作者彙整: Ben Reeves

Druids are one with nature – and that nature is deadly. Over the course of a single combat encounter, the… 閱讀全文 →

In the ‘80s, Nintendo saved the video game industry with the release of the NES. That console ushered in a renewed enthusiasm for interactive entertainment and established a series of brands, such as Mario, Zelda, and Metroid, which remain relevant today. Over the course of only a few years, Nintendo’s name became virtually synonymous with video games, and its characters grew so popular that they worked their way into breakfast cereals, lunch boxes, and Saturday morning cartoons.

However, by the early ‘90s, Nintendo’s chokehold on the industry had started to slip. More powerful 16-bit consoles like the Sega Genesis and the TurboGrafx-16 had begun to challenge Nintendo’s dominance. To stay relevant, Nintendo needed to update its hardware.

A skunkworks team inside Nintendo’s research and development department began crafting a successor to the NES. The system would be surprisingly underpowered, but it would contain several modern gaming concepts and ultimately help cement Nintendo’s place in the industry. That console was the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and many consider it to be one of Nintendo’s crowning achievements.

The Japanese design for the SNES (called the Super Famicom) was much boxier. Nintendo of America felt it looked too much like a toy and redesigned the system for U.S. release

Suping Up The NES

Masayuki Uemura was an engineer working for the Sharp Corporation when Nintendo approached him about making video game consoles. At Sharp, Uemura had built photosensitive cell technology, and Nintendo wanted to use this technology to build a light gun that could interact with televisions. Not only did Uemura help build Nintendo’s light gun, but he went on to design the original NES console that it was bundled with. Over the years, Uemura produced games like Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., and Ice Climber before finally moving on to work on Nintendo’s next big console. However, designing the SNES would prove to be more complicated than Nintendo’s ­original ­console.

Uemura centered the SNES architecture on a custom-built 3.58-MHz CPU. Even for the day, this wasn’t incredibly impressive. Sega’s Genesis console, which released more than two years prior to the SNES, housed a faster processor. However, Uemura designed the SNES’s chipset for maximum visual and audio performance, which helped disguise its lack of horsepower. For example, while the Sega Genesis could only display 512 different colors on a television screen, the SNES had a color palette of over 32,000 colors and could display more than 128 ­sprites ­simultaneously.

The Super Nintendo’s lack of power likely came from Nintendo’s original desire to allow the SNES to be backward compatible with NES cartridges. The NES was the most popular video game console on the market, and it had amassed an impressive library of titles, so allowing the SNES to run all of the NES’s software would have given Nintendo’s new console an impressive head start. Unfortunately, this feature was axed as the system progressed ­toward ­launch.

Fortunately, the SNES had a few unique graphical effects up its sleeve, which made it worth the upgrade. Nintendo designed the SNES to allow for seven different graphical display modes, but only one of these modes reach widespread acclaim. Before the system’s release, Nintendo’s marketing department began trumpeting the graphical feats of Mode 7, a display setting that allowed developers to rotate and scale background layers in their games. This faux 3D effect – seen in games like Super Mario Kart, Pilotwings, and Super Castlevania – became one of the SNES’ distinguishing features and helped set the console apart from its competitors.

Mode 7 – seen in games like Super Mario Kart, Pilotwings, and Super Castlevania – became one of the SNES’ distinguishing features and helped set the console apart from its competitors.”

After establishing the SNES’s internal guts, Nintendo began to think about how its new system should look and feel. Early in the concept phase, Uemura thought that the SNES might function a bit more like a personal computer. In Japan, the NES was called the Famicom, a portmanteau of family and computer. Uemura felt that he might expand on this family computer concept by giving the system a keyboard and card reader, but these input devices eventually fell away in favor of a more traditional video game controller. However, Nintendo’s new controller received a drastic remodel, and the studio design a more ergonomic controller that players could hold comfortably ­for ­hours.

Further inspiration for the SNES controller came from an unlikely source. Fighting games were incredibly popular in arcades at the time, and Nintendo felt that it needed six button inputs on its controller to accommodate console ports for games like Street Fighter II. During focus testing, however, Nintendo discovered that players were easily confused by six face buttons. Four face buttons, tilted into a diamond shape, were much easier for thumbs to navigate, so Nintendo shifted two of its face buttons to the controller’s shoulders. The SNES featured several major innovations, but this controller design, which has been the basis for nearly every controller since, may have been the SNES’ biggest contribution to ­the ­industry.

