design coherent control schemes.
• A consistent menu-based interface that acts like anything else you hook up to a television set, like PVR's and DVD players. The Windows-style interface used by Gnome is not appropriate here.
• Software compatibility regardless of machine vendor
• Hard disk drive
• 2D and 3D video support
• Wireless and wired ethernet connections
• Free downloadable development kits-— no $10,000 barrier-to-entry.

See also:

• The Scratchware Manifesto
• The EA Spouse Posting
• IndieGameDev
• Manifesto Games