The Fun of Super Mario Galaxy

I've only said "Wow!" a few times in the last couple decades of playing games. One of those times was for the breakthrough Super Mario 64, a game that took action/platforming into a 3D world and made it work. It's fitting that I said it again over its (true) sequel, Super Mario Galaxy, a game that took action/platforming even more into 3D and made that work, too.

Why is Mario Galaxy so good and what can we learn from it? To borrow some terms from Nicole Lazzaro's four kinds of fun, Mario Galaxy has hard fun, easy fun, and social fun as well as the ability to evoke the emotions of surprise and wonder.

Hard Fun

Gamers know this kind of fun all too well. This is the fun of overcoming obstacles and attaining goals. When you succeed at an especially difficult challenge, the Italian word fiero describes the emotion you feel as you raise your fist into the air triumphantly. Mario Galaxy has 120 stars to collect, offering plenty of this type of fun.

Hard fun is so common in games that the only thing worth noting here is how well Mario Galaxy informs the player about exactly which goal he's going for, which goals are completed, and how many goals are left. I think this clarity magnifies the fiero aspect of the game. Putting the tally of hard fun at center stage (the number of Mario Stars, out of 120, you've collected) makes it all the more satisfying to achieve the goals.

Easy Fun

Ironically, this fun is much more rare in games. This is fun that's not bound up with winning or goals. The entire Nintendo Wii system has an advantage here because the motion-sensing Wiimote lends itself to easy fun.

Collecting the star bits (the colorful, glowing ammunition that bounces around everywhere) with the Wiimote's pointer is easy fun. Shooting the star bits at enemies is easy fun, though hardly ever required to achieve goals. Using the left-right-left-right gesture to do the spin attack is easy fun.

Another part of easy fun is exploration and variety. Some of the gameplay variety in Mario Galaxy includes:

• Flying with the bee suit
• Shooting fireballs with the fire suit
• Creating frozen platforms and ice skating with the ice suit
• Becoming a ghost who can turn invisible and float with the ghost suit
• Jumping very high with the spring suit
• Riding a manta ray on the water in a race
• Riding a turtle shell underwater in many situations, including races
• Balancing on a ball as you navigate through a level
• Flying with the red star suit
• Numerous tricks of gravity that vary across several levels

Just the moment-to-moment interactions involved with these things are fun, without even considering how they are used in the context of hard-fun-goals.

Social Fun

Mario Galaxy is primary a one-player gamer's game (lots of hard fun), but it includes a brilliant two-player feature that will surely become a standard. Some dismiss this feature as "tacked on," but something that strikes such an exactly correct note was surely a carefully considered feature. The two-player co-pilot feature is intended for a non-gamer to enjoy the game alongside a gamer. It adds a lot of social fun to a game that would otherwise have nearly none of that kind of fun.

The second player uses their own Wiimote, but does not use the nunchuck add-on (what non-gamer would want to anyway?) The second player gets their own cursor on-screen that can collect the many star bits littered throughout most levels. The second player (as well as the main player) can shoot these star bits at enemies. The star bits are basically like a shared pool of ammunition, and the second player can add to that pool and deplete it by shooting. 
The greatness of this feature is in the details. First, the main player never actually needs the help of a second player, so this isn't like forced grouping in an MMO. Also, the second player can enter and leave the game at any time without any annoyance or stop in the action. When the co-pilot is helping, they feel like they are contributing because collecting star bits and shooting enemies is at least somewhat helpful.

Also, there are several times in the game where a special NPC appears who asks you to contribute a bunch of star bits in order to unlock a new level. This means you can't completely ignore collecting star bits, and again, the co-pilot is contributing by collecting them. There are certain times when the main player is too engaged in hard fun platforming to be able to collect star bits at the same time, and this is yet another situation where the co-pilot can contribute.

The role of the co-pilot is kept from having too much impact because shooting enemies does not actually kill them (it momentarily stuns them). Also, even without a co-pilot, any hardcore gamer worth his salt would be able to get enough star bits that no co-pilot is needed. But the non-gamer co-pilot doesn't know that!

