The recent discovery of a pristine copy of Too Much Johnson, a 1938 comedy from the seminal film director Orson Welles, is latest example of a lesser-known work to emerge from a well-known creative mind. The film, long thought to be lost to time and decay, is due to premiere in Italy in October and the chance to view a new and formative piece from a great director is enormously exciting to film buffs.
Nevertheless, Too Much Johnson is unlikely to have the same cultural impact and influence as Welles’ best-known film, Citizen Kane. For example, it’s tough to imagine second-rate video game critics gushing ‘Might this be the Too Much Johnson’ of video games?’ when reviewing the latest blockbuster (not least because so many video games are already the Too Much Johnson of video games). But it’s a useful reminder that, very often, the best-known creative people in any particular medium have a string of lesser-known works to their name.
Video game luminaries are no different in this regard. While the oeuvre of mega-star designers such as Super Mario’s Shigeru Miyamoto have been fully explored, there are many titles in the back catalogues of, say, Metal Gear Solid’s Hideo Kojima, Fable’s Peter Molyneux or Minecraft’s Notch that can be useful in understanding their personal creative journey and valuable on the game’s own terms. Here are ten of the best, most important, most interesting or most unusual lesser-known titles from some of the medium’s greatest names, as we go in search of the Too Much Johnson of video games.
Creator: Hideo Kojima
Best Known For: Metal Gear Solid
One of the only video games to require the use of a solar panel, Boktai is a game designed to inspire pasty-faced players to venture into the sun – a sort of gamification of, y’know, leaving the house. The add-on peripheral detects ultraviolet rays, converting them into in-game energy, which must be used as fuel for the protagonist’s solar-powered gun. Energy gathered while playing outside can be stored, and used to play the game during nighttime hours, like a virtual battery pack.
Despite appearances, there are similarities between Boktai and designer Hideo Kojima’s best-known series, Metal Gear Solid: both are built upon stealth principles, and both games employ light (or the absence of it) as a core consideration in their design. Dismissed by many as a novelty, Boktai is both stylish and substantial, a game that demonstrates Kojima’s inventive flair as a designer as well as a certain prejudice he appears to hold against those of us who live in cloud-blanketed England.
Creator: Markus Persson
Best Known For: Minecraft
Before Minecraft, the title that made Markus ‘Notch’ Persson a multi-millionaire, the Swedish designer worked on the fantasy MMO Wurm Online, a game still available to play for free on the web today. While the knights and castles theme and contemporary graphics may appear to have little in common with Notch’s best-known game, the similarities between both titles run deep.
Wurm Online is, like Minecraft, a Java game that allows players to alter the environment using shovels, as well as granting everyone the ability to make and introduce any in-game object into the world. Players can collaborate on creative projects and even battle one another en masse. The game also holds special significance for Notch as his father, who died last year, played it a great deal. “He was really proud of me for Wurm Online,” Persson recently said. “He made sure that I knew that.”
Creator: Sid Meier
Best Known For: Civilization
Launched quietly earlier this year, Ace Patrol is a World War II air-based strategy game from Sid Meier, one of the godfathers of American game design. While the mobile phone platform may appear to offer less scope for the kind of sprawling strategic nuance that Meier’s best known for, Ace Patrol’s knotted dogfight challenges confound and delight, as you take turns with the AI to move a squadron of fighter planes over various European theatres of war in a series of staccato but nevertheless tense skirmishes.
Released with 2K’s publisher backing, Ace Patrol is free-to-play, offering a number of missions to players gratis, but requiring that you pay to rescue downed pilots or to unlock new campaigns later on. Regardless of the underlying business model, Ace Patrol’s pedigree is evident from first touch.
Creator: Yuji Naka
Best Known For: Sonic the Hedgehog
In a reportedly amicable split Yuji Naka, creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, left Sega to set up his own studio, Prope in 2006. Two years later Let’s Tap launched as the developer’s first release, a curious minigame collection for Nintendo Wii in which players tap a cardboard box (bundled with the game in Japan and Europe, but not North America, where cardboard boxes are apparently in rude abundance) to participate in a range of minigames.
In one example, four players compete in a side-scrolling race across an obstacle course, using rhythmic taps to control the pace of the avatar’s jog, and a hard tap to trigger a jump. In another, players rap their fingers on the box in time with an on-screen musical stave in a rather budget approximation of Rock Band. Of course, remove the box gimmick and you have what is, essentially, a one-button minigame collection, but Let’s Tap succeeds through style and humour, demonstrating Naka’s ingenuity and capacity to find fun in the most seemingly mundane of places.
Creator: Keita Takahasi
Best Known For: Katamari Damacy
One of the video game medium’s true eccentrics, Keita Takahashi is best known for his surreal series, Katamari Damacy, in which you play as a tiny alien prince pushing a sticky ball around a variety of Japanese locations, rolling up modern living’s detritus. Tenya Wanya Teens is no less idiosyncratic, a party game in which two players race to be the first to perform a range of random on-screen actions, from shouting ‘I love you’ at a pretty girl, to successfully peeing into a urinal.
Played with a giant, multi-button controller, each of the game’s simple actions is tied to a different-coloured button on the controller. The joke is that the colours of the buttons change at random (by way of some clever in-button lighting), fooling your brain into pressing the wrong button at the most inopportune of moments. In this way you may cause your character to tell a urinal that he desperately loves it, or, worse still, pee on a pretty girl. An extraordinary if tragically scarce party classic.
