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.

Re:Snood is a definite classic.

[BethLogic]

I was introduced to Snood a couple summers ago while living with a non-geek friend and got very addicted. Many unemployed hours were spent watching the pretty colors gather and then fall. When I was over at my boyfriend's apt I would take every chance I got to try to beat his high score. If he walked out of the room and was gone for a minute I'd start playing. The competition aspect made it much more gripping.

Luckily I found a job and have been able to turn those wasted hours into time spent on /.

Although a little Snood wouldn't be a bad way to kill time as I wait for code to build....

Good Design, Annoying Installation

[weeeee]

If only this game doesn't come with every spyware software in existance! All my friends have this game, and they wonder why their computer runs like crap after installation. Thank you Ad-Aware.

It's not always about graphics and violence

[stevenbdjr]

Games are at heart a form a recreation and enjoyment. Some people find games like Counter Strike and UT2003 disturbing, and with good reason. Games like Tetris, Solitaire, and Snood, are simply fun, without the violence. These are the types of games that parents, grandparents, and wifes play. That's a big market.

Heck, I'm a huge RTCW player, but one of my favorite games is still Columns on Sega Genesis.

The Year of the Snood

[sandbenders]

I remember it like it was yesterday- rank upon rank of students sitting behind Macs in the computer labs, forcing helpless drama students to go to the engineering labs and use windows machines to get their homework done. Countless hours lost, students failing left and right, the university computer store replacinging record numbers of worn-out Mac mice and keyboards.... The cause: Snood. The year: 1998.

Good thing Slashdot stays on top of the latest trends in the Mac world.

Among my friends, Snood has come and gone, enjoyed a brief renaissance, and finally slipped into obscurity. In fact, the year I graduated, in 1998, the term 'Bad Snood'- for a stupid move, or a stroke of bad luck- was in common usage on campus.

Re:Bust a Move Rip Off?

[boinger]

That was my immediate thought, too - some quick Googling shows that the original Bust A Move was an English conversion of a Japanese game "Puzzle Bobble" - the copyrights for Bust A Move go back to 1994.

So, the question is, when is Snood from?

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

Not an indie design success story

[Junks Jerzey]

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?

I like the sentiment, wanting the little indie game designer to succeed. That's great!

But at the same time, is it really a success for all these so called inde developers to keep endlessly, endlessly, cloning the same handful of Tetris variants? Even ten years ago these things were stale, and now, in 2003, we have people hailing a design 100% borrowed from the Bust-A-Move arcade game from the mid 1990s as a "success" for the little developer? Surely there is a way to stay outside the "world of Counterstrikes and Unreal Tournaments" without resorting to writing rehashes of the same diddly batch of puzzle games.

Re:whatever

[Blkdeath]

I'm not sure if this was intended to be funny, or if it was misconstrued by the mods (wow, that'd be a first!), but I'll respond as if it were in a serious tone.

Say what you will about Quake 3 and its tendency to provoke violence in children, but at least people who obsess over it are communicating with other people, albeit over the Internet.

Most people I see playing online shoot-em-ups are too busy fragging their opponents to bother taking their hands from the cursor keys (or whatever they use for direction and fire) to use the keyboard; that would reduce their kill rate.

Games like this (and Tetris, and Solitaire, and so many others) are simply antisocial and psychologically crippling. You play for hours, not because you're "enjoying" it, but because your brain is too numbed to stop.

Are the games at fault, or the people? My grandmother used to (and probably still does) play Solitaire. Alone. She had a board she'd put on her lap and a deck of cards that's probably been dealt more times than I've worn socks. She'd play until she was bored, then quit.

I used to read quite seriously, and would often plow through 200-300 pages in a single night. (I read the American BiCentennial Series in a single school year = 10 months; grade 6). Would that be considered 'obsessive' behaviour, or is that healthy? I couldn't do it now, because performing in public school is much less demanding than performing at work (and heaven knows what would've happened if I pulled a few all-nighters like that and tried to drive before the sun came up!).

Anything to excess is a bad thing. Be it Quake, Snood, Solitaire, reading, chocolate, sex, anything. Rather than regulating everything that COULD cause us harm - why don't we teach our children and students moderation and self discipline?

Give me any of those games any day...

[jellisky]

I love those simple games... the ones that make me focus and think for about a half hour or less. Tetris, Bust A Move (and other Snood-type variants), Tetris Attack (and other variants), Bejeweled, Nisqually, Glines, any of those Yahoo Games word games... all of those get some significant playing time during a standard week from me.

But that's not to say that the more complex games don't get playing time from me. The Civilization series, the Final Fantasy series, Imperialism, the Diablo series... all of those also get played regularly on my computer/console.

The big point, though, is that each game fills a different type of gaming and entertainment niche for me. Both will have markets in the world of gaming.

But, I contend that making those "simple" games, is, as the author pointed out, probably harder than making the more "complex" games. Kind of an oxymoron at first glance, but if you think about it, it makes perfect sense.

A "simple" game must have few controls and those that it does have should be almost immediately obvious in nature. This severe limitation in design isn't overly restrictive, since a simple game will have simple rules, by definition.

But where a simple game is difficult is in the rules of the game. A simple game's rules must be flexible enough that there is no trivial strategy for putting up good scores or winning. The rules must, however, be simple enough that, in reality, they should be able to fit on a simple splash screen. The gameplay should be fluid and usually ever-changing, allowing for natural planning ahead and strategy building. Lastly, skill, not luck, should dominate the gameplay.

Taking these all into account, I can see why there aren't all that many of these simple games. That's not an easy design paradigm, in the least. But, simple games will never really get too much recognition, since they don't really need to. I think the authors of such games often realize that quite quickly. The market is there, but it remains quiet since it doesn't take much time or money to make such a game. So, the ideas can be coded up by an amateur or a professional or two, tested by a few of their friends, and put out for the world to enjoy. Not much infrastructure or capital or time needed for that, is there?

So, keep giving me both types of games. I'll gladly take both. :)

-Jellisky

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).