Death of the console 'absolutely rubbish' - Dizzy creator

Andrew Oliver, co-creator of the Dizzy series, says the age of the traditional games console is far from over. Speaking at games industry conference Develop in Brighton, England, the influential developer said the next generation of home game consoles "may be entering the second or third place in computer games, but that's only because everything else is so good."

Oliver noted that games for new, burgeoning platforms such as mobile phones have seen explosive growth, but said there is room enough for consoles to prosper alongside them. The scale of console success, he said, just needs to be put "in perspective."

"The death of the consoles is absolutely rubbish…I'm sure consoles will go on to [sell] in their tens of millions, but go on and look at mobile devices in the hundreds of millions. It's just going wider."

An archetypal bedroom programmer, Andrew Oliver, along with his twin brother, Philip, produced Codemasters' Super Robin Hood for the Amstrad CPC in 1985. He compared modern mobile game development with that kind of small-scale, '80s, independent development, saying there are "a lot of similarities between app development now and bedroom programming in the '80s."

He also likened Minecraft's successful approach of self-imposed technical constraints to the necessary technical constraints of developing for game machines like the Spectrum, and called for a greater indie presence on the modern home console.