When people talk about the importance of mobile
gaming for the
videogames industry, it's the relatively recent market-defining
titles like
Angry Birds
that steal the headlines. But the stage has really just been
dressed for a true revival of games originally released in the
1990s. So why aren't they being pushed harder to what is arguably
the most suitable audience since their original release?
The generation of mobile gaming addicts alive now and old enough
to drink, vote and drive weren't even born for the release of
Sonic The Hedgehog, a game that sold on the same scale as
blockbusters like
Call of Duty in its day. Yet some of the
most successful mobile games on
smartphones today owe their success to
design principles originally pioneered by the likes of
Sonic two decades ago.
Simple graphics, straightforward gameplay and obvious controls
were design foundations necessitated by limited processing power
inside the consoles they were designed for -- run to the right and
catch rings (
Sonic), run to the right and collect coins
(
Mario), run into a building and be an asshole (
How To
Be A Complete Bastard, an Atari classic from 1987).
The same foundations are necessary and present in
Angry
Birds, Cut The Rope, Doodle Jump or
Tiny Wings. Only
this time they're necessary not because of restricted processing
power, but because of limited options granted by touchscreen
controls and the "quick fix" nature of modern mobile gaming.
The fact remains that these App Store-topping games are, in many
ways, technically identical to their 20-year-old predecessors. It's
just the latter are marketed as "retro", as "classics", while the
former are marketed as innovative examples of modern game
architecture and creative thinking. It doesn't seem right.
For years, Sega, Nintendo and others have made efforts to spit
out their older titles on as many modern platforms as possible;
classics like
Sonic and
Golden Axe seem to pop up
on every platform going, given time. But before now it's always
stunk like a rotten cash-in aimed at the nostalgic 20- and
30-somethings with enough disposable income to rebuy their
favourite childhood titles over and over again, while the
generation below is spending a fortune with
Zynga and
Rovio.
The message is all wrong. These shouldn't be pushed as "retro
games" nervously asking for another 69p of an older gamer's salary.
They should be aggressively targeting the generation who have never
heard of
Chrono
Trigger, but who loved
Dragon Age;
who waste hours on
Farmville but who have never heard of
Will
Wright. This is an opportunity to make a bigger deal of these
classics -- not
because they're classics, but because
they're objectively the most perfectly-executed mobile games ever
made.
I've experienced this first-hand, with the aforementioned
Chrono Trigger being a prime example.
I missed out entirely on the majority of the 8-bit and 16-bit
role-playing games of the 80s and early 90s, largely because I was
too young to afford both a Mega Drive
and a SNES. Certain
Japanese A-listers, including the original
Final Fantasy
series and
Secret of Mana, were all products of Square
Enix (called Squaresoft at the time), and are now available for the
iPhone. I have bought them all,
completed them all and finally got to experience what the
generation of gamers above me experienced while I was busy being
merely a glint in someone's eye.
It's not just confined to consoles, either: someone needs to get
Bullfrog's 1997 classic,
Theme Hospital, ported to
iOS and
Android, too. Quickly, mind, before
Zynga swoops in with something like
Illnessville and makes
a billion dollars off the 16-year-olds who never had the pleasure
of diagnosing bloaty head syndrome or a slack tongue back in the
day.
It's an opportunity that won't linger for too long. The divide
between what's considered "console gaming" and "mobile gaming" will
only exist while gamers still buy both a console and a portable
device. We've seen smartphones start to devour the likes of the
Nintendo DS and PlayStation Vita, and with the mobile gaming
industry what it is right now, it won't be too long before someone
decides not to buy a PlayStation because they've bought an
iPad.
Or before Zynga releases Illnessville. Please, let's not let
that happen. Let's drop the "retro" in mobile and focus on the
"gaming".
The near live video clips from the matches are available on Buzz
which is a consumer engagement platform developed by TIB and deployed at
TIB’s partner locations including Cafe Coffee Day, Crosswords, Nirulas,
Spencers, Barista, transit lounges, leading malls and various Railway
stations.
