The Lost Art of Creating Bad Video Games

Of all the major creative mediums we indulge in regularly of this era, video games have seen the most rapid growth. In the mere two and a half decades I’ve lived, the landscape of this art form has changed from the clumsy beginnings of 3D gaming to one which has been quickly refined to show jaw-dropping visuals, massive amounts of content, and tight mechanical precision, all of which were simply an impossibility under the technological restraints of the mid-1990s. One only needs to observe the graphically updated versions of the late 90s classic Spyro the Dragon trilogy to understand the extreme shift in what designers are capable of accomplishing.

It’s common within any creative medium to see substantial growth within the early decades of their birth. Film made massive strides through creatives pushing the limits of the technology given, going from a brief age of being soundless to creating a brand new craft of acting once this technology was introduced. Of course, this wasn’t the only hurdle film was forced to jump, as it eventually made significant improvements to said sound design, set pieces, visual art, verbal and non-verbal acting, etc. And with each advancement came a new level of audience engagement, allowing minds to craft stories which could only be presented through this medium.

But how can we define a “bad” movie? Applying subjectivity any sort of inherent fact can ultimately lead down a slippery slope in which art can’t be assessed appropriately. While there is value in determining rights and wrongs of a certain craft, it can ultimately lead us down a path of conformity which stunts the creative process. Ed Wood is a director whose passion was near unparalleled, yet this resulted in many films which are admonished for being some of the worst ever created. Yet half a century later, millions of people find incredible pleasure in viewing these films. Granted, much of the enjoyment is relishing in the stilted acting, contrived stories, and cheap effects, but they are nonetheless providing a unique level of entertainment. Tim Burton even created a biopic of Ed Wood as a means of respecting the legacy of the man.

See, film, for the most part, is meant to provide a grand illusion. It is a way for people to observe a world unique from their own and interact with it from the outside looking in. Ed Wood’s films failed to capture this illusion. It is almost impossible to suspend your belief of reality enough for something so absurd. He removes this disguise of perfection in film where everyone is doing and saying things which smoothly progress a plot in the perfect direction, revealing the truth behind what film actually is at it’s most primal level: People trying to tell stories. Through a refusal to confine himself to standards set by storytellers, critics, and audiences, Ed Wood crafted some of the most personal and human works the medium has seen. It was obviously unintentional, but it nonetheless shows the importance of nonconformity in art.

I wanted to preface this essay with an example of older media so we may understand the similarities shared between newer media, as well as discover the ways in which we can differentiate the artistic value of each medium. To begin with, designing a video game requires a very different skill set from creating a film. As video games are directly interactive with the one who chooses to consume it, this creates a unique method in which the story, no matter how simple it may be, can be told. But story isn’t necessarily the primary objective of a video game. In fact, as video games were initially made, story was always an afterthought. The primary goal of a video game is to create enjoyment through a series of player inputs. The consumer plays a far more vital role in the delivery of a video game than they would simply watching a film.

With these pieces known, it becomes easier to make an identification of what makes a video game “bad”. Generally speaking, the common sorts of complaints you will see of most video games are inabilities for a player to engage the product. Whether this be through poor controls and movement, cluttered level design, or simply a philosophy which exists to interfere with the player’s ability to engage (so-called “artificial difficulty”). Look up any video review done in James Rolfe’s wildly successful show, The Angry Video Game Nerd, and you will notice at least one of these issues pop up. Despite how new the medium is to the world, we’ve already managed to discover ways in which to base a product’s quality.

I have a personal philosophy of hating reviews. This isn’t to say I don’t understand the value or disrespect those who hold careers in the field. I just don’t enjoy relegating a piece of art’s quality to standards which vary based on who makes the decision to consume it. This exists in many mediums, but it seems to have more unfortunate implications within the video game industry. Large publishers will sometimes directly tie wages and benefits of smaller development teams to Metacritic scores. While this can be linked to larger capitalistic corruption which exists in any business, it serves to show just how toxic the culture can grow. In the end, much of what we define as a quality experience is being dictated by, at most, a little over a hundred people. That’s not even considering the amount of reviews which have been rendered completely useless due to changes made to a game after the fact, but more on that later.

Let’s wind the clock back to the 1980s, a time before I was born, but a time I’ve been familiarized with through excursions into the games seen released in the era. In 1982, Atari released one of the most infamous video games of all time in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, based on the movie of the same name. Much of the history of the game’s colossal failure has been documented, but the actual game rarely gets talked about on a more personal level. Sure, it had an egregious amount of funding thrown at licensing and production of cartridges, leading it to achieve flop status when it failed to move copies, but what does this say about the game’s quality? The game itself is typically critiqued as bad, but when you peel back the curtains to see why it is the way it is, you can see the roadmap to the game’s failure. Atari was spending far more money for licensing than was typical of movie-video game tie-ins. Executives were not excited about the idea, merely hoping to sell copies based on name alone, and the game’s lead designer, Howard Warshaw, was given less than six weeks to finish the project. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial shouldn’t be remembered for it’s quality as a game, but rather as a warning to how poor management of a project can result in the destruction of all involved.

