Richard Garfield
Photo by Katie McKiernan

Longtime readers may recall a post bemoaning that cooperative multiplayer is hard to come by and harder to do right. Schizoid disagrees. It’s a top-down two-player game where each player controls either a red or a blue avatar. Enemies are color-coded too, and colliding with like-colored baddies destroys them while other colors destroy you instead. You arguably could control both avatars (and there’s a game mode called Überschizoid that lets you try just that: one analog stick per avatar), but it’s not recommended unless your corpus callosum has been severed.

Schizoid is presently available on XBox Live, though the XBLA strictures on demos don’t allow multiplayer. Still, you can fake it by grabbing a significant other and snuggling together to share one controller on Überschizoid, so give it a shot anyway.

We talked to Schizoid’s Richard Garfield about the game’s roots, cooperative gaming in general, and digital distribution. Read on for the details.

Pixelsocks: So, in addition to the color coding, the gameplay revolves around trying to work together with your partner so you can bait, corner, and destroy enemies while minimizing the risk to yourself. Does that sound about right?

Richard: That’s a good summary of it. We believe it’s the most co-op game ever. Unlike other co-op arcade games, you can’t solve your problems with more firepower. You have to do it with your partner.

Pixelsocks: Another thing that distinguishes Schizoid is that it is completely controlled by the analog stick. All the other buttons on the controller don’t do anything.

Richard: We believe you can get a lot of play depth with very few controls. We decided to explore that. You’ve just got the analog stick. For example, the power ups, rather than being activated by a button, are icons on the play field. When the first player touches them, they drag it around, and to activate it the second player has to touch it as well. So both players have to work together to trigger them. And it keeps the control only with the analog stick.

Pixelsocks: You can draw some very weak parallels to a couple of other games that have existed: Pac-Man, which is about navigating through tight environments populated with foes, or Ikaruga, which is about paying attention to the color of the world around you and responding to it. However, Schizoid is actually a pretty unique idea, especially with the co-op element. So, where did the idea for the game come from?

Richard: That’s a good observation, and I think it is true, Schizoid is in a very unique place. The very first idea was brought to us by Jamie Fristram, who’s the head programmer for the project. He had an idea where you pull the left stick and you control the blue guy, and you pull the right stick and you control the red guy. It had a similar sort of play as to what we have today. He thought it was interesting, and we might be able to build a game around it. This game was insanely complicated. It’s still there today, as Überschizoid, that’s the premier single-player mode. But we didn’t think we could get people to play it: it’s just too hard.

Pixelsocks: I imagine that when both avatars are fairly close together you can do it reasonably well, but as soon as you have them on opposite end of the screen, things fall apart pretty fast.

Richard: That’s true, unless you can somehow park one of them in a safe area, which is a technique which people use.

Early on, this was the very beginning of XBLA, we thought it would be a good opportunity to do a really co-op game. We couldn’t believe we hadn’t seen this basic game play premise before, because it seemed so simple. So, that started the game.

Pixelsocks: You mentioned that it’s really hard to play as just a single person, and that’s what Überschizoid is. Was it just the difficulty of doing it alone that drove you to the idea of cooperative?

Richard: I would say that we’d been talking about co-op games for a while, so it was fresh in our minds. There was no doubt in my mind that we could come out with this game as a single player game, but it lent itself so clearly to co-op play. The only question when we began was, “Will there be enough depth to play?” Once we began working with all the different creature behaviors and level design possibilities, it became really clear that it be a good teamwork game.

Pixelsocks: Cooperative games haven’t been very common, even recently. If you had multiplayer at all, it was competitive. However, in the past few years, cooperative play has really picked up. Even traditionally competitive games like Halo 3 bring people together towards a common goal. Why do you think this has popped up?

Richard: I think the timing is right for it. I think the reason the timing is right for it is because networking is getting so much better, and so much more painless, that you can actually connect people without much work.

So what do you do with that networking? Well, historically multiplayer head-to-head has been the place to go. But, since the roots of computer games are in single player games, the really natural place to go is to cooperative games.

Pixelsocks: Two against the world instead of one against the world?

Richard: Exactly. Historically, it’s one person against the world, so moving to a team against the world is a natural place to go.

Pixelsocks: This is towards the end of the Penny Arcade Expo, so you’ve seen a lot of gamers coming through the booth. Have the vast majority been interested in the cooperative play, or have they been interested in the single player?

Richard: When we talk about co-op, it immediately piques their interest. There are a lot of players who see that as a fresh thing, who see it as a very simple concept to wrap their co-op play around. So this is a very good environment to promote a co-op game, because you get to play with people, and play with people hanging over your shoulder, giving you advice, things like that.

Pixelsocks: As I understand it, Schizoid is presently being distributed on Live Arcade. Is it anywhere else?

Richard: It is nowhere else. We hope to see it some other places in the future, but we aren’t working on it currently. It will depend on how it’s received on Live Arcade and what other opportunities come up, but I would certainly like to work on the XBox [version] too, because there are a slew of other creatures and other situations I’d love to put the player in. I’d also like to see it on other platforms.

Pixelsocks: Based on your personal experience working with XBox Live, would you say that digital distribution is going to be a primary mode of game distribution in the future?

Richard: Oh, I think so, yeah. I say that as much as from the point of view of a player as someone working behind the curtain in the industry. It’s a real pleasure, when things are working, to use digital distribution. It’s just so much easier, and there’s so much augmentation and support you can get from whatever the source is. I would bet on it.

Pixelsocks: Okay, one last question for you: if you had to pick one design element, or one decision that you made that makes Schizoid what it is, what would it be?

Richard: The co-op play. The game mechanic was very interesting, and once we combined that with the concept of co-op play, the whole design just fell out, which is a very exciting process. We tried to keep it as simple as possible on top of that premise. The co-op play, and the basic design process.

Pixelsocks: Have people been kind of just picking it up and playing it, without any instruction? Do they grok it right away?

Richard: They do, but there are creatures and situations in the game that they don’t immediately see how to get out of. They’re talking to someone who knows how to play, or experimenting their way around it. The immediate game concept [doesn't] need any explanation. Once you’re told it’s a co-op game and these guys aren’t fighting, everything else falls out.

Pixelsocks: Thank you very much.

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