Finally, the co-pilot's role consists entirely of easy fun. There is no way to actually fail at anything as a co-pilot. You just collect star bits whenever you feel like it, and shoot enemies if it seems like it would help.

If at any point your co-pilot would prefer to sit there and do nothing or put down the controller and check on the stove, that doesn't cause any problems. Because the co-pilot has no pressure, it's easy to suck in a non-gamer. You get their in-game help, you get their observations about where a secret might be hidden, and most importantly, you'll actually communicate back and forth about things (aka social fun).

Surprise and Wonder

In addition to these types of fun, Nicole Lazzaro also mentions several types of emotions that come up in games. I already mentioned fiero, the emotion you feel when you achieve something difficult. Mario Galaxy also creates the very rare game-emotions of surprise and wonder. That's quite an accomplishment considering the game's genre is well-worn territory, but the twists on gravity are interesting enough that sometimes you just sit back and say "wow, that's cool!"

The surprise part is that you feel the wonder part several different times as the gravity tricks change. Just when you thought it was cool to run around the surface of spherical planets, you get to a room where "down" can potentially be any surface.

Then a level where you can flip switches to change the direction of gravity. Then a level where moving spotlights determine exactly where a different direction of gravity is "shining" on an otherwise normal level. There are enough surprises to go around, and I've already ruined most of them for you.

Craftmanship

There's a few pet issues I'd like to point out that Mario Galaxy does right.

Opening Sequence

The opening sequence is only a few seconds long, before you get to actually move around. Compare this to over 15 minutes in the excruciating opening of Paper Mario. The original God of War has an opening sequence of less than 60 seconds, showing that there are better ways of conveying story than forcing the player to watch a long cut-scene before a game starts.

Mario Galaxy conveys some of its story simply by showing speech bubbles over NPCs as you run by. You also unlock chapters of an in-game storybook as you progress through the game and you can read them whenever you want or not at all.

Inertial Frames

When you jump straight up while riding a train in real life, you do not slam into the back of the train; you land on the same spot as you jumped from. Physicists say that you are in the same inertial frame as the train, meaning that you're moving with it and your walking or jumping is relative to it.

You all know this instinctively and yet almost no platform games know this. I remember actually being shocked in the game Spider-Man 2 when my Spider-Man was on top of a car and I jumped straight up and landed on the car. "Wow, they know about inertial frames!" I said. At long last, Mario Galaxy knows about them too. You can finally jump straight up while riding a moving platform and land on the platform without worrying about it moving out from under your feet. 

Wall Jumping

This is a small thing, but points to an important idea. In Mario 64, the wall jump move required good timing. You had to press jump just as Mario touched the wall, no sooner and no later. In Mario Sunshine, The New Super Mario Brothers, and Mario Galaxy, it no longer requires timing. When Mario touches the wall, he starts to slide down and you can press jump at any point during the slide to activate a wall jump.

Someone might say that the original harder wall jump was better because it "required skill." No one actually says that, though. Being able to do your moves is fun, and Nintendo realizes that making a move hard to do is a bad way to add challenge. Even when it's easy to execute a wall jump, there can be plenty of difficulty coming from the level or the situation you're in.

Maybe you have a time limit, or maybe there are some flame jets you have to wall jump past, or a hundred other things. Incidentally, this is the same logic I'm using in making the moves easier to perform in Super Street Fighter II: HD Remix. The moves themselves aren't meant to be the source of challenge, it's how and when you use those moves in the context of the game that's challenging.

Camera

I used to think that moving the camera around while you are in the middle of platforming was part of the game in Mario 64. I was good at this, and I considered it one of the skills the game was all about. Mario Galaxy removes this "skill" almost entirely because it has an amazingly good camera system. Almost all the time, the camera is pretty much where you want it to be. This is a similar concept to the wall jump mentioned above, in that the game is much better off creating difficulty in other places than wall jump execution or camera fiddling.

