The return of social gaming
Even after a tough year, Loading Bar is looking to open more venues in the future
By now, we’re all well used to shifting release dates. No doubt some of the titles featured in these very pages will be delayed, as the longterm effects of COVID-19 continue to be felt. Of all the pleasures we’re looking forward to, though, this one might be the hardest to pin down a date for. Nudging a friend on the sofa at exactly the wrong moment, just as they approach that vital final bend in the track. Standing shoulder-toshoulder at a cabinet, trying not to rattle a carefully-balanced plastic pint cup. Crowding around a screen, not-so-quietly hoping that victory that doesn’t go to the person who knocked you out two rounds ago. Looking at recent data, it’s hard to be optimistic that these kinds of experiences will be part of our gaming life again any time soon, though we’re trying.
We’re not the only ones who miss them. “I dearly miss having my friends over to my place for games so we can trash-talk, give dirty looks and shout over one another, the way nature intended,” says Paul Kopetko. “Some games really work best when played in the same room together.” Like Kopetko’s own Boomerang Fu, for example, a knockabout party game in the style of Bomberman and TowerFall.
His wasn’t the only local multiplayer game which had the misfortune of arriving in a locked-down world. “We started dev long before there was any hint of a pandemic,” Catastrophic_ Overload director James Letherby says. The Bristol studio put out its first game, Drink More Glurp (left) – a slapstick sports game that really comes to life in its 20-player Hotseat Mode – in August 2020. “We had always planned to release in the run-up to the Tokyo Olympics. So when they were postponed, along with a lot of our coverage and conventions getting cancelled, it made for a pretty tough decision to release.”
But release they did, and these games found a slightly different audience to the one the devs had anticipated. “I didn’t appreciate how many families were also in lockdown,” Kopetko says – something that also benefitted Moving Out, an Overcooked-style couch co-op game specifically designed to cross the generations. “There are so few games for the five-to-ten-year-old player these days,” says Ashley Ringrose of SMG, the studio behind Overcooked. “And even less you can play with them as a parent and feel equal.”
Still, there’s a certain degree of unsporting conduct that won’t fly in a family environment (at least, if you want to preserve some level of harmony). And a single household is unlikely to buy multiple copies. “Couch games spread by word of mouth,” Kopetko says – and who hasn’t texted a friend to ask what that game was last night, then immediately typed the reply into their storefront search bar of choice?
You don’t even need to play the game yourself. Seeing a group of strangers enjoying themselves can be enough. “That’s definitely something I’ve been missing the past year – the chance to bump into something new while you’re getting a coffee,” Loading Bar founder and CCO James Dance says. And Loading Bars’ gaming pubs are exactly the kind of venue where this non-algorithmic discovery can take place.
When we’re able to comfortably step out into the world again, there are plenty of games we’re eager to start talking about, and put through their paces. “I think local multiplayer games shared with old friends are timeless,” Kopetko says – and he’s hopeful that games such as Boomerang Fu will enjoy a second life.
Even more exciting are the seeds planted during the past year. The success of titles such as Among Us, Fall Guys and the Jackbox Party Packs has introduced new audiences to pleasures traditionally reserved for in-person meetups. That’s fertile soil for the next wave of in-person social games, which will grow into new shapes because they were conceived in this period.
The same, it seems, goes for the spaces they will be played in. We return to Loading Bar which, even after a tough year, is looking to open more venues in the future. “I think it’s a very different type of growth,” Dance says, than what might have originally been planned – something more local, less reliant on artificial scarcity to draw a crowd, and designed to appeal to a community broader than self-identified ‘gamers’. In other words, the kind of principles we’d love to see local play rebuild itself around. That and a bit of sofa-nudging catharsis, naturally.