Cope

I’ve been in San Francisco. Not for GDC, which as far as I can tell exists only to provide column-inches for excitable bloggers, but for the wedding of Derek Pearcy, the former editor of Pyramid magazine, Origins Award-winning designer of In Nomine, and the man who did all the visual design for the original edition of my game The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Derek is a bigtime Good Soul, and I wish him and his bride extraordinary levels of happiness together.

But this isn’t about Derek, Munchausen or GDC, it’s about in-flight entertainment systems.

If you’ve not travelled longhaul in recent years you’re probably still aware of the introduction of seat-back screens giving each passenger a choice of media to watch, but you may not know that most of them now have a selection of games to play. Virgin, one of the pioneers in this area, used to list 35 old NES games including F-Zero, Doctor Mario, Mah Jong, one of the Bonk games (though I thought those were all PC Engine) and an early Zelda, and those flights to and from Chicago used to zip by.

I hadn’t flown Virgin for a while, so when in November I booked our honeymoon flight to Costa Rica I did so with one eye to seeing what the games on the new V:Port IFE system (based on the Matsushita MAS3000 entertainment system) were like. It’s an update, yes, but hardly an improvement. The video-on-demand delivery is fantastic, with a library of films. The games are pretty much…. I suspect someone at Virgin went to a conference much like GDC and sat in on a session—just one—on casual gaming. Then they went back to the office, phoned Nintendo’s agents and cancelled their contract, then hired a bunch of hacks to do Flash-based colour-saturated knock-offs of every casual game they’d ever heard that people liked, via a half-hour research trip to Yahoo! Games.

So we have 15 titles: the Tetris-alike, the Solitaire, the mini-golf, several trivia quizzes (three of them networked across the aircraft but all of them painfully slow), and variants of Pacman (‘Cave Crunch’ my arse), Backgammon, Hangman, all image-heavy and under-playtested. There is Battlemail Kung-Fu, which Virgin has the cheek to claim was created for them, and a Who Wants To Be A Millionaire thing, but the rest are generics. I can’t find any solid information on which alleged ‘developer’ created these titles but I seem to recall it was some crew of jokers called Snap2, of whom I hoped never to hear again.

And I didn’t, until I stepped onto this BA flight. Here is the same Snap2 plus, unless my memory plays me false, many of the same games, only without the occasional flashes of originality in the Virgin line-up. Here’s the whole maudlin list of BA game titles:

• Backgammon
• Blackjack
• Chinese solitaire
• Crossword
• Hangman
• Keno (American for ‘bingo’)
• Poker
• Professional Gold Digger (Space Panic with atrocious level design)
• Reversi
• Slots
• Solitaire

Depressing, isn’t it? What’s more, if you’re in Economy (which I was, as I’m flying on my own pocket rather than, say, the BBC’s—perhaps some of my friends at the BBC can tell me if the selection is any better up front) the games aren’t playable as the handset is fixed into the arm of your seat, not detachable like the Virgin ones which you can hold like a joypad. So the D-pad is 90-degrees out. Mind you, the control-keys and the 2002 copyright date might make one suspect ‘Professional Gold Digger’ wasn’t developed specifically with BA’s in-flight platform in mind.

(A little Googling suggests that Snap2 no longer exists—its former website is squatted—and its game assets are now owned by a company called NTN Buzztime Inc.)

Part of me is happy that games are seen as a standard component of an adult-oriented entertainment package. The rest of me is furious that these cut-price, outdated, badly implemented knock-offs are considered good enough. I am not exaggerating when I say that the games that came free on your phone are better designed and more enjoyable than any of the titles I’ve listed above. They are without exception shit.

What makes me doubly angry is that this is symptomatic. We’re living at a time when large parts of the games industry is acting with utter disregard to its history and heritage. The PS3 will be released in Europe without the hardware emulation to allow old PS and PS2 games to run natively on it. If you want to transfer game-saves from your Xbox to yout Xbox 360 you will need to buy $70 of Datel kit to do it—and even then you may not be able to play them because like the PS3, it does its emulation in software and many great titles won’t run on it. Nintendo offers arcade classics for download on the Wii but they’re not the originals, they’re the NES or PC Engine ports.

There is a huge wealth of gaming history out there, fantastic titles as playable and enjoyable today as they were when they were released. The Wii Virtual Arcade, the retro titles on Xbox Live Arcade and the continuing releases of retro collections from Atari, Taito, Midway, Sega and others shows that the market for great games of this vintage is far more than just nostalgia or curiosity. They might not fit the current niche-definitions of ‘casual games’ but these titles are more accessible and more stimulating than any of the current offerings. Yes, the graphics may be primitive but I have found that if the gameplay is strong enough then people will still play them. And if BA gave you a choice between Chinese Checkers and Chuckie Egg, which would you play? Which would you replay?

BA’s current seat-back entertainment system is, it must be said, last-gen. Virgin’s V:Port is delivering video-on-demand, so there’s clearly some actual processing power within each individual unit, and apparently their next-gen system, due to roll out later in 2007, puts a mini-PC into each seat-back. In the hands of a content manager with wits and imagination that opens the door to emulators for 8- and 16-bit machines, enough processing power to run a fair proportion of today’s indie games, Flash, demo levels of new titles, and more. They could talk to the likes of PopCap to put Bejewelled onto the system: best-selling games to complement the obligatory blockbuster movies two channels over. Not to mention that the games could be updated every month, like the other content in the system.

But I’m prepared to bet that won’t happen—not in a culture that thinks its customers are going to be happy with rubbish versions of over-played ‘classics’ and wonky controllers. They’ve given no thought to their games offerings for five years, so why should we think that’s going to change in the next five?

(More information on Virgin Atlantic’s in-flight systems can be found here, if you really want to know.)

Filed under: commercial, game design on March 14th, 2007