This book right here is one of the best I’ve ever read about videogames. And I’ve read a whole bunch of them. It’s such a tightly-written, enthusiastic, motivating manifesto, it only takes about two chapters before you’re eye-buggingly pumped full of revolutionary energy and optimism about the future of videogames.

Anna “Dys4ia” Anthropy’s simple but excellent point throughout is that games are catering to a horribly narrow group, because they’re being made by young men who like the videogames that are (and have always been) made for men who like videogames. That needs to change. Anna wants game creators to proliferate now, and she’s dragging you along with her: almost literally, because about half the book is a DIY guide/clarion call to getting the reader started building their own games. It’s hypnotisingly hard to resist, as though Paul McKenna had written “I Can Make You Write Videogames”.

Unlike many books that drone on about their simple agenda forever, and many videogame books that tread slowly and predictably along the well-worn paths of familiar industry lore, Anna stomps purposefully along the shortcuts and the desire lines, racing through videogame history while effortlessly sucking you into the idea of the democratization of the medium. It actually makes you excited about playing all the amazing, surreal, groundbreaking, ingenious games that Anna’s dream community of hobbyist game makers hasn’t even invented yet.

Midway through, there’s an almost throwaway but incredibly profound point about how Blockade/Worm/Nibbler has, thanks to endless knock-offs and Nokia saturation, become generically described as “the snake game” wherever it appears — it’s become a kind of “folk videogame”, in the same way that we treat Chess as a generic, ever-present concept rather than the singular idea of long-forgotten inventors. I’ve never read anything that’s given me such a sudden and magical certainty that videogames are, one day, destined to match the cultural importance of traditional art forms.

Oh, and very early on Anna’s careful to namecheck the late, great Fukio “Rainbow Islands” Mitsuji (who amazingly didn’t have a Wikipedia page until yours truly created one). Full marks all round.

My little goodbye for the final issue of the late, great Nintendo Gamer/NGamer/NGC/N64 was shortened a bit for space reasons. Which means my amazing joke about the R-Type robot on issue 7′s cover was lost to the ages. Until now! Here, I give you the uncut version, and get a little bit sad again about the closure of the mag.

And I meant “space lips”, not “space moustache”. Tsk.

—

Cripes, I’d forgotten that the cover logo once featured the robot from R-Type, of all things. That’s the beauty of being the Editor, readers — you can do what you want!

I miss it, you know.

Helping launch NGamer and steering it through its first couple of years was an absolute honour. Scary, too — how was I going to live up to the legacy of Super Play, N64 and NGC? The answer: cheat. I had the best team and the best readers in the world — so I could basically just sit back and watch 100 pages of peerless magazine magic materialize in front of my eyes every month.

What I loved most were the tiny things that took a preposterous amount of work, like Chrissy wearily photographing all 97 Nintendogs costumes or Matthew trawling through blurry Mario Galaxy preview video for a scoop (and only finding a “space moustache”). That was the special stuff, because it made the mag feel as full of secrets, surprises, love and care as a Nintendo game.

So I’m sad as anything to see it all end. But Nintendo Gamer’s spirit lives on, readers — in your hearts and in your souls! And on your bookshelf if you keep your old copies of the mag, natch.

You know, I don’t think I ever did complete the Robot Factory level. But I still loved that game to death. It’s the only GameCube game I’ve kept to this day. That dinky little GameCube disc looks really silly slotted next to all the proper-sized games and films in my DVD wallet.

I was thrilled to be able to speak to the legendary David Doak and Stephen Ellis for this feature. And I have to apologise to the lovely Karl Hilton, who contacted me after reading the feature and made me wish I’d had the foresight to ask him for an interview too. Once I get some time, I’ll upload the complete interviews.

Photo by Spyderella

I’ve got a real soft spot for Gauntlet. The 4-player coin-op seemed monstrously big to me as a child, and I loved the resounding bass of the music and the “Wizard is about to die” speech. I was so desperate to own US Gold’s ZX Spectrum home conversion, I swapped my precious copy of Pete Cooke’s Academy, which I’d won in a C&VG competition.

