When I look back at the games that, during my childhood, kept my eyes addictively glued to the screen for hours on end, I find that I remember in a special and fond way the puzzle games that truly challenged my mind and honed my problem-solving skills. The heyday of puzzle games seems to me to have been (so far) the ’80s and ’90s. During this time, the games had a special quality that has since been lost, in my eyes. They were innovative; they were creative; they pushed the envelope. Developers seemed to have a magic touch for putting together a set of mechanics that could run as a thread through a whole game, making it, in essence, one large puzzle that the player had to solve.
When talking about puzzle video games and the bygone days of the ’80s and ’90s, one cannot ignore the phenomenon that was, and still is, Tetris. On a purely mechanical level, its brick-dropping gameplay does not seem as though it should have been able to entrance people into a meditative state. And yet it did. To those who were there or those who’ve since played and studied not just Tetris but also its manifold imitators, it now seems an utterly obvious observation to make that there’s something going on that entwines the human brain and Tetris.
The first time I played Tetris is still etched in my memory. It was such a simple and clear-cut game: Line up falling puzzle pieces into complete and uninterrupted lines at the bottom of the screen; then, you’re rewarded with points, and the lines disappear. As you can imagine, the latter is a crucial part of winning, because if any of the lines that you’ve made are on the screen for too long, you’ve lost. They separate the game into a top and bottom part, with your top part full of the lines you didn’t play well, and the bottom part showing basically how well you are doing.
The universal attraction of Tetris makes it so utterly addictive. This is a game that anyone can pick up and play. It’s not about concepts or contexts that can be lost in the sea of cultural and generational differences. It’s about patterns and speed, pure and simple. And it’s about high scores and the burning desire to top that score. Tetris is the quintessential competition of self versus self, of a past performance always being able to be outdone with more thoughtful control under pressure.
An early ’90s puzzle game that really shines is Lemmings. It was developed by a company called DMA Design, which later became Rockstar North, and it was first released in 1991. The player, or indeed, the necessary amount of players, got to stage what amounted to lemming-led commando operations behind enemy lines, using the lemmings as proximity-close explosives or, as the cover suggests, trap-preparers, bomber crews, or safe-crackers.
Lemmings was a game in which the player directed the small creatures, en masse, towards an exit — the one spot on the landscape farthest away from the brink of doom. Because the lemmings would do just about anything except turn around, the player had to clear the way for them. What’s more, because the player’s rudimentary skills (digging, blocking, bombing, and so on) were good only for limited tasks, they were best used as a last resort. “A well-placed bridge,” as my friend put it.
The presentation is simple and charming; the colorful screen and the rodent opera of absurdity compliment well the mechanical precision with which each level must be solved.
Lemmings was a success on each platform to which it was ported. (It was even pretty good on the PC!) Some might say that the dullness of graphics in the workaday PC world of the late 1980s was the perfect match for the off-the-wall aesthetic of DMA Design’s pixel-art masterpiece, but those people don’t know that the people who made those graphics live in a place with pretty much no weather.
Lemmings was a first in many ways, “revolutionary,” as the leading edge of what became the “word revolution” in computer games likes to put it on occasion.
The Lemmings game was unique because it required both tactical thinking and on-the-spot problem-solving. When playing, you had to come up with a nearly instantaneous plan of action and had almost no time to second-guess it. The steadily rising difficulty curve throughout the game gave each round a new, fresh challenge. To solve it, you had to be consistently creative—often under considerable pressure.
Lucky for Gamers…Unlucky for Actual Lemmings
The puzzle game world shifted dramatically in 1993 with the debut of Myst. The creation of two brothers, Robyn and Rand Miller, who worked in a company called Cyan, Myst was by no means the first puzzle game to grace computer screens. However, it is safe to say that it was unlike any that had come before it. Predecessor puzzle games tended toward fast action, quick reflexes, and savvy moves to solve problems that often had as much to do with arcade-style gameplay as with the plot. They also were not usually the kind of games that players could “get lost in.” Myst was that kind of game.
Taking place on a strange island full of bizarre buildings and unfathomable hints, Myst was all about solving one satisfying, complex brain-warp after another. Open a combination lock on a shed to find a quartet of musical notes that would open a hidden door. Use a dagger found underwater to cut through a mess of thorns above the surface. While not heavily story-driven, Myst’s series of graphics in environments like a sunken ship or a dusty old attic was stunning at the time. The whole production definitely had more than its fair share of “wow” moments.
The conundrums in Myst were unique. They required the kind of sharp insights that come from observation. They called for the application of deductive and inductive reasoning. And they were all about attention to the specifics. The solutions were always intellectual. There was no shooting or chopping or bopping. And no hint of nonstop action. The Myst mystique had all to do with brainpower, genre conventions, and the creation of alternative forms of reality within the digital medium.
