The Genesis of Great Game Design: Four Lessons From SEGA Classics

March 30, 2012 - Sean Koch - Features - No Comments - Share

If theres anything rereleases and the indie-resurrected 8-bit era have proven, its that videogames dont become obsolete when theyre 15 or 20 years old. Not if theyre excellent. As someone who put his gaming life on hold in undergrad before jumping headlong into the iOS industry on the press side, I drew a huge sigh of relief when I realized this; covering iOS would put me in very familiar territory, I figured. And yet, my touchscreen-powered journey has been alien in some ways. When I put aside the wide price differentials, the importance of content updates, and the simmering War on In-App Purchases, what nags at me is how much App Store success in certain genres has come down to muscling through with production values while gameplay remains pretty basic. Pretty basic, that is, compared to the very best of what I played growing up. Since I use now-fossilized classics as standards for evaluating what floods into the App Store, its only fair that I turn my love of digital dissection on these relics and explain what took them beyond the minimums of game design from one avid players perspective. Different genres exist in very different states on iOS of course, so for now I turn my attention to side-scrollers. Action/adventure, shoot em up, beat em up, platformer, runner if it scrolls, it rolls into the crosshairs of this opinion piece. Hands down, I spent the most time playing these genres with a SEGA Genesis controller (make that Mega Drive for our readers outside the US). It wasnt for the graphics or music, which had something of a hard edge; aesthetically, the Genesis seemed like whiskey to the SNES chocolate milk. It was because SEGAs console benefited from what must have been some of the greatest minds in the history of game design. A few titles in particular dominated way too much of my childhood: theSonic the Hedgehog series, Contra: Hard Corps and Streets of Rage 3. Taken together, they illustrate four depth-generating principles that should be well within the iOS developers reach.

Lesson One: Story Matters After All I know, I know, some readers will see that as a pretty groan-worthy statement. Lots of devs would probably rather show off their programming chops than their creative writing, and players who want to cut to the chase might point out that Chess has been getting away without a motivating glue beyond its gameplay mechanics for, like, eons. And yet, I can attest that the games and franchises I stuck with over the years were the ones that drew me into strange new

worlds. There are only so many ways you can re-invent the jump button, but a games world, atmosphere, theme, and message these are things that can give it a unique flair and keep it in the back of the players mind when he or she should really be finishing up some math homework. The great news is, you can tell a catchy story or build a memorable world without displaying a single line of dialogue or descriptive text. Sonic the Hedgehog numbers one, two, and three mastered the art of minimalistic storytelling. All players really knew was that animals were popping out of every robot this hedgehog bopped with his spiny body, and that the game environments grew ever more mechanical and corrupted the deeper he followed Dr. Robotnik back to his lair. It was a very primal, easily digested theme: animal versus man and machine. The Sonic trilogys subject becomes especially ingenious when you consider the time period of its release: the 1990s were dominated by imagery of ducks getting tar pumped from their stomachs, a time when grade schools did their best to drive mortal fear into youngsters who didnt recycle. A big part of why Sonic stuck with me so long is that its atmosphere and motifs effectively channeled the spirit of the era as I perceived it. So much the better that Sonics journey represented a vicarious victory over forces that seemed insurmountable in real life!

Contra: Hard Corps (Probotector for those who called their SEGA Genesis a Mega Drive) fell on the very opposite end of the spectrum. Konami did the unthinkable: they merged the gamebook with the hardest shoot em up you could imagine back then. After certain bosses youd get a choice of where to go next, and the result felt like a choose-your-own-adventure novel where you shot the pages to smithereens. It was glorious. There were four distinct paths through the game, with stages and bosses so unique that the urge to fire that console up again just to see them all was simply magnetic. Granted, Konami wasnt in the running for any Academy Awards with the games bonkers plot. But like Sonic before it, Hard Corps pumped a lot of value out of sheer atmosphere. The most compelling story branches gave you the feeling you were playing through one of H.R. Gigers nightmares. Bosses even had personality, appearing to throw temper tantrums as the player slipped through their attacks. If you want to move from subtext to written text without going quite as far as Hard Corps,Streets of Rage 3 is a great example to look at. Its plot contained just one fork toward the end of the game as I recall, but that branch wasnt a menu choice it depended entirely on player performance. The sixth stage had you ferreting around a building filled with poison gas searching for an NPC, and the guy would die if you didnt reach him in time. The game wrapped up with a different final level and end boss depending on the outcome. Since this was back before save points, you felt committed to follow through to the bad ending with the weight of failure on your mind. Nothing like a little pressure! Yes, that is a kangaroo in the linked video by the way, and that brings us to our next lesson.

