As games develop and change in the ‘80s, we see a lot of genres which are familiar but not quite yet in a settled popular shape. Some, though, don’t have so far to go. Nonetheless, the world of deft but very visible solutions to computing limitations continues to produce its own unique magic.
Not that you’d probably get it from the somewhat generic title, but Leader Board is a golf game. As such it brings in another conversion of something outside the world of video games, in this case sitting between the world of sport and of pastimes. As a solo pursuit that’s heavier on technique and timing than athleticism, it’s a particularly good fit for the video game treatment. And Leader Board has all of the golf game’s essentials already in place.
You choose your club, aim your shot to the left or right, and then wrangle a series of power meters, bars on graphs going out of your control, to be stopped by button presses, hopefully in the place you want. It means that each shot requires a combination of planning, technique, and reflexes that is a decent approximation of the real thing. We’ll eventually get to a couple more chances to compare and contrast newer golf games, but the mechanic has mostly survived the three decades since.
What does that leave? The setting, since there is no such thing as a standard golf course. Leader Board opts very quickly to take you into the realm of hitting your ball over expanses of water onto small green islands, the better to provide entertaining failure. It is a world designed with the player at the forefront. And the way that is expressed is one of the aspects of Leader Board that reaches beyond the mundane.
Before each shot, the landscape is rendered in halting, uneven phases, a blank world filled in to form water, grass, the markings of a course. As the golfer on the screen turns to the side to line up a shot, I wonder what would happen if it didn’t stop the icon at the edge of the screen and if I kept going and the camera view followed. Would turning around 180 degrees reveal a howling void in the place where they were theoretically standing a few seconds ago? When they walk, unseen, to where the ball landed, are they walking through an unformed world? It so effortlessly flashes out of existence and is so effortfully reformed, everything pulled into place for one person to hit a ball with a club. For a moment, the whole of existence hinges on where you stop that power bar.
