In July 1983 Videogaming and Computer Gaming Illustrated explained why Gottlieb’s arcade game Reactor had managed only “middling success” while its Q*bert had become the company’s “greatest success so far”. The difference was what the magazine called “the ‘difficulty curve’”. Reactor “was too hard a game to learn. It took too many quarters to get the hang of it”, and then, worse, “it became too easy to play once that first hurtle was overcome. It was no longer a challenge.” With Q*bert, Gottlieb “reversed the difficulty curve”: “It is instantly obvious what the player has to do there, but it becomes increasingly difficult to play.” The rule the trade drew from it was short: “The schematic for a successful machine is ‘easy to learn, hard to play.’”
How hard a game should be, for whom, and who gets to change it, are the questions of difficulty design. In the arcade the answers were set by money. At home they became a switch on the console, a menu of settings, a game that watched the player and adjusted itself, and eventually a game whose director refused to offer any setting at all.
Hard enough to pay
An arcade game earns only while people keep feeding it, so its difficulty is a business decision. The same 1983 article gave Midway’s Stan Jarocki the other side of it. Midway’s 1978 Shuffleboard and Bowling Alley, he said, “were realistic sports games that played too long for twenty-five cents. Now that might not bother the player too much, but an arcade operator expects a fair return on his investment, so he doesn’t want a game that gives his patrons too much for their money.”
Too hard was a risk as well. When Taito showed Space Invaders in 1978, Tomohiro Nishikado told Retro Gamer, “the upper level sales staff and arcade operators felt the Invaders’ attacks made the game too difficult, but they were also a lot older than the game’s players.” Retro Gamer described the curve that won through as “wonderfully straightforward”: “the more aliens you blasted away, the faster the remainder of the pack moved; and when a wave was successfully defeated, the game served up a more challenging one.” The speed-up came from the hardware, which moved one invader per frame, so fewer invaders meant a faster march; the Space Invaders entry explains it.
Operators could also tune the machine they bought. On Midway’s American Galaga, Retro Gamer found, “operators can set a dipswitch whereby putting an extra credit in allows the player to play a single-player game with more ships, usually seven instead of the normal three.” Midway tried the same idea on Wizard of Wor, Solar Fox and Omega Race, “but it wasn’t popular and was soon abandoned, later to be replaced by proper continues.”
A switch on the console
The Atari Video Computer System made difficulty part of the hardware. Its 1977 owner’s manual pointed out the console’s “two difficulty switches”, each marked A and B, and sent players to each cartridge’s own instructions for what they did. The 1980 manual explained the usual idea: “In most cases, the LEFT and RIGHT DIFFICULTY switches are used to handicap more skillful players, Generally, Position A is more difficult than Position B. Some ATARI Game Programs may use these two switches for other functions.” By 1982 the manual gave a second use as well: evening out a two-player game, with the player on the left controller socket using the left switch and the player on the right using the right.
To the program, each switch is one bit. Atari’s 1979 Stella Programmer’s Guide lists them in port B, read at SWCHB ($282): bit 7 for player 1’s switch and bit 6 for player 0’s, each “0 = Amateur (B), 1 = Pro (A)”. The hardware only reports the switch; what “Pro” means is up to each cartridge’s program.
Games that adjust themselves
Some games stopped waiting for the player to choose. Compile’s Zanac, written for the MSX and later converted to the NES, changed its difficulty as it went. Wireframe describes how “the more efficiently the player collected power-ups and slaughtered enemies, the more brutally the game would respond.” Hardcore Gaming 101 notes that the MSX original showed the system on screen as “ALC” (“Automatic Level Control”), a hexadecimal number, and that the enemies it sent depended on the player’s weapon and even on “how fast you hammer the fire button”.
Racing games did the reverse for players who fell behind. Nintendo Power’s 1998 coverage of Midway’s Cruis’n World for the Nintendo 64 noted that its multiplayer mode “also features an opponent catch-up option”, a setting the player could choose. And previewing Factor 5’s Star Wars Episode I: Battle for Naboo in 2000, 64 Magazine reported that it “has a dynamic difficulty setting, which means the better you are, the harder the game gets.”
Settings that change the mission
By the late 1990s a difficulty setting could change what a level asks for, not only how hard the enemies hit. N64 Magazine explained GoldenEye 007’s three settings in 1997: “Agent, Secret Agent and 00 Agent”, which “ramp-up the skill you’ll need to complete the missions in two distinct ways. Firstly, on harder difficulty settings you might need to accomplish more in a level: neutralise all the alarms on level 1, for example, rather than just bungee jump down from the dam. Secondly, enemy reaction increases from one difficulty level to the next, as does their toughness: on 00 Agent level, only head shots can be guaranteed to put an enemy down and out.” Beating all three opened “a new, super-difficult mode”.
