In this two-part piece, I’ll share some recent thoughts about the long-forgotten concept of high scores (well, at least forgotten to my personal gaming experience) and how it strangely crept back in my games and how we could give it a much needed facelift.
Residents of the spookhouse (which would be the name we gave our humble dwelling) went through a revival of old classics in the past few weeks. I never played Galaga in my younger years yet, the girlfriend and the roommate started playing like crazy on the Wii virtual console. The Turbografix version, titled Galaga ’90 ,offers some basic diagram of your progress through the levels on the game over screen, but otherwise the game itself (or the original Galaga), much like about all other games of its time, just wants a high score because it is conceived in such a way that you can’t beat it. When you score high enough, your name can be entered in the list of best scores which can be seen in attract mode.
So high score here means two things: it marks progress and gives bragging rights. You couldn’t possibly have scored that high if you hadn’t survived this long in the game, scraping for more time to score points. Also, whoever watches the high score list and sees your initials knows you mean business and can aspire to beat that score, possibly stealing your bragging rights, creating some sense of challenge out of static numbers.