Mario Galaxy's camera is actually an amazing accomplishment. I saw a GDC lecture one year about camera systems in games from the guy who did the camera for Metroid Prime. That game also has excellent camera handling (and the best mini-map ever). You might say, "But it's a first-person shooter! There is nothing to the camera."

What you don't realize is that Metroid Prime has over 20 camera modes. When you're in an open area, it's a regular first-person camera. When Samus rolls into a ball, it's third person. Some ball-rolling areas have a side-view camera and basically turn the game into 2D gameplay. Going through a tunnel has a special camera, and some boss fights have another camera. 
A Mario-style third person platform game has even more demanding camera needs than Metroid Prime. In 1996, I would have not even been able to imagine a camera for a 3D Mario game that was basically in the right place almost all the time.

When you consider that Mario Galaxy presents far more challenges to camera design than any other 3D platform game ever, it's that much more impressive that it succeeds. No matter which way gravity is going or which kind of crazy thing you're jumping around on, the camera seems to know where it should be. This is undoubtedly the result of endless hours of hand-tweaking of camera paths and some very smart logic to boot.

Even More Excellent?

It's a real jerky thing to take an excellent game and say, "I'm knocking it because it wasn't excellent in some other area that it didn't even attempt." I already cringe at that being done to me someday, so I apologize in advance for this, but I do wish Mario Galaxy were even more excellent.

Before I say what that is, I'll tell you what I think is one of the best surprises in a video game. I mentioned this in my Pacing for Impact article, and I'm about to say the same spoiler now, for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

When you beat that game (which only takes about 10 hours), you are lead to believe that you really reached the end. The game has been showing you what percentage of the map you've uncovered and it gets closer and closer to 100% as you work your way toward the final boss.

After you defeat him, the big reveal is that the entire castle where the game takes place turns upside down, and you have as much more gameplay ahead of you as lay behind. This isn't some cheapy "play the entire game again and get the pink weapon" trick like Ghosts 'n Goblins uses, though. All the stairs and chandeliers and everything else are now upside down, creating all-new puzzles even though the territory is familiar. The enemies are also all replaced by harder enemies. It's surprising and amazing that it works.

Back to Mario Galaxy. It has plenty of surprises of its own, but those take place within each of the many levels. If you take a zoomed out view of the game and just look at the structure of it, it's incredibly predictable. You very quickly realize that each world has 5 galaxies (levels). You realize how many worlds there are from the way the blank spots are arranged on the map.

Even though particular levels are surprising, the overall exercise on the most zoomed-out level becomes monotonous. I played probably the last third of the game on low volume while I watched reruns of Frasier and The Golden Girls on a second TV. (A less honest writer would not have admitted that!)

Mario Galaxy's purple coin missions were especially boring and tedious, even though some of them were very difficult. These missions have you return to familiar levels, but this time the levels have 100 purple coins in them that you must collect.

It's like a 10 cent version of the Castlevania's upside-down castle gold standard. I really wanted Mario Galaxy to break out of its own formula and surprise me on the macro level as much as it surprised me on the micro level. If a big, paradigm-shifting surprise belonged in any game, I think it's this one.

In some strange synchronicity, note that even this very article took a completely different direction than it started on. You expected it to be sheer glowing praise all the way through, then I started giving you may strange fantasies about what the game might have been. Nonetheless, as I mentioned earlier, Super Mario Galaxy iterates on its core mechanics in some of the most clever, polished, and beautiful ways possible.

Save Game Systems

I once heard Peter Molyneux say that during the development of Populous he didn’t want the player to be able to pause the game. His reasoning was that Populous is a world that goes on with or without the player. Luckily, his friends talked him out of it, pointing out that sometimes the doorbell rings, the phone rings, or the baby cries.

Players should have some basic rights. They have lives outside of our games and we should respect those lives and design our games accordingly, rather than expect our players to design their lives around us. Players should be able to save anytime they want, or more precisely, they should be able to stop playing your game anytime without losing their meaningful progress.

