The Evolution Of Video Game UI
We've come a long way from just seeing a score.
I’ve always been fascinated by how video games look. Not necessarily in the graphics department though. Yes, something like God of War has some of the best-looking character models I’ve ever seen, and playing the new Modern Warfare at 120fps with ray tracing switched on was a real treat, but I’m more interested in how the game talks to you. Tells you what’s up. How healthy your in-game persona is, and how much ammunition you have left in your pistol.
As the years have rolled on and gaming has progressed and matured, the way this information has been delivered to the player has evolved too. From form over function to function over form, from the beautifully minimal to the disgustingly messy, and to where it all began, the user interface a video game offers can make or break the whole experience.
Origins
Let’s go back in time, to what many consider to be the ‘first’ video game, at least in a commercial sense, Pong. Two bats, a ball, and your score. This is where it all began. Tennis for Two was another title regarded as the ‘first’ video game, similar in gameplay to Pong, yet when it comes to UI, it had nothing. Older video games were more conceptual than anything. Experimental machines produced to explore the concept of video entertainment, not as something to try and break the top ten of a leaderboard with. So a UI of any capacity wasn’t really necessary.
However, with the success of arcade cabinets such as Pong and Computer Space, the way we treated video games completely changed, and our pockets of quarters would soon run dry. Getting a high score was your only goal. Several digits to determine your place on the leaderboard once you’d run out of extra lives, which itself was usually a simple numerical graphic or several icons- and that’s if you even had lives. Sometimes you were either alive, or you had ten very loud seconds to fumble another coin into the slot to have another try. A three-digit name was all you had from there on out, if you wanted to put ‘poo’ at the top of the leaderboard on Space Invaders, you were more than welcome to. The arcade mentality was beautifully simple. However, as video games continued to evolve, the information we needed to know increased. Most notably, your wellbeing.