The Making Of: Advance Wars

Playing Advance Wars is a painstaking process. It’s not so much trial and error as trial and education, each mistake teaching you a little more about the impeccable clockwork that powers the game’s simple, stunning mechanics. And, it turns out, playing Advance Wars isn’t a very different process from making Advance Wars.

Its creators at Intelligent Systems have been studying their creation over four generations – from the exuberant, unforgiving NES original, to the skeletal appeal of the Game Boy version and the lavish charm of the SNES title, culminating in the near perfection of Advance Wars itself. Each version adds something, takes something else away, a painstaking process of experimentation within a set of rules perfectly balanced between complexity and comprehensibility.

Famicom Wars was released in 1988 and was followed by various versions for Gameboy and one for SNES before 2001's Advance Wars

For a game became the cornerstone of any sane GBA collection, however, its genesis was a little scrappy. “The project was started when we were working on the original launch titles for the GBA,” explains director Kentaro Nishimura, “and, to be honest, Nintendo was already too busy, we had too many jobs to do, so we had to ask Intelligent Systems to share the responsibility of making Advance Wars.”

It was, of course, a responsibility Intelligent Systems had always borne before, but this time around Nintendo was keeping a close eye on the game’s development. “At the early stages, it’s just IS developers who get together and come up with unique game ideas,” confirms director Makoto Shimojo. “But when we present to Nintendo, their observations are nearly always: ‘That’s too sophisticated, that’s not balanced for a general audience’. And that’s when we start working on the adjustments.”

Those adjustments were tied in inextricably with the platform they were designing for. “We were aiming at the GBA’s target audience – relatively young children – and at that time I thought they would like the pop design – the bright colours and rounded characters – and the comedy elements, so we applied that kind of approach to the design and the interface. Of course, when we got feedback from the game we discovered that it had sold mostly to teenage boys, so…” Shimojo laughs and shrugs.

Were there ever any concerns about tailoring such a cerebral game to a portable machine and a young audience? “Yeah, you’re right,” says Shimojo. “At the very beginning we were very aware that we were going to be asking people to play for long periods of time and that the game was going to be quite hard. So we thought, why don’t we make it so the game has a cycle, a wave from a period of excitement to another? If you look at long films, they keep people’s attention by varying the pace, by mixing moments of excitement with moments of calm. So that’s what we tried to do. I don’t know if it quite worked out, but that was our original idea.”

There’s no doubt that these efforts were successful – for many, the total coherence of Advance Wars’ vibrant art style, despite seeming as ready to draw its inspiration from Citroën’s back catalogue as local manga traditions, was what drew them to a genre they’d previously ignored. But once you’ve pulled new players to a strategy game, how do you keep them there? Shimojo acknowledges the problem: “There are people who really like to play action games, games which give you instant feedback without having to think too much about anything. But what’s interesting about Advance Wars is that the team who made it are not avid sim games fans.

"They are people who love Beatmania, who love shooting games and fighting games. For example, I’m an avid racing game fan. And all those people joined together to make the game, and because each member has different tastes, they tried to pick up the best elements of other genres and incorporate them, even though sometimes they had to do it very subtly! For example, one of the most important elements is how you move each unit. It’s important that the player doesn’t feel any stress when they do that. So the guy who loves shooting games came up with the way of moving, so there’s no stress and you feel you can control everything right down to the perfect centimetre. And the guys who love music games helped with the timing, trying to get the tempo right, to make a rhythm with the way you move the units. So those kind of elements – the entertaining elements – are the kind of things which usually aren’t included in simulation games, but they are a core part of the Advance Wars experience.”