I’ll lay my age card on the table here: Uno on the Xbox 360 was the first time I used a webcam. Ever. It was also one of the first games I ever played, on my first ever console. As you can imagine, this combination of first times has given the game a spot quite close to my heart – it showed me how social and casual gaming fits into the world of video games… as well as a few other things I probably shouldn’t have been seeing.
Uno has got something of a legendary status amongst players who were there back in the day. People have endlessly joked about it coming packaged with the console, and some have somewhat firmly-held memories of online interactions with strangers on cam. It was the first game from the Xbox Live Arcade to pass one million downloads after all, solid proof that people were indeed down bad for Uno.
But why did it prove so popular? What about its reputation as far as the webcam was involved? To find out, I had to speak to an expert on the matter.
Enter Chris Early. Early worked at Microsoft from 2005 and 2009 and was the studio head for the Microsoft Casual Games development studio. Not only that, Early led the team that developed Xbox Live Arcade itself. Twenty years later, he’s over at Ubisoft as SVP of strategic partnerships & business developments. I talked to Early about Uno briefly earlier this month, during which he recollected fondly of those initial years working on arguably Microsoft’s best console.
“As with any licensed game, it’s easier when someone recognises it, and there’s a lot of recognition for the Uno name. So that was a good start,” Early initially explains when asked why Uno managed to do so well back then. “We made that game ourselves at Microsoft and Carbonated Games, which was our casual games studio there. The good news with Microsoft Game Studios at that point, as well as Carbonated Games, was that our mission was more about making a high quality game. We needed to show off the characteristics and value of the console, so we were blessed with the budget to do that.”
It turns out, despite the budget behind it and the quality of Uno, there was scepticism at the time that such a game would interest gamers. Something Early was, and still is, happy to have proved wrong. “So it felt good to play the game, to play with friends and family through the game. Combine that with the recognition and the solid craftsmanship lead to the win. The surprise was, for many on the hardcore portfolio team, was like this… ‘No one will play Uno! On a console, really? Why bother?’ But you have to realise, that team I was on were the ones who wrote Minesweeper and Solitaire before I arrived, and those are probably two of the most played games ever!”
For Microsoft, Uno was one of a few games that proved that a smaller scope, more casual experience can win big on the Xbox 360, a reality that paved the road for future releases under that banner. As Early explains, its success and the console vehicle allowed the team to mess around with the bones of Uno to create more, interesting twists.
“People will spend a lot of time not playing HD AAA games,” Early elaborates, “and Uno was a great proof point for that. It really resonated, and we loved it so much we even tried to overcome the challenges it had. One major complaint we had was that people wanted to play it in the same room, there was much more couch play at that time. That’s why we came up with Uno Rush! We went back to the licensor for approval as an official version of Uno. It was a heads-up version where you could see all the cards at the same time, so you could play on the same couch. It was a much more frantic game, and some people didn’t like it for that reason, but it did come back to the same concepts of Uno so I think it went well.”
The elephant in the room demands addressing. One of Uno’s stickier legacies was the creative use of its webcam feature. Now, Uno on the 360 was not the first game to integrate webcam support, but it’s perhaps the game best known for it these days. The idea in itself is a lovely one, connecting people around the world face-to-face, much like the physical game does. Sometimes, though, people would be keen to do a little too much connecting, if you know what I mean.
Early, even now, credits the webcam support as an example of the social merit games can have, and is keen to stress the benefits the webcam support brought to Uno. “You could see their reactions. Unfortunately, over time, the Kinect went away. But Uno was a great example to begin with of how gameplay could be more social. It could involve other people.”
Early would pause, look down, then fondly say the following: “I miss that part.”
Immediately afterwards, I asked Early about whether the team were concerned at all about the more inventive uses players had for the webcam in Uno, and the game’s reputation for such efforts.
To this, Early remarked on the various controls players had to avoid looking at gnarlier stuff during games of Uno: “I had previously worked at a company that had webcam communications and you could quickly see how abuses could appear suddenly. So it was important for us, especially at Microsoft, to allow players to have full control over what they saw. It wasn’t just about what you could broadcast, but it was also about what you could choose to see as an individual.
“Now, Microsoft has a tonne of parental controls which are obviously really important, but you could set it up so you had a child account and could never see video. By the same token, with any given video you could stop seeing it with a click. What we found is there was much less use of video in random match-making games, and far more used in pre-existing friendly relationships.”
It would turn out that, in a roundabout way, Early has maintained a watchful eye over Uno games ever since. Perhaps not as directly, but with Ubisoft continuing to create and release Uno games even today, the series hasn’t fled too far from his sight. A series that, according to Early, continues to enable social shenanigans among those who play it.
“Uno has continued to be huge even since then, as part of our offerings at Ubisoft today,” Early exclaimed. “For fun, look at how many hours people stream Uno. It is surprising to me. We’ll see people who are Rainbow Six influencers or whatever, and in their downtime they’ll stream Uno! It’s about the conversation at that point. Yes they’re playing Uno, and it’s great to see! But Uno is not a super complex game, and they’re still having a great time, and that’s surprising to us.”
Listen, Uno may not have a spot on any ‘Top 10 Xbox 360 games’ lists but it still filled an important spot on the console, and to me represents a slice of what was on offer that’s far removed from the AAA extravaganzas. So here’s to Uno and the Xbox 360, 20 years later.