Lesson Two: Multiple Characters Multiply Replay Value Sonic and Knuckles, a physical expansion pack to Sonic the Hedgehog 3, remains the most monumental content update in the history of videogames in my opinion. One of the reasons why is that the title characters played so uniquely. By that point in the series, Sonic gained different special attacks when equipped with various energy shields, and naturally he was the faster of the two; Knuckles laboriously climbed up walls and busted through things with his fists. SEGA took the concept so far that your path through a level depended on which character you played as, essentially shaping the entire experience around each heros particular quirks. If you factor in Tails and his flying ability, that made three distinct playing styles you could adopt. Thus, I remained loyal to a giant game three times as long as was probably healthy, ignoring whatever else happened to be on the market all the while. Hard Corps gave you four player characters to toy with, each with his or her own exotic collection of weaponry. Konami did a really ingenious thing in spreading the traditionalContra weapons across characters, putting the series veteran a little off balance no matter who you played as and giving the game a very different feel each go around. And if you multiply the games four paths by four characterswow. I didnt even have enough time to play through every variation this game offered, and thats saying a lot for a shoot em up!

Streets of Rage 3 remains the champion of character rosters. Axel was your slow-but-powerful boxer, Blaze had all the cool moves, Skate earned his name by zipping around the screen, and Dr. Zan felt like the stiff cyborg he was supposed to be. There were even a few secret characters, one of them a boxing kangaroo you could rescue from his deranged clown master if you were good enough. Let me say that again this game let you play as a freaking kangaroo. How awesome is that? Each character had completely different regular attacks, grapples, and special attacks, making every playthrough fresh. It wasnt until the twilight of my Genesis gaming years that I realized you could push each characters abilities a little further if you were especially skilled, but thats for the next lesson. Lesson Three: Give Players Something Really, Really Ridiculously Cool to Strive For Im compelled to report on Game Center and OpenFeint integration because these are expected nowadays, but if I may be completely honest: Im underwhelmed with achievements as theyre often presented on iOS. Every time I pull off something noteworthy and a popup tells me Ive added a new bragging right to my Game Center history, I kind of stare blankly at it and say, ThanksI guess? Dont get me wrong friend lists, multiplayer matchups and leaderboards have great utility, but the achievements themselves just dont get me excited like the gameplay rewards I grew up with.

I tell you, every successful chaos emerald hunter remembers where they were, and what expletive they dropped, when they first witnessed Sonic turning into Super Sonic in Sonic the Hedgehog 2. A lot of blood, sweat, tears, and gnashing of teeth went into that tough-as-nails tunnel minigame, and the reward was over 9000 to match. The designers at SEGA had to figure out some way of upping the ante inSonic 3 and Sonic and Knuckles and once again outdid themselves. The introduction of Hyper Sonic was tacky enough, but the apocalyptic showdown in outer space that came with it was a memorable treat for the expert player. Hard Corps didnt really do much in this area. I seem to recall that score thresholds helped keep the player alive through 1-UP rewards but thats a well-worn genre tradition. Linking performance metrics to the story branches, now that would have been delicious: imagine if shooting accuracy determined whether Deadeye Joe survived to pop out of his exoskeleton after the first boss battle, and the player being ushered one way or the other based on that.

