The first thing Zach Gage did, when I walked into his apartment, was apologize for the mess. He had just finished building, in a corner of his living room, an old-fashioned arcade cabinet — the kind of wooden, vending-machine-size techno-altar you would have seen teenagers huddled around in skating rinks in the early 1980s, except this one had a giant Mac monitor for its screen and a Mac mini for its guts and could play more than 3,000 games: everything from the paradigm-shifting superclassics (Space Invaders, Pac-Man) to experimental metagames that Gage and his indie-designer friends invented — with no budget, sometimes in just a few hours — over the last year or two.
Gage referred to his arcade as “a little shrine to games.” Building it, he said, had been his summer project; it cost him around six weeks and $1,000. He ordered parts from Hong Kong, then stripped and cut something like 100 wires, then figured out software to map them all to the various buttons. He had to learn the differences between Japanese joysticks (precise, delicate, sensitive) and American (tough, in order to withstand the constant abuse of meaty, unskilled hands).
He did all this out of a sense of deep technological longing. Gage was born in 1985 — one year after Tetris was born in the Soviet Union — which means he grew up in the era of home-video-game systems like Super Nintendo and Xbox. As a game nerd, he wondered what the heyday of public arcades might have been like: all of those actual bodies sharing the same physical space in order to pour themselves, coin by coin, into digital worlds — a kind of protosocial-gaming. His arcade was an attempt to try to begin to understand that, and playing it had inspired some thoughts that surprised me coming out of the mouth of a 26-year-old who created his career largely online.
“Having just built this, I’m seeing how much I hate the Internet,” Gage told me. “I mean, I really like the Internet and what it’s done for games — it’s been amazing. But in so many ways it’s just terrible. Arcade cabinets did a lot of things that were really smart that we never gave them credit for. There’s a lot of social psychology embedded in that structure.” The Xbox, he explained, offered only a few games designed to be played along with other people in the same room. “No one is designing games like that anymore,” he said. “It’s very terrible.”
Gage is an indie game designer — the Bon Iver to Rovio’s Katy Perry, the artisanal free-range heirloom-turkey breeder to Zynga’s factory farm. He works out of his apartment and has long hair and a perpetually in-progress beard. He works on games mostly by himself, collaborating occasionally with friends, and sometimes he drops into immersive research sessions that can last for weeks. One recent session was intended to figure out why people like playing word games, a genre Gage has always hated. (He thinks it’s cheating to build a game on top of a system that already exists, like words or numbers.) So he spent two weeks playing Bookworm, Words With Friends and Wurdle, during which he decided that the genre suffered from a serious lack of strategy — aside from Scrabble, he says, most of those games are just dressed-up word searches.
The result of this was SpellTower, Gage’s newest and most successful game, which allows users to create towers by building words from letters in adjacent boxes. In its first two months, he says, it earned him enough money to live off for two years.
Gage’s journey into the world of stupid games started, like many people’s, with Tetris. He watched his girlfriend playing it on her iPod one day and noticed the clumsiness of the game’s touch-screen interface. Gage was horrified. (He can be hilariously indignant about what he sees as bad game design.)
“The iPhone has all these wonderful features, and no one was making use of them,” he told me, sounding a little like Howard Roark in “The Fountainhead.” “Everyone was trying to figure out a way to shoehorn games they’d already made onto the platform. Tetris wasn’t built around a touch screen. If we hadn’t had those original games, and we’d only had touch screens, you’d never see a game like that. It would never have come up naturally, because it’s not good. So I started making a game to explore that, to try and figure out what multitouch Tetris would be like.”
The result was a game called Unify, a kind of bidirectional Tetris in which colored blocks drift in from opposite edges of the screen and meet in the middle. The game is addictive; it seems determined to explore some previously neglected intersection in the brain of motor skills and our capacity to track multiple objects simultaneously. It was critically acclaimed but only a modest success, in terms of sales, though Gage didn’t seem to mind. “Coming at it from an art background,” he said, “my interest is solely in getting to play with some new technology that no one’s solved. Unify is, as far as I know, the very first time that anyone’s ever made a multitouch puzzle-block game.”
Gage’s parents are both artists, and he has an M.F.A. from Parsons in New York; he comes off as the classic young artist toiling away in his garret, except instead of anatomy books and turpentine and canvases, he’s surrounded by board games and old controllers and Xbox discs. For several years, Gage scraped out a living from a combination of teaching gigs, speaking engagements and game sales — with game sales being the least reliable contributor. He seems basically unconcerned about money. In fact, one of Gage’s current projects is a satire of the current state of the gaming industry, especially companies’ tendency to try to cash in by copying the latest trend. The game’s working title is “Unify Birds.” It’s exactly the same as Unify except that it has been redesigned in the most superficial possible way: Gage has turned all of the blocks into colorful, wide-eyed birds. “I made a couple of other little changes,” Gage says, “but mainly I just made everything superadorable. It’s been really interesting, because I’ve showed it to people who liked Unify, and they’ll play it, and they’ll be like: ‘Oh, man, Zach. This is a really good game. This is better.’ They wondered what I’ve changed.”
Gage let me play Unify Birds. It felt, immediately, like a much better game — a game, in fact, that might even become a hit.