The End of The Start of An Era

As you may have heard, the start of this week was the final day for the Xbox 360 marketplace and Xbox Live Arcade. It’s the end of a pretty significant era in video gaming: the triumphant return of small creative teams, from the fringes outside of the mainstream/commercial industry (fringes to which they had largely been relegated since the mid 90s), back into the beating hearts of a new generation of consoles and players alike.

Videogames, from their very start with Spacewar — or Tennis for Two if you prefer — have always had at their core a vibrant contingent of tiny low-budget teams making cool interesting things. The beauty of XBLA was that it opened new doors for such teams, and provided a fertile patch of soil where a greater variation of games could find a much larger audience than they otherwise might have.

We want to take a moment to talk about the history of N+, and the impact XBLA has had on our lives.

After we created N in 2004, it won the Audience Choice Awards at both IGF 2005 and Slamdance 2006; by then word was starting to spread about N, and the idea of making a sequel and bringing it to new platforms was pitched to us from several different directions.

Having no concept of how to go about doing that, we started working with Warren Currell of Sherpa Games; Warren seemed to get who we were and where we were coming from at the time, and used his industry experience to help us interface with the business people — people who we, as young just-out-of-university types with very little experience, had no sense of how to approach.

Warren had other clients such as Jamie Cheng of Klei Entertainment; as mentioned on this blog previously, we heard that while they were pitching a Klei game to Ross Ericson at Microsoft, Ross asked whether they’d heard of this game N that he was addicted to — that really got the ball rolling!

N+ for Xbox 360 came out in 2008; we developed it in partnership with the incredibly talented Nick Waanders of Slick Entertainment (who Jamie connected us with). Microsoft had mandated online multiplayer for all XBLA games, and so that led us down a very interesting design path, figuring out how best to make multiplayer work in N — something that we had never before considered.

Development of N+ was difficult and stressful, as is the development of most games, but Nick is such an amazing and multi-talented programmer, he was able to solve problems creatively and got the multiplayer working in an ingenious way. The art by Jeff Agala and the music by Joris de Man really changed the look and sound of N, and made N+ feel like a proper sequel.

Plus (oh yes, pun intended), by then we had learned even more about level design, having worked at it for several more years — and with the addition of new game modes such as Co-op, we were more excited about making levels than we ever had been before. It was an exhilarating time!

Just look at this trailer (from back in the days of 4:3 aspect ratios!), by Craig Macnaughton, plus Jim Munroe, Chris Locke, Max Stussi, and Marc Ngui:

When we made N, we were driven purely by curiosity and passion. We wanted to play something we’d never played before, and had such a strong idea of what that was, we knew that the only way to make that happen would be if we made it ourselves. We had played a ton of shareware and freeware games during university, and really appreciated the energy and ideals of the freeware movement — that was a large part of what had inspired us to make and release N for free in the first place.

The idea of charging money for N+ was a bit daunting, but eventually we realized that putting N+ on XBLA was an opportunity to show a larger, more mainstream audience something a bit different from what they might have been used to — adding some quirky left-field indie attitude to a new and burgeoning digital platform.

To say that making N+ for Xbox 360 changed our lives would be a huge understatement. We were completely unprepared for the reception N+ received, and our perception of the world and what it meant to make videogames shifted dramatically. That was the year we first heard the name “Kotaku”, when Warren told us that N+ had made the front page — we had no idea what that meant, or whether that was a good thing or not! 😉

Over the years, fans have let us know about their fond memories playing N+ with friends and family, and we appreciate that so much. People have told us that N+ was a big part of their childhood, and when we think about the games of our own childhoods — and how special they are in our memories — we feel incredibly proud to have been part of creating something that resonated so strongly. Our games tend to fly a bit under the radar, and spread largely by word-of-mouth, so we don’t usually see too much about them out in the broader world of videogames — thanks so much for sharing. <3

(Having said that, we recently learned that N+ was apparently the 34th best-selling XBLA game of all time, which is flat-out incredible if true.)

Xbox Live Arcade was one of those touchstones, a huge moment for the video game industry which was bigger still in hindsight. Its closure was perhaps inevitable, but still stings. It’s sad that N+ is no longer available for sale, but it had a great run, and we’re still proud of it.

The good news is, N+ gave us the opportunity to keep doing what we love, and, years later, to make the (in our opinion) even better N++, which is available right now on all platforms! 😉

Even more exciting: we’re cooking up something that we think captures the magic of N+, so watch this space — and sign up to the mailing list at the bottom of this page, so that you hear about it first! 😀