Robotron: 2084 creator Eugene Jarvis argued that his thirty year-old arcade shooter could still teach modern game designers a thing or two during a postmortem of the game at GDC 2014.
He said that while today’s developers might marvel at the developer of Candy Crush Saga taking in a billion dollars, Jarvis said he’d “hit that mark thirty years ago with Robotron, one quarter at a time.” The industry veteran, originally a pinball game designer and engineer, gave a code-heavy talk in which he suggested that Robotron shared the same spirit as many surprising, addictive mobile titles like Flappy Bird, because Jarvis developed the game in just six months.
“The design philosophy was a little different,” he said. “It was not the Hollywood triple-A top-down script thing where you spend months scripting out a game design, the art style, you spend years implementing before you can try it out, and if it sucks, well, you hope it wasn’t your money. It was all about an interactive design. You want to start with a minimum playable design, play it, improve it and repeat until a fun game can evolve – which could be completely different from what you intended.”
Robotron was inspired by earlier arcade title Berserk, and Jarvis revealed that he “was totally addicted to it while I was still trying to make Defender a fun game… I was like, wow, this guy is totally kicking my ass. It was kind of frustrating… but kind of like Flappy Bird, sometimes we want to have our asses kicked.”
Robotron: 2084 is similar in spirit to Flappy Bird as both were made quickly and represent a steep challenge, said Jarvis.
Classic arcade games, Jarvis stated, were “only about the play” because challenging the player was “all we [developers] really had to offer.” “With Robotron, we wanted the potential for that long-term ‘hero’ play,” he said. “Giving the player challenging waves, and relief waves, so if they were skilled, they could ride the roller coaster for hours, perhaps days – aspirational hardcore play.”
Jarvis said that while lessons can still be learned from Robotron’s pure play and challenge, today’s developers should steer clear of seeking inspiration from less well-designed arcade titles of yore. “A lot of the classic games were, level one, easy, level two, medium, level three, you are dead: put in another quarter. We wanted to avoid that. We wanted this amazing, ‘at the edge of human skill’ play.”
Jarvis did lament some things lost from the classic arcade era, claiming that though the rudimentary hardware meant they had to work hard to make something playable, a few positive aspects are now overlooked. “We had beautiful CRT monitors back then. They’ve got their built in anti-aliasing, that phosphor glow… but more importantly, they’re much faster than LCDs. When the video goes in, it comes out instantly, where as an LCD has so much processing you’re 20, 30, even more milliseconds behind. It was ideal for twitch gaming.”
Robotron: 2084’s rapid-fire play started rather differently from how most fans would expect, however, with Jarvis revealing that he originally intended the game to be rather more pacifist. Beginning with a version of the game with just static danger electrodes and the player-seeking Grunts (which stands, he said, for “Ground Roving Unit Network Terminators”), it was a turn-based game in which the player would try to lure the robots into mines. “It felt so passive-aggressive,” said Jarvis. “I wanted to shoot something!”
“Initially we tried limiting the player to four shots at a time, so it became a tactical thing. This wasn’t enough. So we added forty, fifty, sixty grunts. Not enough. Screw it, man… 128… actually I think it was 127 because it was all we could fit in memory. It was awesome.”
Jarvis’ first prototype of Robotron was rather gentler than the frenetic shooter it would go on to become. Image credit.
He advised, however, that designers shouldn’t stop once they’ve got something that’s good enough. “We had a cool game, maybe we could have stopped at that. Noah Falstein had this term, ‘avoid the void.’ Void is a game that varies only in difficulty. You want to create a rich soup; a spicy dish with vegetables, the occasional hot pepper… maybe a rotten anchovy as a surprise…”
He went on to suggest that those rotten anchovies were the game’s bugs. “I found this out several years after we released, but we had this thing called the ‘Mikey bug.’ At the beginning of a ‘brain wave’ due to an initialisation error, they will all seek out Mikey, rather than the nearest human. So if you can keep Mikey alive, not rescue him but fend off the brains, you have a huge bonus opportunity… but you also have to keep one enemy alive so you can collect the points. One wrong move… it’s all gone.”
“This was not programmed into the game,” he said. “It’s an emergent behaviour. Some of the coolest features of a game can be bugs; you have to be skilled enough to make sure the program doesn’t crash, but is buggy enough to have richness.”
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