Augustine Sunardi

Augustine Sunardi

Coussens

English 8

24 April 2020

Great Game Design

Video games are an unexpected but beautiful form of art, bringing in well over 1.5 billion people around the world to take part in the limitless stories and worlds unfolded through the art of game design (Chikhani). On the surface, video games might seem to just be about the gameplay, but inside them lies an intricate story, a clever design, beautiful artwork, and countless hours of work. not many games have the ingenuity to achieve greatness and praise, but those that do are truly masterpieces. I have admired these games for a while and am heavily interested in the design process that goes on during the creation of these games, so I have decided to design my own original video game and create the artwork as well for my Capstone project. In order to get a good idea of how video games have evolved and changed over the years, I have researched the history and evolution of video games. In addition, to help me determine what makes a video game great, I researched the history as well as the design and thinking process behind the classic video game Super Mario Bros., a groundbreaking video game that many consider to be great. As a result of my research, the information has helped me deduce that the key to a great game design is to look at everything from the perspective of the player and create a game from that view, and I will use this information to help make my game design the best it can be.

Over the years, video games have rapidly advanced into games with high definition visuals, beautiful graphics, and complex gameplay. However, everything has a small start, and the very first video games were made in laboratories and universities with expensive and simple computers (“Video Game”). What can be seen as the first computer game was in a computer designed to run a simple player versus computer logic game for the 1940 New York World’s Fair. The game was the old game of Nim and the computer won 90% of matches out of 50,000 (Chikhani). Other notable mentions include Tennis for Two, made by the Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1958, and Spacewar! by MIT, which was the first game that could be played on any system that could run it. Later in 1967, Ralph Baer developed the Brown Box, the first console that could run multiple games on a television and was meant for households. Baer gave a company called Magnavox the license to his invention, and they called it the Odyssey, which was complete with 28 different games. Despite it being a failure due to video games being a new concept at the time, among the 28 games the Odyssey featured, one inspired another game company, Atari, to create the very first arcade game, Pong. Released in 1972, it was a success, and Atari soon became the first video game company to be very successful. Afterwards, Atari made the Atari 2600 in 1977, a home console with color visuals and the ability to change video games by swapping the cartridges (“Video Game”). While it was not too successful at first, it soon became popular with over 2 million Atari 2600s sold in 1980 (Chikhani). Video games quickly became part of the everyday world and as more people got interested in them, the more advanced and innovative they became.

After seeing video games become an incredibly profitable market, many companies started to create their own games and consoles in an effort to be superior to their competitors. Notable games released by various companies from 1970 to 1980 that helped boost the popularity of video games include the arcade release of Space Invaders in 1978, Pac-Man’s release in the US, and Donkey Kong. However, this successful market suddenly plummeted with the release of a video game based on the movie E.T., a terrible game that many people consider to be the worst video game in history, with 3.5 million copies out of 4 million being returned to the stores. Although the sudden crash was not only due to E.T., it was a prime example of companies looking for easy money and filling the market with bad games with low effort, which was the cause of the giant crash that made several companies go bankrupt (Boyd). The situation then greatly improved with Nintendo releasing the Nintendo Entertainment System, or the NES, in 1985. It featured better visuals, better sound, and especially groundbreaking and unique games like Super Mario Bros. that changed video games forever. With the rebirth of video games, several new companies came into the industry. Out of these many companies, the most notable were Sega and Nintendo, two giants in the video game world that dominated the market with their consoles and games at the time. Sega created the Genesis console with 16-bit graphics to one up the NES, and Nintendo retaliated with the 16-bit Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The two companies battled to be the best in what is known as the console wars, and later on more companies like Sony and Microsoft grew to be tough competitors. From here, technology rapidly advanced with improved graphics and 3D games, and video games evolved into the complex and ingenious games we have today with motion controls, high definition graphics, and virtual reality (“Video Game”). However, even with so many modern games with advanced technology, only a few of them have such a good design that they truly deserve to be called great.

A prime example of a great game is the aforementioned Super Mario Bros., which is considered to be among the greatest video games of all time. Designed by famous game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, Super Mario Bros. was game changing for its time and single handedly saved the video game market from the video game crash of 1983 (Nix). The stoic plumber named Mario who stars as the main character of the game has become a cultural icon due to the game’s profound impact on the world. Unbeknownst to some, Mario originated from an 1981 arcade game called Donkey Kong as a carpenter named Jumpman (Huddleston). In 1980, Miyamoto was given the task to replace Radar Scope, a failed arcade game, with a new game that would save the company from their financial loss. He initially wanted to make a game with the characters of Popeye, Olive Oil, and Bluto, all of which are from the cartoon Popeye. However, Nintendo was unable to obtain the rights to those characters so Miyamoto replaced the characters with his own, creating a game with a carpenter named Jumpman rescuing his girlfriend from the grasps of a giant gorilla named Donkey Kong.(Nix). This game featured Jumpman climbing a construction site and jumping over obstacles to rescue his girlfriend from Donkey Kong, and the game was called Donkey Kong. Before releasing it to America, Jumpman’s name was changed to Mario after their landlord, Mario Segale. Following the success of Donkey Kong, Miyamoto then designed another game with Mario as the star, Super Mario Bros. Released in 1985, the game did incredibly well. Sold alongside the NES console, more than 40 million cartridges of Super Mario Bros. were purchased (Huddleston). The main reason it did so well was because of the game’s uniqueness as well as Shigeru Miyamoto’s genius design and innovation.