So I was fascinated by Ed Logg’s talk at GDC a few days ago about the making of the game. I’ve embedded it below. And in the hope that his insights don’t disappear into obscurity, I’ve transcribed the early game concept document he showed – with its original name ‘DUNGEONS’, and the original idea for the player to descend into a ‘Hall of Death’ and grab treasures there – and included a few screenshots of his slides showing early artwork. G4TV and IGN wrote up some of the talk details. [Update: the actual slides are up on the GDC site now]

The design document

The original concept document for Gauntlet. Click for big.

Text from above:

COMPANY PRIVATE

‘DUNGEONS’
January 4, 1984

Game Initiation: October 18, 1983
Last Revision:
File: [ziegler, dandy]init.mac
Prepared by: Robin E Ziegler, Ed Logg, Chris Downend

Suggested Project Team:
Team Leader = Chris Downend
Project Leader = Ed Logg
Game Design = Ed Logg / Robin Ziegler
Programmers  = Robin Ziegler / Ed Logg
Engineer = Gary Stempler
Technician = Rich McCoy
Illustrator = ? Debbie Hayes ?

Brief Storyline:

The noble knights and magicians of the realm must rid the Castle Morda-nima of the evil demons and monsters and restore it to its original glory.

1-4 players act and react in a multi-level maze/dungeon/castle. Part action, part real-time adventure game with players cooperating with each other to stay alive. Players must navigate the maze, kill the nasties, eat food, collect treasures, open doors and find their way deeper into the dungeon. Until they reach the Hall of Death. This is the final resting place of lost goodies. They will then grab as much treasure as they want and try to escape back to daylight, thus ending the game. (Or possibly the player could start another trip at this point..)

Brief Character Description:

Player characters will be player selectable. Eight different starting characters will be available for the player to choose from. The characters will all be somewhat different but yet be relatively equal. Some would have good short-range abilities but lack some long-range power or speed of another. They would be dressed and/or color coded to distinguish them as to player ownership. The player-pawns would move around the maze controlled by the player. They will need to find keys, food, treasure and assorted other items while trying to kill opponents.

They would have three offensive capabilities:

1. Long-range: Some missile weapon (arrow, fireballs, rocks… whatever) does damage to opponents (similar to Centipede)
2. Short-range: Sword or other close in weapon does damange to opponents (similar to Joust, UltimaII, Ali Baba…)
3. Smart: Smart-bomb would kill all (with exceptions) opponents within screen area (similar to Defender and Dandy)

Brief Playfield Description

Playfield will consist of walls (brick, rock, steel and other wall materials), doors (single and double) and other castle/dungeon items. These will be laid out to form a large (up to 3×3 screens) maze/level. Levels will be connected via transporter devices. There can/will be many levels (64, 99, 128?). The view will be from 3rd person NQTD. NQTD = Not Quite Top Down.

Getting started:

Players will start by inserting coins for credit and then selecting his/her player-pawn. The selection is done in the player status window. This action can take place during game play and not affect other players. Once the selection has been made, the player-pawn will be transported to a clear area near the center of the screen. This transportation will use the “Star Trek” sparkle effect.

Slide screenshots

Early character artwork. Ed only has black-and-white photocopies of the original colour versions.

Early versions of the Gauntlet characters, with different names. Ed Logg wasn’t sure why the character names changed.

Report from an Asteroids focus group. Ed Logg does not like focus groups.

Text from above:

The focus group findings indicate mixed overall reaction to the ASTEROID game. General confusion was observed in game play, although this will most likely diminish with repeat play. The primary confusion area was relating to the use of the thrust feature.

It is clear that this game was considerably more favorable to the younger age group. This may or may not be indicative of its market potential.

We would highly recommend field testing this game at a Game Center location to observe player reaction and competitive collections prior to final product development and production decision.

Fascinating slide: the data from the ‘field tests’ of various Atari games, showing how much money they made in a test location (in this case, Milpitas Golfland in California) prior to release. Each pair of columns is for a different week (starting at the right: 25 September 1985, 2 October 1985, and so on).

