Back in The Day, Karate Champ was a formative experience for me. Being able to execute a variety of punches and kicks via the two joystick control scheme was revelatory. However, that experience was soon overshadowed by the arrival of Street Fighter, and later, Street Fighter 2. I had never before witnessed such aggressive competition between two players as I had when waiting for my turn to step up and drop some Dhalsim action on the current winner. Then Mortal Kombat hit arcades, and that just cranked the volume up another notch. The year following that brought the first 3D fighting game, Virtua Fighter, and the younger me was once again blown away by the quality presented by the constantly-developing fighting game genre.

Similarly, having been an avid player of the Atari VCS, the appearance on the burgeoning home console scene of systems like the Intellivision, the TurboGrafx-16, the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Playstation, etc. just amped up my desire to spend all of my time playing games and doing nothing else. The singular experience of playing a video game simply became more and more sophisticated in all areas -- graphics, sound, gameplay -- until it seemed that there was no way to predict what might be coming next.

However, at some point I began to find that, while I was still in anticipation of this or that upcoming release, there was a kind of jaded quality to my apprehension of what the gaming market had become. Perhaps it was the frequently-seen "me too" phenomenon behind game development, where once a breakout game hit the public, other studios rushed to imitate or iterate upon the core concepts inherent in that breakout game. The truly original ideas seemed to come much more slowly, and spaced farther apart in time.