But 1985 rolled around and some company called Nintendo released a game called Super Mario Bros. which you may have heard of. This game has the legacy of revitalizing the video game industry, pioneering a new type of game which would become the standard: finite experiences. Super Mario Bros. isn’t the first game to have such progression, where the player was working toward completing a story, but it had a profound impact in making this the norm. However, the true beauty of SMB, to me, is how well it’s managed to hold up. Any new player can jump into the game and immediately understand how it works, while also having some fun playing it. It’s been pretty played out by this point to refer to how World 1–1 is one of the most well-designed pieces of any video game, but damn if it isn’t true. Keep in mind, there wasn’t much to base level design off of at this point, because levels themselves weren’t really a commonality. The fact that they managed to knock so much out of the park on the first go could be seen as detrimental to the industry as a whole. Because when all we know is what is good, how can we discover what will be better?

If we compare Super Mario Bros., Castlevania, and Mega Man, we can see three games with extreme similarities and extreme differences. While all three are focused on horizontally pressing through a multi-screen area until you reach a goal, SMB was focused on movement, CV was focused on placement, and MM was focused on action. These are all platformers, but the ways in which one will need to play are totally different. I just happened to give examples of some games which managed to get their own formulas down, leading to decades of success. But the fact is, most video games created in this era simply couldn’t figure it out. It’s easy to make a game which draws similarities to Mega Man, but if the developer doesn’t understand the nuances of the physics, level design, enemy placement, difficulty scaling, music, etc. the game is not going to be held in the same regard. A common mistake of many “bad” games from the era was the use of the up button on the D-pad to control a jump. Now, when the game in question relies on precise movements, using the d-pad for a jump is not going to feel good. However, when the fighting game genre came around, designers realized that designated the up input to jumps allows the games to flow more naturally. Traditional fighting games still use this command. We figure out what works and what doesn’t work through this experimentation, and just because something worked for Super Mario Bros. doesn’t mean Contra can’t switch things up to create an equally pleasing experience. It’s sort of like how in horror films, a film like The Exorcist accomplished fear in a very visible way, but Jaws captured a similar level of fear by rarely letting the audience see what it is they’re afraid of.

And it is because of these bad video games that we can more roundly understand what does and doesn’t work. It’s crucial for designers to understand both the beautiful and ugly parts of the industry. the aforementioned Nintendo is notorious for delaying video games, allowing time for further polish perhaps learning from Atari’s mistakes. This effort to maintain a consistent quality is why Nintendo is still such a massive force in the industry, even when they lay an egg. When you dislike a Nintendo game, it’s almost always safe to say it isn’t because of technical issues or unrealized concepts. Even something as despised as 2015’s Star Fox Zero was the result of Nintendo wanting to innovate, rather than haphazardly throwing something out on the market.

Which, I suppose, finally brings me to the main point of this essay. Bad video games in the 2010s are different from bad video games in 1980s. To sum up why this is, I’m gonna give you a short example using a game called Silver Surfer, released in 1990 based on the comic book character of the same name. This game is a disaster on many levels. It’s a shooting game with both vertically and horizontally-scrolling sections, a type of genre notorious for producing some of the most challenging video games of all time. But the designers of Silver Surfer didn’t understand the natural flow of how these games use their difficulty to create a rewarding system. Instead, it loaded the screen with death traps, most of which the player is unable to see coming, resulting in a game more about memorization than skill. It is notoriously known as one of the most supreme examples of failed game design, resulting from a group of people that unfortunately didn’t understand the nuances behind how a shoot ’em up should naturally flow. It also has this:

Tim Follin is by no means a household name, but among circles of fans who appreciate video game music, the guy is a bit of a legend. I’m not going to try and discuss whether the song above is any good, as music is gonna be different for everyone. What I will argue, however, is just how much work had to be put into this song. Follin worked his ass off pushing the limited NES soundchip to it’s limits, designing a multi-structured song composed of beeping noises which can easily be recognized as coherent music in each segment. While it’s easy to chalk up Follin’s work as wasted given the legacy of the game featuring it, I feel it serves more to highlight the fact that this game was not designed with the purpose of being the frustrating mess it was. I have no doubts the team was attempting to create something to engage and reward the audience, because there are pieces to suggest so. Development studio Acclaim Manchester went on to have a moderately successful library of games, unfortunately culminating in closure in the mid-2000s.

