Pac Man Fever!
In the news of the really weird, Martoon over at the indiegamer boards pointed out this... incredibly bizarre link to ambient arcade sounds of the 1980s. All that is missing is a few token pinball games, loud exclamations of profanity, and 80's music piping in in the background. Well, and the smell of smoke drifting in from outside, and the scent of stale pizza. There's the Internet for you - you can get almost anything online, including memories.

I listened to that cacophonous mixture for a few minutes, and it really did bring back a bunch of memories. It was pretty amazing, actually. It really did sound a lot like an arcade of the day - complete with occasional half-heard mumblings of conversations - and the whole sense-memory thing kicked in. See, arcade games got me started programming in the first place. I'd blow my whole allowance in the local arcade (or, if unavailable, over at the local Pizza Hut or other establishment where video games were as common in nearly any public establishment as slot machines in Las Vegas.) Asteroids, Pac-Man, Galaga, Qix, QBert, Phoenix, Starfire, Defender, Missile Command, Star Wars, Dig-Dug, Frogger, Turbo, Pole Position, Scrambles, Galaxian, Satan's Hollow, Tron, Disks of Tron, Starcastle, Berzerk, Gorf, Ms. Pac Man, Lunar Lander, Tempest, Reactor, Battlezone, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong - these were my early influences.

The arcades - noisy, dark dens with lots of flashing lights to call your quarters (Berzerk would even announce, "Coin Detected In Pocket!") - introduced me to what computers could be about. They weren't just big number-crunching machines capable of doing complex accounting, tax, artillery, or astrogation calculations. They could do these fun, adrenaline-pumping GAMES that provided an experience completely unlike anything seen a few years earlier.

Unfortunately, I was shorter on money than I was on imagination. So my $5, $7, or $10 would go VERY quickly. Once I got a computer, I would try and replicated these experiences on my own. At first, we had a Sinclair ZX80 - which was almost useless for replicating anything (1K of memory, and it couldn't run calculations and display things on the screen at the same time). Later I got a Commodore 64, and taught myself machine language to speed up certain graphics routines where BASIC was too slow. My games stank, for the most part, but it was a great learning experience. I taught myself programming for the express purpose of making games.

The coolest thing was that back at this time, there were no horizons - no established "genres" (though a few fuzzy boundaries had evolved separating 'arcade games' from 'roleplaying games' and 'adventure games' - though the boundary between those two categories was pretty thin by itself). There were some fairly interesting game concepts that never really took off to become established 'genres' - I mean, how would you categorize Joust, Dig-Dug, Reactor, Qix, or Frogger? It was pretty much "Anything Goes" - and granted, a lot of things went - and nobody mourned them when it was gone. There was an awful lot of crappy ideas, but that comes with rampant creativity. The arcades often felt like a brainstorm given light and sound.

Today, when people talk about game design, it's instantly categorized even before it is fleshed out. You'll hear people talking about wanting to create "a first-person shooter" or a "real-time strategy game." Categories provide useful semantic shortcuts, but they are too often used as limitations on what can or should be done. That's B.S.

I've read that Sid Meier's approach to game design is to come up with an overall theme or concept... such as a game about pirates. Then he comes up with ideas of what sort of activities one could do within that concept that would be fun. I think Shigeru Miyamoto goes through a similar process for his games. Richard Garriott's earlier games very clearly came from this same mentality.

So as I listened to the sounds of a bygone era (that sure sounds a lot more poetic than the reality, doesn't it?), this is what I thought of. I know how hard it is nowadays to achieve market acceptance with truly innovative design. A lot of these old videogames failed for the same reason back in the day, while 'maze-chasers' and 'top-down-shooters' dominated the arcades. But I find myself really wanting to recapture some of the pioneering spirit of that time period - something that dissapeared not because the frontier vanished, but because too many developers became very comfortable with where they settled.

Labels: retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 1:15 PM (Permalink)