Breakout – the Atari game created by Steve Wozniak & Steve Jobs
I’m not much of a gamer, but I think Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell may have put his finger on what is often missing from mobile games – a lesson he last week told the Guardian many have yet to learn from the early arcade games.
“When you look at mobile and arcade gaming, they’re identical,” Bushnell says. “Mobile has some of the same game constraints for the player, and that ‘easy to learn, and difficult to master’ metric.” This common phrase is, as it happens, known as ‘Bushnell’s law’ – he first uttered it in 1971 while making his preliminary steps into the arcade business with seminal coin-op Computer Space.com
That lesson – dating back to the days when Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created Breakout for Atari – was something arcade games designers had to learn if they wanted to get people first to try a game and then to keep feeding in the coins …
It was something present in one of Atari’s earliest and simplest games: Pong. Anyone could get the hang of controlling the bat in just a few seconds, but continuing to win as the levels ramped up got progressively harder. Many mobile gaming developers have lost sight of that approach, he believes.
They can be so focused on graphics that they forget they have to get the timing right, and they have to have proper scoring constructs. I have been so pissed off with some mobile games I’ve wanted to throw my phone, even if I’m only going to hurt my phone there, and not the game.
Bushnell is partnering with Dutch publisher Spil to develop at least three as-yet-unnamed titles that he says will demonstrate the validity of the lesson today.
I have only a handful of games on my iPad, but thinking about it, they all meet that criteria. Even flight simulator X-Plane is essentially easy to get started: push the throttle forward, release the brakes, then tilt the iPad. Within seconds, you’re flying – but smooth landings are tougher, and you can add rain, winds and darkness to make things as challenging as you like.
It was Bushnell who contracted the two Steves to create Breakout, because his in-house developers thought the days of bat-and-ball were over. The game proved skeptics wrong. It will be interesting to see what his team creates now.
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I prefer to use a controller to play games on my phone.
Those touch controls are horrible.
I ordered the SteelSeries Nimbus controller from Apple because I thought it would make the TVos and iOS games more fun to play. Truth is: the controller is horribly overpriced. The only neat thing was the lightning port to charge it.
It just felt not worth the price tag. I returned it, of course. I prefer well done touch controls to bad physical sticks and buttons.
The reason I don’t have a controller for my iOS devices is the restriction to certified devices and its effect on quality and pricing. Both the XBox One and PS4 controllers are great devices, widely available, below $50. It’s great that the various suppliers of iOS-compatible controllers no longer think they can charge $80 or $100 but — based on those I’ve tried in Apple Stores — the physical products still have a way to go.
It’s also a hassle that the Mac didn’t get a dedicated game controller framework until v10.9 and that it supports only the MFi devices; the old generic USB/HID route is a hassle.
Yep, that alone is why I’m selective about what games go on my devices.
I agree…
Can I be a pedant? The image shown is of the Atari 2600 conversion of Breakout, which owes nothing to the Steves, being a conversion they didn’t work on of a game they didn’t design. Evidence is (i) the prominent composite video; and (ii) the aspect ratio. The arcade machine used a portrait-mounted display.
As a fellow pedant, you may indeed. :-)
Missing? There have been plenty of good mobile games out already that are built on this idea. Most people just don’t have experience with game design and don’t recognize what games do to level complexity.
Any of the games with that kind of 3 star rating for each level is built around the idea that a novice could beat it with one star and move on to the next level but then someone who wants more of a challenge can go back and get all 3. Cut the rope was great at this and it really was hard to get all 3 stars in later levels. It added a lot of replay value. There are plenty others too.
Monument valley is a good example of a modern bad game. Beautiful and a clever idea – but not a good game. There was no challenge and no replay value. The puzzles got a little more complicated but the leveling was literally one dimensional. Play it once and you know what to do. I can’t go back and solve it a different way or get a better score, or get rewarded for doing it a harder way. It was made by designers and not game designers. That’s why.
Never been much of a gamer…because the games or other players I was up against always beat me! Still I do have fond teenage memories of playing and playing very well actually, arcade classics such as Outrun and Riddle of Pythagoras (a very good Arkanoid clone) I also liked older arcade classics such as Asteroids and Battlezone, but wasn’t very good at them…a recurring theme there. Oh and Atari’s spectacular looking full colour vector graphics arcade version of Star Wars was fun and easy to play too. There were many others going back to my misspent youth, but those mentioned here together with pinball! Were my favourites.