Myst was special in how it transformed the game world by emphasizing the virtual landscape. It didn’t just throw the player in front of a locked door as part of a puzzle-heavy game. It put the locked door inside a structure that was part of a strange and fascinating world. It was hard to find a locked door or any clues for how to unlock it because the line between the game and its puzzles on the one hand and the game world and its narrative on the other was, for a lot of people, both blurred and breathtaking.
Myst enjoyed both critical and commercial success. It sold millions of copies and became one of the top-selling PC games in history. In addition, what it did for narrative in video games can’t be ignored. It created a genre that was all about the story, mixing in puzzles that were integrated into the plot. It stood in contrast to what many popular games were offering. In a time when the industry kept saying games should be more than just 45-degree-angle corridors, Myst let players explore an open world filled with narrative.
In the late 1980s, Tetris dominated the puzzle game conversation. But another Nintendo game left an indelible impression on puzzle game players in the early 90s: Dr. Mario. Though not a sequel, it felt very much in the same addictive vein as Tetris. And while by today’s standards both games can appear quite primitive, their playtesting has withstood the test of time. As you begin to play Dr. Mario, immediately the player takes on the role of the eponymous doctor. Armed with a bottle filled with colored capsules, your objective is to eliminate all the viruses inside your bottle.
The aim in Dr. Mario is to pair capsules with identically colored viruses, to create lines of four, and to clear those lines from the screen. Once the game really starts to get going, the number of viruses to deal with—their arrangement on the screen—starts to increase, and then it’s just a matter of time before you die. Or, wait, I mean in 1986, it was just a matter of time before you “lost.” So, yeah, this simple yet captivating game involved meticulous planning and an understanding of the game’s geometry, especially if you hoped to make it past level 20, where the madness starts to ensue.
Dr. Mario distinguished itself with its delightful outward appearance and tunes you can’t help but get stuck in your head. I am not exactly “cheerful” by nature, but the unabashed rainbows in the presentation of the original game nearly made me cover my eyes at first glance—the landscapes of my own imagination were typically and literally much darker when it came to playing around with the same kinds of ’80s game scenarios that Dr. Mario was nonetheless fiddling with (see “my own imagination” and “lame scenarios” in the scenario that follows). These visions left impressions, all right.
The puzzle genre’s pliability was well shown in the success of Dr. Mario. Players of all ages found it a good mixture of strategy and reflex response. That effect was amplified when two friends competed head-to-head, leading to an entirely different type of play that was as much about twitch as about planning. The blending of real-time and real interaction, a balance of multiplayer and confounding puzzle mechanics, was never quite matched in its console family tree. It flickered briefly within Tetris Attack and Planet Puzzle League, but Dr. Mario remains a uniquely multiplayer brain-blowing experience.
The puzzle games of the 80s and 90s have an enduring quality. Of course, back then there weren’t any imitations; pioneering puzzle game designers were simply extraordinarily creative. Since the initiation of the puzzle game ascension in the 80s, there have been two main paths for their development. One, called the action puzzle game, has the player controlling a figure in an environment filled with objects and potential interactions. The second one, the thinking puzzle game, leaves the players alone in a quiet space to contemplate a challenge for as long as it takes.
The 80s and 90s were an era of experimentation and barely constrained new ideas. Whole new ways of playing games were being discovered. A hundred ways were tried and tested for every single one that stuck. During this time, the genre that would become called the Puzzle Game was born and found its first stride. Tetris is the obvious exemplar. But the list of influential games just from this era could go on…
What made these timeless, classic puzzle games stand out was the accessibility factor. They were, and still are, some of the easiest games for anybody to just pick up and play. And they were always addictive enough that, once players start, they don’t want to stop. Over time, because of the mechanics as well as the basic design of the games themselves, they became popular in a way that not only exceeded the original designers’ intentions, but they achieved something that I think can safely be called a universal appeal across all video gaming demographics.
The puzzle game genre owes much to its forebears, and their influence is evident in the modern puzzle games that have taken up their mantle and achieved similar, if not greater, success. Gaming historians generally agree that the first video game to feature a puzzle was *Mystery House*, an Apple II release from 1980. The game was only modestly successful, but it laid the groundwork for key elements that would define the future of the genre. Despite their successful predecessors, however, contemporary puzzle games are in no way bound to old mechanics or ways of thinking.
To me, the conundrums of the ’80s and ’90s aren’t well-remembered just because they’re Friday night, passed-out-on-the-couch, to-the-moon-Jimmy type of fun. They’re memorable because they made for some truly extraordinary experiences for those of us who grew up playing them. This 1988 puzzle game would set the template for subsequent entries in the series, with the most recent appearing in the form of Kingdom: Two Crowns in 2018. And its “solve or die” type of gameplay has rightfully earned it a place in the pantheon of great puzzle games.
The innovative mechanics, engaging gameplay, and universal appeal of the best puzzle games from the 1980s and 1990s have turned them into classics, respected and loved by gamers both old and new. This is very much not the end of the story, though. Today, a new generation of puzzle games carries the banner forward, challenging players in ways every bit as exciting and fresh as their forerunners did. Together, they make up a huge and beautiful body of work within the pantheon of video game history.