Patents

Ed mentioned that there were 5 patents issued for Gauntlet – his first ever patents. Here’s one of them from Google Patent Search, Patent #4738451.

Reviewing a fantastic game like Beat the Beat is always harder than you’d think. When I was a young, smooth, narrow person working for Arcade magazine in 1999, I got given Super Mario Bros Deluxe on Game Boy Color to review. So all I had to do was create a fitting critique of one of the greatest and most influential games ever made. In 200 words. At a time when I still didn’t really understand semicolons. “They should have sent a poet”, etc etc.

Anyway, Beat the Beat is brilliant.

Here’s an odd little magazine feature of mine I’d forgotten about. It was part of the Making Of… retrospective series I wrote regularly for NGC magazine – but, unusually, it’s about a hardware system rather than a game. It was published in January 2005, about a year after the Nintendo DS was announced and a few months after it hit the shops.

1.2 million sales by December means gamers love the Nintendo DS. But what do the people who make the games think? NGC peeks behind the scenes to find out.

It was January 20th last year when Nintendo finally stopped teasing us about an “unconventional new hardware project”, and formally announced the Nintendo DS. It was quite the big announcement – but not half as eye-opening as watching Americans skipping out of stores with a carrier bag full of finished console, just ten months later.

That’s fast. Almost too fast, in fact, for the people meant to be bringing you twin-screened, stylused-up games. It’s easy to imagine that, long before that January press release, Nintendo were whispering secrets into the trembling ears of developers and freely handing out the kit needed to get started on DS games. But the special shield of secrecy was working overtime on DS – as Ruud van de Moosdijk of DS developers Engine Software recalls.

“We knew something was going on,” he says. “Nintendo of America send everyone a regular mail that keeps us informed when they’re working on something. But concrete information on Nintendo DS? Somehow, the press got it earlier than we did.” Another coder moans that, before January, “we didn’t even know it was a handheld console”.

Of course, not everyone outside Nintendo HQ was kept in the dark. Two or three of Nintendo’s “favoured” friends were probably working on DS back in 2003. It’s easy to guess who from the video of impressed coders – EA, Sega, Square, Konami – that Nintendo showed at May 2004′s E3 expo. But whoever the privileged few were, they must have been let in on the secret early – or those American shoppers would have been staring at empty game shelves. “Based on when we received the kit, there’s no way we would have been able to develop a DS game in time for launch,” says Ruud. “Impossible.”

Ruud was actually one of the lucky ones, bagging a DS dev kit – the raw guts of a DS, used to actually make the games – just after E3 in May. “I understand from my fellow developers that it was quite tough at the time to get one,” he says. It still is: most of the developers we rang in early December were still waiting for theirs. One was jumping up and down because the customs people had locked up his DS for a week-and-a-half; another had no dev kit, but a meaty deduction from his credit card account by Nintendo all the same.

Those that have kicked off work on DS, though, are impressed. They might not like the look of the console (“It’s like that old GBA,” one coder spat), but they’re impressed. “We were quite surprised as we expected it to be less powerful than we originally thought,” says Mark Crane at Pocketeers, an official DS developer from the UK. Playing around with DS, he’s found that 3D games will be much faster and more detailed than he expected. “It’s easier developing for DS than Game Boy Advance,” he says.

Nintendo has a special website for DS developers – and by May last year, hidden behind the site’s password-heavy security obsessiveness, its forums were filling up with comments from happy developers. “Everyone was very active exploring DS,” says Ruud at Engine. “We were all experimenting and having fun with the touch screen – some in ways that are too rude for me to describe. And a lot of people were starting to think again. For the last couple of years, we’ve had too many copycat games. With DS, Nintendo is clearly saying: you have to really think about how to make a good game with this system. The chain of effects it’s having on developers is very positive, I think.”

In fact, when big Reggie told us in May that DS stands for “Developer’s System”, his big roaring mouth wasn’t lying. Not just because the twin screens, fancy stylus and wi-fi magic are setting coders’ brains alight with sparks of idea-electric. But also because Nintendo are being much nicer than usual to the world’s games people.

