[Theodores]

Thanks for the link. I have fond nostalgic reminiscences of these gone wrong interface experiments when skeumorphic design was king. There was an aspect of being patronising about the thinking that went with this, an implicit assumption that users were stupid. Nowadays these design patterns have great retro feel.

To a certain extent everything goes in phases and fashions. The Windows XP style buttons were all the rage for a while, nowadays everything is flat. They won't be flat forever.

As we move further away from the analog world the interface mistakes of the past that hark back to skeumorphic analogues of analog devices have a special quality, maybe not for everyone or every thing, but, if you wanted to design a game and set it back in the last century then things like the QT Player or Microsoft Bob provide great inspiration.