Atari co-founder to enter mobile games market, first title out next year

Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell has apparently joined forces with Spil Games, a small Amsterdam gaming studio, to create new mobile games. The co-founder of the legendary arcade gaming platform is apparently “pissed off” at the quality of some of the mobile games he has tried and playing those has made him want to “throw his phone”. He’s hoping he can do better.

Bushnell is in line to create at least three titles with Spil Games, the first of which is slated to be released early in 2017. “When you look at mobile and arcade gaming, they’re identical,” Bushnell says. “Mobile has some of the same game constraints for the player, and that ‘easy to learn, and difficult to master’ metric.” But with the ubiquity of mobile games these days, Bushnell says it’s difficult to find quality ones.

“Generally, a tremendous number of mobile games are poorly designed,” he says. “They can be so focused on graphics that they forget they have to get the timing right, and they have to have proper scoring constructs. I have been so pissed off with some mobile games I’ve wanted to throw my phone, even if I’m only going to hurt my phone there, and not the game.”

Bushnell says that a lot of these games out there miss the point of “hardcore fundamental game design”. The Atari co-founder says that he never really stopped designing games, and so picking up his methods and executing it with Spil Games should be a relatively easy task. Now, we are yet to see if Bushnell has retained some of that Atari magic. Time will tell.

SOURCE: The Guardian