Sean,
Great insight on Metroid. I hope that people with influence at Nintendo
and other game companies read how this whole thing played out on your blog.
I found your comments about “comfort games” to be especially
interesting. It’s a descriptive and useful term, and now that you frame
it that way, it brings lots of other games to mind. Super Mario World is
one. There is plenty of good content in that game, but no challenge. It
is not a bad game, but replaying a game like that is more about killing
time than anything else. Mario Kart is only Nintendo’s biggest cash cow
because they struck gold with a multiplayer formula. It could have been
a great single-player game too, but it’s not … it’s a comfort game in
single player, and it would have died long ago without its multiplayer
component. I am curious to know what other games you consider to be
“comfort games.”
In the early days of consoles, most games were either ports from the arcades or they were heavily influenced from the arcades. I cannot recall any comfort games on the Atari 2600. On computers, the games there were pretty taxing either because they were emulating arcade games or would hit you hard intellectually (such as strategy games or the old adventure games where you are constantly typing).
I’m trying to think up some for the NES. The only one that comes to mind is Dragon Quest. With Dragon Warrior, I remember how much of a different experience it was from other games. NES games were mostly either shmups or platformers, and they all had arcade-like gameplay. But with Dragon Warrior, you could just sit back and hit a button and ‘phase out’.
“A slime draws near!”
“Command?”
“Attack!”
“Slime attacks!”
“The slime misses! No damage hath been done!”
“Command?”
“Attack!”
“The slime has been defeated! You get 4 experience points! You are the master, Malstrom!”
While the game didn’t say that last sentence, it did sound like it though! I was once really sick, the type of really sick where you can just watch TV and can’t really play video games. However, I discovered I could play Dragon Warrior. How hard was it to just press a button and read text? The more time I put into the game, the more powerful I got! I could just walk around in circles, and I would eventually level up. The only way how you could not win in Dragon Quest is if you didn’t put in the time. The game had no real ‘skill’.
I remember having the information poster (that came with the exclusive Nintendo Power deal) that had all the stats of the monsters of the game and where they would appear in the game world. It was so much fun.
But it was fun because it was different from the other games. It was a great game to play when you were sick. Perhaps the comfort game began with the JRPG?
Final Fantasy I was no comfort game. That game was constantly taxing you and very stressful at parts.
How about Shadowgate? I guess it could be if you’ve already beaten it. But the game was scary, and you would constantly die.
The Lolo games? No way.
Tetris? Nope. That game got faster, faster, and faster on you!
Zelda I? Zelda II? No way.
Comfort games began to emerge from JRPGs and blossomed through the adventure games. Although I think many PC strategy games, when played at a low setting, could be a comfort game. Civilization, Railroad Tycoon, Sim City could be played as comfort games. Perhaps this is why the market shifted toward real time strategy as that could not be played as a comfort game (until later RTS games came out which became slower and, as such, the RTS genre got less popular).
The latter Zelda games are definitely comfort games. How can you die in Wind Waker or Twilight Princess? Link to the Past might also qualify due to how easy it is.
Clearly, JRPG games are ‘comfort games’. Final Fantasy, which was certainly not a ‘comfort game’ on the NES, became a comfort game series on the SNES. Who was challenged in Final Fantasy 4 or 6? Let me do my imitation of the final battle for Final Fantasy 6. Ahem…
“Ultima!”
“Ultima!”
“Ultima with Magic Box!”
And there it is. I’d have to replay Chrono Trigger to see if it is. It probably is.
With perhaps the exception of Ultima 7 Part I and II, the Ultima series isn’t. There is too much note taking and map making. Ultima 8 and 9 are quasi-action games (much to the disappointment of Ultima fans).
Wing Commander? Hell no.
Star Control 2? Maybe.
F-Zero GX? NO.
World of Warcraft? DEFINITELY. Holy cow, that is probably the mother of all comfort games. The loot is designed to be given out based on time invested. So raids have the best loot not because it is the hardest but because it requires the most time invested from the player.
This whole Sakamoto thing is fascinating. The whole industry is really
beginning to define itself, isn’t it? Quite possibly more through its
failures than its successes. You never used to hear about game
directors. It was all about publishing companies. If you bought a
Nintendo or Capcom or Konami game in the NES days, you were almost
guaranteed quality. The individuals working for those companies were
irrelevant. Only game geeks knew who Miyamoto or Kojima were. Nintendo
or Konami certainly never did anything to publicize them.
