Today in Tedium: The first video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, came packaged with dice, poker chips, and paper money. They represented a compromise between Ralph Bauer, the console’s designer, and Magnavox, who worried that the machine’s box-and-knobby controller obscured its purpose (that is, playing games). These days, most players don’t even need a tutorial to intuit most games’ controls: our modern controllers are mostly optimized for popular genres, invisible vessels through which we experience games. But every so often, a novel, awkward, or downright weird controller goes totally mainstream. Today’s Tedium follows three of these controllers, and how they shaped the way we play games. — Dayten @ Tedium
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$900
The going price for an unopened Guitar Hero World Tour band kit for the Playstation 3. (The original set cost $190 retail.) Activision closed controller manufacturer RedOctane in 2010, meaning the original band kits currently in circulation are the only ones in existence.
(Cassidy James Blaede/Unsplash)
RedOctane’s plastic guitars brought Japanese arcade rhythm games to US dorm rooms
RedOctane wasn’t a game company—it was a controller company. Famous for its third-party Dance Dance Revolution mats, RedOctane eventually realized that its success was tied to Konami. The publisher was reluctant to bring an official release of DDR (and GuitarFreaks, its popular arcade music game played on plastic guitars) to US markets.
Meanwhile, music game developer Harmonix had just hit a snag in its Frequency series. Though lauded for its lane-based rhythm gameplay, sales remained low. Then-Microsoft exec Ed Fries traced this shortfall to a lack of specialized hardware.
A game studio without hardware. A hardware company with no games. The resulting partnership, Guitar Hero, sold tens of millions.
You could write a book about the origin of the music game boom (and someone is!). But behind the “how” of business savvy and market forces, there is a much simpler “why,” which is that millions of people wanted an excuse to play around with plastic guitars.
Interviews with 30+ sources, conducted by Guitar Hero historian Blake Hester, make clear that arcade music games were built from the ground up to capture a certain feeling. From the beginning, RedOctane said, “We knew that everybody wants to be a rockstar.” Harmonix, too, was founded on “creating technology that lets anybody feel like a musician.”
As everyone knows, the best way to play Guitar Hero is by running “Free Bird” at 300% speed. Is the song even music at that point?
These games were never educational. “Feeling like” a musician isn’t the same as becoming a musician, in the same way that feeling like an anime military general in Fire Emblem doesn’t qualify players to actually conduct anime wars. Guitar Hero simulated musicianship by letting anybody go through the motions of holding and strumming a guitar in a way that felt more structured, and therefore more genuine, than simply playing air guitar. Because RedOctane’s hardware simply mimicked the button presses of existing controllers, it was always possible to play Guitar Hero without a guitar. No one I know ever did. The guitar was the game.
Harmonix’s newest venture, Fortnite Festival, has everything a rhythm game needs: polish, great net code and a bottomless well of songs. Still, when I play it, I run my fingers across the letter keys with the same slackjawed intensity of a MOBA. I don’t feel like a rockstar. I don’t jump or swing my guitar, like the contestants of early Guitar Hero tournaments, and no crowds cheer.
As far as controllers go, recreations like the PDP Riffmaster are being made, and selling out just as quickly. But the culture those controllers created is harder to recapture. Recently, my local sandwich shop hosted a Rock Band night, complete with an original RedOctane guitar. It was messy, to say the least. The keys stuck, and I missed almost every orange note. But I played a couple songs for my friends, who were as enraptured by the music as they were impressed by my playing—and all I did was use the controller handed to me.
“Go to the About menu, hold down the center button for about three seconds, and you’ll get a Breakout (Pong) game to play while you listen. Neat.”
— Reviewer Nick Triano, describing how to access Breakout, an easter egg on the original iPod. Later circularized into Vortex on fifth generation units, it’s both the first click wheel game and the first experiment in gaming as an accompaniment to music.
The iPod’s click wheel invented the modern mobile game
Allow me to make a somewhat arbitrary distinction: handheld gaming existed in 2001, at the time of the original iPod’s release. The Game Boy was in its third generation, and systems like the Nokia N-Gage experimented with merging phone and game functionalities. But mobile gaming didn’t quite exist before the iPod.
The challenge for handhelds is to compress whole-souled games into a lightweight package. The challenge of mobile gaming is simply to create lightweight games. And while 2005 saw the international release of Pokémon Emerald, a 30-hour handheld RPG from an international franchise, the first third-party iPod game (released that same year) was Coolgorilla’s free-to-play Rock & Pop Quiz. The following year saw click wheel versions of Sudoku, Solitaire and Pac-Man—the kinds of games you might play on the toilet.
Eventually, iPod games were no longer hidden.
Granted, the platform was still very young. But as iPod gaming came into its own, it tended to favor arcade-style games with simple mechanics and few persistent elements. (Emphasis on “tended.” You Song Summoner diehards out there are welcome to fight me on this assessment.)
Of course, Apple didn’t invent sudoku, nor did it invent the concept of playing games on phones, PDAs, calculators, and other handheld devices. Nokia was already famous for including Snake on its phones. The iPod wasn’t even the first device with a click wheel, which was lifted from navigation wheels in other products. Apple’s innovation was its ability to package these advancements into one device, combined with the company’s knack for staying cool.
