Waiting for the Citizen Kane of games
Orson Welles' 1941 film Citizen Kane marked the moment when film went from being entertainment to being regarded as an art form. And increasingly game designers are talking about the imminent arrival of video games' Citizen Kane moment.
Game publisher Ubisoft's Ben Mattes is the latest to predict the Citizen Kane of gaming. But Mattes, who has worked on Assassin's Creed 2, is not alone. 
Many other game developers are predicting the same, among them French designer David Cage who is openly trying to make his forthcoming PlayStation 3 game Heavy Rain that moment.
It's a laudable aim, but video games will have a hard time turning that ambition into reality for one reason - hardware changes.
Citizen Kane was a box office flop, it took until the mid-1950s before it really started to get the recognition it deserved. It could only do that because the technology of film didn't change drastically in that time so people could still watch it.
But 15 years in the world of video games is a lifetime - 15 years ago the first PlayStation hadn't even been released. So the chances are any Citizen Kane of gaming would be in danger of being lost and forgotten on some obsolete platform.
Comments
DoktorD3ath
2 years ago
There have surely been many games that have delivered part of the promise of games-as-art. ICO, FFVII, Mario64, etc. Maybe what we are looking for is a single game to bring together enough of the components in a single package, together with a 'serious' theme? or is it just wide recognition that defines the moment?
I would say that we've probably had the game, it's just waiting for a critical reappraisal. The march of technology is a threat, but it has (in part) been addressed with such developments as the Nintendo classics on the Wii Shop Channel.
dave_clark_f1ve
2 years ago
Personally i think we had that moment in Ico. I didn't ply it until about a year ago, and even now it just looked beautiful and had some truly amazing visuals. Also, Ico was never about the challenge so much as the experience. It was never a particularly hard game, but the developers did make every effort to make it beautiful.