The Endless Loop…
The early video games had many things in common, some more obvious then others. If a game was successful then it was common place to expect a ton of clones to follow (Pac-man, Space Invaders, Pong) just to name a few. There were other subtleties such as similar graphics and sound, a large assortment of space themed games and so on. But there was one thing a lot of those games seemed to have, and that was endless game-play!
While playing those classic games your main objective is points, points and more points. In most cases you played until you either died from an obstacle, died from an enemy or died from boredom (which ever one came first). Sure the games would level up, increase speed, add more obstacles and enemies to the point where is was almost impossible to keep going… Games like Astrosmash on the Intellivision, I remember getting so far and it was so fast that if I blinked, I lost.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this form of game-play as we all came to except that certain games were designed to see who can score the most points, It would be difficult to achieve that if there were an ending as scoring would be finite. That being said I am aware of the fact several games also had what has come to be known as the kill screen. For those unaware what that means, its basically when you play the game for so long that the system runs out of memory and can’t continue. In the case of Donkey Kong, once Mario hits the kill screen… he just rolls over and dies! The other notable kill screen was made public with Pac-Man, that kill screen would show half the maze and the other half would contain some crazy code. These “kill screens” were not intentionally inserted in the game to create an end, but rather a side effect to game looping.
There are methods of controlling the endless loop through the use of a timer, games like Pitfall would continue to scroll until your time ran out. This is a great concept except it has the issue where a finite score can be achieved (Its quite hard to do, but it can be done). You also now have another factor to compete and that is time, as in how many points can you get in a certain amount of time.
Not all games from the past were like that though, some did have a goal or ending to be achieved. One of my Favourite games on the Intellivision is Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, and in that game you must get your team to the misty mountain and grab the crown. Once you achieve that the game is over and you can play again on a different difficulty setting. Adventure for the Atari 2600 is another example, you run around in a top down layout collecting items and slaying dragons until you achieve your goal. Both games are very similar and provide a level of game play that has nothing to do with points, just careful planing and navigating.
Games that loop have a different kind of challenge to them then games that have and end goal. Players need dexterity and pattern recognition skills to compete with the best of the best. They are also perfect for those who like to put a game on, start playing and let there mind wander. Once you get into that groove, you can almost be on auto-pilot, well until the game hits its fastest speed that is… then you better snap out of it!
Brian Pudden