Super Mario World was one of the first games released for the SNES, but it is still heralded as one of the best. Speed runners have been able to finish the game in less than ten minutes

Coming To America

In Japan, the SNES (called the Super Famicom) had a plain, square design and rounded edges. However, before shipping the console overseas, Nintendo of America believed it need to redesign the case for the western market. Nintendo of American passed the project to an in-house designer named Lance Barr, who felt that the Japanese design was too toy-like.

“The Super Famicom was maybe okay for the market in Japan,” Barr told Nintendojo back in 2007. “For the U.S., I felt that it was too soft and had no edge. We were always looking at future modular components (even the NES had a connector on the bottom), so you had to design with the idea of stacking on top of other components. I thought the Super Famicom didn’t look good when stacked and even by itself, had a kind of ‘bag of ­bread’ ­look.”

The American redesign was also a reaction to feedback on Nintendo’s previous console. The original NES was a relatively simple gray box, and Nintendo of America had received several complaints from NES owner who had placed drinks or bowls of cereal on top of their consoles only to spill liquid into the vent at the top of the unit. To prevent SNES owners from the same fate, Barr made sure that the U.S. version of the SNES had an uneven surface. Barr also gave the console a more muted color scheme, and changed the controller’s X and Y buttons so they had a concave curvature, which offered a better haptic distinction between all four ­face ­buttons.

Metroid never sold very well in Japan. Super Metroid had a troubled development and was almost cancelled at several points during development. Thankfully, it wasn’t

Now You’re Playing With Super Power

When Nintendo released its original NES, the video game market was in the middle of a large-scale recession, and Nintendo had to trick retailers into putting its new console on their shelves by marketing it as a toy. Five years later, those roles had reversed, and retailers were begging Nintendo for larger shipments of the ­Super ­NES.

More than 1.5 million fans rushed out to pre-order the system before it launched, and Nintendo’s initial shipments sold out in about two hours. In Japan, the Super Nintendo was such a hot commodity that the consoles were reportedly shipped to stores secretly and under the cover of night, for fear that the Yakuza might rob retailers. The SNES’s launch day became an international media circus as thousands of people lined up in front of electronics stores hoping to get their hands on ­a ­console.

“Many parents called in sick to work so that they could join the lines of waiting shoppers,” wrote Steven L. Kent in his book The Ultimate History of Video Games. “All of Tokyo was slowed down by the crowds, and a frenzy began when news spread that Nintendo had shipped only 300,000 consoles. The pushing and shoving were so chaotic that the Japanese government later asked Nintendo and other video game companies to restrict future hardware releases ­to ­weekends.”

All of Tokyo was slowed down by the crowds, and a frenzy began when news spread that Nintendo had shipped only 300,000 consoles.”

The fervor over Nintendo’s new console is even more surprising in light of the fact that the console only had two launch titles in Japan: F-Zero and Super Mario World. For the U.S. release, the following year, Nintendo added the amateur flight simulator Pilotwings to that lineup. Three games might seem paltry today, but Shigeru Miyamoto and his team of designers were only given 15 months to design and code the entire launch library from the time they saw the first ­machine ­designs.

Over the years the Super NES amassed a library far more impressive than any of the system’s technical specifications (see sidebar for our favorites). Nintendo continued to support its console with some of its most beloved products, such as The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, and Super Mario Kart. Meanwhile the world’s most prolific development studios, such as Square, Capcom, and Konami, rushed to release their titles on Nintendo’s new hardware. Even near the end of its lifespan, the Super Nintendo was turning out graphical powerhouses like Donkey Kong Country, Star Fox, and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, which seemed to push the limits of the hardware to ­new ­heights.

The Super Nintendo proved that Nintendo wasn’t a one-hit wonder, and it cemented the company’s place in the video game industry. Much of the nostalgia surrounding Nintendo’s brands was built up during the SNES’s lifespan as its meager launch lineup grew into a library containing some of the most beloved games of all time. The Super NES was never the most powerful system on the market, but Nintendo understood that developers didn’t need to possess the most powerful hardware to be a market leader. The Super Nintendo helped shaped the industry like few consoles have before or since, and it created a foundation for our modern ­gaming ­landscape.

This article originally appeared in the November 2017 issue of Game Informer.

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Mobile games were supposed to be an indie developer nirvana. When the iPhone debuted in 2007, Apple pitched consumers on the promise of an endless stream of tiny creative games and other productivity applications. Indie developers immediately recognized the market’s potential: A small team of developers could release their experimental projects to millions of users at a low price and reap large rewards. Early mobile hits like Words with Friends, Fruit Ninja, and Temple Run seemed to confirm this notion, and those titles helped their developers amass significant nest eggs.

