I don’t know about Rogue/Zork/etc. but monster training has been an important mechanic in games like Dragon Quest 5 and the Megami Tensei series long before Pokemon existed.
12 year old me was watching Nintendo send representatives to Senate hearings to try to censor the entire medium of video games. Every L Nintendo takes is a benefit to the world.
EDIT: I just checked and it looks like the only game EA released since Veilguard that was targeting the general gaming audience (i.e. wasn’t a sports game, a Sims expansion or a mobile game) was Split Fiction. Battlefield 6 will be out in a couple of weeks so we’ll see how that does.
He did some sound design on Tomb Raider III and composed for The Last Revelation, Chronicles and Angel of Darkness. He wasn’t involved with any of the games people actually care about.
They were always conservative. A few years before these ads Nintendo participated in Senate hearings where they advocated for censoring the entire medium. They just had a “fellow kids” period in the early 2000s. Luckily, judging by the sales of the GameCube, most people weren’t fooled.
Games continue to get cheaper to make as middleware improves and advancing hardware lessens the need for optimisation. If companies choose to spend more on games despite this then that’s their problem.
