> Computing used to be constrained as well. I love this story about the development of the Atari 2600 game Pitfall. Most of the game's design was a clever set of choices to get something fun working on the limited hardware designed to run Pong.
Has anyone actually tried to play Pitfall! lately? It is, like, a pretty bad and un-fun game, doesn’t hold up as well as pong or pac-man at all. I think it was impressive at the time because it was at the limit of what the system could do.
It seems like a counter example to the thesis of the piece IMO. I get the idea that constraints can become part of the design and you get interesting ideas. But in this case, Pitfall! just does it’s best to mitigate the constraints and becomes a worse version of every successor that was made after the limitations were cleared.
> We will only have settings that fit on one screen.
But, like, please don’t actually remove all the setting, that’s annoying.
Pitfall requires you to be willing to get a pencil and paper out to map it, and carefully track that underground, each screen change is three above-ground screen changes. (Which, mercifully, is documented in the manual: https://www.gamesdatabase.org/media/system/atari_2600/manual... ) The real game is trying to explore and plan a route to collect all the treasures in under the time limit.
This is an explanation, not any sort of moralization. I'm completely unwilling to expend this amount of effort on a game either. Old school dungeon crawlers need the same thing, so most of those are pretty difficult to get into even if they are good in the abstract. I don't mind a modern game working like Etrian Odyssey and creating a hybrid map making system but pencil & paper is not something I'm interested in.
I think Pitfal holds up much better than pong especially in how single player games evolved. There’s some nuance that’s easy to miss, such as the player’s score getting penalized for actions that don’t kill them. The manual provides both the number of treasures and the max possible score, so it’s got a meaningful end goal. https://atariage.com/manual_page.php?SystemID=2600&ItemTypeI...
There’s basically 3 levels in how players should approach the game. Basic mechanics which aren’t that difficult, but time pressure and trying to remember a rough and there’s a meaningful challenge. Exploration/ Routing, options are limited but exist so you need to discover and remember the games layout. The correct route crossing over your starting position also means you can explore significantly further than an optimal run. And finally actually putting together a run without hitting 20 minutes or 3 deaths to find all 32 treasures.
Put it together and you’ve got a basic but perfectly playable game someone could sink a lot of time into even 40 years after release.
I think one of the best constrained system was the original GameBoy. It was voluntary conceived to be cheap and basically impossible to program without hacking it. Hell, there wasn’t even enough memory to hold an entire screen frame.
Interestingly, there were really few bad games on the GameBoy. I think that was because you were forced to invest more than money to create a game. Getting more people wouldn’t help you to get it done, your only solution was to have a smart team who would be capable of working through the insane constraints.
I disagree with there being few bad game boy games. Most of them were shockingly bad at the time, and have aged worse IMO. What there was was a few absolute diamonds that set up some incredible sequels.
Also the system had a quite good lifespan, so there was a long time for gems to show up. And, probably, the designers also became accustomed to the limitations and learned how to design around them well.
Plus, we were kids sitting in the back seat of cars and on busses… the nostalgia factor is real, not hard to beat activities like “staring out the window” or “annoying your sibling.”
Yup, the issue with constraints is that if there is any pressure at all you'll end up trying to squeeze as much as possible within them which makes the design space harder to work in. Technology constraints in particular excite a specific kind of programmer and sometimes lead to worse games because it becomes hard to work on the actual game itself.
> Has anyone actually tried to play Pitfall! lately? ... I think it was impressive at the time because it was at the limit of what the system could do.
I'd argue Solaris is, by far, much more impressive than pitfall.
Surprised he used the Jaws example when the clearest case of what he is talking about is what I refer to as the Tragedy of George Lucas.
The first star wars trilogy, but especially the first movie, was extremely budget constrained to the point where Lucas had to exchange his own salary for merchandising rights (an accidentally brilliant move), and they did the best with what they had. decades later, he decides that now he has the budget to make them the way he really wanted to, he goes and makes major changes with CGI and destroys the original copies, which can only really be found in unaltered digital form on underground sites.
Then the prequels come and it's very obvious he had unlimited budget and creative control, and the result just simply was not even close to good, or at the very least not even close to the magic of the original trilogy. Giving creators unlimited control seems to have great capacity to end very poorly.
I'm going to go on record and say that the Tragedy of George Lucas started in ROTJ. Watching it for the first time in a while a few years ago, the Gonk Torture scene[1] was where my switch flipped. That scene is just a callout to the looped animatronics in the line at Star Tours --- does bad looped robotic torture add anything, or did Lucas put it in because nobody would tell him no. I think ROTJ is also where Lucas started becoming dependent on chroma key (although he had used it before). Some of the chrome keyed scenes are groundbreaking effects wise, and that's neat, but it takes away from immersion.
