Mattel announced its intent to buy The Learning Company (which owns Mindscape, which in turn owns SSI). Does anyone else notice the vicious cycle starting again? Mattel has already tried this once and were one of the factors contributing to the great video game crash. I'm beginning to see potential for the market to move this way...

Step 1: A whole bunch of big companies gobble up the smaller ones (even not so small ones). We're at this phase now with a lot of the old game companies getting absorbed. How many have been in the past year?

Step 2: Refocusing of the industry onto the casual market. We're seeing the beginnings of this. While there's always someone trying to grab the elusive common man in PC market and just about every company has at least one project working in that direction, I suspect we'll see the engines of MicroProse and Sierra pushed heavily in that direction. Eventually the vast majority of the industry will be targeting them and us obsessive gamers will be left out in the cold.

Step 3: Flooding the marketplace. This is a natural outgrowth of step two. I know some of you are thinking "We don't have this already with real-time strategy or first person shooters?" I would like to point out hunting games and Myst clones at the height of their power as indicators of how can be worse. Now picture there being five or ten times as many clones of those games from major publishers and crowding out anything else on the shelf.

Step 4: Rejection of the goods. Past experience has taught us that the core gamers aren't going to touch these games (or if they do its usually just one title of the type). There simply won't be enough consumers willing to buy whatever type of "next big thing" that floods the market is. Remember the stories of the Atari E.T. cartridge landfill? I would expect something similar.

Step 5: Pulling out. Badly burned, the big money people decide there is no money in gaming and get out of the business taking the companies they ate up with them. Smaller companies that remained somewhat independent die out taking all of their projects with them as the venture capital goes away.

Alright, maybe it won't be that bad. Maybe there's enough counter force out here to stand up against all the Mattel's and Hasbro's and whoever it was who bought Sierras and prevent them from steam rolling everything and taking everyone else with them. But somehow Mattel's plunge just makes me think to much of 1984... (the year, not the novel)