Speed and difficulty of older games

News & General Discussion
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It has probably been discussed to death, but last night we were in a bar with one of those “60 games in one” arcade setups and they were all 80s games, which is what I grew up on. My wife grew up in a small town so they didn’t see much beyond Pac Man and Donkey Kong, so we sat there watching the intro screens go by and I expressed probably-too-much excitement when favorites came up. (And now I realize about 75% of my favorites were vector graphics… which is probably what I should work on next.)

The arcade setup didn’t have Robotron 2084, but she wasn’t familiar with it (!) so I pulled up a youtube video, and it struck me anew just how much more difficult, unforgiving, and plain fast the original arcade games were. I mean this thing was practically a graphical representation of a grand mal siezure:

Even though I loved these games, I guess I didn’t quite enjoy the extreme difficulty level. (Yes, I know the arcade could set the difficulty levels; in the 90s I owned a Space Duel machine until it became impossible to find parts for the vector graphics CRT – I still regret selling it, these days I know enough I could have fixed it myself.)

And sure, today there are plenty of games with crap flying everywhere, but I have the feeling that generally it’s SFX eye candy. And I know there are exceptions like SuperMeatBoy that are pretty difficult, but as a rule I feel games have become significantly slower and easier. Is it about making games accessible to a wider audience?

It’s a good thing our current project is so far along, otherwise I’d probably be spending my weekend brainstorming some sort of new vector graphics game… :slight_smile:

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There are probably several factors at play here. One is the different monetization model. Arcade games relied on getting players to put in a quarter, and then getting them off the game as quickly as possible so they (or someone else) could put in the next quarter. The industry very quickly zeroed in on the difficulty curve that would do this effectively. And that meant hard in most cases — I can’t remember how many times I put in a quarter and was out of lives within 30 seconds.

With the advent of consoles, the proposition became very different. Here customers were expected to pay a large sum of money up front, and they wanted to get their money’s worth of play. So the games suddenly became much, much longer. Comparing Donkey Kong to Super Mario Bros, I think this is the main difference in game design. The games still weren’t exactly easy, but they weren’t designed to get relentlessly harder so as to kill you off and let the next person play — there was suddenly no harm in letting the same player go for hours.

Modern casual games have a different situation yet. Here users aren’t paying anything for the game, but they also have an incredibly short attention span. So, we need to engage the player and keep them coming back, and engaging with our ads. Usually this means not punishing the user with a difficult challenge right off the bat.

However, it doesn’t always mean that… I’ve noticed a cohort of games which are every bit as difficult as arcade games, if not more. I’m thinking of things like Flappy Bird for example. You’re expected to last a few seconds, but to have that “one more try, I know I can do better!” feeling to keep you coming back. (I’m wrapping up a game of this sort myself right now.)

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if arcades were still a thing these days they’d be riddled with analytics and traffic patterns like if there’s only a couple of people in the arcade, the machines they play are more forgiving so that the arcade has a sense of fullness to attract other people and so on…

lithium arcade.

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Are they any good though? Sure they are difficult, and therefore quick, but is there any depth to them?

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The kind of people who made this all those years ago are the kind of people making modern FPS games, pushing boundaries, riveting up the action, trying to cram as much stuff on screen as possible without lagging the frame rate.

Arcade games were set with difficulty to what, in most games today, would be the Extreme or Hardcore or Insanity difficulty setting. They were made to eat quarters.

It has since been revealed that people generally don’t like those fast twitch, impossible kinds of games. Any more than most people like having their knuckles cracked with a ruler for sitting with bad posture. Sure, it used to be common place… but given a choice, very few would choose a game you can barely play over a game you can enjoy at a challenging, but fair difficulty.

Being “unbeatable” is not a credit to a game. It’s one step away from “unplayable”… and for a lot of these fast paces old arcade games, I think you’ll find that’s the popular opinion.

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Dark souls is very, very far from twitch. It clearly warns you with tells what will happen, and you will generally die because you were not able to control your impulse to attack, and took too many risks you didn’t need to (or are just plain not patient).

So difficulty can come from many places, not just pixel perfect fly-like reaction times that suit 14 year olds with pent up hormones, with nowhere to go.

People buying AAA games don’t want difficult games in general. They want pure entertainment. People buying indie games want a bit of challenge… however I think we’ve all moved on from being needlessly punished like frog says.

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It depends on what the difficulty is coming from although I wouldn’t say everyone hates it these days.

Devil Daggers sold about 60,000 copies on Steam and the game is basically focused on just the fast arcade action aspect period. It seems to be patterned after the old arcade style games at its core. Even down to what people often describe as a cheap shot in the old games of enemies spawning behind you. It’s just facing overwhelming odds and seeing how long you can survive.

