Difficulty Design
Balancing challenge and accessibility
Difficulty design is the choice of how hard a game is and who can change it. The sources here run from the arcade trade's "easy to learn, hard to play" rule and the Atari VCS difficulty switches to GoldenEye's objective-changing modes and The Lost Levels.
Difficulty design is the choice of how hard a game is, for whom, and who gets to change it. The sources held here show the arcade trade discussing it as a business problem in 1983, Atari building two difficulty switches into the VCS console in 1977, and by the late 1990s difficulty modes that change a level’s objectives, a “catch-up” option in a racing game, and a Japanese release sold abroad as the hard version.
Fast facts
- “Easy to learn, hard to play”: the arcade trade’s rule of thumb, as reported in 1983.
- Earliest “difficulty curve” here: Videogaming and Computer Gaming Illustrated, July 1983, on Gottlieb’s Reactor and Q*bert.
- Console difficulty switches: Atari VCS, 1977 — “Amateur (B)” and “Pro (A)” in the programmer’s guide.
- Modes that change objectives: GoldenEye 007 (1997): Agent, Secret Agent, 00 Agent.
“Easy to learn, hard to play”
In July 1983 Videogaming and Computer Gaming Illustrated explained why Gottlieb’s Reactor had underperformed. “Veteran players and industry insiders blame the machine’s middling success on what is termed the ‘difficulty curve’. Reactor, simply, was too hard a game to learn. It took too many quarters to get the hang of it. That alone would not scare away the dedicated player, but the machine’s kiss of death was that it became too easy to play once that first hurtle was overcome.” The rule it broke: “The schematic for a successful machine is ‘easy to learn, hard to play.’” Gottlieb “reversed the difficulty curve on Q-Bert, their greatest success so far. It is instantly obvious what the player has to do there, but it becomes increasingly difficult to play, involving the player all the more and inspiring him/her to keep trying.”
The same article has Midway’s Stan Jarocki on the other constraint. The company’s 1978 Shuffleboard and Bowling Alley “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.”
Space Invaders (1978) is the early model of a curve built into the mechanics. As Retro Gamer described it: “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.” Tomohiro Nishikado recalled that when Taito showed the game to the trade, “operators felt the Invaders’ attacks made the game too difficult, but they were also a lot older than the game’s players.”
Operators had their own controls. On Midway’s US Galaga, “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” — a feature Midway tried on Wizard of Wor, Solar Fox and Omega Race too, and dropped.
The console switch
The Atari Video Computer System shipped with difficulty as a hardware control. The 1977 owner’s manual: “Your Console Unit has two difficulty switches. Each marked A and B, In all cases read your Instruction Booklet for full details of the options these switches give you.” The 1980 manual explains what they were for: “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.”
To the program they are two bits of port B, read at SWCHB: “0 = Amateur (B), 1 = Pro (A)” for each player, in the 1979 Stella Programmer’s Guide. What the bit does is up to the cartridge — the manual’s “other functions” — which is why the switch labels are letters rather than words.
Modes that change the game
By the mid-1990s a difficulty setting could alter what a level asks of the player. N64 Magazine’s 1997 review of GoldenEye 007 (Rare): “there are three difficulty modes — 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, “each has a different final level”, opened “a new, super-difficult mode”.
Rubber-banding — computer opponents that speed up when behind — appears in the same period as a switchable option. Nintendo Power’s 1998 coverage of Midway’s Cruis’n World on the Nintendo 64 notes that its multiplayer mode “also features an opponent catch-up option”.
Harder by region
Japan’s Super Mario Bros. 2 (1986) reached North America in 1993 inside Super Mario All-Stars, renamed The Lost Levels. Nintendo Power reported it from the Summer CES as “the incredibly challenging Lost Levels”, and its review warned: “It’s known as SMB 2 in Japan, but is finally here in North America to challenge the very best players.” “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.” A game judged too hard for one market became, seven years on, the compilation’s selling point for its best players.