Then the gold rush happened, and the mobile market metastasized into something ugly. App stores overflowed with ad-driven, free-to-play games that catered to the lowest common denominator. Mobile game development became financially unsustainable for many. In the midst of this mobile “indiepocalypse,” two friends found success in an unlikely place. Their secret: Make a thousand bad games.

Ziba Scott and Alex Schwartz at a GDC party in 2013, around the time they came up with the idea for Slots

THE BROKEN DREAMS OF GAME DEVELOPERS

In 2013, Alex Schwartz and Ziba Scott joined a shared workspace co-op in Boston while independently pursuing careers in game development. Both designers had shifted to the mobile space with the dream of making their big break in the industry. After their first meeting, they quickly bonded over the struggle to realize that dream.

Schwartz had attended college for game design before landing a job at Seven45 Studios working on a failed Rock Band clone called Power Gig: Rise of the SixString. After its release, Schwartz set off on his own and formed Owlchemy Labs, the indie studio that released the racing smuggler game Snuggle Truck as well as the early VR standout Job Simulator.

Scott, on the other hand, worked for seven years as a Linux consultant and web developer when he decided that making games was more fulfilling. After earning a master’s degree in serious game design from Michigan State University, Scott secured a publishing deal with Adult Swim Games for his puzzle game Girls like Robots. By the time Schwartz and Scott met, they had both signed contracts with big publishers and released creative indie titles to favorable reviews. And yet, both designers still struggled to make ends meet.

“We always felt like if we could do something that was creatively fulfilling, and we made enough money on game number one to fund game number two, then that was top-tier success,” Schwartz says. “We played the multiplatform hustle, where if you make something in Unity you can put it anywhere, and it wasn’t working. The dream wasn’t ‘Oh man, I hope we can be kings of mobile.’ We were just chasing platforms, and we were watching the concept that people would spend three dollars on a premium mobile game nosedive super hard.”

We played the multiplatform hustle, where if you make something in Unity you can put it anywhere, and it wasn’t working…”

“It was 2013 when it became clear that that premium mobile market was dying,” Scott adds. “It was becoming a strange beast. Even now, you can’t follow the successes from two years ago. You can’t follow those rules because the industry is constantly changing. That was something we were learning. I think both of us felt like we were a year or two too late to release a three-dollar game or even a five-dollar game on iOS that would even make its money back.”

Half a decade after the release of the iPhone, the mobile market was awash with clones, reskins, and other low-effort shovelware. In some cases, the clones were actually making more money than the originals, which famously happened to number-based puzzle game Threes in 2014. Schwartz and Scott felt that it was nearly impossible for the average game developer to get noticed without a million-dollar marketing budget. As young indie developers struggling to pay the rent, Schwartz and Scott were growing disillusioned.

Then they had a crazy idea. If the system had stopped working for them, maybe they could just work the system.

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QUANTITY OVER QUALITY

Every January, MIT helps host the Global Game Jam, the world’s largest game jam, which takes place at multiple locations around the world. While teams of programmers and artists beat their heads trying to come up with one “perfect idea,” Schwartz and Scott giggled in a corner and asked themselves, “How can we do worse?”

The two developers had often joked about how they could reskin and clone their own games and flood the mobile marketplace. Now they were ready to actually do it. But first, they needed to make a game that was incredibly simple and easy to clone. Schwartz and Scott never intended to spend a lot of time or effort on a project like this. Cutting corners was not only encouraged, it was a mantra. Ultimately, the designers decided that they didn’t even need to make the game themselves – they could just download and repackage some prebuilt program off the Unity Asset Store. Reskinning and cloning a game they hadn’t even made felt like one gigantic corner to cut. It was perfect. Schwartz and Scott hopped online and bought a slot-machine game for $14.99. The duo didn’t know it yet, but they would eventually see a massive return on that investment.

“Slot-machine games seemed like the perfect fit, because they have such a low barrier to entry,” Scott says. “There aren’t many games simpler than pressing a button that says good or bad. You can hardly abstract the concept of a game any further -than -that.”
“Slot-machines are the one world where there is already an entire industry built around reskins, and no one gives a s—,” Schwartz adds. “Walking through Vegas, you see hundreds of different slot-machines. You walk past Cleopatra slots and then Wheel of Fortune slots, there are even Fruit Ninja slots. It’s such a weird world that we didn’t understand, but we knew that humans seem drawn to them in some way.”