There is fun in such things just because it’s fun to blow things up (it’s great feedback… an instant feeling of accomplishment) and dance with the enemies. And it’s satisfying to improve. The first time you played an old arcade game you probably didn’t survive very long. But you learned, your skills and timing improved a bit, your ability to anticipate enemy behavior and even the behavior of the game world model as a whole improved a bit. You tried again and made it a little further. And that’s the driving force behind games like Devil Daggers too I think.

Although like @hippocoder said it’s definitely more a niche thing. Still it exists. This group of people who want very simple rules and a very difficult challenge. It’s a great recipe for short intense game sessions.

I never cared much for the pixel perfect jumps and insane difficulty of many of the older games. I also don’t care for the modern floaty jumps and such. Something in the middle is just right. And taking those core gameplay loops and adding a little more depth is something that I am focusing on. Needs to be balanced though.

It’s interesting that Robotron actually seems to have more of a story and more depth (in the enemy design) than Devil Daggers does.

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There will probably always be a niche market, and within that niche, faster and harder is better.

Just want to point out that it is a niche, and although you can create a good vs. evil paradigm in:

Old games were hard and fast and therefore “good” vs. new games are slow and easy and therefore “bad”.

And argue such, old video games weren’t all hard and new video games aren’t all or even mostly easy, and in fact I believe some of the most challenging games are being made these days, specifically competitive pvp games… you can literally compete against people who will roflstomp you like you’re not even trying. And it’s 100% fair, unlike a.i. can be at times.

So, no… I don’t think the argument holds any water. I think the problem is that the newer fast-paced games are not so discoverable in today’s huge market place, and since they are niche you will be lucky if something bubbles up and gets some notoriety. It just seems like nobody makes this stuff any more and everything has changed completely.

Plus nostalgia goggles, zey blind uz to ze troof.

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Oh yeah I am not suggesting old games are “good” and new games are “bad”.

That’s why I listed Devil Daggers. It has the same kind of design as the older games. Actually even more simplistic in some ways. It’s that part I am thinking about. There are people who only want to play deep games and there are people who enjoy just some quick blasting fun. Games where they can just drop in and play with simple rules, very straightforward.

I don’t see any games as being right or wrong / good or bad in a general all encompassing sense. If someone is enjoying a game then it is the right game for them. For someone else it might be the wrong game. It’s like many of the puzzle games or “find the hidden things” games. They are not bad games or dumb games or anything like that. They’re just not my thing. But there are certainly people who spend hours & hours playing them. They are the right games for those folks.

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Arcade games were long on skill and short on content for the most part. Mastery of a level was a requirement to get the most out of the content. After all, it just wouldn’t do to beat an arcade game in the span of a few visits.

As a result, successful players developed to a very very skilled level, and had something they wanted to show off to friends, which I imagine was a fantastic demonstraton of the game and encouraged new players.

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With regards to vector graphics I always believed Atari had the best variety (BattleZone, Gravitar, Space Dual, Asteroids, Black Widow, Red Barron, Major Havoc, Tempest, Quantum, Lunar Lander, etc.) of vector graphics games available. Cinematronics Armor Attack was one one of the nicer vector graphics two player co-op style game.

Do you have unity asset Vectrosity already? It includes a nice battlezone type of clone called tankzone as a demo. Great place to start on your vector graphics game design weekend. :slight_smile:

I always thought Williams had some of the hardest ones when it came to difficulty like Robotron 2084 and Defender. I always thought Defender had the most complex input controls to learn of any game available.

Have you seen Eugene Jarvis’s Classic Game Postmortem: Robotron: 2084?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90GuCjmNzVI

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I think games are a big enough market that can sustain a lot kind of games (at least if you don’t need to sell 4million copies to break even).

And that includes “old school difficulty”. Case in point : VVVVVV (which AFAIK has sold well over a million). I’d argue difficulty wise, it’s as tough as a lot of the old school games. The only (pretty major) difference, is that it has checkpoints very often, while a “true” old school game would start you from all the way to the start of a level if you died.

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Hadn’t seen that postmortem but it’s pretty great, thanks. I was thinking about faking the vector effect with a edge-highlighting shader on real 3D objects to mimic Space Duel’s hidden line removal…

Edit: After watching that GDC talk… I need to jump on ebay and find a working Defender sound board. In the 90s I had one wired up as my doorbell. :slight_smile: Change which of the 8 pins went high and you’d kick off one of about 120 sound effects (though probably only 20 or so made good doorbell sounds, some were super quiet, some never ended without a second “shutdown” input, etc.)

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Yes I agree. The game market really is huge. Everything we’re (or at least everything I am) doing is niche. There are people who want to play very difficult games. It’s no different than people who want to play Horror games or anything else really. Think of all of the people who love “jump scare” horror games.

