Apparently, I blinked and missed some extraordinarily good games on iOS that came out in recently in the last few years almost a decade ago. Fortunately my kids were there to educate me, yes, including the 6-year-old:
- Rodeo Stampede, nine years old and with ads but man what fun. Echoes of YMBAB and Crossy Road.
- Geometry Dash, which I could and should just watch my kids play because my reflexes and sense of rhythm aren’t enough for level 1 let alone this sorcery. Both the in-game music and the name reminded me of the first game I ever bought on Steam, which was of course Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved.
- Snake.io+, which brought memories of my old Nokia pouring down. But now it is a bit too competitive for my taste and I could only watch in awe as progeny raked up points two orders of magnitude higher than the runner-up.
All this reminded me of a conversation Tyler Cowen had with the YouTuber Any Austin who said that every medium reached its peak — with which I wholeheartedly agreed [Note: And quite clearly we had reached Peak Movie in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, going downhill ever since Jaws graced the screen. ] — and that Peak Gaming was Pac-Man and Space Invaders — to which I could only say Huh?!
But then the more I thought about it the more I realized that he was basically correct. Well, in generalities if not in the specifics, as the Peak Single Player Video Game [Note: Let’s not put in multiplayer games there, as they should be compared to card games, board games and sports ] was clearly Tetris.
I only half-kid. Show Tetris to a 10-year-old and she will immediately get it, spend a half-dozen hours on it the same day, and then dream about the figures. There are a few other gaming prototypes — and yes, Space Invaders and Pac-Man are both examples — but everything since then could be interpreted as a variation on a theme, adding whiz-bang graphics and sound effects to sugar-coat a basic mechanic. In an alternative universe where I have a PhD in ludology I would have been able to name a few more prototypes and family trees, digging into the core mechanic of each AAA title to get to its Space Invaders nugget; and if there are any blogs where this is actually done please point me to them, I would love to subscribe!