Classic Arcade Game Traits

• Single Screen Play: In a classic arcade game, the bulk of the gameplay takes place on a single screen, with players maneuvering their game-world surrogate around that screen, sometimes only in a portion of that screen. This was done, no doubt, in part because of technological limitations, but it also has very important artistic ramifications on the game s design. Players, at any time, are able to see the entire game-world, and can make their decisions with a full knowledge of the state of that game-world. Obviously, empowering players with that kind of information seriously impacts the gameplay. Many of the games in the classic arcade game form would include more than one screen s worth of gameplay by switching play-fields or modifying existing ones to create additional levels. Examples of this include Joust , Pac-Man, and Mario Bros . Though these games may have included more than a single screen in the entire game, at any one time the game-world still consisted of just that one screen.

• Infinite Play: Players can play the game forever. There is no ending to the game, and hence no winning it either. This was done in part to allow players to challenge themselves , to see how long they could play on a single quarter. Players can never say, I beat Asteroids , and hence players are always able to keep playing, to keep putting in quarters . At the same time, having an unwinnable game makes every game a defeat for players. Every game ends with the player s death, and hence is a kind of tragedy. Having an unwinnable game also necessitates making a game that continuously becomes more challenging, hence a game design with a continuous, infinite ramping up of difficulty. With the advent of the home market, game publishers no longer wanted players to play a single game forever. Instead they want players to finish the games they have and buy more. This is one reason why it is now rare to see a game with infinite play.

• Multiple Lives: Typically, classic arcade games allow players a finite number of tries , or a number of lives, before their game is over. Perhaps derived from pinball games, which for decades had provided players with three or five balls, multiple lives allowed novice players a chance to learn the game s mechanics before the game was over. Given adequate chances to try to figure out how the game works, players are more likely to want to play again if they improved from one life to the next . The ability to earn extra lives provides another reward incentive for players and also sets up a game where dying once is not necessarily the end of the game, which in turn encourages players to take risks they might not otherwise .

• Scoring/High Scores: Almost all classic arcade games included a scoring feature through which players would accumulate points for accomplishing different objectives in the game. For example, in Centipede , players get 1 point for destroying a mushroom, 10 points for a centipede segment, 100 points for a centipede head, and 1000 points for a scorpion . Another classic arcade game component with origins in the world of pinball, the score allows players to ascertain how well they did at the game, since winning the game is impossible . The high-score table was introduced in order to allow players to enter their initials next to their score, which would then be ranked in a table of scores so players could have a point of comparison to see just how good they really were. The game would remember the table as long as it stayed plugged in, with some games, such as Centipede , even remembering the high-score list or some portion of it once unplugged. The high-score table enabled the classic arcade games to exploit one of the key motivations for playing games ” bragging rights. Players could point out their name in the high-score table to their friends as a way of proving their mettle. Friends could compete with each other (almost all of the games included two-player modes, where players switch off playing) to see who could get the higher score.

• Easy-to-Learn, Simple Gameplay: Classic arcade games were easy for players to learn, impossible (or at least very difficult) to master. Players could walk up to a game of Centipede , plunk in their quarter, and by their third life have a good idea of how the game functioned and how they might play better. Why players died was always completely apparent to them. There were typically no special moves involving large combinations of buttons that players had to learn through trial and error. There were few games with tricky concepts such as health or shields or power-ups. Again, commercial considerations were probably a factor in making these games simple to learn. At the time of their initial introduction, there was no established market of computer game players and there were few arcades. The games wound up in pizza parlors and bars, where any regular person might walk up to one and try it out. These novice players might be scared away if the game were too complex or baffling. Of course, simple does not always mean limited or bad gameplay; it can also mean elegant and refined.

• No Story: Classic arcade games almost universally eschewed the notion of trying to tell a story of any sort , just as many modern arcade games continue to do. The games always had a setting players could easily recognize and relate to, many of them revolving around science fiction themes, though others dabbled in war, fantasy, and sports, among others. Many, such as Pac-Man and Q*Bert, created their own, unique settings, keeping up with the rampant creativity found in their gameplay. The classic arcade game designers did not feel required to flesh out their game- worlds , to concoct explanations for why players were shooting at a given target or eating a certain type of dot, and the games did not suffer for it.

  
  Even though the action in Sinistar did not take place only on one screen, it is still considered to be an example of the classic arcade game form.

Of course, some games broke some of the above rules of the form, yet they can still be considered classic arcade games. For example, Sinistar and Defender both included scrolling game-worlds for players to travel through, with players unable to see all aspects of the game-world at any one time. Indeed, on first inspection, Battlezone seems entirely the odd man out among early classic arcade games. Yet, if one looks at the traits above, one will discover that it featured infinite play, multiple lives, scoring, was easy to learn, and had almost no story. All three of these games included mechanics which, by and large, were adherent to the classic arcade game form. Thus we can still group them with games like Space Invaders and Asteroids , which follow all the rules laid out above.

Centipede , one of the defining games of the form, follows all of the characteristics of the classic arcade game listed above. Though not a very complex game by today s standards, the marvel of Centipede is how all of the different gameplay elements work together to create a uniquely challenging game. It is easy enough to make a game ramp up in difficulty by adding more and more enemies, but Centipede naturally increases the challenge by the interplay of its few elements so that the game organically becomes more difficult over time. Nothing in Centipede is out of place, nothing is inconsistent, nothing is unbalanced. To analyze Centipede is to attempt to understand how to design the perfect game.