Compare the iPod to the BlackBerry, which went from ubiquitous to obsolete as Apple cornered the mobile market. It revolutionized business by putting an office in your pocket, and as such it appealed especially to businesspeople. The iPod also made life more portable—but instead of an office, it compressed the function of a record store, a jukebox, and eventually an arcade. It appealed to young people, the primary drivers of coolness. What the BlackBerry did for work, the iPod did for culture.
At the same time, the click wheel solved “BlackBerry thumb” by doing away with full keyboards and tiny buttons. The click wheel didn’t require a ton of attention and had a satisfying sound. It was easy to navigate menus, and with the App Store, appealed to the early internet’s growing appetite for media that could be seamlessly downloaded and then tossed away in all of fifteen minutes. Mobile games were, and essentially remain, fidget toys.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwyiRuS71Ug
Dicey Dungeons, a 2019 roguelike dice game from Distractionware, never held my attention when I bought it on PC. Despite its sleek packaging, I found the luck-based mechanics frustrating as I tried to formulate strategies for the game’s higher difficulties. But after picking it up on Apple Arcade, everything clicked. Instead of optimizing each run, I took every opportunity to chuck dice and pop Dicey’s eye-candy aesthetics. Even at a stoplight, once.
The success of iPod games was the success of the iPod: the ability to quickly shuffle through media, to pick something up and put it down just as quickly, to fit into the existing cracks of daily life. iPod games were mobile because the iPod was mobile. Even as touch screens reinstated the maximalist design of early mobile devices—now in the form of buttons and microtransactions on every interactable inch of screen space—the best mobile games still echo the simplicity of the click wheel.
Emulators can’t quite capture the weirdness of the Wiimote
Unlike the plastic guitar and click wheel—around which games formed almost incidentally—the Wiimote came as a directive from Nintendo. Wanted to make a game for one of history’s best-selling game consoles? You had to contend with its unwieldy motion controls. This resulted in a huge variety of approaches, from first-party releases that used the Wii’s technology to its fullest, to games that basically managed to ignore it.
The addition of the Wii Motion Plus in 2009 multiplied the Wiimote’s utility by allowing for far more precise inputs. Combine that with any number of hardware releases added during the console’s seven-year lifespan, from the weight-sensing Balance Board to the uDraw GameTablet, and you’ve got a nearly infinite design space.
That makes game preservation complicated, according to folks at Dolphin Emulator. By simulating a virtual Wiimote in space, gestures like “shake” and “swing” can be mapped to a single button press. From there, proper emulation requires layers and layers of additional considerations. An archery sequence might work best on two DualShocks, while a particular minigame might require players to switch to a secondary control profile.
One thing they will not be able to emulate: The perverse joy of seeing someone slam a Wiimote into a TV set.
As one developer explained, “The perfect control scheme for Super Mario Galaxy” (which works well on controller) “won't work on Super Paper Mario” (which uses stock Wiimote motion controls to their fullest), “and neither of those would be what you'd want for Skyward Sword” (a Wii Motion Plus game with precise swordplay). These technical challenges can turn away casual players who just want an easy way to relive their favorite games.
It’s one thing to save a game’s art, music, dialogue and even cinematics behind a pane of glass. But games are not a visual medium: the point of games is to play them. Saving games in a playable form—like Dim Bulb Games’ interactive museum of lockpicking minigames, and even the salvaged click wheel games on the Internet Archive—is the biggest challenge for preserving games. And since games are indelibly tied to the hardware on which they were originally designed, each loss of hardware represents a loss of the games it hosted. Whether hacking a game onto modern controllers truly preserves them is a question of philosophy, but emulation allows most games to be, in the words of one Dolphin dev, “at least playable from beginning to end … But, some of those experiences will be absolutely awful.”
Others—games with bespoke hardware, like Tony Hawk Ride’s plastic skateboard—remain completely unplayable without the proper hardware… for now.
Modders and devs continue to develop better and more intuitive solutions for even the most obscure control schemes. While Nintendo puts previous generations’ hardware (and software) to rest, the emulation community is wide awake. It may take a while before your favorite Wii game is preserved in an easily playable, technically simple package, but rest assured: it will be preserved.
PewPewPewPewPewPewPewPewPew was a co-op side-scrolling shooter controlled by two microphones, held by two players.
One player fired a laser gun by shouting “pew pew pew,” while the other controlled the character’s movement by making jetpack noises.
Meanwhile, the micro-handheld Playdate uses the same D-pad and two buttons as the original NES, with the exception of a mechanical crank on its side. The delight of this console is seeing how developers like Lucas Pope, Bennett Foddy and Zach Gage have all designed around this one odd control feature.
Life for developers, emulators, and players would be a lot easier if we could all just decide on a single control scheme. But doing that would rob video games of the novelty that defines the medium. When players get sick of hitting the same buttons again and again, the stage is set for a weird controller to take the world by storm.
Unlike other art forms, games are tactile. Even when we aren’t literally standing in front of our Kinects, we’re moving our bodies through space to move avatars in digital space. Gameplay is acrobatic, as our hands and minds bend to the contours of the game we’re playing.
That’s a big challenge for any game to rise up to, but it helps to nail down a game’s design into something solid—as philosopher Graeme Kirkpatrick put it, “an instantiation of the game program in the hand.” In other words, the shape of a game is the shape of its controller.
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Thanks again to Dayten Rose for such a killer piece—and he wanted to offer a quick thanks to the folks on the Dolphin team, including JMC4789, Reverie, and iwubcode, along with everyone else who chipped in as he was trying to make sense of the Wiimote.
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