Just why is Peggle the happiest game on earth?

Peggle is not particularly old. Intellectually, at least, I know that. But it comes from an era that, despite being relatively recent, still feels extremely distant. I could tell you that Peggle was released in 2007 – I just checked – but that’s not the best way of explaining how much time has passed in this peculiar gap of 18 years.

So let’s try this instead. Peggle was the first game I ever saw that ran funny messages when the loading bar was inching towards completion. Peggle was a bit of an outlier on Steam when it first launched, to the degree that I spent a good part of those years writing about the strange new phenomena of “casual” games – although Peggle is anything but casual.

More? Peggle – I know this, because I just downloaded it – is 19 MB in size. Actually it’s just under that. I rounded up, and it’s still tiny. I always think of Space Giraffe, which clocks in just under 50 MB if memory serves, as being the perfect compact game. And then I think of those blue 3.5 inch disks I used to carry around at university and the floor starts to spin beneath me.

To put it in yet another different way, when Peggle was first out, I was still regularly visiting the “Interestingness” tab on Flickr. Flickr was in its prime, in fact. I was checking it regularly and so were all my friends. I went on a press trip to Seattle to see the PopCap team that made Peggle, and I used a spare day to visit the Central Library in Seattle, which is now my favourite building in the whole world, give or take the LA Water and Power building. (Do check the library out if you get a chance.) And then when I got home from Seattle, I looked up the library on Interestingness on Flickr and realised it was where I had first had the idea to go and visit it.

Granted, this seems, as ever with me, like a lot of things pinging off in different directions. But here’s the underlying point. Peggle comes from a time when I felt very good about things. And it’s hard not to see why. I am a perhaps unnecessarily cheery person even now, but I look back and think: Seattle, Peggle, Flickr accounts! Libraries! Press trips and meeting interesting developers!

Why this is all meaningful, to me at least, is because I loaded up Peggle just now on Steam – 27 Feb, 2007, Overwhelmingly Positive – and I felt that same rush of idiot positivity. It’s like it had been bottled with the game and had remained in there, living some kind of vaporous life alongside the dormant code, and I’ve just released it again. Seattle sunshine! The red floor at the library! Bjorn!

Peggle is like this all the way through. It is a thing of happiness, and I am curious to understand why.

There’s the basic gist of it, of course. Peggle is Pachinko, in essence, with you firing little ball bearings from the top of the screen to hit pegs on the way down. Who doesn’t want that kind of set up? And then there’s the aesthetic sheen that PopCap is so good at: the rising scale of chimes as you hit more and more pegs, the Smoky the Bear wildlife backdrops. The characters who all bestow special powers. The fact that the Ode to Freakin Joy plays at the end, when all the pegs are gone and Alexander weeps because there are no more worlds to conquer.

Then there are all those special powers that keep the game fresh and allow you to do interesting things with your shots that all feel like a form of wish-fulfillment. This is what a power-up should feel like! It should feel like something you’ve just realised you wanted in the first place. Track shots after the first bounce? Multiple balls? Little ledges on the bucket at the bottom to give me a better chance at things? All of this stuff makes sense!

These powers are part of a framework of little pluses that PopCap drops in throughout. There’s the orange pegs that build the Ball-o-Tron meter. There’s the fact that if you drop a shot into the bucket you get to use it again. There’s the roving purple peg, which is fun to spot and also a way to lead you into dangerous plays. There’s even that most subtle of features that PopCap dropped in during testing: the team put at least a couple of zeroes after almost every score in the game, and it turned people’s satisfaction around.

Then there’s the most basic stuff. I think there are three of these elements in Peggle and I count them accordingly: trajectories, gravity and luck. Trajectories are fun because we like to calculate them, and because Peggle starts with a peg-field that feels like an impenetrable thicket, and you need a way into that kind of thing.

Gravity, meanwhile, gives Peggle rigour. It allows you to watch what’s happening on screen and say: yes, this isn’t just fun, it’s legit. Newton is on board with this game. I know what I expect to happen and so when it happens – the downward pull of the ball bearings – I feel like everything is unfolding in a just universe. A universe that makes sense!

Finally, there’s luck. So often discounted by developers, but luck is brilliant in games. If you feel like you got lucky – every now and then, far beneath the barrier at which it becomes an indulgence, or coddling – a game can make you feel fantastic. It’s lovely to feel that you’re brilliant at something, but slightly better, I think, to occasionally feel like your brilliance is backed up by the universe choosing to smile on you.

And this is the thing about Peggle that I now see, the thing that transforms it from a clever, elegant piece of design and into that rare game that speaks to human spirits. All the little positive tweaks to the game – all the slow-downs and Ode to Joys and rainbows and unicorns and scores with three zeroes tacked on the end, even all the moments when you suspect PopCap might have had its thumb on the scale for that astonishing last shot that changed everything? All of that ties into Peggle’s message.

I think its message is pretty simple. And if it’s not always useful, it’s often something people want and need to hear anyway. With its rebounds, its lucky shots, its flukes and its moments of pinpoint brilliance, with its sheer movement from chaos to clarity, Peggle tells its players the same thing that Jean-Martin Charcot used to tell his neurology patients: the unforeseen is always possible. And so when you feel like you’re out of luck, Peggle is often there, Overwhelmingly Positive, and ready to give you a bit of a boost. With a few extra zeroes stuck on the end, obv.