There’s little more satisfying in gaming than receiving an achievement on the Xbox 360. The popping noise as as an icon appears signifying that you have done something great is something that always brings a smile to gamer’s faces (unless, of course, it’s an achievement for futility). On the Xbox Engineering Blog, Microsoft revealed that the iconic noise and notification accompanying it almost didn’t happen.
The blog discusses how achievements came to be, and gives a technical exploration on how they work. The technical aspects will be interesting to only a few people, but reading about the decision process surrounding the Xbox Achievements is interesting. Particularly of note is the fact that, when creating the idea, the developers really were split on whether they would be a distraction and whether gamers would like the idea.
“Some people argued that gamers wouldn’t want toast popping up in the heat of battle and that game designers would want to use their own visual style to present achievements,” writes Vince Curley, Xbox Live & Platform Architect.
“Others argued for consistency and for reducing the work required of game developers. In the end we added the notification popup and its happy beep, which turned out to be the right decision, but for a long time it was anything but obvious.”
The beep is an ingrained part of being an Xbox 360 gamer. Every single game rewards achievements, and some gamers have become “achievement whores,” playing even the most awful of games in order to get every single achievement and reach astounding gamerscores.
The achievement system really, at the end of the day, reflects the number of games people have played through, and also indicates skill. There are general achievements that are easy to reach, like beating the first level of a game or scoring your first goal, but there are also difficult achievements like Zombie Genocider, in which one had to kill 53,594 zombies in one playthrough of Dead Rising. Of course, that achievement also spawned a cheeky and similar achievement in Left 4 Dead called Zombie Genocidest in which players had to kill 53,595 infected. Achievements add value to games as players seek to earn extra points for their gamerscore doing everything from killing to jumping to traveling across a map to get a few more points here and there.
What would the Xbox 360 be like without its achievement system? Can gamers even imagine playing without achievements at this point? It was a brilliant innovation that was nearly left on the drawing board. Thankfully it wasn’t.
