Godus - train wreck in progress

[MahrinSkel]

Elite is more a US/UK difference than an age one. I'm plenty old enough to have been in on Elite but it just wasn't real big here, not like over there.

Could be. I did get in on it because my brother-in-law brought it back to the US with him when he rotated back to the States.

As for the financials: It's not always that simple, Jeff. There are places where there are tax incentives and other funding available such that if you can get enough funding to run for a year, you can keep running on the same scale for several years thereafter just by milking various programs in rotation. Texas has a program where you can essentially get almost your entire operating budget for the prior year kicked back to you, for example. With the right setup you can potentially create a financial perpetual-motion machine.

--Dave

[Soln]

Yup. Plaid Hat Games just moved to Dallas I believe.

[Count Nerfedalot]

I've known of Peter Molyneux since Populous on my Atari ST. He over promised even then. That was my second computer, and probably the fourth or fifth *generation* of computers I'd played games on. Yes, I'm old.  Back then EVERYBODY over promised and under delivered when it came to games.  Rather much like now, and pretty much like all marketing.  It just seems a lot more personal when it's a repeat offender and you get a name and face to go with it AND the promises are something that you really really want. Kinda like, say, Carmack or Meier or Koster or pretty much any other con artist/Madison Avenue scumbag/politician/pitch man/dreamer.  Unfortunately, that's one of those lessons you have to learn for yourself, often repeatedly. I guess it's better if it's only to the tune of $60 at least.

Probably OT, but since it was brought up anyway, comparing the popularity of the original elite in Europe vs USA, I really think that was due to the premium price it cost plus the relative amounts of piracy going on. I think the original was overpriced, and it's probably true again. The result was that in Europe it was hugely popular because the price didn't matter since almost nobody paid for it. In the U.S., where piracy, while prevalent, wasn't as predominant, it wasn't as popular because the price was more of a factor. I apologize if that sounds racist/culturalist/elitist/whatever. Its just a theory based on personal experience and anecdotal evidence.  I'd love to collect more data, even anecdotal, to test the theory, but even 35 years later it's hard to get people to give an honest account of how many copies within their circle of friends were legit vs pirated. I'm my case of the people I knew to have it, it was 50:50, but that's from a massive sample of two.  :(

[Trippy]

No, we pirated everything here in the US for the Apple ][ too

[Sky]

We had both a 'white hat' and a 'black hat' C64 user group here. Guess which one was more popular amongst gamers? I would imagine the reason it's difficult to get an accurate accounting is that people tend to not want to admit crimes on the Internet, yeah? Because it was criminal activity. I was of course one of the white hats and a law-abiding citizen but most of the other guys in the Blackbirds may have had a couple legit copies in their disk boxes (of hundreds of games).

The name of the usergroup may give away another reason those guys were pretty cagey with information.