This is an old argument where one side talks about the convenience of saving anytime and the other talks about the need to make games challenging, but this is a false dichotomy. We can allow the player to stop playing without excessive penalty and make a challenging game. It’s just a matter of defining what “saving” actually means.

As an example, Mario 64 doesn’t literally allow the player to save anywhere they want, but it still meets this requirement in spirit. The point of the game is to collect all 120 stars, and every time you collect a star, you “save and continue.” You cannot save your exact position in a level, but such a feature isn’t needed anyway. The geography of the game is designed such that a player can reach the entrance to any level in just a few seconds by navigating Mario’s castle and getting back to any specific goal in a level doesn’t take long either. This preserves the game’s difficulty (players can’t save and load to get the stars more easily) and it also means the player can turn the game off at any time, knowing that the only important progress (collecting stars) has been saved.

Save Point vs. Checkpoint

God of War 1 and 2 and Resident Evil 4 all use the same save system, which is also common in many other games. They all have save points and checkpoints. Save points let players save their progress and load it later. Checkpoints are sprinkled invisibly between save points and if they die, they go back to the last checkpoint rather than all the way back to the last save point. This system isn’t too bad, but it doesn’t do a good job of letting the player save and quit at any time, either. It would make more sense if the player could pause the game at any time and save progress up to the last checkpoint. I’m not suggesting that the player should be able to take a step, save, fire a shot, save—just that they should be able to stop playing the game and resume from the last checkpoint. After all, that would happen anyway through dying.

Why separate save points from check points in the first place? I think the answer is for technical reasons rather than design reasons. God of War was designed for the PlayStation 2 and Resident Evil 4 originally appeared on the GameCube (and later on PlayStation 2 and Wii). These consoles take a few seconds to write a save to the memory card, so doing this every time the designers wanted a checkpoint would probably have been too annoying to the player. This lead to spread out save points and the addition of check points for convenience’s sake. In the future, we won’t have these technical restrictions.

Gears of War was designed for the Xbox 360, a system capable of writing a save file quickly. Gears of War’s save system is a definite improvement over God of War’s and Resident Evil’s: The player can play through the entire game without having worry about finding save points, but can also quit playing at any time and automatically start at the most recent checkpoint. Gears of War does this by having many checkpoints, all of which automatically save progress without any action required from the player. This example well-illustrates the false dichotomy I mentioned earlier. The save system is both very convenient and does not interfere with the difficulty of the game. In fact, Gears of War could be tuned to be arbitrarily difficult without sacrificing any convenience in its save system.

Multiplayer

Save systems get a little trickier in cooperative multiplayer games. Players expect to be able to join a friend’s game and leave at any time, and to save and continue their progress later without the game’s save system getting in the way. Gears of War does a great job here too, allowing a friend to join an in-progress game at any time (taking over the AI for the character named Dom). The player can get through a couple of chapters alone, then have a friend join who can leave at any time and pick it up again later. Even if the friend is new to the game, they’re still allowed to join someone who’s playing the last level, because Gears of War is trying to be as convenient to the player as possible.

One hitch is that when the friend leaves, the player must briefly quit the game then restart it from the same checkpoint. On this matter, Lego Star Wars has Gears of War beat because it allows a friend to seamlessly join or leave a game without ever quitting out to a menu screen.

Playing Gears of War with a friend is easier than playing alone (there are no AI adjustments between coop and single player), but it could have been incredibly difficult had the designers wanted it to be. The save system’s flexibility doesn’t prohibit difficulty. That said, if you were really serious as a designer about creating a meaningful leaderboard for single player and co-op play (Gears of War doesn’t do this), then you’d need a single player mode where no one can ever join in, and a co-op mode where the two players are set from the start and can never switch out. This would be highly annoying, so it should only be used as a hardcore leaderboard mode inside a game that also offers a more forgiving system.