A lot of people here may not be able to understand why anyone would want to play such games just walking around and &^@&^$@$$!!&^ in your face. Many devs might think it is stupid. Many gamers might think it is stupid. But that part is irrelevant. You don’t make games for people who aren’t your target market.

It’s like my most recent game released on GameJolt. It was released 5 days ago and here are the stats from about 15 minutes ago when I took the screenshot:

Most people who aren’t interested in a game will simply not bother to play or or rate it or leave a comment. But then there are exceptions who will of course.

I’m not sure how other folks around here look at such things but for me I only care about the top 60% of these ratings. The Terrible ratings I completely ignore. Why? Because there is no reason for someone to rate it Terrible unless this kind of game is just not something they enjoy playing (they aren’t my target audience) or they are just being an ass. The reason I have this view is obviously it is not a terrible game when the majority of people have rated it Great and Perfect.

Even if the majority of players hadn’t rated it Great or Perfect still I would only look at the first 3 ratings. The people who rated it Good or higher are my target market. I can work with the Good folks and possibly make the game so those people have a Great experience instead of a Good experience playing the game. And maybe in the process that will allow some who had a Meh experience to now have a Good experience. Maybe. But I wouldn’t waste time thinking about it.

Anyway… I thought maybe some firsthand stats on an old school sort of game that is pretty challenging may be of interest. This game definitely isn’t ridiculously hard but it is challenging. It’s probably similar to something like Robotron except I think it starts out at a little more gradual pace and I made sure to handle collisions in favor of the player and allow a decent amount of leeway. Just because I think it is important when the player dies they know absolutely it was their own fault not the game being ridiculously hard for no reason. Still it is challenging.

Basically if you threw something out like Robotron today you’d see similar stats just like any game. Any game you release will have people rating it Terrible, Meh or Good. The way you know if you have something workable is to see if you have any Great or Perfect ratings. Because that means it is connecting with your target market out there. And Robotron today I think would find a market as well. I am sure there are already such games out there. Some 8-bit style twin stick shooter.

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Wow. That is a great idea for a door bell. I wish you had it on video the reactions of the people after they rang it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA3IzSxqjGY

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Back then video would have involved lugging a pretty bulky VHS camcorder around, lol.

(Though I did work for a “multimedia” company so we had the stuff to transcode to AVI or even, gasp, burn to CD on our $4000 burners… DVDs didn’t exist yet.)

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That days of 1x CD burning. :slight_smile:

So what were your favorite vector arcade games?

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1x burning and a blank CD cost about $7 and had a 50/50 chance of failing (we called them “coasters”).

Vector favorites… Space Duel obviously, since I owned one of them when I was 18. My two roommates and I would compete for high score at the end of the month, and the highest scorer didn’t have to contribute to rent. You always knew when somebody was short on funds, they’d be up all night banging away at the game. We wired it up to a larger amp and 15" subs and that thing could shake the house.

Definitely Red Baron, 3D flight-sim combat was mind-blowing in 1980. I always loved Tempest but I flat-out sucked at it. Star Castle wasn’t a well-known or well-liked game but I liked it a lot. Omega Race was also apparently not well-known but I liked it (unique-at-the-time rotary control and the first sit-down arcade game I saw). And rounding off the vector favorites list is Gravitar – basically Lunar Lander on stereoids.

I want to add Defender to the list but I was so bad at it that it isn’t fair to say it was a favorite. Of course, nobody else I ever met was any good at it either.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smKHtLYv1LY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk_QbhXj2R8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Sa2aDxvxJ8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZv-9R2fPjI

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Ha, there it is… moving it into my new apartment in '91 (hence all the beer scattered about).
Pro-tip: you do NOT want to move a full-sized arcade cabinet up two flights of stairs.

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I never played many games actually IN an arcade but I was more into the home computing era of Atari/Amiga and played a lot of action arcade games on there. Looking back I see how almost all games on those platforms were very male-oriented. There was a lot of skill-testing, adrenalin pumping, difficult challenging games, where you actually had to have “the skills” to be able to get good at it. It wasn’t enough to sit back and sip some tea and wonder about what you’ll do a few minutes from now. It was all about being in the moment, intense action, immediate threats, and whether you could react fast enough. It was an adrenalin-pumping thrillride which was quite capable of destroying the buttons on a joystick before long. And it was FUN as hell.

