If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words for an animation? A whole game? Last time out, Jet Set Willy had more than 50 different rooms to explore and no way to see the whole mansion without taking a good long playing. Mugsy is not on the same scale.
In it, you play as a mob boss in a vaguely US prohibition-era setting, specifically a boss called Mugsy (…Mugsy Balone?). You type in your answers to questions from gangster underlings regarding how your mob should operate for the year: how much to spend on weapons, how much on bribes, how many of your protection racket ‘clients’ to go after. Then you get the results, and go round for another year. Did you spend enough on weapons to keep your people alive? Did you bribe the police enough to keep from getting raided too badly? How much did you make?
That’s pretty much it. Of course, in one sense it’s on a different scale from Jet Set Willy because it’s larger: you can keep trying different combinations and seeing slightly different stories. In another, very real sense, it is tiny. There are two (two!) different interstitial animations which you can see as one year ticks to another, and a desultory arcade game bit that occasionally comes up where you shoot down would-be assassins, but that’s not a lot. And the complexity of the simulation is significantly less than games I’ve seen with spreadsheets as their interface. There is at least a certain level of necessary randomness. And the ideal inputs, as far as I can tell, scale with the amount of money you’re making, which makes a certain narrative sense as police and rivals start going after you more, and also means it isn’t quite just a case of finding out the right numbers and plugging them in. That’s still not enough to make it a very compelling exercise.
So what does Mugsy have going for it do have done well when it was so basic even for its time? One word: style.
The text interface itself is part of it, written in an attempt at mob voice which consists of writing “da” instead of “the” and throwing some slang like “dough” in. It’s not an easy task to create character in such little dialogue, but the effect of Mugsy’s attempt is to edge a potentially one-dimensional character towards zero dimensions, or possibly one dimension where the only axis is that of patronising. The writing isn’t any less slapdash on a technical level: I got told that I had “1 loyal hoods” left. There’s still style there though, even if I hate it.
The other thing is the visual art. The game was sold as an interactive comic book, so essentially in alternative modern parlance, a visual novel. And the pictures tell a lot more than the probably <1,000 words in the game. I have only been playing a few games with small sprites so far rather than it being most of what I know, but the full screen artworks of Mugsy still stand out. Even the way they render as geometric shapes before slowly cohering into a scene works in its favours, giving extra life to the sense of figures looming in the shadows. The band playing in the spotlight in one of those animations, yellow standing out starkly, looks great. I still can’t imagine the appeal of Mugsy lasting, but at least it tells a story in a way that makes its medium count.