Once Schwartz and Scott had a working game, they set to work making copies. They added new background images, in-game “about” descriptions, and a custom theme song. Their slot games were of admittedly low quality, but they had taken less than an afternoon to cobble together. Future clones would take only a fraction of that time.

Scott wrote a Unity editor script that automatically grabbed images off the web, swiped an about blurb from Wikipedia, and then used a text-to-speech program to generate new lyrics to their electronic theme song. At this point, all Schwartz and Scott had to do was type a theme into their Unity editor and the program would spit out a new slot-machine. Before long, they had dozens of slot games with titles as absurd as Lobster Slots, Richard III Slots, and Harlem Shake Slots.

The designers then took the hundred-plus games they had made and published them onto the Google Play store. They marveled at the fact that a few people actually downloaded them and laughed over the smattering of bad reviews. At this point, Schwartz and Scott’s silly experiment seemed like a success. They didn’t know what it proved, but releasing a glut of low-quality games onto Google’s marketplace felt like a snarky middle finger to the industry and its rising tide of low-quality content that was drowning out premium mobile products dedicated developers had poured their blood, sweat, and tears into. Their curiosity satisfied, Schwartz and Scott walked away and forgot about their little experiment.

Over the next several months, while quietly unobserved, their games continued to accrue downloads.

DOUBLING DOWN

After the Christmas break of 2013, Schwartz and Scott returned to check up on their slot-machine experiment. They were startled by their discovery. All of Schwartz and Scott’s games were free to download, but like most free games, these slot games featured integrated advertising. It was almost a joke. One of the most annoying aspects of the mobile market were the “gacha” free-to-play games that roped players into watching one ad after another for another spin at the wheel. Schwartz and Scott were trying to mock those types of games; they hardly expected to make money on the ads in their own crappy games.

“A lot of times app stores have a bump over the holidays and we wondered what happened,” Schwartz says. “We saw that our downloads had gone way up, but then we checked our ad network backend and saw that in January and throughout the holidays we were making over $200 a day.”

“It’s hard not to look at a few hundred bucks a day that took no work and not draw a line from $200 to millions twinkling in our eyes somewhere,” Scott says.

Schwartz and Scott didn’t need any more encouragement to fire up their automated workshop again. But this time, they were ready to take things to the next level, so they incorporated under the name Signal to Noise. The pair even came up with a cutesy tagline, “We are the noise.”

Making slot games was a snap, but there were a few speed bumps to Schwartz and Scott’s automated system. It took several minutes to fill out all the forms to submit a game for publishing on Google’s App store, and the pair still had to sit down and brainstorm new themes for future slot games. Sure, typing in a new theme took seconds, but they felt that even this process could be automated.

To solve the first problem of submitting games for publishing, Scott used a web-automation tool that played back browser-based interactions. This allowed him to record the inputs for filling out the developer agreements needed to submit a game to Google’s Play Store. To solve the second problem of generating ideas, Schwartz and Scott had Google Trends feed their system relevant news and celebrity gossip, which resulted in games likes Deer Antler Spray Slots and John Boehner Slots. Next, they downloaded massive lists of words and coded a formula that took random adjectives and paired them with random nouns. This program spit out a stream of nonsensical slot-machine ideas like Stupid Pumpkin Slots, Tremendous Face Pain Slots, and Inexperienced Great Horned Owl Slots. “We had reduced the gap between conceiving a game to publishing it to market to typing a single word and hitting enter,” Scott says.

After a few months of tinkering, Schwartz and Scott had developed an automated system that could be accessed via Wi-Fi from any country in the world. They had visions of sipping drinks on the beach while periodically checking in on their slot-machine empire. The duo nicknamed their system The Goose, as in the fabled bird that laid golden eggs. Before long, The Goose was churning out and publishing games at an insane clip. In fact, Schwartz and Scott were amassing more games than they could ever publish; Google actually restricts developers from publishing more than 15 games a day. But even with this artificial restriction, after its first year Signal to Noise had already submitted nearly 750 games to the Google Play Store. Most games only got a few hundred to a thousand downloads, but even the least successful slot-machines contributed to Signal to Noises’ overall downloads, and ultimately ad impressions.

We had reduced the gap between conceiving a game to publishing it to market to typing a single word and hitting enter,” Scott says.

“One month, we looked at the drip income of Owlchemy’s entire portfolio,” Schwartz says. “I remember that Slots, this low-effort garbage pile, was somehow bringing in more money than the past four years of my creative endeavors. That was a real laugh-while-crying kinda moment. I went, ‘What the f— are we doing with our lives if this joke has started to supersede true effort?’ … I almost didn’t want it to make money, because it proved that it’s more effort to make games the right way. There was a feeling of it shouldn’t be this easy, because it proves that, as a society, people are not as discerning with quality as we had hoped.”