I specifically make the point of stating Silver Surfer being designed with good intentions, because I don’t feel this has been occurring in the past few years. For example, let’s look at 2017's Star Wars Battlefront II. This was a game which actually ended up being bad enough for global governments to push for illegality. That’s only a slight exaggeration too. We saw the game release at the height of the loot box craze running through the industry, invented within the mobile market and popularized by Overwatch, which functioned as extraneous purchases which gave players a random chance of acquiring what they wanted to receive. There was huge controversy prior to Battlefront II surrounding loot boxes, but the publishers siphoning them into the game had been smart enough to avoid allowing the mechanic to play a notably important role in progression. But EA instructed DICE to create a game with the purpose of taking advantage of this craze in an effort to make more money than the base game could alone. Through tying various upgrades to help in competitive combat, as well as stunting it’s leveling system to be a brutal slog without the help of these loot boxes, Star Wars Battlefront II didn’t feel like a game developed with the intentions of creating a good product. It feels like a business model that gamers didn’t want to engage with, hence the bad review scores and insane backlash. The game almost singlehandedly squashed the momentum of the loot box craze, and created a level of dissonance between industry of fans which was unprecedented. We were surely never going to see another game designed with such disregard to quality.

…Then Fallout 76 happened…

As you may have assumed given the iconic Brotherhood of Steel helmet I chose to cloak this particular essay, I am one of the many people who finds pleasure in dunking on Bethesda for putting it on shelves. In the mere year since it’s release, Fallout 76 has amassed a number of criticisms from how much of a mess the product ended up being to Bethesda’s sheer flippancy in engaging the community it made money off of. Fallout 76 was put out for purchase as an unfinished product. I don’t even want to skirt around this for the sake of fairness. It is abundantly clear Fallout 76 wasn’t finished, as Bethesda released the game under the pretension of adding to the game to make it a complete product years down the line.

The live service craze is one which has been around for a very long time, operating under the impression of a game adapting and growing as years go by. This is a way to keep games which thrive off of playerbase remaining fresh, so that said playerbase can remain stable enough to support the game. A key part in designing a game with these intentions, however, is to create something which can initially draw people in so that this plan can unfold. As much as I hate to give them credit for things, Blizzard didn’t just throw World of Warcraft on the market and maintain a playerbase because they had so much for the game in store. They created something which felt complete and built a following which is still going strong 15 years later. They did the same with Hearthstone and Overwatch. Bethesda didn’t want to put in that same effort when creating Fallout 76. Even before the game released, there wasn’t much talk about what Fallout 76 actually was, simply that it was going to follow this structure. This resulted in an absolute embarrassment for the once universally respected developer. Much like Star Wars Battlefront II, Fallout 76 doesn’t feel like an attempt and failure at creating something great. It, again, feels like a business model which gamers didn’t want.

Is it fair to say these two games were designed to be bad? Probably not. I am well aware of the dichotomy between executives who make decisions and the development team who abides regardless. But I can’t see a passion in these games. Silver Surfer is probably worse than both, but I can view each part individually and see some creative spark within it. When I look at either of these games in their base forms, I just can’t see it. While it may be unfair to say they were designed to be bad, I do think it’s fair to say they weren’t designed with passion. And that’s where I feel “bad” video games of opposite eras are different. Deigning a game pleasurable to audiences and critics alike has almost become a science at this point, so games which fail to hit that are usually either making the effort to shake up the formula of a respective genre, or they simply don’t work on the level a video game should. I believe it’s safe to say both Star Wars Battlefront II and Fallout 76, in their base forms, fall into the latter camp.

Now, I specify the base forms for a reason. I mentioned much earlier how review scores can become useless over time, and it’s precisely because of the model both of these titles operate under. Do you remember No Man’s Sky? It was a game which received an absurd level of hype based on what was promised and unfortunately unable to deliver upon once it got rushed out to market. While it wasn’t necessarily a bad game depending on who you ask, there’s no denying it was a disappointing one. But two years after it’s release, the game received a massive patch which completely changed the structure of the game to the point where the base form is almost unrecognizable (So I’m told at least, I’ve never played). If you ask anyone who currently plays No Man’s Sky, you’ll here almost universal positivity surrounding it. It took two years, but NMS transformed from a disappointing game to a genuinely well-regarded one.

I bring this up because, as much as I’ve railed on them, these games still have a playerbase, and are still updating to fix problems addressed by the community. Hell, I think Battlefront II is actually decently regarded nowadays. The point is, who’s to say that the plan behind releasing these games as the mess they were won’t pan out? There’s a big discussion to be had on the fragility on this art form, as well as the integrity which goes along with making such significant changes, but it only furthers the notion of how different “bad” video games have become. We have the technology to fix our video games, and that’s a bit scary to think about when it comes to the future of game development. Though I suppose all that truly matters is whether or not companies learn from the mistakes we’ve seen them make. As of this writing, this remains to be seen.