I’m not much of a gamer, but I think Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell may have put his finger on what is often missing from mobile games – a lesson he last week told the Guardian many have yet to learn from the early arcade games.
“When you look at mobile and arcade gaming, they’re identical,” Bushnell says. “Mobile has some of the same game constraints for the player, and that ‘easy to learn, and difficult to master’ metric.” This common phrase is, as it happens, known as ‘Bushnell’s law’ – he first uttered it in 1971 while making his preliminary steps into the arcade business with seminal coin-op Computer Space.com
That lesson – dating back to the days when Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created Breakout for Atari – was something arcade games designers had to learn if they wanted to get people first to try a game and then to keep feeding in the coins …
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