The fact that no other game in the market was like Super Mario Bros. was a key element of its success. At the time when Super Mario Bros. was released, the designers of video games were usually the programmers themselves, meaning that they mainly focused on the program and hardware. Things were different for Super Mario Bros., as Miyamoto, a graphic designer with no programming experience, was in charge of designing the game (“Inventor”). Unlike the other designers who only created things that they were comfortable programming in their games, Miyamoto knew nothing about coding games so his ideas were not limited to the program’s capabilities. He explored many possibilities that no other developer thought would work, and as a result created a game that was unimaginable for its time (Nix). In addition to the unique gameplay, Super Mario Bros. also featured a full and unique story, something that is absent in many other games made during the 1970s-1980s. Furthermore, not only was the game one of a kind in many different ways, but it also featured clever gameplay design that keeps the player playing. For example, take the initial level of Super Mario Bros., Level 1-1. When designing the game, Miyamoto thought about how to help the player understand what to do even without the space to program text into the game. To solve this, he designed the level in such a way that it subtly guides the player to learn how to play. The very first scene the player sees upon starting the level is Mario placed at the very left of the screen with the right side completely blank, indicating where to go. After proceeding to the right, the player encounters flashing yellow blocks with question marks that give off a mysterious feeling, enticing the player to hit them. Once hit, it rewards the player with a coin, encouraging them to hit the next question mark block, which has a mushroom come out when hit. Even if the player tries to avoid the mushroom, blocks are placed in such a way that the player will hit the mushroom sliding towards them and Mario will get bigger, teaching the player that they are beneficial (“Inventor”). With these simple but clever designs, the game helps anyone to learn and have fun with the game no matter how experienced they are, which is part of Miyamoto’s design philosophy (“Inventor”). When designing his games, Miyamoto also aims to create worlds and stories that the player would get immersed in, just like how a book or a movie does. Furthermore, Miyamoto values uniqueness and originality in his games, saying in an interview that the most important part of his game is that it is “something that no one has created, and something that no one else can create, something that is uniquely Nintendo” (“Shigeru”). By analyzing these design philosophies, one unifying idea that is the key to a good game design can be concluded.

A great game comes from the ability to look at a game as a player rather than a designer and create a game from that point of view. This conclusion is drawn from not only the design philosophies behind Super Mario Bros. that made it so great, but also many great games over the years. The common idea shared by the many different ideas Shigeru Miyamoto thinks about when creating a game is that one should focus on how the player sees their game. This idea is evident throughout many of the video games that are considered masterpieces today, and is the foundation of every aspect of a good game. Whether it be the gameplay design, the story, or the characters, it is an essential part of developing each and every aspect. Although this idea may seem obvious to some, it is often overlooked by many developers even today. The creators that do pay attention to the player's perspective end up creating great video games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Breath of The Wild is critically acclaimed for its gameplay design, featuring a massive open world adventure where the player has near complete freedom to do what they want and explore wherever they want (Gray). Along with the limitless possibilities to experiment and play with using the game’s many features, the player gets a feeling of excitement and happiness by discovering and exploring new things, which is just what the designers intended (Webster). By creating this game around the feelings a player would have when playing the game, Breath of the Wild became a great game loved by many. This demonstrates how modern game developers use the perspective and feelings of players to masterfully design their games.

The skillful mastery of video game design is showcased through the select few video games that have become icons in not just the video game community, but have also become cultural icons in the world as well. Their popularity stems from a great game design that is founded on one central idea. As a result of my research, I learned that this central idea, the key to designing a great video game, is to design through the eyes of an everyday player instead of simply designing it as a creator. This conclusion was developed through researching the history and evolution of video games as well as the history and design process behind Super Mario Bros. To further my point, I have also briefly researched the design behind The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, another video game with a brilliant design that is considered to be great by many. While designing my own video game for my Capstone project, I will take these design fundamentals that I have learned and thoughtfully apply them to every aspect of my video game in order to make my game great. As I conducted my research, I realized that video games have a much bigger impact on the world that it might seem. The number of people who play video games around the world are rapidly increasing, and video games are becoming a central part of the world’s modern culture. With my findings, I aim to not only improve my game design skills, but also help other people see the true art and beauty of video games and their design.

Citations

Boyd, Andy. “The Video Game Crash of 1983.” The Engines of Our Ingenuity,

University of Houston, 7 Jan. 2016, https://uh.edu/engines/epi3038.htm.

Accessed 21 April 2020.

Chikhani, Riad. “The History Of Gaming: An Evolving Community.” TechCrunch, 31

Oct. 2015, https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/31/the-history-of-gaming-an-evolving-community/. Accessed 20 April 2020.

Gray, Kate. “Is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild the Best-Designed Game

Ever?” The Guardian, Guardian Media Group, 30 May 2017, www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/30/the-legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-nintendo-game-design-open-world-player-explore. Accessed 23 April 2020.

“How the Inventor of Mario Designs a Game.” YouTube, Vox, 12 Jan. 2017,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=K-NBcP0YUQI. Accessed 22 April 2020.

Huddleston, Tom, Jr. “'Super Mario Bros.' Debuted 33 Years Ago - Here's How Mario

Accidentally Became a Gaming Superstar.” CNBC, NBC, 13 Sept. 2018, www.cnbc.com/2018/09/13/super-mario-bros-how-shigeru-miyamoto-created-mario-for-nintendo.html. Accessed 21 April 2020.

Nix, Marc. “The History of Super Mario Bros.” IGN, 18 Sept. 2015,

ww.ign.com/articles/2010/09/14/ign-presents-the-history-of-super-mario-bros. Accessed 21 April 2020.

“Video Game History.” History, A&E Television Networks, 10 June 2017,

www.history.com/topics/inventions/history-of-video-games. Accessed 20

April 2020.

Webster, Andrew. “A Chat with the Directors of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the

Wild.” The Verge, 11 Mar. 2017,

www.theverge.com/2017/3/11/14881076/the-legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wil

d-nintendo-interview. Accessed 23 April 2020.