Shufflepuck Café – An absorbing marriage of simulation and illusion

Year: 1989 |Publisher: Brøderbund
Developer: Christopher Gross, Gene Portwood, Lauren Elliott
Original format: Macintosh | Version played: Amiga

Not to brag, but once upon a time I was lucky enough to have a conversation with Alexey Pajitnov, creator of Tetris and super smart fella. This short phone call took place around 2007 as research for a magazine article about puzzle games. Little of the exchange sticks in my memory now, but one thing I’ll never forget was when I asked him his opinion of motion controls, with the recent release of the Wii fresh in everyone’s mind. His paraphrased answer… “To be honest, I’m still fascinated by the potential of the mouse.” At the time, I wrote this off as a glib remark. A comment, I assumed, made in place of a considered opinion of the Wii Remote. I’m not even sure if I included it in the final article. But as I play Shufflepuck Café, I wonder if old Pajitnov had a point…

On a purely mechanical level, Shufflepuck Café is so simple that it’s genius. Presented from a first person perspective, your only avatar is an air hockey puck, controlled with absolute one-to-one precision simply by moving the mouse around. Some might say this isn’t so original. Pong had its paddle controllers. Marble Madness its trackball. But Shufflepuck Café’s great illusion isn’t just a matter of control. Every element of the game works to suture the player into its narrow slice of alternative reality so well that all else momentarily ceases to exist.

I find Shufflepuck Café is best played now, exactly as it was when I first discovered it on a mate’s Amiga 500 back in the Nineties. Emulation doesn’t cut it. You can’t get the most from this game by playing on a crystal clear display, in a window, with your favourite collection of GIFs and a folder of tax returns beaming back at you. No, this is best experienced on original hardware, through a CRT monitor and in a dimly lit, if not entirely dark room.

There’s quite a lot of black in Shufflepuck Café. Maybe it’s just an absence of detail, an attempt to conserve the power of the hardware, or a holdover from the game’s monochrome Macintosh roots, perhaps. But the effect is a potent one nonetheless. Sit at a desk, let the glow of the cathode ray tube wash over you, and as the blackness of the room blends with that of the screen, you’re no longer at that desk. You’re in a seedy bar on some planet, god knows where in the galaxy. You should feel afraid; most of the alien patrons are degenerate thugs or powerful gang lords, but all that seems to matter to them is shufflepuck. As you play, all other concerns fade, and time stands still. Every match is tense, and yet there’s also something quite comforting about the way the immersive perspective wraps you in its hold.

Aside from the title theme and a jaunty jingle played in between rounds, Shufflepuck Café is music-free, leaving you only with the ambient sound effects of the bar. This was fairly common with Amiga games as limited memory made it difficult for both music and SFX to be played simultaneously – some even gave you the option of one or the other – but in Shufflepuck Café it feels less like a limitation and more like a directorial choice. The delicate balance between the occasional sound effect and otherwise total silence somehow has the effect of making you feel even more… there.

I think the ultimate credit for total air hockey immersion really has to go to Shufflepuck Café’s opponents though. Just like the Mos Eisley Cantina, this café is a wretched hive of scum and villainy; populated by weird and wonderful alien creeps who, while they might not shoot first, will certainly not hesitate to smash the puck into your goal as quickly as you blink.

From the iconic character select screen, in which each opponent either glares menacingly or glances shiftily back at the player, it’s clear that Shufflepuck Café isn’t just a sports simulation. It is air hockey’s own Punch-Out!! where the cast’s personality quirks also inform their play style.

Tackle them in tournament order and your adversaries start out suitably meek and easy to beat. Skip Feeney is Shufflepuck Café’s Glass Joe – a typical wimp who looks like Harry Potter in a hoodie. He’s a complete pushover and a perfect way to ease into the game. The difficulty increases ever so slightly with Visine Orb, a bug-eyed alien only just tall enough to nervously peek over the table. His play style, brilliantly, is just as anxious as his appearance. His puck erratically shakes across the table either through a lack of confidence or a chronic case of the tremors. Either way, it’s remarkable how well the game uses its mechanics to actually tell you something about the character and, in turn, how character informs the gameplay.

As the challenge ramps up, your challengers become tougher, cooler customers. There’s the intimidating General, a Napoleonic pig who partly resembles the Gamorrean Guards from Return Of The Jedi, only much smarter and presumably more of a threat. Then there’s Princess Bejin, who will assuredly knock you off your streak by waving her hand to telekinetically swerve the puck in impossible motions. Even in this weird alien world, the first time it happens, I swear you will not be prepared!

Shufflepuck Café’s most memorable character is Lexan Smythe-Worthington, a mid-table contender with a penchant for too many tipples. This sophisticated, aristocratic alien sports a dapper tuxedo and adeptly plays with just one hand while he holds a champagne glass perfectly steady in the other. Lexan is a skilled player, enough to match your every move, and it initially feels as though you might never manage to shuffle a puck past his nimble hand. But as the game goes on, and he knocks back one blue champagne after another, his skills gradually start to decline, his reactions fade and the tables start to turn. By the end of the match you can walk all over your tipsy rival, and as you put the final goal past him, he ultimately passes out and comically slides beneath the table!

The effect is so brilliantly done, so subtle in its gradual change that you’d be forgiven for not realising at all. The first time you notice, it’s easy to tell yourself that it’s just your imagination, that you’ve imprinted your experience onto the character and assumed a level of sophistication not intended by the game’s creators. Yet repeated play reinforces the pattern and proves this is no coincidence. Reassuringly, the trick loses none of its appeal with repetition and merely becomes something to look forward to, making Lexan Smythe-Worthington the highlight of Shufflepuck Café’s captivating rogues gallery.

Taken as a complete package – the characters, the atmosphere and the perfect one-to-one mouse control – Shufflepuck Café becomes more than the sum of its parts. It’s the Amiga’s closest equivalent to virtual reality (if we ignore the actual Amiga-powered VR machines of the 90s), a magic trick on a single floppy disk, whose spell is far more powerful than simulating a fun bar game.

FOUR LITTLE THINGS ABOUT SHUFFLEPUCK CAFE THAT I RATHER LIKED

1. Nerual Ttoille (co-developer Lauren Elliott spelled backwards) usually appears as a ghostly figure with no face, until you score or concede a goal and then the cloak pulls back to reveal a tiny grinning head within!

2. Having a tough time? You can use the in-game options to adjust the paddle size. Try waving your magic hands past this one, Bejin!

3. Not everyone on the character select screen is an opponent. The cyclops in the bottom right corner is there just for fun. You can click on him to make his eye move around and make a squishy noise.

4. Shufflepuck Café released on a few formats, including some Japanese PC releases. Maybe it’s nostalgia talking, but I’m not sure their art is quite as effective as the Amiga version. In fact, they look downright weird. But I still kinda want to play them. Someone loan me an X68000!

Finally, how about some music from Shufflepuck Café…