The Classic PC Gaming Era (1977-1989) - Shufflepuck Café
It's basically Pong meets the Star Wars cantina, but with a three-dimensional twist.
RELEASE DATE: 1988
DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Brøderbund Software
PLAYABILITY TODAY: Highly playable
BEST VERSIONS: Macintosh, Amiga
It may be hard to believe today, but the PC mouse was still a rather exotic peripheral in the 1980s, and many PC gamers didn’t begin using them until the latter half of the decade as graphical user interfaces became more common in productivity software and games. One platform where the mouse was absolutely essential was the Apple Macintosh, but most of the games that were developed for the Mac utilized the mouse as a point and click tool. Shufflepuck Café, however, was that rare game that realized the mouse could be used quite effectively as a simulated air hockey paddle, and designer Christopher Gross, along with fellow game developers Gene Portwood and Lauren Elliot (who’d both worked on several Carmen Sandiego games as well as Captain Goodnight and the Island of Fear), used the Mac’s speed and graphical prowess to put together what was essentially a three-dimensional version of Pong played against an odd assortment of AI-controlled opponents.
And were it not for the fact that Shufflepuck Café is extremely well-executed and amazingly simple to just pick up and play, I probably wouldn’t be recommending it here because there’s not much to it. You start off in a bar on some alien world, and the manual explains you’re the galaxy’s most successful Krypton 3 salesman, but your Space Transporter (in some versions, the “Nash Sombrero”) has broken down. While you’re stranded, you decide to play some Shufflepuck. Your opponents include a droid you can program to different skill levels, a dweeby physics student, an aristocratic lizard who’s too busy with his drink to put up much of a fight, a warthog pretending to be a revolutionary general, an alluring princess with psychic powers and, worst of all, a big tough guy named Biff who’s got no sense of sportsmanship but who’s also extremely difficult to beat. All you have to do to challenge someone to a game is click on them, and the game itself is fairly easy to pick up and play if you’re even remotely familiar with air hockey.
Of course, there are additional options to make the game more fun. There’s a tournament mode where you can attempt to be the big winner, and there are ways to change your paddle style, size and technique. There’s even a bumper you can place in the middle that gets knocked around during play and makes it hard to hit straight slam shots. When you score on your opponent, there’s a fun glass breaking effect that makes your shot feel substantial, and on the Macintosh version and some of the later ports such as the Amiga, there are great sound effects to go along with it.
On the Mac, Shufflepuck Café is a good-looking game that makes good use of the limited screen and monochrome display to create a fun arcade-style experience. It also happens to be the most distinctive in its appearance since the alien opponents have a flat, cartoonish look with highly exaggerated features. The Amiga, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC and MS-DOS ports are all in color and sport a more unified and refined graphical style while preserving the game’s sense of speed and fluid motion. The Japanese ports on the PC-98 and Sharp X68000, meanwhile, have completely redrawn graphics in a manga style and also include two additional characters. Curiously, the Famicom version has yet another art style all its own which is somewhere in between the Japanese and North American titles.
While Shufflepuck Café has never been officially re-released, two spiritual successors created by fans have been released in the meantime: a 2003 German title called Nightclub Shufflepuck and a 2013 mobile game (also available on Steam) called Shufflepuck Cantina. While I have not played the former, the latter is a grindy copycat with nice presentation and controls (and even a VR mode!), but far less charm and a more pronounced Star Wars vibe. Stick the original Shufflepuck Café if you can.
As Our Series Continues…
In the coming weeks, we’ll talk about gameroom games, puzzle games, unusual games and begin delving into the arcade and console games you missed from the 1980s.
And while you’ll definitely see some titles from prominent North American publishers like Sierra On-Line, Infocom, Activision, Electronic Arts, Brøderbund, SSI, MicroProse, Lucasfilm Games, Epyx and Sir-Tech in the mix, you’ll also see references to games from the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Spain and Japan.
If you’ve missed the earlier entries in the series, which cover ASCII games, adventure games, wargames, strategy games and role-playing games, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.
Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 1. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!