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WALKING AWAY FROM A WINNING HAND

On a good month, Schwartz and Scott wouldn’t even interact with The Goose and they could watch the ad revenue roll in. But eventually, The Goose always needed attention. Schwartz and Scott had built a fragile scaffolding with several points of failure. Their entire automated system relied on over a dozen different online services, from Google to Wikipedia to small web-based freeware. When Google Images caused problems for their automated system, they had to switch over to Bing’s image search. When Google Play required game submissions to include high-res images, they had to update their photo capture system. When Unity changed its privacy policy, a country altered its laws on gambling apps, or a checkbox on Google’s publishing forms shifted even 10 pixels to the left, The Goose would grind to a halt and the system had to be updated. Fixing these problems was rarely complicated, but The Goose needed the-occasional greasing.

The bigger issue was that Signal to Noise had started as a joke, but it had grown into something larger – something unfulfilling. “I was constantly torn between pride and amusement and a sense that I should be doing something else,” Scott says.
“There was a joke here, where if the mobile market was more sustainable for premium content, then we wouldn’t have had to lower ourselves to following through on this joke idea,” Schwartz adds.

When Google started to implement systems that made it difficult for cloners like Signal to Noise, Schwartz and Scott ultimately decided to walk away from their project. On March 19, 2017, after more than four years, 1,500 slot-machine games, and over 1.6 million downloads, Signal to Noise published its last game: 3D Astronomer Slots – Free.

To be clear, Schwartz and Scott didn’t shut down their automated system, they just stopped updating it and let The Goose die a slow death. They left the keys in the car and let it slowly roll into a ditch. Surprisingly, The Goose lived far longer than either Schwartz or Scott had expected. Today, Signal to Noise’s entire portfolio of games has been suspended by Google for failure to keep up with the latest updates. Even so, as of this printing, Schwartz and Scott are still scraping in a small amount of ad revenue from users who occasionally fire up the apps still lingering on their phones.

BIG PAYOUT

Fortunately, these days, Schwartz and Scott don’t have to play the slot game to make money, and both developers have found some of the indie development success they yearned for. In 2016, Scott used Fig to successfully crowdfund Make Sail, a physics-based construction adventure, and the game is currently in early access. Meanwhile, in 2017, Schwartz’s company Owlchemy Labs was purchased by Google, and Schwartz has spun off once again to form another, currently unnamed, indie game company.

Both Schwartz and Scott say Google has made it more difficult for developers to flood the market with the types of automated clones that they released, but that doesn’t mean the mobile market has become more friendly to developers, or users for that matter. App stores are still brimming with clones and ad-driven shovelware that make it hard for premium titles to be discovered. This problem isn’t localized to the mobile space, either. As online stores like Steam continue to open up and make it easier for anyone with a computer to publish software to the platform, developers will continue to find ways to exploit those systems.

“It’s interesting how this experiment tied into my ideas on curation,” Schwartz says. “This is the logical outcome to a completely open, uncurated platform. Quality goes down, people think of various schemes to flood the market, and consumers are left with a low-quality experience overall. I feel very passionately that consumers should have a curated experience. So this was us jumping over the tiniest of tiny fences to go muck around in an open ecosystem to show people how bad things are, and how bad they can be.”

If Schwartz is to be believed, then maybe the problem isn’t with the kinds of developers who churn out endless clones and other low quality software. And the problem might not be the consumers who find themselves lost in a sea of likeminded apps that constantly demand their eyeballs. The problem is likely the systems platform holders have built that allow for this level of exploitation. Some developers are trying to stem this tide. Valve has taken a player-driven approach to discoverability, allowing user reviews and trends to drive many of Steam’s algorithms, but as more new games flood the market, developers continue to complain about getting lost in the sea. Online stores are full of garbage, but who’s cleaning up the trash?

This was us jumping over the tiniest of tiny fences to go muck around in an open ecosystem to show people how bad things are…”

If anything, experiments like Signal to Noise expose the inefficacies of our current online markets, and offer a peek into one potential future where automation spirals out of control.

Today, the internet is crawling with automated bots that do everything from sending emails to leaving consumer reviews to responding to Twitter comments. It’s easy to get lost in the cacophony. Tomorrow, bots are already learning how to make, publish, and even promote games. What happens next is still up to us.

This article originally appeared in the June 2019 issue of Game Informer.

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