Massive Saves

In massively multiplayer online games things get even trickier still. On the plus side, players can log out at almost any moment they want in these games, and their character’s progress (such as items or experience points) will be saved. In World of Warcraft, players can’t log out while “in combat,” and must wait 20 seconds when they do want to log out, but it’s pretty player-friendly overall. There’s even a hearthstone that lets players teleport back a city (once per hour) so they can end their play session at almost any time with character progress saved. What’s much harder to save is progress on a quest or in a dungeon. If a group of four friends is halfway through a three-hour dungeon, one could log out, but it’s socially unacceptable and that player won’t be able to continue their progress in that dungeon later. This is a worse problem during raids where 25 people must coordinate their real-life schedules and the ability to log off at any time is basically gone.

Blizzard has taken some steps to simulate the kind of save points seen in offline games, though. The Scarlet Monastery dungeon starts in an ante-room with four separate portals leading to four different wings. This allows players to play just one fourth of the total experience, stop, and come back later. Also, the Mauradon dungeon gives players an item half way through that allows them to teleport back to the half way point, so they can continue their journey later.

Blizzard added even more winged dungeons and pseudo-save points half way through dungeons in the Burning Crusade expansion to World of Warcraft. Players welcomed these changes as they make the game much more convenient, though they still fall somewhat short. A single player game with save points more than an hour apart would be considered lacking, but at least Blizzard is moving in the right direction here. There is opportunity in the MMO genre to be even more friendly to players’ real life schedules.

Diablo 3

Blizzard's Diablo 3 is notable for having such different save game systems on different platforms, at least for a while. In the Mac and PC versions, the save system was similar to an MMO. That means it saved everything you do at every moment. Also like an MMO, you couldn't pause the game. If you brought up a menu screen, the game was still running underneath it and monsters could still attack you.

In the Xbox and PlayStation versions, you can pause though. Bringing up those very same menus in these versions pauses the action and monsters can't attack you. The console versions of Diablo 3 have a lot of good features going for them, but the ability to pause turned out to be one of the best "innovations" to me over the Mac/PC versions. (I'm busy and often get interrupted, so this comes up constantly.) Thankfully, after the first expansion to the game, the Mac/PC versions were updated to also allow pausing.

Outliers

Let’s return to single player games and look at two unusual examples: Dead Rising (Xbox 360) and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (Nintendo DS). Dead Rising has save points, but no checkpoints. The open-ended nature of the game makes it very easy to forget to save at all, especially considering that the save points are off the beaten path inside the various bathrooms of the shopping mall where the game takes place.

When players die in Dead Rising, they are given a confusing choice: they can restart from their last save point, losing all character progress since they last saved, or keep their character’s progress, but lose all save points. Yes, you read that right. If a player wants to keep their character’s progress since the last save (such as experience points gained and moves learned) then they must restart the entire game from the opening cut-scene. Even stranger, Dead Rising only allows a single save slot per Xbox 360 profile, per storage device.

That means the game is trying its hardest to restrict people into playing the game only the way the designer wants, while still remaining easily defeatable if one makes a new profile or uses another memory card. By “defeatable,” I mean this grants users the ability to create two save files, a feature common to almost all games.

The reasoning behind these decisions in Dead Rising was probably to create a very specific experience for the player. They are supposed to care about finding those save points, and care that they are in constant danger from zombies and that if they die, the last save point was a really long time ago so it’s going to be a big deal. The world is against the player—as it almost always is in the horror genre—and so the game’s difficulty is intentionally very hard. If the player keeps playing through the game and dying and starting over, they’ll start each time with a stronger character and with more knowledge of how to navigate the game correctly and save the various victims from the zombies. Incidentally, this same save system was used in the game Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, which was also by Capcom and is rumored to share some team members with Dead Rising.

