VR needs its ‘Space Zap’
On a recent trip to the historic arcade ‘Outlane’ in Zurich, I stumbled on Space Zap, an – extremely – simple shooter game from the early days of video games history. Outlane specialises on historic pinball machines, but they also have a few old video games on display. Among them some famous classics such as Asteroids, Breakout or Galaxian. During our visit, Unity 3D was holding their press conference on the upcoming release of Unity 5, which, among others, introduces a new lighting engine that churns out near-raytracing quality 3D graphics in real time; The buzz about HTC’s new VR Headset HTC Vive was flooding my twitter feed.
Ironically, I was totally absorbed with my game of Space Zap which was released in 1980 – 35 years ago (!) – by Bally Midway. It is a space themed shooter. One could even say that it was an early tower defense game. The gameplay is simple: You are the commander of a tower, which can shoot in 4 directions. Attackers hit from all four sides in rapidly increasing speeds and frequency. Your goal is to shoot all the waves of enemies and survive as long as you can in the hunt for the highest score. Controls are as simple as the game: One button to shoot, and four buttons to direct your laser cannons in the direction of the enemy. The game doesn’t even feature color: A rainbow-coloured transparency that was stuck on the screen turned the black-and-white graphics into an illusion of color.
Developers are building games with budgets higher than most hollywood movies, technology is able to fool us into believing that we’re in a place we are not by perfect lighting and VR technology; Yet, here a simple game of shooting somewhat spaceship-like looking ships is able to still get me excited. It shouldn’t surprise me: Fun is what games are about. And if everything works together in harmony, the technology sometimes doesn’t matter. Space Zap has perfectly adapted graphics that don’t distract from it’s key mechanic (the shooting of attackers), perfect controls (huge buttons) to accomplish the task, and a rhythm that makes it fun to play.
Now, that’s not to say that the Unity 3d game engine that is already revolutionising game development and virtual reality technology (which still has to prove itself) are not adding anything: Immersive open world experiences like Bioware’s Dragon Age series, or beautiful games like Monument Valley have mechanics that simply wouldn’t have been possible in the 80s. But, Virtual Reality technology still needs to mature and get one of those games that will still be fun to play in 35 years from despite being ridiculously outdated. And if I could take a guess, games like “Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes” could just be the type of game to be standing the test of time.
If you want to visit Outlane, please check out their website on outlane.ch. The arcade is open every last Thursday of the month, and has pinball machines dating back to the the early 1900’s up to their latest machine from 2015.