Creator: David Jaffe
Best Known For: God of War
In an unlikely beginning for the creator of the PlayStation 2’s most gruesome action epic series, David Jaffe cut his teeth on a platform game starring Disney’s best-known mascot, Mickey Mouse. Contrary to Kratos, God of War’s endlessly vengeful fallen hero, the mania referred to in this game’s title isn’t mental illness, so much as a manic tour through 65 years of Mickey’s history.
Billed as the first game to employ Disney’s in-house animators, this was also one of the first games to revisit the character’s earliest work, with levels based upon classic cartoons such as 1928’s Steamboat Willie, 1947’s Mickey and the Beanstalk and 1990’s The Prince and the Pauper. As Jaffe’s first project in the video game industry, the lessons learned designing levels no doubt informed his later work in myriad, if unrecognizable ways.
Creator: Hironobu Sakaguchi
Best Known For: Final Fantasy
Hironobu Sakaguchi left Squaresoft, the company he helped defined, under a black cloud in 2004 following the release of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the most expensive animated movie yet made at that time, which lost the company tens of millions of dollars. It was no doubt a blow, but by then Final Fantasy’s creator had made his fortune, and retired to the comfort of a bronzed beach in Hawaii. Since then he has returned to game development and formed the studio Mistwalker, creators of Japanese RPGs such as Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey and, most recently, the Nintendo Wii’s The Last Story.
But it’s Sakaguchi’s iOS curio, Party Wave, that is his personal Too Much Johnson, a mobile phone game that pairs his favourite Hawaiian hobby, surfing, with the RPG designs for which he made his name. “Riding a wave is such a great feeling,” he explained last year. “At the same time, I like those moments when I'm waiting for a wave to ride. I get into a semi-meditative state and ideas start popping into my mind. Party Wave is my way of showing my gratitude to surfing, which has given me so much enjoyment.”
Creator: Peter Molyneux
Best Known For: Fable
Peter Molyneux remains Britain’s most eccentric and polarizing game designer. Considered by some to be a bald genius, others an infuriating charlatan, his career is nevertheless punctuated by some undisputed greats, including Populous, Dungeon Keeper and the Fable series. GeneWars is perhaps his least known creation, a Warcraft-esque real time strategy game in which your combat units must first be generated through genetic experimentation.
Visually similar to Bullfrog’s better-known games, Populous and Magic Carpet, GeneWars’ focus on experimentation and lab-base evolution could be later seen in Molyneux’s Black and White and even Wright’s Spore. As with so many of Molyneux’s projects, there is some debate over how much input he had into the game’s design (he is simply credited in the game as ‘management’) but regardless of the extent of his role in its creation, GeneWars bears unmistakable signs of his design influence.
Creator: Yoshio Sakamoto
Best Known For: Super Metroid
If Shigeru Miyamoto is Nintendo’s daytime mascot, a designer for all the family, Yoshio Sakamoto represents the darker side of the company’s output. The mind behind the Metroid series of science fiction puzzle platform games was, at least in his formative years, drawn towards murky, foreboding scenarios. Gumshoe, an NES title from the mid-1980s is no different. It features protagonist Mr. Stevenson, an ex-FBI agent turned private detective who must track down the Mafia boss, King Dom, who has kidnapped Stevenson's daughter, Jennifer.
But Gumshoe is a game that also demonstrates Sakamoto’s restless creativity, as a platformer that is controlled via a light-gun peripheral. Players must shoot Mr Stevenson in order to make him jump, as well as using its invisible bullets to clear obstacles that lay in the character’s path. One of the most curious genre mash-ups of the era, Gumshoe is also an early precursor to the so-called Endless Runner that has found huge popularity on iOS in recent years.
Creator: Yasumi Matsuno
Best Known For: Final Fantasy Tactics
Yasumi Matsuno started his career in video games at Quest, a Japanese developer best known for its early tactical RPGs Ogre Battle. Final Fantasy creator Hironobo Sakaguchi was so impressed with Quest’s work that he bought the entire studio and tasked Matsuno with designing the first true Final Fantasy spin-off, Final Fantasy Tactics. The game’s subsequent success allowed Matsuno to take more creative risks, a freedom that resulted in the classic PlayStation game Vagrant Story and, more recently, Final Fantasy XII. After Matsuno left Square-Enix citing “ill-health”, he took a break from game development before joining Level 5, the studio best known for the Professor Layton series.
Here he began work on a curious Nintendo 3DS download title, Crimson Shroud, a sort of video game approximation of Dungeons and Dragons, complete with figurines to represent the main characters, and physical dice rolls to dictate the outcome of battles. While the game is something of an acquired taste, particularly for those players who have never played a boardgame RPG, Matsuno’s talent for fantasy storytelling is no less diminished on the handheld’s small screen. Now on another break from game development, there’s a sad chance that Crimson Shroud will be Matsuno’s final creation.
Simon Parkin is an award-winning writer and journalist from England. Described by the New Statesman as "one of the most effortlessly masterly voices in video game writing" he has contributed to The New Yorker, MIT Technology Review, The Guardian, Edge magazine and others, writing both criticism and journalism from the front-lines of video game culture. Follow him on Twitter.
Source : ign[dot]com
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