Evan Van Zelfden's coverage of the Project Horseshoe game-design conference reminded me of a striking moment in one of the speeches there. Mike Sellers of Online Alchemy challenged us with this question:
Original CD image by Arun Kulshreshtha
Name a wildly popular entertainment technology that suddenly perished because its stewards didn't innovate. Here are your clues:
- It was introduced in the ’70s.
- It became more popular in the ’80s and hugely popular in the ’90s.
- By the turn of the century there were 9,000 titles available.
- By the ’10s it was the dominant entertainment technology in the U.S. and Europe.
- By the ’20s, everyone who was anyone in entertainment was distributed via this technology.
- And then, almost overnight, it became irrelevant.
Can you guess? Answer after the jump....
So what entertainment technology came out in the ’70s, dominated the Western world until the early ’20s, and then vanished almost overnight? Like me, you may have been thinking about the wrong century, because the answer Sellers gave was...player pianos.
The rest of Van Zelfden's article does a good job of tying that concept to the evolution of video games. I was also pleased to see he shared one of the more disturbing images from Sellers's presentation. It's on page 2 of the article and made me think hard about parallels between gaming technology and computer music.
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Read More Entries by David Battino.
@DJ: That reminds me of a statistic I heard from a Yamaha rep: The majority of people who buy player pianos today don't even play. They buy them as furniture, or perhaps as acoustic MIDI players.
I knew the answer when you got to the '10s...!
I say let's bring them back; and cheaper than a Yamaha disk-klavier... one for every house!
=dj=