Viz - The Game

Imagine what hockey would look like if it were played on a chessboard with pieces the size of an infant. Viz was never a simulator in the classical sense — this is a turn-based strategy game that someone christened with a sports name and released into the wild at the start of the nineties.

In a simple arena, two teams of abstract pieces face off against each other. Your goal is straightforward: get the ball to the opponent's side, or hold it longer than they do. It seems chaotic at first glance, but the rules are strictly logical. Each piece moves according to fixed movement rules, occupies its own chunk of the board, and behaves like a chess piece with its own geometry. This isn't a hockey simulation — it's an abstract game on the theme of hockey, where principle and geometry collide.

Playing is slow and strategic. You think ahead, consider positions, wait for your opponent (or the computer) to make a positioning mistake. There's no escape here — the graphics are stripped-down, sound minimal, mouse control sluggish. The game's pace feels like a board game on your computer, not a sports match. After twenty minutes, you're already feeling the fatigue from clicking and waiting.

This game's peculiar experimental approach is what makes it interesting today for the curious player who wants to see how things were experimented with in the early nineties. It wasn't a successful game, wasn't a hit, and hardly anyone talked about it. It was a quiet attempt by someone who thought chess and hockey belonged together. Chances are, few people even noticed it.

These days you'd play it more out of curiosity. If you're interested in how far someone pushed "sports design" without graphics and without dynamism, Viz is an archive piece worth checking out. It's not a game for fun — it's a game for testing what you could do with design when you had few resources and plenty of time.