> In 66 years after the first time celluloid film was shot...

I think this is a false comparison. Celluloid film is actually the mature technology that emerged after several decades of experimentation with moving images.

If you want to compare the very earliest date for anything that looks remotely like a video game to a similar date in film, then you want the stroboscopes of the 1830s. The comparison, of course, suddenly looks a lot less ideal for film: By 1900, the medium had achieved basically nothing of note.

But I don't think that's a reasonable comparison, either. I think a more reasonable comparison would be to look at the point where each medium started being successfully marketed as a commercial venture.

For film, that would be April 14, 1894 with the opening of the first Kinetoscope parlor. For video games, that would be May 1972 when Magnavox first released the Odyssey game console.

So we've had 40 years of commercial video games. 40 years of commercial film would bring us to 1934.

1934, notably, doesn't get us to the watershed year of 1939 (often referred to as "the best year of film ever" because of the groundbreaking movies that transformed the genre) or Citizen Kane (often referred to as the "first modern film" because of cinematic techniques it pioneered).

If we look at the AFI 100 Years 100 Movies list, we discover that there are only seven films listed from before 1934: It Happened One Night, The Birth of a Nation, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Gold Rush, City Lights, Duck Soup, Frankenstein, The Jazz Singer

Two of these are Charlie Chaplin films and one is truly notable only for its technological innovation (i.e., sound in The Jazz Singer).

The 10th Anniversary of the same list removes Birth of the Nation, Frankenstein, All Quiet on the Western Front, and the Jazz Singer, replacing them with: The General, King Kong, Intolerance, and Sunrise.

Based on this sort of data sampling, I would have to disagree with your assessment that "games are maturing at a reasonably slower pace than films". In 1934, film was only just beginning the decade in which it would truly come into its own. I suspect that if we looked at a 100 Years, 100 Games list 60 years from now, we would see a similar pattern: A small number of pre-2012 games, most of them clustering in the last 5-10 years and a couple selected from the previous decades.

HYPOTHESIZING FUTURE JUDGMENT

If anything, I think the early annals of gaming may fare a little better than the early annals of film: AFI selected nothing from the first decade of commercial film for its list. I suspect that a hypothetical AGI would include at least one or two titles from the golden age of arcade gaming -- Space Invaders and Pac-Man, perhaps.)

From the '80s and '90s we would then expect to see a handful of titles, many selected because of the influence they had on later games: A couple of Nintendo titles. Ultima IV. Final Fantasy VII. Doom 2. King's Quest. Tetris. Some subset of that. Looking at the last 5-10 years, we would probably expect to see maybe 7-10 titles (I'm guessing Portal makes that list).

CONCLUSION

And then, if the pattern of the AFI list were followed, in the next 10-15 years we would expect to see three times as many games appear as in the previous 40.

If video games are, in fact, mirroring the development of film then we are only just beginning to see the true flourishing of the art form: What has come before is merely a faint precursor of the grandeurs that are about to arrive.

What's interesting to note is that a similar 40 year watershed can be found in the history of theater: In 534 BC the first competition for drama was held in Athens. In 499 BC, thirty-five years later, Aeschylus wrote his first play.

u/raddit-bot · 1 point r/FullMoviesOnline

Related categories:

Reddit mentions of The General [Blu-ray]

idea-bulb Interested in what Redditors like? Check out our Shuffle feature

Found 2 comments on The General [Blu-ray]:

Interested in what Redditors like? Check out our Shuffle feature