I was a little late kicking off my first project of 2014, but it seems to be going well anyway: A series of small articles at USgamer that I’m calling Daily Classics. The idea was to run a weekly retrospective on an interesting game celebrating its 15th, 20th, 25th, 30th, or 35th anniversary this year… but I ended up with a list more than 450 long, so I decided to have a go at doing them daily instead.
Once I’d whittled down the list to merely “daily,” my intention was to just run brief glimpses at games in no particular order. Then Nintendo’s troubled financials came out last week, and one of the first games on the list happened to be the infamous Radar Scope, and I started thinking about how Nintendo has a history of stumbling only to bounce back to a stronger place than ever. There’s no guarantee that’ll happen now, but it seemed like an interesting point to ponder. And then I noticed that there were several other Nintendo games of significance on the list, so I started thinking of ways to tie them all together. Then I started breaking the rest of the list into other groups of five games connected by various means. And all of a sudden this turned into something much better and more meaningful than I had originally intended.
Basically, what I’m saying is that I accidentally stumbled into something good again quite by accident. My entire life is pretty much a sequence of me bumbling into fortune through no merit of my own. I’ll take it, I guess. In the meantime, why not peruse the first week of items in this year-long series? (I’ll add in the Thursday and Friday links on Thursday and Friday.)
Nah, it’s not all luck. You have to have some insight to see those trends, to pick out something perhaps of even more significance. Good job glomming on to it! :)
These have been great reads so far. Also, the only time I’ve actually seen a screen of Radar Scope! Looking forward to the next 447 entries. :D
Agreeing with the others. If you keep “stumbling” into good things it’s because you did the preparation to stumble into them a long time ago. Keep up the good work.
@Sarge, @Pip
“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
― Seneca
You guys are generous, but no, my life is basically a lot of flying by the seat of my pants and blundering into coincidences and lucky strokes.
Okay sure, but I think that more or less applies to 99.99% of the population.
There’s a good article about Donkey Kong Country 2 which may explain why it was so successful: http://www.sirlin.net/articles/the-secrets-of-donkey-kong-country-2.html. While graphics explained the popularity of the first to a significant degree, the sequels had some very impressive level design IMO.