Blinded by Your Own Equipment

I was once asked to help save a floundering project. This game was in serious trouble: It was behind schedule, over budget, and not fun. I played the early alpha version and was appalled; it was an agony to play, and the reason was obvious: It was too damned slow. This was in the early days of single-speed CD-ROM drives, and the designers were eager to take advantage of the vast opportunities made available by this new technology, so they stuffed the game chock full of glorious graphics at every opportunity. Since RAM in those days was rather paltry, they didn't buffer anything; all the graphics had to be loaded off the CD every time they were displayed. The result was a triumph of tedium; every time you clicked the mouse or pressed a key, the game would run off to the CD for five seconds before redrawing the screen. After two hours of this torture, I shut the damn thing off in fury.

LESSON 95

Your game must be fun on typical machines, not top-of-the-line machines.

When I arrived at the studio, I did not immediately confront the developers with this blunder; I first wanted to feel them out. It took less than five minutes to discern the problem. Their development systems placed the CD-ROM images on hard drives, permitting lightning-fast response times. They had no inkling of just how much the slow response times ruined the game; on their machines, it flowed along nicely. When I tried to explain the problem to them, they were dismissive; it couldn't be that bad, they were sure. I had to insist that they sit down and play their own game off the CD-ROM before they appreciated the magnitude of the problem.

This tale provides the most egregious example of a common problem. Game developers use the very best equipment, and they often fail to appreciate just how far ahead of the population curve they are. This leads them to produce games demanding the very best equipment, which is confined to the most dedicated aficionados. The result: an ever-more insular and isolated gaming community.