I’d never heard of Michael Brough when I downloaded his iPhone game Corrypt, and my first impression of it wasn’t entirely positive. It had stark, surrealist pixel graphics and very little animation. After solving the first couple of simplistic puzzles, I found myself hopelessly stuck on an early challenge involving lots of boxes in a cramped room. Frustrated, I quit the game and quickly forgot about it.
But Corrypt refused to go away. IndieGames.com hailed the PC version as the best free puzzle game of 2012, and another of Brough’s games, VESPER.5, was nominated for the 2013 Independent Games Festival’s prestigious Nuovo award for innovation.
What finally snared me was a glowing review of Corrypt penned by Frank Lantz, creator of Drop7 and the director of New York University’s Game Center. “This small game, with its rough edges and its cryptic, self-consuming typography,” Lantz wrote, “will repay the attention you give it a thousandfold.”
I decided to take another look. Corrypt, upon proper exploration, revealed itself to be a brilliantly designed puzzle game, unforgiving and unwilling to accommodate players who refuse to give it their full attention. Peel back one layer, and it reveals another more surprising one. Then it does that again, and again, then it flips itself inside out and laughs at your expectations.
“The way [it] works, you’re not sure if it’s something wrong with the game, or if it’s something intentional,” Brough says. His smile fills my Skype window. “I’ve had people e-mail me saying ‘there’s a bug in your game,’ and then describing it exactly as it’s meant to work.”
Brough, a 27-year-old New Zealand native, makes games that confound players’ expectations. Brough has grabbed numerous awards and captured the attention of the indie gaming community, but many respected developers say his games are too ugly to catch on with a mainstream audience. His games might be too weird, his style too divisive, for him to make any money in the ruthless games business.
Around the time Brough turned 11, his family bought a Tandy computer with BASIC installed. Brough spent countless hours of his childhood mucking about with the programming language, making text adventures and other simple games that he’d share with his parents.
While he tinkered with BASIC, Brough often encountered bugs. He’d make a small change in the code, and a game would break in an interesting way. But instead of immediately fixing the error, Brough became fascinated with the bugs themselves.
“The idea that a bug could produce strange and interesting effects,” he says, “is a mythology that I like.”
“If, when something goes wrong, it just crashes, that tells you nothing,” Brough explains. “If something goes wrong and it keeps going, that reveals something to you about how it works, and how the computer thinks.”
With modern hardware like the iPad, Brough complains that the fun of toying around with computers, “that feeling of being at a low level, feeling close to the way computers work,” is gone. For him, the oft-touted “magical” consumer-friendliness of Apple’s devices is a restriction on learning opportunities.
“Now you have an iPad, and you don’t know what’s going on under the screen,” he says. “It’s basically a piece of magic.”
After completing a degree in math and computer science at the University of Auckland, Brough moved to London and began working towards a Ph.D. He landed a decent-paying programming job while continuing his scholastic work, but continued making games, including the beautiful, abstract strategy game Vertex Dispenser, which even Brough admits may have been too esoteric. It combined elements of shooters and real-time strategy games with a complex puzzle system, and many players felt overwhelmed. “I just could not get my head around those concepts at the same time,” said one.
Halfway through the Ph.D., Brough burned out. He quit both his job and his schooling, becoming a full-time game developer. He followed his wife, now the family’s principal breadwinner, to Scotland, and has for the previous year worked tirelessly on his games, producing a diverse portfolio of Technicolor puzzlers, roguelikes and multiplayer games.
Take for example Helix, another Independent Games Festival nominee. It’s a space shooter in the vein of Geometry Wars, but without any shooting. Instead, players defeat enemies by carefully flying around them in circles.
Glitch Tank, an iPad game for two players, is an obvious manifestation of Brough’s lifelong appreciation of glitches. Its fat, stark pixel art pops and crackles on the screen, always seemingly on the verge of falling apart completely. Each player’s controls, a panel of four buttons, is unreliable, with new buttons shuffling in and out with use. It plays like a Game Boy cartridge that’s been dropped in a puddle and trampled by schoolchildren, but it’s all carefully, intentionally designed.
Even the game’s marketing seems glitchy. Brough uses the App Store product description space to describe it as “A digital board %ame⚡⌁ Competitive retro action/strate%* for two pla*ers░.”
Zaga-33, a roguelike with permadeath, is much more subdued, although it does its best to confuse players. Each time the game is played, the effects of all its items are randomized. What was once a teleport skill in one game becomes a deadly laser in the next, and a result each playthrough inspires the same sense of careful curiosity that an entirely new game would.
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The Ugly, Corrupted, Brilliant Games of Michael Brough
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The Ugly, Corrupted, Brilliant Games of Michael Brough
