Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 113)

Trigger Happy
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for each new Nintendo system in order to maximize
gameplay potential.
When I spoke to Richard Darling of British
developers Code-masters about what makes a game
“fun,” he echoed Paul Topping’s admiration of early
physics-based games such as Thrust: “You’re flying
that little space rocket around and you pick up a ball
and it’s on the end of a pole with a weight, and the way
it swings and the way your thrust and acceleration
affects the swing and the motion and everything is
extremely intuitive. It’s complex, but it’s intuitive.” But
more than that, according to Darling, Thrust was also
cybernetically clever:
The control system is deep—in that anyone can pick it up and
play it; you’ve got a thrust button and you rotate left and
rotate right. Now if that was move left, move right and move
forward, the gameplay would be extremely limited. But the
fact that what you’re actually doing is thrusting, which is
accelerating you, and you can rotate to any angle, and thrust
at any angle, means that the learning curve in becoming an
expert at the control system is very long.
That was true of Super Mario Bros as well. It seems like a
simple “press a button to jump, run left, run right” game,
but if you analyze it, you actually accelerated left