Today I come to you with one goal - to talk about speed up items. They are little power ups, usually seen in older games, which drop from enemies and permanently change your ship's speed. Usually with no way of reverting back outside of dying.
Everyone hates them, and honestly I kinda hate them too, and sometimes it's tempting to ask why the fuck the devs thought this was a good idea to begin with. Well here's my argument : no matter how you feel about the speed up items themselves, they show an important & highly valuable difference in how game design was seen among arcade game designers.
For various reasons (like simplicity of controls, the need for games to be immediately understood & countless others) arcade game designers tended to default to adding depth via "natural" means, making the depth internal to the play area itself, and more immediate. Moving mechanics away from the player and into the game itself. Life up items, power ups & speed up items are great examples of this because ostensibly they are a statistical layer of variables, one very similar to that of JRPGs, but represented via ingame objects.
Whereas now these things tend to be contained on the player's side, or externally - speed selection via a button, levels and experience points as an abstract layer on top of the main game, bombs as meters. Often these layers could be brought back into the game and probably be more interesting for it, but developers simply don't think this way as much anymore because the practical necessities of arcade design are gone. If you want to see a bit more of a resurgence in arcade design, you have to look towards Pico-8 devs who have to work around its 2 button limit by using the playfield itself more.
The "internal" approach to designing stuff is one of the things that defines arcade game design, I think. It's interesting because it gives all of these objects meaning. Power ups & speed up items drop from specific enemies, at specific points of the screen. Sometimes they drop based off specific conditions. They move around and either create high priority areas for the player, or block off certain parts of the screen. Whether or not you'll want to grab them can, at best of times, depend on not just the part of the game you're at but also your current situation/resources/etc. As seen in Gradius' power up bar and shield refilling. Later games like Toaplan's stuff even played with the concept, programming power-up movement in a way where it deliberately fucked with the player's expectations.
I think if modern devs want to design truly great arcade games, they have to get into the same mind state that lead devs to implementing shit like speed up items. Because even if it turns out that there's just no way to make fucking with the player's moveset forcefully fun, this all comes from a good place - an attempt to integrate & create meaning.
Side note : I CHALLENGE you to think about the development of various mechanics through this lense. Cause think of some shit like the chicken-in-a-barrel pickup from 2D beat 'em ups. You have this mechanic where you have to break a barrel, then be in that area, then walk up and do a pickup animation. We all had moments where enemies screwed us over. Then you got the orbs in stuff like Ninja Gaiden and DMC - more forgiving but still area based (& they often drop in the middle of enemy crowds!). Orbs were getting replaced by potions (including in NG itself lol) - purely player driven healing that exists outside of the context of the game, often via a literal inventory. Estus flask equivalents are a bit of a pushback against this trend, where they brought a bit of context back in via spacing, but even they are getting faster in Souls derivatives.
