When people talk about the importance of mobile gaming for the videogames industry, it's the relatively recent market-defining titles like Angry Birds that steal the headlines. But the stage has really just been dressed for a true revival of games originally released in the 1990s. So why aren't they being pushed harder to what is arguably the most suitable audience since their original release?
The generation of mobile gaming addicts alive now and old enough to drink, vote and drive weren't even born for the release of
Sonic The Hedgehog, a game that sold on the same scale as blockbusters like Call of Duty in its day. Yet some of the most successful mobile games on smartphones today owe their success to design principles originally pioneered by the likes of
Sonic two decades ago.
Simple graphics, straightforward gameplay and obvious controls were design foundations necessitated by limited processing power inside the consoles they were designed for -- run to the right and catch rings (Sonic), run to the right and collect coins (Mario), run into a building and be an asshole (How To Be A Complete Bastard, an Atari classic from 1987).
The same foundations are necessary and present in Angry Birds, Cut The Rope, Doodle Jump or Tiny Wings. Only this time they're necessary not because of restricted processing power, but because of limited options granted by touchscreen controls and the "quick fix" nature of modern mobile gaming.
The fact remains that these App Store-topping games are, in many ways, technically identical to their 20-year-old predecessors. It's just the latter are marketed as "retro", as "classics", while the former are marketed as innovative examples of modern game architecture and creative thinking. It doesn't seem right.
For years, Sega, Nintendo and others have made efforts to spit out their older titles on as many modern platforms as possible; classics like Sonic and Golden Axe seem to pop up on every platform going, given time. But before now it's always stunk like a rotten cash-in aimed at the nostalgic 20- and 30-somethings with enough disposable income to rebuy their favourite childhood titles over and over again, while the generation below is spending a fortune with Zynga and Rovio.
The message is all wrong. These shouldn't be pushed as "retro games" nervously asking for another 69p of an older gamer's salary.
They should be aggressively targeting the generation who have never heard of Chrono Trigger, but who loved Dragon Age; who waste hours on Farmville but who have never heard of
Will Wright. This is an opportunity to make a bigger deal of these classics -- not because they're classics, but because they're objectively the most perfectly-executed mobile games ever made.
I've experienced this first-hand, with the aforementioned
Chrono Trigger being a prime example.
I missed out entirely on the majority of the 8-bit and 16-bit role-playing games of the 80s and early 90s, largely because I was too young to afford both a Mega Drive and a SNES. Certain Japanese A-listers, including the original Final Fantasy series and Secret of Mana, were all products of Square Enix (called Squaresoft at the time), and are now available for the
iPhone. I have bought them all, completed them all and finally got to experience what the generation of gamers above me experienced while I was busy being merely a glint in someone's eye.
It's not just confined to consoles, either: someone needs to get Bullfrog's 1997 classic, Theme Hospital, ported to iOS and Android, too. Quickly, mind, before Zynga swoops in with something like Illnessville and makes a billion dollars off the 16-year-olds who never had the pleasure of diagnosing bloaty head syndrome or a slack tongue back in the day.
It's an opportunity that won't linger for too long. The divide between what's considered "console gaming" and "mobile gaming" will only exist while gamers still buy both a console and a portable device. We've seen smartphones start to devour the likes of the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Vita, and with the mobile gaming industry what it is right now, it won't be too long before someone decides not to buy a PlayStation because they've bought an iPad.
Or before Zynga releases Illnessville. Please, let's not let that happen. Let's drop the "retro" in mobile and focus on the "gaming".
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
