Control Freaks

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

(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.

(Denise Jans/Unsplash)

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.