Streets of Rage 3 did have something special in store for the expert player. As you reached certain high score thresholds without losing a life, something strange and wonderful would happen: your character would start unleashing cans of whoopass you didnt even know they could muster! The higher you scored on your current life, the more extreme this effect would become, indicated by little gold stars below your characters health bar. Not that this necessarily made the game too easy for already skilled players: the more your character evolved, the more open youd be to enemy counter attacks if you failed to master these on-the-fly changes. Getting ahead of yourself and losing a life would dock one of those precious performance stars; the quest to get it back could be utterly addictive. It was one more layer of variation on the main formula and that made it valuable.

Lesson Four: A Little Variety Goes a Long Way This idea underpins everything discussed before, but its worth noting additional ways these classics scored high on the depth meter. Each game in the Sonic the Hedgehog trilogy presented a super-challenging minigame that gave players a break from the usual side-scrolling action.Hard Corps inherited the Contratradition of tossing in bike riding and hold-on-for-your-life flying stages that are just as critical to the formula as all the cool guns. According to fansite Streets of Rage Online, an extra mode planned for Streets of Rage 3 sadly received the axe before release but the game made do with a harrowing bulldozer chase sequence. Its important for devs to keep their audiences in mind when deciding how wide to cast their game design net in a single title, of course. The additional modes in Sonic, Contra, andStreets of Rage all tested the players action skills, which is what they signed up for; a round of Sudoku or a math puzzle sitting smack dab in the middle might not have gone over quite as well.

So What Holds Back iOS Action Games? Lets face it: all those awesome features were implemented by entire teams and companies that had some cash to burn. Nevertheless, other genres on iOS have managed to capture console-quality depth, and Ive seen shoestring budget side-scrollers that could have done likewise if the dev had reached just a little further. Its worth noting that theres a love of all things 8-bit among the indie development community, so maybe reinterpreting the 16-bit era and its game design advances is just something that needs to be worked up to on a cultural level. Maybe the inclination is there but the desire for it is something the consumer base needs to work up to. I would also agree with those who note user interface design as a critical barrier. We can certainly see it in beat em up ports by Bow Mobile and SEGA themselves, whove had to scramble to fix control issues post-release or let their multi-button titles sit on the App Store and weather storms of criticism. Were left with quite the catch-22, arent we? Cash-strapped indies have much less luxury in the way of post-launch recoveries if they get adventurous with UI design, and yet every auto-scroller or game with no bells and whistles beyond right and left movement will blend into a sea of similar titles.

But I would propose that none of the games Ive mentioned relied on interfaces much more complex than the best iOS indies have churned out this year. GlitchSofts Star Marine is evidence enough that complex shoot em ups are well within reach. The Rotting CartridgesKale in Dinoland is especially worth a good hard look if youre just embarking on your own journey into the App Store.Kales interface is scarily close to an NES or Game Boy controller in terms of arrangement and reliability. Its still one button shy of whats needed for specials in Streets of Rage 3, to be sure, but look at what Kale has already gained with its four-way virtual D-Pad. The main character can target enemies above him and make his rides climb and descend. Thats more than we can say for most side-scrolling heroes on this platform! If placed in a belt-scrolling environment, Kale could move up and down the field, execute aerial attacks mid-jump, and context would take care of grapples. Double-pressing in one direction to run or dash, plus a dash attack? Mm-hmm, yep, I see those there too. And whos to say a tap at the screen couldnt make little Kale pull off a somersault kick, while a swipe makes him launch a fireball? What strange and wonderful things the future may hold! Want to chime in and tell me how Im just a nostalgia-goggled old fogey and completely ignorant of the pressures of being an indie dev, or just want to share a memory of another game that really hit the mark way back when? Its your turn to sound off in the comments section! And if youd like to spout your own thoughts on the state of iOS gaming and want to use a feature iFanzine article as your sounding board, why, we can arrange that. Unless otherwise noted in descriptions, all media in this editorial owes its existence to the fine contributors at the Videogame Museum.