“I’ve worked with Nintendo for a while now,” says Damir Slogar at Big Blue Bubble, a Canadian developer working on a DS game for release in 2006. “And this time, they’re doing a lot of the stuff they missed with GBA. Take the development kit itself: the Game Boy Advance kit was very limited and problematic, but the DS one is much better. Not to mention the price. The initial price for a GBA dev kit was really, really high. The DS kits are very reasonably priced.”

The reason for Nintendo’s new nice-as-pie attitude is simple: without friendly developers, this risky new handheld would be finished before you’d even put in your order at Argos. But the smiles and beckoning waves from The Big N still surprised people like Ed Magnin, a veteran Texas coder who had a surprise drop through his letterbox last summer.

“I was invited to a DS developer conference in Santa Monica in September,” he says. “I’ve been an authorised developer for previous consoles and, usually, they invite the publishers. They don’t invite you. With this one, I hadn’t even been asked about developing for DS – and yet I still got the invitation. And there were a *lot* of people there. People flew in from all over the world. Reginald Fils-Aime got up and gave a talk to us about how Nintendo ‘gets it’ this time – and they had dev kits there complete with a price list and everything.”

You can’t please all the developers all of the time, though – see the bit on programming problems elsewhere on these pages. And certain areas of DS’s insides are “not very well designed,” says an anonymous coder. “But then we’re working with very low-priced materials,” he concedes. “If something doesn’t work quite as well as I’d like in order to make DS cheaper – well, I can live with that.”

And the publishers? Given their excitement, Nintendo might as well have called it the ‘PS’.

“Publishers are very, very excited,” says Damir at Big Blue Bubble. “A couple of years ago, they were very cautious about new consoles like Gamecube – they didn’t know if they should dive into development or not. It was very hard to get a contract to make a game back them. Now, with DS, it’s a lot easier. The publishers really believe that DS will be as big a success as Game Boy Advance.”

It helps that Nintendo have cut down the slice of money that they demand from every cartridge sold – one of the biggest complaints about developing for Game Boy Advance. You still need a bigish team to take advantage of DS’s 3D frippery – a band of six people working for nine months on a top GBA game becomes ten people and a full year on DS. But with publishers throwing their moneybags around, all the big names are hopping on board the DS train. One coder even mentioned they’d seen evidence that *Grand Theft Auto* goliath Rockstar is beavering away on Nintendo DS right now.

But wait – what about Game Boy Advance? Lorie Clay, producer at Digital Eclipse – the people who brought you GTA on GBA – thinks there’s plenty of life left in it. “Nintendo has got an awful lot of Game Boy Advance systems out there,” she says. “By allowing DS to play Game Boy Advance carts, they’ve made it very easy for developers – if you develop a GBA game, you can still reach DS owners. I don’t think DS means the end of GBA.”

Maybe. But we repeatedly heard the words “switching development” from coding teams we spoke to. Over the last half year or so, developers have clearly been shifting people away from GBA as their DS dev kits arrive. Nintendo stresses that it doesn’t want its new double-screened baby to compete with its superstar handheld – but DS’s success with developers may be the very thing that eventually drains the life out of Game Boy.

Still, we’d rather have new ideas than another round of indentikit GBA platformers. “Of course, that’s the biggest problem with DS,” admits Ruud. “How the hell do I use those two screens and not make it look like I’ve just used them because they’re there? But that’s a good thing, too. We used to come up with a game idea first, then think about how to make it fit with a particular console’s technology – which joypad buttons to use, that sort of thing. But now, with DS, you have a touch screen, you have two screens… you actually start with the technology, and you have game ideas based around that.”

And according to him, it’s not the developers who are the biggest key to DS’s success – it’s you. “If people like your readers are enthusiastic about DS,” he says, “we developers go with them. Because we read everything. Remember that when you’re writing to a magazine or posting to an online forum about DS. Don’t think we don’t read it. We read *everything*.”