I understand why a designer might create a save system like this that reinforces the concepts of the horror genre, but that's making a game that's too much for the designer and not enough for the player. I was personally annoyed by this system to the point of quitting because I could not play it the way I wanted. Dead Rising is an amazing technological showcase and combines the design concepts of a sandbox game (go wherever you want, do whatever you want) with the horror theme of a mall overrun by zombies. And yet, I’m not allowed even two save slots, I’m bullied into playing the same parts over and over because I feel obligated to restart all the time, and the save points require me to actively seek them out, which means it’s very easy to play for an hour or so and forget to save, then die. That type of save system may work for hardcore players (who border on sadomasochism anyway), but the fictional Little Jimmy from Idaho (the person I often design for) is just going to quit playing out of frustration. I know I did.

On the other hand, Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow has an unusual save feature that is intended specifically for the player’s convenience, rather than for the designer’s vision. This game has standard fixed-location save points (with no check points) and it also has a second method of saving called a save marker.    

Players can pause the game at any time and create a save marker, and then the game quits to the title screen. When they want to play again, they can either load a game that was saved at a save point or they can resume from their last save marker. The tricky part is that if they resume play through either method, then the save marker is destroyed. That means if the player is in the middle of a boss fight, they can save, stop playing, play something else, then later resume from the exact moment they saved. But players cannot reduce the game’s difficulty with this feature because it does not give them a second chance of any kind. This is another example where the game can remain very challenging, and yet still allow the player to save and quit at any time. This same save system was also used by Fire Emblem (Game Boy Advance) except you didn’t even need to pause and create a save marker. It was automatically created for you any time you turned the Game Boy off during gameplay.

New Mario, Old Trick

One of the most surprisingly bad save systems of recent times comes from an otherwise wonderful game: New Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo DS). It would have been very natural in this game to allow the player to save at any time on the map screen between levels. Instead, the player must beat either the castle at the end of a world or the tower halfway through the world in order to save. For example, in World 2 this means beating a minimum of five levels before reaching a save point. Players can also spend their hard-earned star coins to buy a powerup from various mushroom houses which also lets them save, but they very well might not want to spend their coins.

The need to keep the player at arm’s length from the ability to save is conspicuous here given the traditions of the genre (Mario 64 did much better) and doubly-so considering this is a handheld game. Surely the concern wasn’t about keeping the game challenging, because NSMB lavishes the player with extra lives the whole way through. My girlfriend once asked if she could play Nintendogs on our DS, and I had to explain to her that no, she couldn’t, because I just spent almost an hour collecting nine star coins and didn’t reach a save point yet so I had to leave the DS in sleep mode until I could save. I’m not sure which game designer sensibility this restriction on saving serves, or why it would ever be more important than allowing my girlfriend to play with her virtual dog.

NSMB really stands alone here. The most incredible part is that when you beat the game, you unlock the ability to save anytime you want on the map screen! This proves that no technical limitation made the save system the way it was. The convenience of saving anytime was deliberately withheld from the player, and given as a reward at the end. As designers, we can’t do this, and must instead put the real lives of our players ahead of our game designery ideals.

Saving For The Player

A save system should allow the player to stop playing at any time, allow the player to pick up where they left off with as close to zero replaying as possible, and save as automatically and seamlessly as possible, so the player will not forget to do it.

Saving should be treated as one of the player’s natural rights, not an earned privilege or a game mechanic around which to make strategic decisions. The design space we have to create new games is so unthinkably large that we lose virtually nothing by restricting ourselves to designs with friendly save game systems that don’t presume to override the real-life needs of players. As I have shown, this does not even require a tradeoff with game difficulty; even difficult games can have convenient save systems.

We should always try to design a save system that simply serves its purpose and fades into the background, otherwise we might end up like New Super Mario Bros.—a game with sales of over 10 million units worldwide, and with ten million girlfriends unable to play Nintendogs.

Pacing for Impact

Is it better to save your best content until the end of a game so you have a strong finish, or is it better to make the first few minutes of gameplay as good as they can possibly be? If your best stuff only shows up after the player has invested 20 hours, reviewers and some players might not even know it’s there. But if you "give away the farm" on the first level, the game has nowhere to go but down.

