The Content of Punch-Out!!

Ahh, it is another Iwata Asks column! This time it is about Punchout!! and, oddly, most of it is about reminiscing about the earlier Punchout!! games. I supposed that is what they have to do since the developers of Next-Level Games company weren’t in the interview.

Readers here will know that I have advocated content over gameplay as the reason why people play games. Now, gameplay is very important. The connection between game content and gameplay is very much like between a story and writing. No one buys a book for its ‘writing’. They buy it for the ‘story’. The writer may write words, but it is the reader who takes those words and sees the story. Good writing makes reading very addictive, a ‘page turner’. Good gameplay is the same, it creates the ‘one more turn!’ attitude.

When you observe customers purchasing games, from any generation, you will note their purchases are based primarily on the content. They will buy a baseball game because they like baseball! Or they will buy a flight simulator because they like the idea of flying planes. The gameplay can radically be different with the content remaining the same. FPS games based on World War 2 play very differently than RTS games based on World War 2. If the customer is sick of World War 2, it won’t matter what ‘gameplay’ you do. They won’t buy it.

In something like Tetris, you have the gameplay of the falling blocks. It is all fine and good. But the content of the game, what Tetris really felt like was very different in the consumer’s mind. The content of the game was Soviet Union brain teaser or really just celebrating the Soviet Union in general (which was not done during the Cold War). For example, just listen to this:

Just the music and visuals alone should spur a wave of feeling within you. Without the gameplay, you can feel and sense that this game is distinctly Russian and proud to be so. Tetris was like a ‘culture shock’ because no one really was familiar with ‘Russian’ themes and all.

Tetris is important not just because it is a timeless game, it is the last remaining heritage of the Soviet Union to exist. When archeologists dig up our bones, they will understand our civilization not through pots or even movies and television (which are nothing at all like how we view life) but with games.

I distinctly remember when Tetris exploded across computers (first) and then the NES and Gameboy. Part of its impact was that it was a type of ‘culture shock’ of it being distinctly and proudly Russian. This is why I think NES gamers had the better experience than Famicom gamers because the NES games were a ‘culture shock’ to Americans raised on American games. Sure, Japanese were making console and arcade games during the Atari Era, but we are talking about a Japanese controller with the NES, almost all the games being Japanese design. PC games began to feel a little ‘stale’ when compared to these exotic Japanese games.

But back to the point, there is gameplay and there is content not unlike how there is writing and there is a story. Keep in mind I am not saying the content of games is a ‘story’. I mean ‘content’ as in that is what is going on in the player’s head.

The video game does not take place on the TV screen or with the controllers. It takes place inside the player’s mind.

In the least staged Shakespeare play, “King Henry IV Part II”, Shakespeare makes his best character, Falstaff, to say: “I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men”. In other words, Shakespeare is saying it takes two people to create ‘wit’. The experience of the joke is the combination of the jokester’s tongue and the listener’s mind. In the same way, a game is the combination of the product (what is on the shelf) and the customer’s mind. The real ‘game’ is being played inside the player’s mind. The graphics, music, sound, and all is just to help the mind out!

So what we are ending up with is game developers not knowing why their games are successful! They might think adding more ‘gameplay’ or ‘items’ and ‘levels’ is why the game was so originally successful. This might be the reason why so many sequels later an IP begins to sputter. The game developer could say: “But I was  doing more of what I did with the original!”

Consider this Takeda quote from the interview. When he made Punch-Out!!, he was focusing on the moves of the fighters and all. But once the game was out, and coins filled the machine, it began to dawn on him the REAL reason why people play Punchout!!. And this real reason, of what is going on in the player’s mind, is the true content of the game.

Quiet reader! Let us listen.

Takeda

I felt this when I made the arcade game. At the time I had worked hard on directing the game, like how the opponent would do this and that, but the cash box filled up with a lot of coins.

Iwata

A lot of people put in their 100 yen coins and played the game.

Takeda

What I suddenly understood at the time was the reason the customers pay 100 yen was not for a realistic interpretation of boxing, but because they were attracted to the root of the sport. This is similar to what Wada-san just said, but everyone knows about boxing and I think it is something that many people know well, but a sport they probably haven’t participated in. The excitement felt when showering an opponent with blows and knocking him down to the floor is the real thing. I think the biggest reason the game was appreciated was the basic allure of boxing.

The content of Punchout!! is obviously boxing but, more precisely, it is the root of Boxing such as showering an opponent with blows and knocking him down to the floor. People love that!

Also, one pattern I have noticed in many successful video games is that the design, wit, and humor of the game revolves not around the protagonist but around the villians. Punchout!! could not have been successful without colorful, interesting, and quirky villians. Neither could Super Mario Brothers despite Mario being an already established character from other games.

When I think of systems like the SNES or PlayStation or N64 and even PC Gaming, the ‘wow’ I got from the games were graphics. But the NES, which was an 8-bit machine when computers were 16-bit in America, the ‘wow’ was not graphics. The ‘wow’ was in the music.

It has been forgotton that Super Mario Brothers popularized background music. Before then, music was only in jingles. But the NES games were beautifully done not because their music was the ‘best’ but because it had such a unique effect on the player. Music, more than anything else, affects the mind. And NES music was like hypnosis for the brain. Looking back, I liked games like MegaMan because, in great part, of the music. I couldn’t realize that back then as I was thinking, “Wow! This game rocks!” when renting MegaMan II (which caused me to buy MegaMan III the DAY it came out). Consider the music of the NES Zeldas or any of the NES classics. The tunes are immortal despite their simplicity probably because they are performing some strange effect on the brain. There is a reason why Plato banned music from his Republic.

With Punchout!!, as with the other NES classics, the music just totally made the game. The content of the game of the FEELING of pummeling your opponent and knocking him out could not have been executed as well as it was without the soul stirring music: