Ball

"When it is released, the game will automatically start"  --Ball instruction manual

Developer
Nintendo R&D1

Release Date
28th of April, 1980 (Japan)


I put a lot of thought into how best to begin this blog, I promise. How to strip away decades of accumulated cultural knowledge to see the original context of these games more clearly. How to transport the reader back to a time where even the simplest electronic amusement was a technological marvel. But then I settled on the game I would begin with, and realised that its title would say all this more emphatically in just four letters than I could ever manage.

Ball.

One word. One syllable. One immutable physical fact. Everything you need to know about how removed we are from the modern gaming industry is laid bare by the fact that the start of a whole new line of products, one of the year's most significant releases, could get away with a title as brazenly simplistic as Ball.

Yet in some ways there is no title more appropriate. Everyone has an innate understanding of what a ball is. For many of us, it is one of the very first toys we experience. We throw it, it bounces, and we laugh. A microcosm of cause-and-effect from which we start to grasp the physical laws of our Universe and find the joy within. And this is precisely what Ball had to do - introduce tentative players to the unknown laws of its own physical Universe.


The choice to base the very first Game & Watch title on the act of juggling is intelligent in this regard. By requiring players to track a moving ball, Ball subtlety emphasises that these games will represent movement as ticks between discrete LCD images. The goal of the game - don't drop the ball - is both naturally intuitive and immediately engaging, which makes it ideal for encouraging the game into new hands. And juggling is a natural blend of judgement, reflex, timing and multitasking - cognitive functions that will become defining staples of the Game & Watch range across its decade-long life.

Moreover, here we already have evidence of Nintendo as a developer that accepts the constraints upon their game and shifts its design to accommodate them. Tying the movement of the juggler's hands together works to both simplify input and raise the stakes. Separating the balls into just three distinct trajectories, and introducing challenge with unpredictable transition times, makes good use of the 72 image limit imposed by technological limitations. Even the pillars at the side of the screen are there to disguise LCD wiring that could not be hidden. For what is essentially a pilot device, Ball feels honed - refined both physically and psychologically.

Admittedly, the entirety of Ball is so trivial by modern standards that a game of similar complexity can be placed as an easter egg in a music player application in the built-in software of Nintendo's current portable system. But as the beginning of a line which would introduce many innovations that are still evident in that same system, Ball has significance and value beyond the surface that is well worth celebrating. The current staff of Nintendo would appear to agree, going to extraordinary lengths to accurately recreate the game in 2010 as a consumer loyalty reward.

I am not pretending that Ball was the first game of note Nintendo developed. But I could think of no better starting point for this blog than a game which simultaneously rings in a new philosophy of game design and the most exciting decade in the history of the industry. It really does mark the start of a whole new game.

Play ball.