Snood, the Simple Game

Greg Costikyan has penned a Snood screed that bears reading for anyone into game design. I gave Snood a try a couple of years ago when I read that Woz was hooked on it. Fun. I've played it on and off since then. But the ninth most popular game in 2001? That's nuts. Is Snood part of a series of tiny puzzley games, like Tetris and Bejeweled, that can still do well in a world of Counterstrikes and Unreal Tournaments? Is there still the chance for an individual or small team to strike it rich writing a game like this (maybe for cell phones)? Or is the engagingly simple game doomed to extinction? M : The Snood-equivalent for Linux is Frozen Bubble.

Comments

Snood is a definite classic.

[AugstWest]

Gamers tend to think that games will only be classics if they're adopted by gamers. That's why they're so surprised when deer hunting games outsell Quake.

My 64 year-old mother got hooked on Snood, and got a copy for everyone she knew. She doesn't know what kind of video card she has, she doesn't know the bus speed of her RAM, but she'd be up until 3 in the morning trying to beat her high scores.

Oh, it is already available on cell phones and PDAs.

Bust-a-move

[SonicBurst]

otherwise known as puzzle bobble to the rest of the world. Both mame and NeoRageX play it very well, btw. :)

Re:whatever

[Jason1729]

I used to play multiplayer tetris on the LAN at work. There were bonus pieces that let you do good things like eliminate rows from the bottom of the screen or bad things like drop random blocks on someone's screen

It was team based and you generally had to use your good blocks on an ally who's in trouble. We'd play it for hours at a time, and we were enjoying it and socializing, not too numbed to stop. Since we were all in the same room, it was like a LAN party. Occasionally, even the managers would play.

Games like quake3 where all you do is go around shooting things are boring. That's what's mind-numbing and crippling. Tetris makes you concentrate and think.

The best games are the simple ones with high playability, so to answer the question in the summary, there will always be a demand for this.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Why Snood is more popular than Bust-a-Move

[Rayonic]

You may be wondering why Snood is so much more popular than the game it poorly rips off, Bust-a-Move (aka Puzzle Bobble). I mean, BaM was around for years, appeared on many more systems, enhanced the gameplay over the generations, always had multiplayer , etc, etc. So why Snood?

Simple: Snood was (is?) available in the America Online games section.

Yep, we have another thing to curse the "drooling AOL hordes" for - popularizing an inferior puzzle rip-off. Oh, and for a good non-spyware-riddled version, try Popcap.com's Dynomite, or at least go out and one of the many versions of Bust-a-Move (not all versions listed).

Reminds me of one o' my customers...

[Midnight Ryder]

This kinda reminds me of one of my customers. I quite often talk to my game customers via email (Asking how to get past a level, needing a re-download after loosing the game, etc. Not all 'support' stuff really, but, kinda nice to talk to the people who enjoy the games, and find out what they want more of.) Anyway... one of my customers that contacted me had a serious problem. She was in her late 60's, I believe, and loved Tile Panic!, a fairly simple puzzle game that requires some quick thinking on higher levels.

Problem is, her daughter wouldn't let her play anymore. Apparently she had heart problems, and after a while, her blood pressure would go WAY up, and she'd have to quit playing.

Not wanting to be the death of nice little old ladies, I created a separate version for her that takes out the time-based element of the game. She's the only one I know who managed to actually play perfect games on more than one of the game difficulty levels! But the whole thought of someone refusing to give up playing the game dispite the health detrement because they like the game too much is both strange and encouraging ;-)

(Eh - since I'm here, I'll plug one o' my other puzzle games, since that's a bit o' the discussion on this thread - go check out Tile Panic!, as mentioned above, and Boulder Panic! 2 DX. Or don't :-)