Inductive reasoning

OPINION: Halls of Fame and the like are fraught with danger. Whosoever purports to decide who deserves immortality and who does not is bound to make the wrong decisions and, with them, enemies. The same is true in any field of endeavour.

Look at Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. I was part of a campaign to get The Beatles, the single most successful band in popular music history, included on the Walk. It took 10 long years of letter writing and fund-raising to get the committee to give them a star. Last year the Olsen twins got one. I make no comment.

In San Francisco, someone has had the bright idea to start a ‘Walk of Game’, acknowledging those who have earned immortality in the video game industry. There are three categories: people, characters and games.

The first two people inducted are beyond any argument. Nolan Bushnell, who founded Atari in 1972, virtually started the video game revolution.  Shigeru Miyamoto, the game designer from Nintendo who developed Donkey Kong, Super Mario Brothers and The Legend of Zenda, has just as rightly earned his place.

I have to admit that Atari and Nintendo are two of my very favourite companies. Atari for the fact that it dominated the video game business through the 1970s then in the 1980s kept going out of business and rising, phoenix-like, from ruin. Nintendo I love because it embodies adaptation. It was started in 1889 as a calligraphy concern and evolved as its market demanded it -- greeting cards, then playing cards, then board games, then toys and then video games. How many of today’s technology companies can claim a 19th century heritage?

My wholehearted support of the Walk of Game ends, though, with the first inductee in the Game category. Halo has only been out for a few years. Good game, yes, but its claim on immortality is as tenuous as the Olsen sisters’. How can it be honoured when its precursors -- Unreal, Doom, Marathon, Quake, Wolfenstein -- are not? For that matter, where are Pac Man, Space Invaders, Breakout, Asteroids, Centipede, Frogger and Missile Command? Is it enough to honour the founder of Atari and thereby cover all of these? I think not.

Here’s my theory. The site of the Walk of Game is the Metreon, a cinema, retail and entertainment complex owned and operated by Sony. Sony’s PlayStation currently dominates the video game industry, but Sony has not made any significant contribution to the history of gaming. Name me one landmark game that has come out of Sony. I’ve been wracking my brain and come up blank.

Likewise, Halo is representative of Microsoft’s effort to break into the game industry with Xbox. It acquired Halo when it acquired Bungie, one of the better game developers, and made the game exclusive on Xbox where Bungie had been developing it as a multi-platform release (even for Mac).

Microsoft’s contribution to the history of gaming, like Sony’s, has come from standing on the shoulders of giants, and nothing symbolises that better than Halo.

Microsoft and Sony have both come into the game late, armed with corporate muscle and deep pockets, with the intention to dominate. They have that in common.

The inductees in the Game Characters category were Mario from Donkey Kong and its numerous spinoffs, Link from Zelda and its various sequels (these two offering an additional tribute to Miyamoto), and Sonic the Hedgehog from the Sega game of similar appellation. Sega, of course, is no longer in the game console business.

Within the Metreon (I should mention I’ve been there), there is a video game store, which sells exclusively PlayStation and PlayStation 2 games and accessories. It can have escaped no-one’s sense of irony that not a single one of the Walk of Game inductees is on sale.

Matthew JC Powell still enjoys a spot of Pac Man. Swap high scores on mjcp@optusnet.com.au.