Give me Less, Give me More

It was 1982, and I still remember the box. Small, blue, with cover art of an almost cartoon-rendered Hellcat fighter shooting down a Zero, the game was titled Hellcat Ace. It came from a publisher called Microprose, and the programmer was a guy named Sid Meier. I handed over my hard-earned money and took the game home to my Atari 800.

Of course, I knew nothing about the game other than its title. There were no demos, million-dollar marketing campaigns, or Internet reviews to help guide my purchase. There were a handful of magazines, but they couldn’t cover all the games on the market. More often than not, buying a computer game was gambling with thirty or forty dollars. In this particular case I gambled because of another game: Bruce Artwick’s Flight Simulator. After playing it on a friend’s Apple I wanted a similar experience, only without all that boring civilian flying.

The gamble paid off. Soon I was soaring over the Pacific ocean, sending Japanese planes down in flames. It was everything I hoped for and more. Instead of flying in a green and black wire-frame world, I took to the air in glorious color. Admittedly, only six different colors, but that was still four more than Flight Simulator. Best of all, no silly civilian mode. It was all action, all the time.

Until the mid-nineties I gambled on a lot of games, buying game after game without any prior knowledge of what they would be like. Sometimes the gambles didn’t pay off. Yet looking back, that period contains my fondest gaming memories. When I think back to those early years, it’s not the games themselves that truly stick out (although, obviously, some were more special to me than others) but the feelings that they elicited.

Back then games were born from creative visionaries, not from accountants needing a quick way to boost next year’s profits. As an example, let’s look at Flight Simulator and Hellcat Ace.

When Bruce created Flight Simulator, he wanted to share his vision with other people, allowing gamers to take to the skies. Sid looked at that and went one step further, creating a more visually realistic flight sim. Later, someone would have a dream that it would be great if you had a wingman. Then maybe more realistic navigation would appear, and so on, and so on. How many games have had their genesis in someone saying, “Wow, this is a really cool game, but what would be really cool would be if…”

That’s exactly what led me to Hellcat Ace. I played Flight Simulator, and then, “Wow, this is a really cool game but what would be really cool would be if…” I bought and experienced the “if” in Hellcat Ace.

I loved discovering the “if”, especially when I didn’t even know I was looking for it. I’d pick up a game having a vague notion of what to expect, only to be completely surprised by what the game had to offer. This could be the depth of gameplay, the immersion factor, or just little details. I can remember playing Blue Max for the first time and seeing the moving cars. My first thought was, “Hey, that’s pretty cool! The world is alive!” My next thought? “I wonder if you can turn them into scrap metal?” You could. Nice.

Some of this evolutionary process was because gaming was a young field. Many things simply hadn’t been tried before, and of course that made them fresh. But it wasn’t just that, the games had mystery. Every screen was new. Every quest, unique. Every black floppy disc was a gateway to new adventures. No marketing genius had pummeled into you every last aspect of the game you were booting up prior to playing.

Today it’s impossible not to know every detail about a computer game. All a developer has to do is merely mention the possibility of an upcoming game and there are fifteen previews and fifty fan sites that spring up. From interviews, designer diaries, screenshot galleries, banner ads, and demos you know exactly what you’re getting, what the interface will look like, what the combat models will be, how many lines of text were used to create the dialogue. You’ll even know what games the developer ripped off. The only unanswered questions will be how many patches it will take to finally run and will it live up to the hype? The mystery is gone.

Do I miss playing games where my character resembled a melted pad of butter? No. I do. however, miss that sense of awe I used to feel. I’m tired of seeing the same titles (with new Roman numerals) on the shelf. I’m tired of games that exist because everyone else is doing that type of game. I’m tired of hearing everything about a game years before it even enters beta.
I want to be surprised again. I want to feel like I’m the first kid on the block to have an experience with a game that will still make me want to talk about it twenty plus years later. Do I need to live like an information hermit to achieve that, or will the publishers of the world ever learn that sometimes less is more?