The general trend I see in successful games is that they tend to show a great deal of their coolness (but not all of it) in the first few minutes to half hour of gameplay. Let’s look at some case studies.

Metroid Prime

As of this 2006, Metroid Prime is the 4th highest rated game of all time on gamerankings.com (10th highest as of 2014), receiving a 9.7 from Gamespot, a 9.8 from IGN, and a perfect 10 from EGM. It’s sold 1.3 million units on GameCube, according to TRSTS data.

The first few minutes of Metroid Prime show off an amazing amount of the game. We learn basic movement (R button shifts to freelook, L button shifts to strafe/lock-on). A button shoots and B button jumps. If you hold the A button, you get a fancy charge-up shot, while the Y button fires missiles. The X button turns you into a ball (with 3rd person camera) equipped with bombs (that make you bounce), and everyone loves rolling around as that ball. Your visor lets you scan the world to get info and tips and even open some doors. Most doors you just shoot to open, and your charged shot can be used to clear rubble. You also learn how to operate elevators and use the save stations. After only a few minutes, you fight a boss where you learn how to circle strafe while locked on and dash sideways during a lock-on. A few seconds after that, you get to use your grapple gun. (It was probably a mistake that they had you use the grapple gun for the first time during a timed sequence, but oh well.) You also get a taste of Metroid Prime’s map and mini-map, which are probably the best in-game maps of 3D levels the industry has seen yet.

That’s an incredible number of cool features revealed in the first few minutes of the game. It makes you realize right away that Metroid Prime is a class act that deserves your time. Incidentally, after the intro sequence, your character gets damaged and loses access to the morph ball, charged shot, missiles, and grapple gun. The game designers need to give you these items slowly over time to reward you, but they wanted to make sure your first few minutes were packed with coolness, so they gave you a great taste of what’s to come.

Grand Theft Auto 3

This infamous breakthrough title conveys its core ideas in the first few minutes. The game starts with a very short series of three missions: First, get in the car and drive your buddy to Point A, then drive to Point B, and finally pick up a certain passenger at the hospital and take her to Point C. This sequence teaches you how to get in and out of cars, basic driving (gas, break, turning), how to change the radio station in the car, how to pick up passengers, how to get a new car if your current car gets too damaged, and how to use the mini-map to find mission objectives.

After those first three missions, the game turns you loose into the world to do whatever you want. Doing whatever you want is the core concept of Grand Theft Auto 3, and the player realizes it right away. You can drive anywhere. You can fight people on the street and take their money. You can crash cars, wreck stuff, and steal cars. You can totally ignore the story and mission structure and make up your own story and missions. In doing so, you quickly learn about the police "star" system where committing worse and worse crimes increases force of police who are sent after you. You have to hide out or find secret police stars hidden in the world to reduce your infamy rating and get the cops off your back.

I’ve watched several people play GTA3 for the first time, and all of them abandoned the game’s mission structure within 5 minutes to explore the world and create their own goals. No wonder it sold over 5.6 million units on PlayStation 2 alone (and many times more than that once you factor in other platforms and expansions).

Castlevania and God of War

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PlayStation 1) and God of War (PlayStation 2) are both examples of a near ideal distribution of “good stuff.” Both games start by showing you a large portion of the game mechanics. Castlevania uses the same trick as Metroid Prime where the player gets to start with a bunch of cool moves and weapons that they won’t get to use again until much later. God of War introduces basic fighting, ground throws, air throws, opening hatches, walking tightropes, a boss fight, special finishing moves, and use of magic all within the first few minutes. Note that best boss is the first one (the Hydra) and the most fun and effective magic power is the first one you get, (Poseidon's Rage, the 360 degree lightning attack). Each of these games is putting its best foot forward to get your attention from the start.

The interesting thing is that these games feel great right off the bat, but they don’t feel like the 9/10 or 10/10 games that they are. In each case, something later in the game takes the quality from 7 or 8 up to 9 or 10. In God of War’s case, it’s the emotional content of the excellent story that builds to a very satisfying conclusion. Even though the game is a “fight a bunch of guys game,” the story and presentation elevate it to the status of “memorable experience,” rather than just “brawler game.”

