Canabalt, with special guest-stars Killjet and Talkpack

Canabalt has been out for a little over a year now. It's become one of the most famous and best loved one-button games out there, having just missed out on the sweet spot of being released for the Kokoromi Gamma IV contest. It has been called one of the greatest games ever made over at Tim Rogers's Action-Button, where it was labeled the equivalent of "Super Mario Tetris". We've seen it retooled as a clever little typing game, we've seen plenty of fan-art inspired by it pop up throughout the 'net, and we'll soon see its two-player version debut in Toronto. Players have figured out ways to hack it and cheat for astronomically high scores. It has helped make Adam "Atomic" Saltsman and his Flixel AS3 library a household name for households who know about indie-gaming, and on platforms as diverse as online browsers and Apple by-products it has managed to conquer the casual gaming world as much as anything can, without betraying at least some semblance of hardcore street cred. It may just be the most important game released in the past ten years. And yet somehow, I cannot help but wonder what all the fuss is about.

Maybe it's because I'm still reeling of jealousy towards everyone else whose own one-button games have succeeded, where mine have mostly floundered. Maybe it's because I feel as though I'd already played the game before, in different forms. PixelJAM's Dino Run, for example, has almost all the important parts of the run-and-jump minimalism of Canabalt, more or less-- more the mostly redundant directional buttons, less the randomly generated game map. Cactus's Precision has a similar focus on gameplay based entirely on running and jumping, though with a fixed playground of rooftops and pits. Part of the fun of Saltsman's game is the random nature of it, the way in which every playthrough can be similar enough to others to be familiar in its rule-set, but devastatingly unique in how the physical landscape dictates it plays out. It offers an absolute minimum of platforming agency, yet at the same time broadens the field of challenge to be as wide as possible within that limited range of ability.

The only function the player has at their disposal is the jump, and though there's some nuance in how long or high a leap can be managed thanks to the duration of a button-press or running-start momentum, it becomes a surprisingly small defense against all the myriad of dangers strewn throughout each newly spawned skyline. As with all never-ending games of this sort, the question is never whether or not one will die, but rather how long before that happens, and also perhaps by what means. Indeed, the proudest claim of a Canabalt expert isn't necessarily the record-setting length of one's run, but the fact that one they were able to avoid the more embarrassing deaths of missing a jump, falling into a pit, or crashing into a wall. If a building collapses under your feet, or a giant bomb falls on your head like a piece of Chicken Little's fragile sky, that isn't necessarily your fault. Sometimes the random generation of the game's levels doesn't give you quite as much wiggle room as you'd like, and spawns a sequence of buildings that are almost mathematically certain to end in some kind of death. All you can do is stay alive until that final bad roll of the dice, and hope that you enjoy the good luck to steer clear of snake-eyes for as long as possible.

As such, you might well wonder why I'm bothering to decry this game at all. After all, it's got a simple enough idea, a solid enough blend of agency and challenge. It has something close to the promise that Milton Bradley sells on the boxes to copies of Othello--"a minute to learn and a lifetime to master." Therefore, why go after it, like this? It isn't hurting anyone, after all, is it? To a certain extent, I fear it very well might be. Yes, there's a kind of ludological beauty to the absolute minimalism in its design, the way it milks a maximum amount of potential from so limited a premise, but that doesn't quite disguise how shallow a game it can be, for long stretches. That same simplicity that helps the game become almost universal in its appeal also makes it something of a perfect little gamer's addiction-- like pulling the handle on a slot machine, the interaction necessary is easy enough, but the longer you go on, it becomes harder and harder to stop. There's enough agency to give you the illusion of control for long stretches, but even the best player can't make it past the worst bits of bad-luck level spawns. It becomes a Sisyphean struggle just to keep going, with no real end or reward in sight.

Still, if it were available for PSP, would I purchase it? You bet your ass, I would. I love the feeling it gives you at the best of its moments, letting you leap from rooftop to rooftop like a superhero testing newfound powers, or an acrophobic detective in pursuit of a lead over the streets of San Francisco. I'd lose track of hours at a time playing it in public places, shunning all social contact except for the kind I program into my own games, on the off-chance I was able to pull myself out of Canabalt long enough to play anything else. Part of the reason I'm so afraid of Saltsman's little piece of gaming heroin is because of how vulnerable I recognize I am to it. Part of solving a problem is admitting that you have one, and like Joe Clay, I have to admit to my own dirty little addiction and ask for the strength not to fall off the wagon, one day at a time. Of course, as with all drugs, there are alternatives available that help save one from the prospect of quitting cold-turkey altogether. Stuff like Dino Run and Precision are readily available online, but for the very best kind of therapy, one is obliged to make the trek out to Babycastles, which as an arcade has become something of a gaming methadone clinic thanks to its one permanent title on display-- Tristan Perich's Killjet.

There are so many things that make Killjet a thing of mystery, a thing of wonder. There's the fact that there's only one copy of it anywhere in the world, one of the very few unique and individual pieces of gaming obscurity existing today. You can't download it off a torrent site, or play a Flash version of it on Newsgrounds. If you want to play it, you have to take a train to New York and find whatever borough Babycastles happens to be occupying at that moment, and when you play it, you'll have to adjust yourself to its own idiosyncratic ways. There's no controller to speak of, save for a pair of buttons on either side of the television monitor that the game's one-bit chip is hardwired into-- one to control your avatar-ship's rise, and the other its descent. As soon as you begin, the game begins to scroll across the screen from left to right, rather than the opposite that we've had ingrained into us from years of playing games that move in the same direction in which Western literature is read. As with Canabalt, every playthrough is unique thanks to a randomly generating world that is manifested here as a set of caverns with a top-to-bottom wrap applied (whenever the floor or ceiling isn't there to get in the way), and furthermore the object of covering as much distance as possible before finally crashing is just the same, as well. The two games are so closely related, one wonders if they were separated at birth, somewhere along the memetic line.

The primary differences are two-fold. First, the player's input is broadened, however subtly, to two functions instead of one-- rise and fall, like a shoot-em-up without the bullets. Sure, you could probably retool the input to make it work with just one button-control, but that would sacrifice efficiency at the altar of mere elegance. Second, while the game's loss-state is just as inevitable as in Saltsman's, the ways in which it is triggered are far fewer, reduced in fact, to one-- crashing into a wall. In that sense, Canabalt and Killjet are the inverse of one another, one offering only one way to live and countless ways to die, the other giving a single opportunity for death and at least two methods for survival-- one fans out, while the other bottlenecks. If you want to understand one game, it behooves you to try and experience the other, as long as it's within your geographical means to do so, at any rate. As a designer myself, they helped serve as the two primary influences for a new work of my own in Talkpack, which stands as a kind of interactive critique of the experiences contained in either work. It's less a fully formed game itself and more of a sketch, than anything else-- the single-input control of one paired with the single-death challenge of the other, with the random-level generation of both spiraled out into a kind of odd world navigation kind of gameplay. Maybe I'll try to expand it someday into a kind of one-button Metroidvania at some point, but who knows?

At the very least, Canabalt and Killjet are the first games I've ever played that have driven me to make another game of my own, by way of direct inspiration rather than any kind of osmosis-influence. They are among the newest gateway game experiences for players and creators alike.