Trigger Happy
for each new Nintendo system in order to maximize gameplay potential.
When I spoke to Richard Darling of British developers Code-masters about what makes a game “fun,” he echoed Paul Topping’s admiration of early physics-based games such as Thrust: “You’re flying that little space rocket around and you pick up a ball and it’s on the end of a pole with a weight, and the way it swings and the way your thrust and acceleration affects the swing and the motion and everything is extremely intuitive. It’s complex, but it’s intuitive.” But more than that, according to Darling, Thrust was also cybernetically clever:
The control system is deep—in that anyone can pick it up and play it; you’ve got a thrust button and you rotate left and rotate right. Now if that was move left, move right and move forward, the gameplay would be extremely limited. But the fact that what you’re actually doing is thrusting, which is accelerating you, and you can rotate to any angle, and thrust at any angle, means that the learning curve in becoming an expert at the control system is very long.
That was true of Super Mario Bros as well. It seems like a simple “press a button to jump, run left, run right” game, but if you analyze it, you actually accelerated left
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