by Peter Berger on July 11, 2006

Robert Altman opens his intricate ensemble film, The Player, in an audacious way. It’s witty, self-referential, and utterly bewildering. The camera winds and wends its way through a Hollywood back lot, picking up snippets of conversation. The shot lasts 8 minutes, without a single cut. The camera keeps returning to a studio executive’s office window, where you can hear producers being asked to pitch their movie “in 25 words or less.” Self-referential material like this is difficult to pull off well. If you manage it, you’re a genius, but if you don’t, you just look self-absorbed.

The pitch for Game Tycoon, in 25 words or less is: “Develop a company to publish video games during the 1980s.” When I heard the pitch, I immediately said to myself “I have to see this game. It’s either going to be completely brilliant, or it’s going to fall flat on its face.”

Sadly, Game Tycoon is not completely brilliant.

What is so striking about Game Tycoon is the sense of missed opportunity. This is not a sloppy game. It is clear that a lot of thought and care went into developing it. The character designs are quirky, cartoony, and pleasant to contemplate. The art and music assets are enjoyable. Apart from some long load-time issues, the game seems to be very well crafted. The problem isn’t in the workmanship, but in the design. As Gertrude Stein said about Oakland, California, “There is no there there.”

Economic simulation games – “Tycoon games” nowadays – go back to the dawn of home computing. But the genre hit its stride, in the form of a workable formula, with Sid Meier’s seminal 1990 game, Railroad Tycoon. What that game brought to the table was the idea that a tycoon game had to be more than just numbers. It had to have style, it had to have a sense that you were progressing in several dimensions at once, and it had to keep you on your toes. Once a game was underway, there were comparatively few moments when you actually just sat around and waited for something to happen. Either you were busy or you were losing.

In Game Tycoon you will spend a lot of time waiting around in a sparsely populated world. Here’s a typical session. Design an engine by picking its features from a list of check boxes. Go to the local university and hire programmers, artists, and designers. These employees consist of a name on an index card, along with a salary cost and two ratings; that’s all you ever see of them. Go back to your office and assign the workers to their tasks. Then you make time go quickly for two months or so. Once you have an engine, you can design a game by pressing some buttons. Wait for 4 more months. Go to the print shop, duplicate the game, get a publishing deal if the game is good enough, and then wait several months to see how it sells. You can buy advertising to help your product sell. If you make money, you can buy nice furniture from a catalog.

This is, in other words, a simplified project management game. You create a simplified Gantt chart and shepherd the product to completion. As a self-referential work, the game falls flat here. The Player works because you can imagine the characters pitching (and making) their own movie. You cannot, however, imagine anyone using Game Tycoon to make the game Game Tycoon. The game is too functional, too narrow, too focused on mechanics to the exclusion of frivolity. Apart from the jaunty art direction, there is a sense of playfulness.

Elaborating on this is important. The missed opportunity here is that the interesting part of developing software isn’t in creating a Gantt chart, it’s in designing that which the Gantt chart is used to build. The user interface Game Tycoon uses to create a new game feels perfunctory, almost tacked on. Compare this to the ship design UI in Galactic Civilizations II. You could spend an hour tweaking and customizing your ship so that it looks pretty. This has no functional impact on the game whatsoever, but it adds a degree of vitality and verisimilitude to the finished product that can’t be accomplished merely through cute character animation. If you give players an opportunity to breathe life into your sim game, they will reward you with love and devotion. Game Tycoon will not inspire a legion of devoted fans.

It is unreasonable to expect a small game developer to be all things to all people. Nonetheless, the overall feel I get from Game Tycoon is that they had the talent and motivation to produce something fun, but they focused on the wrong aspects of play during the design phase, and so squandered the opportunity. Ironically, this is exactly the sort of failure that can’t happen in Game Tycoon. In that world, as long as you pick a popular genre and hire hard workers, you’re guaranteed a degree of success. But the challenges of game design are subtler than that. I really wanted to like Game Tycoon. Given the level of polish in many aspects of the game, I’m sure the developer’s future efforts will be worth playing. This one just doesn’t have the spark.

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