One of the Best and Weirdest Mobile Games Just Got a Reboot

An oft-overlooked asset of video games is the way they can help habituate players to a new kind of technology. As the game scholar Ian Bogost has remarked in interviews and his own writing, ubiquitous PC software like Minesweeper and Solitaire helped people acclimate themselves to using a mouse and keyboard and begin to learn how to manipulate discrete objects on a screen. Mobile gaming might feel like the Wild West compared to the now historically established PC, but even in the fast-paced world of Flappy Bird (we hardly knew ye!) and Candy Crush Saga, a sense of history is beginning to emerge.

That's why I find it so fascinating to revisit a game like Eliss Infinity, a remake of sorts that was recently put out through the iOS app store. The game was originally released as Eliss in March 2009—for perspective, that was seven months before Angry Birds first appeared on mobile devices, so forever ago. But even recent mobile hits like Threes and Flappy Bird seem conservative compared to designer Steph Thirion's creation. He told me over Skype recently that he was inspired to make the game after seeing Apple's iPhone.

"The device was super interesting to me because it was one of the first multi-touch ones," Thirion said. Looking back at the game now, however, he admitted that he may have gotten a little carried away.

You can see what he means once you start to play Eliss Infinity. It's a puzzle game, the main challenge of which involves trying to match different colored planets to make them fit inside of scraggly rings of the same color whenever they appear on screen. To adjust the size of the planets, you have to squish them together or tweeze them apart with your fingers. And while you're struggling to do that, the screen is constantly filling up with more planets that leech away your health whenever they get too close to one another.

It's frantic, visually stunning in a dizzying sort of way, and a lot of fun. When I first emailed Thirion about the game, he made sure to tell me to keep playing until I unlocked the endless "Infinity" mode that gives the remake its name.

"That's my favorite part," he wrote. "It's hard though; it's a laser-focus type of multi-touch game. It's not for everybody but people that do get into it really get into it. (tip: use both yer hands!)"

I asked Thirion what he meant by that, and he told me that he originally revisited Eliss when he was stuck in a rut while working on his new game, Faraway, an ambitious project that he's been laboring over for years. Like Eliss, he's set out to make Faraway an endless game. He's still trying to figure out how exactly to pull that off, something that reworking Eliss multiple times has helped him realize is a lot trickier than it seems.

"I remember looking at Tetris and thinking: this is such a simple algorithm, but it's super replayable," Thirion said. "Just having this simple system that had so much depth to it…it made me realize that it's actually easier to build content than to find a formula that's super simple and engaging. It's a lot more challenging than I thought!"

If there's one thing he's now sure of, however, it's that he doesn't want to make Faraway quite as crazy a multi-touch experience than Eliss Infinity. When he first made the game, he explained, he thought everybody would be like him—excited at the sheer possibility of being able to touch the phone's screen at multiple points simultaneously and have it respond, be able to "move things around constantly." And, well, they were. But he soon discovered that "usability wise, it's very problematic."

He's probably right. But it's only because of experiments like Eliss Infinity that we now know that. Plus, as anyone who's gotten sick of Temple Run or Jetpack Joyride can tell you, having a simple control scheme (i.e., tapping) might be better in terms of its usability. But that doesn't mean the game itself is any better. There's a still a lot to learn about how we use touchscreens, and we need more weird experiments like this one to help figure it out.