This is a good point. I don’t know when or how the ‘game god developer’ started. I stopped playing console games around near the end of the 16-bit Era and reappeared with the Wii. It wasn’t around at the end of the 16-bit Era. But was prevalent when I returned to gaming. So something changed.
Now there is a complete reversal. Not sure if you ever watch videos on
Wii’s Nintendo Channel (heaven knows why I do considering they rarely
talk about games that aren’t already out). But there is tons of footage
of Sakamoto talking about Other M. Recently they published a special
that was something like ten minutes of Sakamoto and some other guy
giving subtitled talks about the most inane crap you could imagine. And
the Iwata Asks things are great to watch if you don’t like yourself very
much.
Good thing I don’t have the Nintendo Channel. I’m one of those people who aligns his habits to avoid advertising. For example, I don’t watch TV, and I haven’t for around a decade now. If I need to watch something, I have Netflix. Screw the advertisers!
And the Nintendo Channel seems like just one big huge commercial. People say “So was Nintendo Power!” But Nintendo Power didn’t have advertising unlike other game magazines. Nintendo Power cleverly excited people about Nintendo games by educating them about the games. I would see pages filled with wonderful maps, level layouts, and tips. I would find out detailed information about a game I had never played. It was these strategy guides that got me interested in playing games I had never played before. It was like, “Since I read this feature, I feel as if I can already beat this game. So I might as well rent/buy it and see if I can!”
Come to think of it, the strategy features gave me a taste of how the game design was and how the game worked. For example, if I knew beating Metal Man would give me a weapon to shoot from any angle and would be useful against killing Wood Man, this told me much about how the game played. In order to figure out if I should try out a new game, I would read the strategy feature on it. Today, we get crappy reviews and fake previews. For a real life example, people got more interested in Starcraft 2 after watching pro games and listening to tips from Day[9] or someone else.
I much prefer this than the developer interview. Who the hell cares about the developers? What they should be doing is interviewing the customers. Let customers say how the game adds to their life, how they play with the game, and perhaps even have me watch them play the game.
Would you rather watch Miyamoto blabber about Mario 5 or watch someone from the street play Mario 5? I always chose the latter. I can relate to the customer, and I want to find out about the game experience. Developer interviews do not tell me anything about the game experience.
Although I do find Sakamoto interviews very entertaining because I find myself just sitting there, with my mouth hanging open, in complete shock everytime he has an interview. He says something insane like ‘Metroid is about maternal instincts’ to ‘Other M is a NES game’.
It is bizarre! Why are we seeing this? Does everyone at Nintendo have
hopes of becoming famous? I think it is indicative of the shift in focus
that you have been talking about–from player to developer. They seem to
think we are fascinated by the process of creating video games. If their
collective egos inflate any more, that whole place is going to explode
like Chernobyl.
I think this is the fault of the marketing. Many of the developers probably don’t even want to be there. I can guarantee book authors don’t want to do ‘book signings’. Authors hate being in public which is why they are authors in the first place. But publishers make them do it because they think it will sell books. Movie stars will appear on late night comedy shows to talk about their latest movie. You know they don’t really want to be there, but it is believed it will sell more movie tickets.
So what will happen is that directors will create games, not studios. It
will be just like the film industry. My friends and I went to see
Inception because Chris Nolan directed it. And just like the film
industry, developers will see the disadvantage of all this individual
attention–consumers have zero loyalty to individuals. When things go
bad, organizations get off much more easily than individuals do. Sega
has released so much utter garbage that it is shocking that their decent
games sell at all. Meanwhile John Romero had one big failure and
completely lost any respect that anyone had for him.
I am sure Sakamoto will regret all of the time he spent blabbing in
front of a camera with his stupid hair. I can guarantee Nintendo won’t
be using him to promote Metroid next time. Hopefully it goes beyond that
into a wake up call to everyone there–we don’t give a crap about the
innards of your company, Nintendo.
You make a great point that people root behind companies and not individuals. People will root behind Nintendo, even buy a game because it is Nintendo made, but you don’t see them root behind Miyamoto. I still don’t see anyone say, “I am buying this game because Miyamoto made it.” Instead, I see, “I am buying this game because Nintendo made it.”
PC games tried with individuals like Lord British or Sid Mier. But Origin ended up becoming more well known than Lord British (who became known more for the fictional character), and people talk about Firaxis or Microprose more than they ever talked about Sid Mier. This is probably a good thing since video games are a group effort. The only times when a name stuck and the company didn’t was if the game was just made by one person. Randy Glover and Jumpman or Andrew Braybrook and Paradroid.
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