The prequel trilogy has so many scenes that feel sterile because the actors are clearly separated from the backdrop. It's hard to feel like the actors are in a desert wasteland when they don't even look warm.
I think this scene does add something, which is showing how scary this environment is to droids as R2 and C3pO are walking in. It shows it quickly, efficiently, without having to use dialogue on it. It takes ~15 seconds, and also has the fun side-effect of being a cute easter egg to anyone who went to star tours.
I think it's a rare example of a good easter egg because it still communicates something important to the scene without just feeling like it's there for a nod or reference.
> and also has the fun side-effect of being a cute easter egg to anyone who went to star tours.
I don't think that was an explicit callout to Star Tours -- which opened at Disneyland years after RotJ came out (1983 and 1987). If anything, the easter egg went the opposite direction!
>The prequel trilogy has so many scenes that feel sterile because the actors are clearly separated from the backdrop. It's hard to feel like the actors are in a desert wasteland when they don't even look warm.
Ah, that’s it! That perfectly encapsulates why the prequels felt so off.
Did you ever consider that all "magic" was people watching kid movies as kids and that it never was great? Like, nostalgia.
I think that comparatively to the market Star Wars was ahead of it's time, 50 years ago. But now we just tell way better actlual Sci Fi stories, which are not child oriented movies with lots of funny costumes and simple rags-to-hero plot?
> Then the prequels come and it's very obvious he had unlimited budget and creative control, and the result just simply was not even close to good, or at the very least not even close to the magic of the original trilogy. Giving creators unlimited control seems to have great capacity to end very poorly.
I hear this a lot, but the prequel plots had a great deal more politics, intrigue and a bevy of nuanced characters. The originals were pretty black and white in comparison. I think the prequel plots have aged better.
The prequels are truly awful. Some people (not me) say there's no accounting for taste but liking the prequels is as close as you can get to an objectively wrong opinion about art.
The best thing you can say about the prequels is that they're ambitious. Lucas wasn't content to repeat himself. But the acting, characters, and script are all complete failures.
The first Star Wars movie is indeed an example of "compromised visions are superior". The movie was famously saved in editing by George Lucas' then wife. Lucas didn't even direct the second and third movies, he handed them off to more capable filmmakers.
Thanks for pointing this out! I oft like to quip that george lucas’s successes are often attributed to the people around him that stopped him from his worst impulses.
Once a movie's defence involves it having "politics" that is a bad sign - even a 3-hour movie isn't really long enough to give politics a treatment that is interesting; the storytelling is too turgid. Game of Thrones seasons 1-3 had politics, intrigue and a bevy of nuanced characters and showcased why something like the Star Wars prequels didn't really work. A good political story needs to be long and gritty and requires an inspired writer with a deep grasp of social dynamics (Lucas fell down here pretty hard - if he had a better grasp of his own limitations he wouldn't have attempted to tell a political story).
And the politics of the prequel was uncomfortably black and white. "There is Good v. Evil and Evil Won At Politics!" is an approach with a frustratingly low-functioning level of emotional intelligence; that just isn't how interesting politics works. Part of what made GoT such a sensation was political storylines were done properly.
Did you get Mandela Effected here from an alternate universe where the movies described in the "What If the Prequel Trilogy Was Good?" videos actually got made?
Sorry, they just aren't. There are numerous breakdowns going into great detail why the plot is nonsensical and silly. This isn't even addressing the acting, which at times is so horrible it's laugh out loud funny (reportedly lucas only allowed actors to do single takes, although I'm not sure if that's ever been confirmed). From a cinematography standpoint, it's also kind of a mess, especially when you break down the absurd amount of shit he crams into nearly every single shot of the film.
The only reason they have appeared to have aged well is because they filled in a lot of the silliness and nonsense with quality content from other sources such as clone wars (which ended up being good) and comics, etc. to fill in the gaps.
It also helps them age a lot when you compare them to the latest trilogy, which I'm sure I don't even need to elaborate why that is.
For the record I still occasionally watch the prequels now, but when they came out, they were very poorly received and for good reason.
I think quite a lot comes from teenage nostalgia from whichever era you are from. The original trilogy is not actually all that good, but some people still talk about it as if those movies are the epitome of moviemaking. I think it has a lot to do with the circumstances that people first saw them in. The prequels are also not fantastic movies, but as the people who saw them in cinemas as children grew up they came to be loved more and more. It's not so much the movies themselves that are liked, but the associated memories.