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has one of the biggest surprises in games, and if you haven't played it, I’m about to ruin it. The game leads you to believe you've reached the end when you find Dracula and kill him. There’s a map that keeps track of what percentage of the game you’ve visited, and it approaches 100% by the time you reach the big boss. The surprise is that this is only the halfway point! The boss causes the castle (the entire game world) to flip upside down, and you must now play through it all over again, this time walking on what used to be the roof. Chandeliers stick up from the ground, you walk on the undersides of stair cases, and you begin to realize that the entire game was planned from the start to support an entirely different upside down game! Wow! All the enemies are replaced with harder enemies, and the various keys are hidden in new places. The awesome design of the upside down world elevates Castlevania to a very memorable experience.

So if starting out strong, but ending stronger is the key to victory, then what are some examples of games that break this trend? Games that start out weak and end up weak aren’t very informative here, but games that start weak and end strong would be great examples. We’d expect those games not to sell very well.

Psychonauts

I hate to pick on Psychonauts because Tim Schaefer’s great writing in previous games is one of the reasons I joined the game industry in the first place. That said, the first 12 minutes of Psychonauts are, from a gameplay perspective, a very poor experience. The only interactive things I did in those 12 minutes were enter my name, move the camera to the right and then up one time each in a tutorial, and walk two steps to an NPC that triggered even more movies. The rest of the 12 minutes was all movies. I just wanted to play the game. What’s just as bad is that after two hours, I didn’t get even a single Psi-power. Only after about three hours did I get to see anything that set this platformer apart from any other platformer, and the real interesting stuff isn’t until much later in the game. Even though many people told me that the game has wonderful ideas and cool gameplay as you get into it more, the first time I played it, I never made it past the first 12 minutes.

Traditional RPGs

RPGs in general also suffer from this phenomenon. Most (Final Fantasy-like) RPGs start you out with a wooden sword, no spells, and have you fight a few rats or something. Over time, your arsenal of spells and attacks increase and you usually get the ability to do combos of spells (or use your party members together in combos) that are pretty interesting and fun. This fun tends to come later in the game though, at hour five rather than minute five. This is perhaps why the single-player RPG genre isn’t selling as well anymore, except for games called Final Fantasy or games that have the Star Wars license. [Post publication note: Oblivion and Skyrim are RPGs that did well, but note that they use the GTA3 sandbox gameplay model.]

Pace for Impact

It should be no surprise that you need to start out strong, or at least strong enough to grab the player’s attention. Burying the best content at the end is generally not a good idea, but it’s a question of degree. If your final boss is a 9/10 experience, but your first level is a 2/10, you have a major problem because no one is going to see that final boss. On the other hand, if you can get that first level up to a respectable 8/10 experience, then ending on a 9/10 boss is great, and perhaps nearly the ideal scenario. In any case, don’t be tempted to save all the fun until after the 20 hour mark because your first level is going to be your most played and most judged level. Go the extra mile to make it stand out, even if it means giving the player a preview of a few fun mechanics you planned on saving for the end.

One last note: if you really want to start in a way that no one ever does, then get rid of all that junk that players are tired of waiting through when they turn on a game. Get rid of the intro movie with the publisher’s logo, the intro movie with the developer’s logo, the legal screens (put them as an option on the main menu), and any other non-content cruft you can find. It’s getting totally out of hand how many screens of garbage games start out with before getting to the main menu. You’re much better off building brand awareness by actually making a good game than forcing everyone to see your logo every time the game boots. Put your logo in the main menu itself if it matters so much. When I pay $50 for a game, I expect to be exempt from even 5 seconds of this stuff. (Technical disclaimer: sometimes those logos are shown during loading time, and removing them wouldn't actually save any time.)

Almost no games follow the above advice. Yours could be one of the few. Oops, I saved my most interesting idea for the end of the article where no one will really see it.