Poll of the Day > Borderlands guy says gaming doesn't have its Citizen Kane, what do you think?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Randy Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox, who just made Borderlands 4, said that.

If you disagree, what is gaming's Citizen Kane?

Can gaming have a Citizen Kane? Has gaming already been under Citizen Kane's influence?

I'm brainstorming wedding venues because our original plan fell through.

citizen kane is dumb as fuck so gaming has a LOT of citizen kanes

Ive never watched citizen kane, and I don't really get what dude is saying.

I mean, I kinda do, but not really.

My understanding is that a big part of CKs influence was on a technical level, so in that respect id say there are a lot of equivalents you could point to.

I also think the comparison is dumb as fuck and that goes double for Randy Pitchford.

The fact that Randy Pitchford said it generally makes it safe to assume he's completely full of shit.

Because he usually is.

Wasnt it la noire or something like that

Snoregasm posted...

My understanding is that a big part of CKs influence was on a technical level, so in that respect id say there are a lot of equivalents you could point to.

I also think the comparison is dumb as fuck and that goes double for Randy Pitchford.

Pretty much exactly this. Citizen Kane is noteworthy because it established many of the cinematographic techniques that are still considered standard today. It's hard to point to a single game that pioneered elements that show up in almost every modern game (unless we get into things like LoZ introducing save files), given how varied games are, but you can definitely say things like SMB is the Citizen Kane of platformers or Elder Scrolls is the Citizen Kane of open-world RPGs.

And also it's Pitchford and he just compulsively says dumb nonsense whenever he gets the chance, so I don't think there's much need to read into what he means.

adjl posted...

(unless we get into things like LoZ introducing save files),

do you count saving high score lists as save files though

adjl posted...

unless we get into things like LoZ introducing save files

It might be more accurate to say LoZ introduced battery-pack cartridge memory saves (which aren't really used anymore for the most part), considering there were games before that that had save files. Especially on PC. Though LoZ wasn't even the first, just the most popular one. So it might be more accurate to say it popularized it rather than introduced it.

There's also the argument that save files as a whole are just extensions of the password feature - a save file is basically just the computer entering the password for you. Which then allowed for more and more complex passwords, with more variables flagged. When a human is entering a password, you're limited by how many variables the human is capable of entering in a reasonable period of the time, but the computer itself can handle thousands (if not millions) of variables, allowing for far more complex world-state saves.

In some ways, it's like how waaay back in the oldschool days, computing magazines would actually come with articles full of code you could manually type into your computer to run programs, because external memory wasn't really a standardized thing yet (or was tape-based).

Umm... Literally Timesplitters Future Perfect

Lokarin posted...

Umm... Literally Timesplitters Future Perfect

I understood that reference

But also
https://youtu.be/tBlyllhV-zM?si=76MsgItOiXbTKSLC

Lokarin posted...

Umm... Literally Timesplitters Future Perfect

My man

I was literally prepared to take this topic seriously, but now there's no need.

Also fuck Randy Pitchford. Gaming may or may not have it's "Citizen Kane"(whatever that means), but it definitely has its Donald Trump. Complete with compulsive lying, questions of business practice ethics, and even allegations of minor sexual abuse!

Renowned magician Randy Pitchford?

heIly posted...

do you count saving high score lists as save files though

I wouldn't. Save files in the sense of what LoZ did allowed you to preserve your progress in the game so you weren't starting over every time you played. Whatever high scores you save, you're still starting at the beginning of the game each time (at least unless you also have a means of saving progress).

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It might be more accurate to say LoZ introduced battery-pack cartridge memory saves (which aren't really used anymore for the most part), considering there were games before that that had save files. Especially on PC. Though LoZ wasn't even the first, just the most popular one. So it might be more accurate to say it popularized it rather than introduced it.

That's at least partially why I don't really see much point in going down that route: so many of the technical innovation milestones in games are just applications of existing concepts (both from within gaming and from adjacent computery business) and not truly anything new, and their modern implementation often only bears a conceptual resemblance to those original iterations because the tech has changed so much.

Heck, even more broadly, that's kind of why it's hard to pin down a single "Citizen Kane" for video games. Gaming as a medium has grown incredibly fast, and that's inevitably included a lot of convergent evolution and lots of ideas being introduced by lots of different games.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

There's also the argument that save files as a whole are just extensions of the password feature

Indeed. One could easily argue that saving is strictly a QoL feature, though that wouldn't be a particularly popular opinion these days and you don't see many games coming out with password-based saving, even if there are few enough variables that a password's complexity would be more about arbitrarily obfuscating it than about actually needing more characters to represent the data.

This is also why early memory cards could be so small, even by contemporary file size standards. Save files often don't actually contain much data, given that all they have to do is tell the game how to reproduce your previous position.