Too hard to export
Sometimes the difficulty setting was the whole country. Nintendo’s Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 (1986) was a harder remix of the first game, and the West did not get it. When it finally arrived in 1993, as The Lost Levels in the Super NES compilation Super Mario All-Stars, SNES Force explained the gap: “Considered too difficult for American and European games players, it was only released in Japan.” Nintendo Power now sold the difficulty as the attraction. It called the game “the show-stealer”, “finally here in North America to challenge the very best players”, and gave a warning: “This is your last chance to back out. Once you enter The Lost Levels, you won’t want to quit until you’ve rescued the Princess. This game is waaayy harder than the original SMB.”
Firm, but fair
Dark Souls (2011) went the other way from adjustable difficulty: there are no difficulty levels to choose. Its director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, told Edge before release that he had “no intention to make the game any easier”, and set his team a target: “we are trying to make the most difficult game that it is possible to make, which at the same time can be conquered by those who persevere. It has to be firm, but fair.”
He judged every obstacle against five criteria. “We want any player to be able to clear any obstacle simply by learning from mistakes and paying close attention. Then, the reasons for failure must always be clear and understandable. Every problem must have multiple solutions, so that players can tackle it in whichever way they want. The game’s controls can never be a factor from which difficulty is derived. And finally, we want to make sure that there’s the possibility for miracles to happen.” An obstacle that passed all five, he said, had “achieved the maximum level of difficulty, while retaining the necessary element of fairness”. His test player was himself: “I’m actually not very good at action games. Nonetheless, that makes me a good benchmark for creating something that anyone can complete with dedication.”
Players still found a setting of sorts. Dark Souls lets people leave messages in each other’s games, and Edge’s reviewer thought that the hints “undermine the dopamine rush of hard-fought epiphany”. “If Dark Souls has difficulty tiers,” the review decided, “there are just two: Insane (online with hint graffiti) and Teeth Gnashingly Impenetrable (offline).”
Sources
- Videogaming and Computer Gaming Illustrated, July 1983, “Arcadia: Raiders of the Lost Arcade”, p. 42 onwards: Reactor and the “difficulty curve”, “easy to learn, hard to play”, Q*bert, Stan Jarocki on Shuffleboard and Bowling Alley.
- Retro Gamer issue 117, August 2013, pp. 58–59, Stuart Hunt, “Invasion of the Coin Snatcher”, with Tomohiro Nishikado: the sales staff and operators, the Space Invaders difficulty curve.
- Retro Gamer issue 32, 2006: Galaga (arcade), Midway’s extra-ships dip switch and Wizard of Wor, Solar Fox and Omega Race.
- Atari, Video Computer System owner’s manual (1977): the two difficulty switches marked A and B.
- Atari, Video Computer System owner’s manual (1980): switches “used to handicap more skillful players”.
- Atari, 2600 owner’s manual (1982), “Difficulty Switches”: making a game harder for a skilled player or balancing two players; left socket, left switch.
- Steve Wright, Stella Programmer’s Guide (Atari, 1979), section 4.1, “Port B – Console Switches”:
SWCHBat$282, bits 7 and 6, “0 = Amateur (B), 1 = Pro (A)”. - Wireframe issue 25, October 2019, p. 50, “Developer Profile: Compile”: Zanac’s difficulty responding to the player’s skill.
- Kurt Kalata, “Zanac”, Hardcore Gaming 101 (web, secondary): the “ALC” indicator on the MSX version and what it responds to. https://www.hardcoregaming101.net/zanac/
- Nintendo Power issue 112, September 1998: Cruis’n World “opponent catch-up option”.
- 64 Magazine issue 41, June 2000: Battle for Naboo preview, “dynamic difficulty setting”.
- N64 Magazine issue 7, October 1997: GoldenEye 007 review, the three difficulty modes.
- SNES Force issue 4, October 1993, p. 34: Super Mario All-Stars, The Lost Levels “considered too difficult for American and European games players”.
- Nintendo Power issue 51, August 1993: Summer CES report, “the incredibly challenging Lost Levels”.
- Nintendo Power issue 52, September 1993: Super Mario All-Stars review, “the show-stealer”, “waaayy harder than the original SMB”.
- Edge issue 226, April 2011, pp. 51–57: “Soul Survivor”, Miyazaki on difficulty, “firm, but fair” and the five criteria.
- Edge issue 234, December 2011, pp. 106–108: Dark Souls review, the two “difficulty tiers”.