Joust & Balloon Fight

In the early 2000s-- I want to say around '03 or so-- a number of arcade games were released via Shockwave arcade, introducing the latest batch of game playing kids to many of the classic titles which dominated arcade halls in the previous generation.

Although arcades still existed at that time, they were in the middle of a transformation which began their slow march to irrelevance. Soon to be well and truly replaced by home consoles, many arcades still in operation had made the transition to being more "experiential", with fewer of the standard upright cabinets and more dexterity games, basketball, and air hockey. Were it not for the newest generation of designers and developers ripping, porting, or creating games "inspired" by the older classics, it would have taken considerably longer for young kids like my brother and I to get to Joust, with the likelihood of running into the cabinet in the local Namco arcade dwindling by the day.

Joust

THE EGG

For the uninitiated, Joust is a single-player or two-player game released by Williams Electronics in 1982. Players took the role of knights mounted on an ostrich or stork sporting side-scrolling movement and a "flap" command. Repeated flaps made the task of flight easier, and when combined with lateral movement, could quickly pick up speed. The resulting movement felt like guiding a big ball bearing through viscous oil; unctuous and heavy. It was satisfyingly predictable and the consistent physics counter-balanced the relative difficulty of maintaining fine control. Flapping around the stage at break-neck speed was satisfying in of itself; hitting an enemy knight at top speed made you feel twelve feet tall.

Joust is famous. I need not explain the finer details of Joust. Admittedly, I'm not sure I ever appreciated those finer details until I was quite a bit older. My brother and I would regularly find ourselves huddled around our keyboard in the computer room, flapping away and alternately cooperating and thwarting each other's progress. The logic and tactile experience of Joust struck a chord with us, and it became a mainstay in the stable of free, internet games we kept on rotation when it was time to play.

Balloon Fight

The first time I encountered Balloon Fight was when I had found it at our local Salvation Army, most likely in 2000. Years prior, an NES had found its way into our house, making the distinct gray casing and offset image on the Balloon Fight cartridge recognizable to a kid like me who had missed the NES' debut by nearly a decade. I played a a total of maybe forty-five minutes over the course of a week before I traded it away in a schoolyard barter. Several years later, when returning to the NES to see what lessons an aspiring designer could learn from the first major success in home video game design, I came across Balloon Fight for the second time.

And now I love these single screens, go figure.

Booting it up, I remembered my fickle complaint as a child, that the image didn't scroll so "what [was] the point?" How unfair a young Mas was, especially considering that so many other games I played also took place on single screens. I was likely not even citing my actual misgivings, as kids sometimes do. Now grown, I decided to return with fresh eyes.

My first thought once I got going was, "Oh, this is Joust." There are a handful of differences which I'm sure wouldn't hold up in court today, but Balloon Fight does manage to still feel like an improvement and iteration upon Joust's success. For one, despite the lack of an arcade cabinet's more natural feeling joystick, I found the controls more responsive and commanding. Second, the addition of a second button allowed for welcome upgrade to player choice. Press the A button and the player character (no longer riding a steed but instead being held aloft by a cluster of balloons) will flap their arms, ascending slightly. If the player holds the B button, the player will continually flap their arms. This was a wonderful and simple addition. I find myself frequently alternating between the two for speed or finer control. Balloon Fight is now in my adult rotation of games I play, probably clocking in one to two hours a month just zenning out to the rhythm of the gameplay loop and thinking about my day. Its an excellent "unwindy" game.

Satoru Iwata, my hero

So here's the part that would have gotten these gaming pioneers in trouble were these games somehow made in our current gaming climate, a climate in which lawsuits are nearly as profitable as games themselves (a trend Nintendo could be argued was the trailblazer for as well...). Williams Electronics wanted to license a port of their monster hit, Joust to the Nintendo Entertainment System, and Nintendo hired out to their fated partner, HAL Laboratories for the job. Satoru Iwata was working at HAL at the time, and his first commercial product was that NES port of Joust. His next project was Balloon Fight. He wasn't simply inspired by Joust, but rather, he in effect was given the opportunity to make Joust again. Thankfully for his reputation and development as a designer, he chose to iterate and refine, rather than wallow in hacked out shovelware.

I learned two significant things from Balloon Fight. Number one, iterating upon existing work is not just capitalizing on a previous works' success. Or at least, it need not be. As stated before, one could be forgiven for calling Balloon Fight a cynical rip-off at first glance. The sensation of flight is refined in such a way to make it clear that the designer-- in this case, Satoru Iwata-- wasn't simply phoning the work in, but rather expanding on something he himself was enjoying. There is joy in Balloon Fight. The second significant lesson I learned, and one which I have private speculation that Shigeru Miyamoto learned as well, was that effective and satisfying games are usually deceptively simple in operation, and devilishly complex in scope.

What's it mean?

With this sort of design philosophy, the designer's job is not complete when a mechanic is designed and refined. In fact, the designers real task is yet to come, in that they are now charged with guiding the player through challenges which test, reinforce, and expand the player's ability to utilise that core mechanic. Balloon Fight, like Joust before it, does not introduce new abilities, goals, or even enemies. From the first stage, the rules of engagement are set, and all subsequent stages take on a silent language, forever clear to player if they pass the first stage.

This style of player education would become famous and much-celebrated only a year after Balloon Fight, with the release of Super Mario Bros. Miyamoto has never cited Joust or Balloon Fight as inspiring that philosophy, but I can't help but wonder if that's where the kernel of the idea began. Heck, Iwata's work on on Balloon Fight was transposed onto Super Mario for the underwater levels, with Mario's swimming physics operating on the same control code. Much like a used sporting goods store, history runs in cycles.

So Joust is Balloon Fight and vice versa, and that's a good thing? I suppose for now, yes. Both remind the designer to stop overdesigning; just focus on that primary gameplay loop and making it *feel* good. Simplicity and joy-- that's the recipe for lasting gameplay.