I wonder if in ~10 years we'll have a new batch of people who like the latest trilogy. First ironically as they get through their edgy teenage phase, then unironically as they grow up further and point out some great scenes from between the (admittedly many) terrible ones.
The very first Star Wars ("A new hope") is fairly basic in plot, but with very good moments and no mistake.
The next two, especially the empire strikes back, are really good in their own right in terms of film-making artistry. They have the right tone, rhythm, imagery, scenography.
The best theatrical release since the original trilogy, IMO. I think part of it is because of how much gravity it imparts to the beginning of Episode IV. (And the other part is how objectively bad the prequel and sequel trilogies were.)
I honestly got bored with Rogue One. All standard plot points, nothing new, plus you know how it ends. I fell asleep midway through. Once you know the ending, the plot needs to have some twists and turns to stay relevant and interesting. One rogue scientist having the detailed design for the entire Death Star is a ludicrous premise. That thing's as big as a planet. Heck, no single scientist could tell you the detailed architecture for CERN or even the ISS for that matter, and those are significantly smaller in scale.
I like them, they’re better than most movies and pioneered digital cinematography. The sequels have less going for them due to their inherently contradictory nature from Disney’s mercurial production demands
I seem to have that reaction watching the originals. It's like watching a mix between a western and a soap opera, but set in space. Maybe it's because I watched the prequels first, then the originals.
At least we both agree that the Clone Wars (and associated material) is good.
A few generations have grown up with them now, which greatly elevates their status. It's not that unlike the original trilogy in that way. I can think of any number of films that I liked as a child, some hold up better than others, but even the ones that don't, the early impression creates a lasting fondness that is stronger than many of the flaws which more mature first-time viewers might not be able to look past.
Lucas wanted other people to direct the films, in his defense, nobody took him up on it. He had some inkling that maybe he shouldn't be directing the films, but he couldn't find a way to convince someone to take them on...
I suspect it was a combination of being intimidated by what was being proposed (prequels to some of the most beloved films of all time) and Lucas retaining creative control to a level other people felt like they couldn't really do it? Not sure. I'm sure when Lucas passes away we will learn a LOT more about the entire thing.
Yes exactly, they’re not in it for the money else they’d be chasing money instead of art. That’s why it’s so good; they’re willing to suffer for it. Money corrupts everything.
> Unfortunately, I don’t know how to convince others, especially those above me, that if I do less of the features they want, the product will be better, despite trying.
I think it boils down to the fact that this is nowhere near being an absolute irreducible truth. Sometimes if you don't do the features I want, the product will suck and I'm getting another product from someone who has something other than a ruthless asceticism as their only core value.
This reminds me of the excellent talk "Constraints Liberate, Liberties Constrain" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqmsQeSzMdw that is more about doing the programming rather than planning it as in the article, but with a similar approach.
I've always felt that engineering can best be described as "the art of compromise." The more you understand and embody this the more success your engineering projects will have.
This is very easy to achieve in "physical" engineering disciplines. It's remained an elusive idea in software engineering for whatever reasons.
Reasonable general advice. It's important though to evaluate the quality of the constraints we submit to. There is both incredible freedom and oppression in constraint. Hopefully the constraints you choose push in the former direction.
I kinda had similar thought: best inventions are made under constraints. You aren't going write a responsive app if framerate isn't a constraint. You aren't going optimize download sizes if you assume everyone has multi Gb Internet connection.
I also believe, but i have no proof, that setting limits on the scale of a country, will provide tangible benefits : for ex, assign a maximum allowed power consumption increase per year, and let the market figure it out.
The idea of being more creative by being limited reminds me of the journaling style solo TTRPG's.
I like to dabble in fiction writing, but give me a blank piece of paper and I freeze. With the journaling solo TTRPG's you are essentially given a list of prompts which are quite often set in a predefined world. Somehow by being forced to write a story with these prompts I can write so much more and far quicker then I could by staring at my own piece of paper.
Has anyone actually tried to play Pitfall! lately? It is, like, a pretty bad and un-fun game, doesn’t hold up as well as pong or pac-man at all. I think it was impressive at the time because it was at the limit of what the system could do.
It seems like a counter example to the thesis of the piece IMO. I get the idea that constraints can become part of the design and you get interesting ideas. But in this case, Pitfall! just does it’s best to mitigate the constraints and becomes a worse version of every successor that was made after the limitations were cleared.
> We will only have settings that fit on one screen.
But, like, please don’t actually remove all the setting, that’s annoying.