After a while though, as games proceeded, markets opened up, new genres appeared, new 3d hardware came along, and that not only created numerous new genres but also overshadowed the old mostly-2d hardcore “man games” a lot. Genres like shootemups, and platformers… partly they sort of suffered because there WERE so many of them, and so many ideas had been tried and done, and done well, and it seemed like there wasn’t a whole lot new to experience. So it sort of got a bit old as people kept looking for new exciting cutting-edge games, getting all bleary eyed over the dazzle of 3D and all that it offered. I mean seriously, back in the day there were so many platform games and shooting space games, it was really done to the death. Things evolved and most people followed the ‘new and cutting-edge’ because there was no longer much ‘new’ or unseen happening in the older genres.

Then along came new audiences, new types of games, games that actually appealed more to women, casual gaming, turn-based games, more puzzle and strategy games, realtime strategies, tower defense etc… all pretty new genres appealing to new audiences. And then also along came MOBILE, which now appealed to a whole different gaming scenario - shorter attention spans, completely shite touch-based controls which make it really far from ideal to control any kind of intense skill game like a platformer or shootemup, having to resort to like 1-button Rayman affairs and such. Okay games in their own right, but compromises to try to suit the control interface. And then of course all the massive influence of mobile games and new genres there etc… trying to please lots of people with as much ease and simplicity and the whole soft-sell low-barrier-to-entry movement towards free-to-play etc with everyone trying to clammer for appealing to as many gamers as possible and to never turn anyone off. So that means dumb tutorials and friendly little screens and very forgiveable gameplay and all that. So now everyone is just sort of coasting along with less intense gameplay and far less test of skills, I think largely due to the touch interface which really lends itself more to casual interaction.

Then you have consoles which have expanded greatly and still have intensity-supporting controllers, but with so many buttons and so much 3D popularity it’s really overshadowed some of these arcade type of games. And even some of these games have tried to appeal more to wider audiences so are dumbed down and over-explained and less intuitive. There is a certain ‘art’ to making a game intuitive so that you learn it automatically as you discover things, and that’s something of a lost art. The whole business model influence is pretty major as described in above posts, everyone trying to get as many customers as possible basically means people pleasing and softening and trying to be too big and too generalized. That doesn’t mean niches aren’t there or aren’t important or viable, just that they are smaller and they might not fare quite as well in terms of ‘business sense’. If its all about making money, then it’s not really all about staying true to the art of good gameplay.

Also we have the situation where developers really sort of ran out of ideas in terms of the 2d games because they did have such a prolific time of things back in the day and not much happened in terms of making use of new 3d hardware etc. So now there is a bit of a resurgence of these old genres where people are finding ways to make better use of the new hardware. There are some really gorgeous 2d games coming out including platformers and shootemups. There’s not a lot of them but they’re coming, and they’re starting to explore some new possibilities. Obviously some of those are the hideous notion of ‘lets do everything in 3d/2.5D with physics’ which I find to be very lame, but it depends if it produces good gameplay or not. There’s also a lot of 2d games on mobile where developers are trying to tap into some of these old genres like shootemups etc but usually I think these are made by newcomers who weren’t really around in the good old days of the intense skill-testing difficulties, plus the control scheme doesn’t lend itself well to intense action, so most of these games are pretty basic and not very exciting. I think desktop or consoles offer a better outlet for big-screen modern 2d games.

Actually this is where my focus is at the moment… making a 2d arcade action game with increasingly intense difficulty and a tremendous test of reflexes, you know, just like the old arcade-style ‘hardcore’ 2d games. I’ve decided not to care about whether there is a big audience or trying to please everyone. In fact I’ve become much clearer by learning about other genres and audiences and in particular what games women tend to play, exactly what my game will NOT include because they are not my audience. I’m making a ‘man game’, lol. Just good old old-school blasting action FUN and intensity and great gameplay, using some of the hardware bells and whistles but also exploring some new avenues which just weren’t possible technically back when. For me some of these old genres are the best when they’re done well and a lot has been ‘lost’ as a result of all this other expansion of gaming audiences and flashy hardware visuals and all that. It’s time for a bit of a resurrection I think.

Overall I notice like on mobile that the drive to make money has really sent everything downhill into this very ‘friendly’ no-entry-barrier kind of mindset, where everyone is trying to scrape up whatever desperate scraps they can from the massive amounts of other people who are doing the same. There’s a sort of scarcity in a sense, not enough paying customers or customers not paying enough, and this whole focus on monetization and stuff. I think it’s really driven the heart and soul out of a lot of games and has just turned them into business devices. My strategy is to do exactly NOT THAT and to instead focus on making a great, fun game that stays as consistently true to the spirit of playing and having fun rather than watering things down for the sake of trying to get more people to play it. I don’t know if it’ll mean any kind of business/financial success but I DO know that once it’s made it’ll be a game that I will really really enjoy and that some small niche of people will also really really enjoy.

I guess it begs the question whether truly great gameplay games can make money or whether you have to sell your soul in order to do that.

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