Sunday Thoughts: Innovation

In the infancy of computer gaming programmers were faced with eight colour palettes, one button joysticks and 48k to squeeze an entire game into. Looking back from todays terabyte hard drives and internet enabled phones, the ZX Spectrum is the computing equivalent of a rock on a stick but with these simple tools the most inventive games ever were created. Every title today is a direct ancestor of those early titles.

[drop]It’s quite mind-blowing to think that someone, somewhere once said ‘Hey, what if we have this character and he can jump.’ That person created the platformer, an entire genre of gaming.

You may not have heard of Tomohiro Nishikado but he created the shoot ‘em up when a dream about Japanese school children who are waiting for Santa Claus inspired him to create Space Invaders.

Back in the 1980s, programmers took the most basic building blocks and created a new form of entertainment. Like a child with a tub of Lego, their imagination ran riot, whole worlds, or in the case of Elite, entire universes were created in 48k or less.

Software houses (which usually consisted of two chaps in a garage in Sussex) did not have 3D, motion control or anti aliased rendering to hide behind, they had to create something playable, something original and try and avoid colour clash whilst doing so.

As the games industry grew up, technology advanced via the Amiga, Megadrive and PC until we reach today’s powerhouses, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. We now have 3D, motion control, that bloke from The Office doing a voice over, multiplayer and games designed by movie producers. What we do not have is any new games.

The storage space, memory and processing power of gaming has increased by a factor of millions since the days of the ZX Spectrum but the basic structure of games has remained the same. Strip away the fancy 3D graphics, multiple path upgrade systems and Hollywood cut scenes and we are still playing titles that were designed in the 1980’s.

Killzone 3 is a descendant of Doom on the PC which is a descendant of 3D Monster Maze on the ZX Spectrum 81 which is the child of Maze Wars, a game from 1974 for the Imlac PDS-1. Take the interrogation sections from L.A. Noire, strip away the fancy graphics and you’re left with a classic text adventure.

[drop2]What of current darling Portal 2? You could argue that old favourite Pac-Man did it first. It’s a puzzle game in which you move about a sealed location avoiding traps. Move Pac through one ‘portal’ and he appears on the other side of the play area via a corresponding ‘portal’ – reverse direction and appear at your starting point. Other lineage is more obvious – Super Stardust is Asteroids with the emphasis on Steroids.

Some claim that the last innovation in gaming was Populous, the first ‘God’ simulation. When I was at school, back in the 1980s, I spent my lunch hour playing a BBC Micro game which I think was called Settlers. The idea of the game was to manage the resouces of a village and deal with natural disasters including a flood.

I would argue that the last original home video game was created in 1996 when PaRappa the Rapper introduced the world to rhythm action games, a game to be celebrated or vilified depending on your view of the chart domination of Just Dance and Zumba Fitness.

It’s not just me. Peter Molyneux has voiced his concern about the state of the games industry.

“I love new ideas and innovation. I’m trying to think of a more diplomatic way of saying this, but I’m just a little bit bored of doing things the same way in games. While I love all the drama of modern games there is this sameness about it. “

“They’re essentially the same – one’s got a green palette, one’s got a grey palette; you’re shooting and ducking and diving and it just seems almost on the point of being a little bit like Hollywood where they have got into this rut with their action films.”

Have we reached the point where there are no new games, just the same games in new clothes?

I’ll leave you with one last thought: Starhawk is out next year and will feature massive multiplayer space battles.  Sometime in 1973 Jim Bowery created a game called Spasim on the PLATO network in which players flew around planets and each other in wire-frame space ships.

It had multiplayer, supporting up to 32 gamers.