Such retrospective navel gazing brings me on to a game that caught me by surprise while watching the weekly instalment of The 1Up Show, a free stream and podcast that I download occasionally. In one of their recent episodes they covered Flower, a game that I can only describe as “playing the wind”. Since such a description is flimsy at most, I’ve embedded a video below to demonstrate what I mean.

I was quite surprised by this – I hadn’t heard of thatgamecompany before and was caught by surprise by a new game concept that seemed to come out of nowhere. A short while later and I discovered the history of two students from the University of Southern California’s Interactive Media division, and suddenly everything  linked up. These are the guys that tried out new game mechanics through Cloud and later flOw, and come from the same course as the team that developed PMOG. Both these games are expose their raw gameplay through an uncluttered interface and simple mechanics, all of which help to make the game fun as well as making it simple to implement. Progress information is supplied through in-game elements, such as the size of your cloud in Cloud, or the length of your creature in flOw. The mechanics for flOw worked so well that they were borrowed heavily for the cell phase of Spore.

The culmination of all of this means that flower, rather than being something unexpected, is more of a natural evolution of previous concepts produced by a niche developer. That doesn’t mean that their efforts should be belittled, but instead followed closely. Such primal concepts as the ones demonstrated here are useful to track, as they provide a canvas on which to build further games, in much the same way as Spore has done. It’ll be interesting to see not only what thatgamecompany produce in the future, but also which other games currently in development by others are influenced by thatgamecompany.