Watching other people play games can be fun, something that was obvious well before doing so became its own industry. Some are more fun than others, or at least fun in different ways. I would happily read someone’s extravagant fan fiction about their Football Manager game, but actually watching them playing it would not have the same effect. I know that Thrust is a game suited to watching, because I have fond memories of gathering round a BBC Micro at my grandparents’ place and watching relatives playing it.
Watching people fail at difficult games can be enjoyable. But if there’s a narrowly defined path for them to take, only so many things they can do at any given point, you’re pushed towards the tension of ‘will they achieve x’, and not much else. Will they make that jump/hit that note/figure out that puzzle? One way around this is by being one of those ROM hacks full of ridiculous secret traps, which can indeed be entertaining in their unfairness.
But what if the player is doing something difficult that isn’t hidden at all, where there isn’t just a yes/no but they can take a much wider range of actions at any moment? As a viewer then, you have very much greater potential for tension and surprise and amusement. One way of achieving the above is to set the player a relatively straightforward broader task, but make the basics of any kind of movement they need to do it complicated and difficult. It’s the successful approach of recent lol-video magnets like Octodad and I Am Bread, and going back to Thrust made me think of those.
Thrust is, reductively, ‘70s Atari arcade classic Asteroids plus gravity. You have a pointy spaceship and have to traverse a planet’s surface/interior to shoot and/or pick up some stuff, meaning you have to stay close to the ground. Instead of pressing the direction you want to go in and having your ship move that way, you have control over rotation and thrust.
You start off dropping towards the ground and things don’t get any easier from there. Dealing with both momentum and gravity is a nightmare. It takes a constant stream of adjustments, and compensating adjustments, and compensating for the previous compensation. Overcooking it and crashing is inevitable, particularly after the first level when you have to start going through narrow passages underground. The potential for slapstick failure is ever-present. Even more so on the Spectrum version, where gravity is a capricious jerk, or at least a series of them, and scrolling is worse. And watching someone confidently pick up their cargo only to slam into the side of the exit passage doesn’t stop being funny.
