I Still Die on the First Stage

I Still Die on the First Stage

Every console I sell gets tested. I load a shooter, because a shooter tells you quickly whether the sound, the sprites and the controller are honest. And almost every time, the same thing happens. I die on the first stage. I have been handling these machines for years now. I am not getting any better.

For a while I took that as a verdict on me. Then I started reading how these games were built. Parodius looks like a joke — cartoon ships, comic music, nothing you would call serious — and it is punishing, because the series hides a rank inside it: the better you play, the more bullets it sends at you. The machine is watching your hands. In Dragon Spirit you collect orbs to grow a second head, then a third, and the third head makes your body so wide that skilled players refuse to take it. The power is a trap you are invited to accept. Space Invaders speeds up at the end, and that was never designed as a climax. Fewer aliens on screen simply meant less for the hardware to compute, so they moved faster. Nishikado left the flaw in and let it become the tension.

None of that is cruelty. It is attention. Those men were studying the reflexes of a person they would never meet, and building for that person's hands, from the very first second.

And they knew when to open the door. 1943 replaced lives with a single energy bar, so that an ordinary player, hit again and again, could still go further in. On the Famicom you could even improve the plane itself between stages — its armour, its fuel, how long its weapons held. My grandfather sat in front of that game and kept going. He was not good either. The design let him stay.

So I have stopped apologising for stage one. I clean the shell, I test the sound, I die, and I send the machine on to someone whose fingers are faster than mine. That person exists. This work is mostly a matter of getting the machine to them intact.