THE FUTURE OF DS

The new ideas that coders are cooking up in their big programming pots.

PC LINK
Ruud van de Moosdijk: “I think this will happen. DS will connect with your PC in the same way that Gamecube connects with GBA. Imagine a free PC program that, say, uploads your times from a racing game and sends it to the developer so they can create a live, constantly updated high-score table.”

NET DOWNLOAD
Ruud van de Moosdijk again: “The wireless function is fine for multiplayer, so I hope coders avoid using the online capabilities only for battling and racing. They’ve got the potential to create a huge community, by offering the ability to simply go their website and download new stuff straight to your DS.”

BETTER VISUALS
Damir at Big Blue Bubble: “I don’t think any of the developers have had a DS or a development kit long enough to develop something that is really specifically developed for DS and its potential. The games out now are quite good, but far away from what you can expect a year from now.”

TOUCH MAGIC
Mr Anonymous Developer: “I’ve seen demos that demonstrate some very nice uses for the drag and drop’ feature of the touch screen – sliding objects around the screen with the stylus. The potential comes from the screen being made for kids, so you can really scratch it with the stylus.”

ARM TWISTING

Developers want to get up close and personal with DS’s insides.

In July, news broke that some coders were unhappy that Nintendo had made one the chips inside DS ‘off-limits’ to coders. Basically, the ‘ARM7′ chip – responsible for controlling Nintendo DS’s sound, touch screen and wireless functions – is impossible to use as intricately as developers would like. Coders like Ruud van de Moosdijk at Engine would rather it were different.

“It’s still very much possible to create a great game on DS – that’s not the problem,” he says. “But if you want to do really, really amazing stuff, or write your own music player, it’s impossible. I hope they change their approach. If they’re doing it from a commercial point of view – they intend to make money by selling us tools that can access the chip – they won’t change it. If they’re doing it from a security point of view – they wanted to stop us knowing too much before the DS was launched – maybe it’ll change. A lot of people have actually been moaning about this on the Nintendo developer forums, so I’m hoping the pressure will help them change their minds.”

RotAKoko by Rakugaki-Otoko is a real labour of love – a two year labour of love that’s emerged as a rotaty maze game that’s a shootery spin (hoho) on the Super Nintendo’s On The Ball / Cameltry, except its got cuteness and joy oozing out of its pores, and a brilliantly bewildering intro. Check this out:

See? Awesome.

The game itself can’t live up to that promise of that intro – you simply guide your ‘rotating agent’ around some probably over-complicated and under-populated mazes, grabbing coins as you go. There are some nice ideas later on – like darkness-shrouded levels you can light up by pelting bullets at enemy lightbulbs – and the odd tough boss level that ups the adrenaline a bit. The author is so sweetly concerned about all that spinning making you dizzy, he’s put a signed disclaimer on the loading screen.

“Please take a rest, ok? Keep yourself healthy.” My heart is exploding here.

Honestly, it’s not the greatest game you’ll ever play, but the sheer love that’s gone into it, the nostalgia-triggering innocent ’90s-ness of it all, the lovely music, the beautiful visuals… it makes me happy for so many reasons, I’m not sure 21st century mathematics has invented enough numbers to count them all up. Play RotAKoko (Windows, download)

Cannot… stop… playing… Red Chaser.

There’s little here that a bazillion Kongregate-hosted dodge-the-blob Flash games haven’t done before. But the music is relentless (Speed Of Dark by Cartoon Bomb, since you ask), the enemies come in just-discernible waves so it’s undeniably your fault if you lose, and the multicoloured neon madness – combined with the need for hyper-alert stare-of-death concentration – sends the game straight through your eyeballs and into your brain in a properly psychedelic way.

Red Chaser isn’t a rhythm game, but all the same I have a feeling Zach Lewis has been playing the BIT.TRIP series and likes what he sees and hears. No harm in that. Play Red Chaser (Flash)

(Incidentally, Zach also put together Money Thief for the Ludum Dare 18 indie contest, and that’s well worth a play too.)