Taxonomy of Virtual Spaces
Many of my previous posts have focused on the "Filmation" aesthetic style as an example of a spatial paradigm in digital games.
This post is an exploration toward evaluating another paradigm through the evolution of "cute" or "cartoony" games, with their genesis in the late 1970s and evolution through the 1980s.
Cutie Q
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| Cutie Q screen shot |
Cutie Q (Namco, 1979) was the third title in Toru Iwatani's Gee Bee series, preceded by Gee Bee (1978) and Bomb Bee (1979). The Gee Bee games were inspired by Breakout (Atari, 1976) which had kick-started arcade game popularity in Japan in a way that Pong (Atari, 1972) and its clones never had. The Gee Bee series mixed block-breaking gameplay with pinball and pachinko aesthetics, featuring interactive items on the playfield like pop bumpers, spinners, and rollover targets. Cutie Q is the first to feature cute characters in the game, such as pink ghost "minimon," yellow "walkmen," happy/unhappy faces, and characters on the rainbow-colored blocks.
Earlier arcade games had featured recognizable characters that were more than simple paddle, car, tank, or rocket ship shapes (such as TV Basketball (MIdway, 1974), Western Gun/Gun Fight (Taito/Midway, 1975), and Circus (Exidy, 1977)). Tomohiro Nishikado's Space Invaders (Taito, 1978) aliens are recognizble as different sea creatures (octopus, crab, and squid). However, none of these earlier characters would be considered to be "cartoony" or "cute" (although the crab space invader is generally considered to be "the cute one").
Cutie Q is probably the earliest example of a "character game"* with intentionally cartoony and cute (it's right there in the name) figures. This concept served as direct influence on Iwatani's next game with Namco, Pac-Man.
Cutie Q Visuo-Spatial Analysis: The game screen emulates an orthographic view of a bagatelle-style playfield, but there is no real sense of gravity to understand which way is "down." The player could be looking down at a plan view of the playfield (like a pinball machine) or across at an elevation view (like a vertically-mounted pachinko machine). The character images are shown in orthographic front and side elevation views, the best way to show character details on a tiny 16 x 16 one-bit-per-pixel (1BPP, i.e. a two-color palette) sprite. The game has a sense of continuous 2-D game space limited to a single screen (fixed frame).
* The term "character game" is also a term used for Japanese "simulation games" (what we call board-and-counter wargames in the west) that are based on manga and anime series. For more on this topic, you should see my other blog for articles and translations I've made of various Japanese sci-fi and anime games (and one German one).
Pac-Man
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| Pac-Man screen shot |
Iwatani's next game, Pac-Man (Namco, 1980) abandoned ball-and-paddle gameplay for the relatively untapped genre of maze games (preceded by few examples like Gotcha (Atari, 1973) and The Amazing Maze Game (Midway, 1976)). Pac-Man is similar to car racing game Head On (Sega, 1979), which is about driving over and clearing the screen of "lane markers" (dots) in a maze of roads before an opponent car can run into you.
Pac-Man, of course, replaces the act of driving with eating as the titular character devours his way through each maze. Bonus point edibles include fruits like cherries, strawberries, and oranges, their graphics reminding the player of "fruit machine" (a.k.a. slot machine) reel images. Pac-Man is pursued by four ghostly, large-eyed monsters that look like they evolved from Cutie Q's pink minimons. Pac-Man features a technical leap past Cutie Q's graphics capabilities: the multicolored monsters and bonus items feature two-bit-per-pixel (2BPP, 4 colors, including transparency) sprites. Iwatani designed his monsters to be "cute," with big expressive eyes that look ahead in the direction they are moving.
The game also included some of the first "cutscenes" seen in a digital game.
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| Pac-Man first intermission |
Pac-Man includes three intermissions that play after mazes 2, 5, and 9. These are short and humorous "cartoons" that reward the player with short breaks between rounds. This is further evidence of bringing visuals from animation into digital games.
Pac-Man Visuo-Spatial Analysis: The game screen emulates an orthographic plan view of a maze (not unlike a hedge maze) seen from overhead. It could be argued that the maze is seen from the side, but the lack of gravity that pulls to the bottom of the screen (this is not a platformer) and similarity to overhead driving games like Head On support a view from above. The character images are shown in orthographic front and side elevation views, much like in Cutie Q. This creates an incongruity between characters and their environment, one that I wrote about before (see the Orthographic Projection section). The game has a sense of continuous 2-D game space limited to a single screen (fixed frame) with a cylindrical topology (characters may move directly from one edge of the maze to the other by using the side tunnels).
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