Qix (Arcade)
Visualizing progress well goes a long way towards making a game feel satisfying, and for many of the early arcade games, the simplest way to achieve this was reduction. In Pac-Man there are fewer and fewer dots to collect as you munch them up and in Space Invaders each alien killed brings you closer to winning the level, but in Qix your gauge for progress is what you add to the screen. Rather than focusing on what’s taken away, success in Qix comes ever closer as you add more colored rectangles to the play area, this fight for territory control not only providing a different sort of satisfaction than its contemporaries but allowing for many valid strategies to achieve success.
Qix (pronounced “kicks”) takes place entirely in one giant rectangle that fills most of the screen, the only thing outside its borders being details like your current score and the game’s name. Within this rectangle you control a marker that travels around the edges of the rectangle until you press a button. This will make the marker head out into the black empty rectangle and start drawing a line the game calls a Stix. By drawing a shape that has at least one border aligned with either the outside barrier or a preexisting shape within the play field, you are able to fill in a region of space with either teal or red depending on if you pressed the button for fast drawing or slow drawing respectively. Slow drawing provides an additional boost to your score for being the riskier and more time-consuming option, but no matter how you make your shape, this space now counts towards a percentage of the full rectangle you need to control to reach the next level. While I have seen claims that Qix can have its percentages adjusted by arcade operators, I’ve only seen evidence that each stage on a Qix arcade machine will require you to fill up at least 75% of the area with regions you’ve staked your claim to.
Obviously, Qix wouldn’t be too interesting of a game if all you did was draw shapes inside of a bigger shape, so there are a few complications meant to prevent you from claiming so much territory too easily. The eponymous Qix is perhaps the most dangerous, it being a series of lines that shift in color and move around in strange and hard to predict ways. While you are making the lines that will become the borders of claimed areas, the Qix can kill you by colliding with the Stix of your incomplete shapes, forcing you back to wherever you started drawing with one life less than the three you are given per quarter. Maneuvering your marker when a Qix is near is risky but not entirely up to chance, the Qix’s speed and lack of aggression meaning sometimes you can operate close to it without too much concern or push your luck knowing that it’s currently too far from your line to cause problems. As you reach later levels though, the Qix multiplies, the player needing to work around two of the strange titular troubles. However, this also gives the player a new victory condition when it happens, as you can choose to instead split the play area so a Qix is on either side of your line, the level completing regardless of the percentage of area claimed and giving you a score multiplier that lasts until you run out of lives.
To keep you moving in Qix instead of lollygagging as you try to find the best moment to move out and make a shape you have a spark enemy appropriately named Sparx. Traveling along the borders and lines you’ve drawn, a Sparx moves around the interior’s edges to try and hit you if you aren’t making a line out in the play field. The Qix threatens your lines with its movements, but the Sparx will surge around and can only be avoided by leaving the safety of the borders. By their first appearance they already come in a pair, but if you let the timer that appears as a red bar above the play area run out, more Sparx will enter the play area as will an upgraded form known as a Super Sparx that can travel on a line you’re drawing. Qix usually moves quickly enough with certain strategies that it’s possible you might not even see these upgraded enemies, especially since the timer resets between levels, but you certainly won’t have the time to sit around because of both the initial threat of the Sparx and what they might become if you aren’t quick to claim your turf.
The final complication to taking over the rectangle is The Fuse, another way of keeping the player moving in that it only appears if you start drawing a line and come to a stop before finishing it. The Fuse begins at the starting point of your line and travels across it, disappearing if you complete the shape but burning you if it catches up before then. Like the Sparx its movement achieves a decent speed but both can be outrun if need be. The Fuse is simply the way the game tries to stop you from stalling as you wait for a Qix to move into a more optimal position. Despite being another complication meant to encourage quick movement, Qix still maintains its spot as a fairly strategic game. Having so much freedom to draw your shape means you can adjust your course on the fly or in reaction to the movements of your enemies, but more importantly, there are multiple valid tactics to succeed without any of them being so effective they feel required.
Besides the simple shake-up of trying to split up the two Qix instead of meeting the percentage quota, achieving victory can involve things like taking every small opportunity available to gain any ground, multiple small but safe shapes adding up over time despite being slower than something bold like drawing a long quick line to carve a huge chunk out of the play field. Players concerned mostly with their score instead of just beating levels will want to use the slow draw option and claim as much territory as possible when moving at the pokier pace, but they can earn even more points if they manage to claim above 75% of the rectangle’s interior. Any percentage point above 75 provides a small bonus, and there are legitimate but incredibly difficult ways to claim up to 99% of the play field so long as your last shape has been worked towards properly. Splitting Qix can involve tactics like building a large central tower of stacked thin rectangles, playing for percentage claimed can be made easier by cordoning off a Qix in a corner with an exit too small for it to slip through, and it is through openness to strategies like these that Qix manages to be so replayable. The enemies are tough to work around so they put up a legitimate challenge, but the many ways you can balance their behaviors and your goal makes the game enjoyable even though it only gets a small change to its central formula when the enemy count increases.
THE VERDICT: Qix is an arcade game that makes strategizing simple and satisfying. The need to claim so much of the rectangular play field while avoiding the small selection of enemies allows for different approaches, progress visualized well by how much of the area is colored in and success achievable through many different styles of play. Qix’s core play is challenging but open to experimentation and quick plan adjustments, so while it does quickly expend its only shifts to the format when it introduces additional enemies, your time spent playing the similar levels can still vary. While the Qix itself is hard to predict, it’s vital towards making the shape drawing a more tense and thought-provoking activity.
And so, I give Qix for arcade machines…
A GOOD rating. Qix is a game that’s constantly changing without really introducing too many new variables across its stages. As you draw a shape, the play field now has new borders to travel on, areas the Qix can’t enter, and new lines for the Sparx to travel on as you plan your next drawing. Your strategy influences your opportunities while the game makes sure it can keep applying pressure to you with its three enemy concepts. While the concepts on show are incredibly solid and don’t disrupt the play, Qix does feel like it could have added more ideas into the picture to keep things fresh beyond the small difficulty increase achieved by adding in extra enemies. However, the regular play encourages a player not to just do the same actions they did last time they played. An opportunist might find their play style is slow and become riskier to compensate, but the risky player might find they are losing too many lives and adjust to take what claims they can. The movement of the Qix influences your options constantly all while the Sparx roam the interior lines to keep you from just striking whenever the Qix’s seemingly random movement makes it easy to avoid. Qix is by no means complex, but you do need to think on your feet and can benefit from attempting certain approaches.
Like many other arcade games, the simple but satisfying fun of Qix means it would have many imitators, some even retooling the Qix gameplay to display lewd imagery rather than colored boxes as you fill in the play area. While that’s a different form of making progress satisfying, some mechanics introduced in the frequent iterations on Qix did show that the format has room to grow without completely destroying the original’s appeal. The original’s flexibility does still mean it isn’t just the starting line for the game format though, able to entertain by being an arcade title that can be played in a unique way each time you pop in a new quarter.