Why a koi pond?
The game could have been about anything that moves in straight lines and turns at corners. It is about koi because of what a koi pond is for: a place you go to slow down and look. This is the short history of that idea, and how the game tries to keep faith with it.
Carp in the rice terraces
Koi are carp. The ornamental kind, nishikigoi — “brocaded carp” — come from the mountain villages of Niigata prefecture in Japan, where farmers kept plain dark carp in the ponds that fed their rice terraces, as food for the winter. Sometime in the early nineteenth century the farmers began to notice fish with patches of red or white, and, being farmers, kept the pretty ones and bred from them. What began as a curiosity in a few villages became a craft: by the time a group of these fish were shown in Tokyo in 1914, there were named varieties, and by the middle of the twentieth century there were koi shows, koi judges and koi prices that could buy a house.
The point of that history for a game is that koi were never wild fish admired from a distance. They were bred to be looked at from above, from the edge of a pond, which is why the patterns sit on the back. A koi is a fish designed for a viewpoint. Koi Drift uses the same viewpoint: you look straight down into the water, and the fish are painted for it.
The pond as a place
A garden pond in the Japanese tradition is not a fish tank. It is a piece of a garden, usually the still centre of it, and the koi are one part of the composition with the stones, the overhanging maple and the reflection of the sky. People sit by them. Feeding time draws the fish to the edge in a slow crowd; the rest of the day they drift, and watching them drift is the point.
That slowness is what the game is built around. Koi Drift has timers and, later, predators, but the rule at its centre is about waiting for the right moment rather than acting fast: a koi leaves only when its whole path is clear, so the skill is in seeing the order, not in tapping quickly. Calm Drift removes the timer altogether. The music, the water and the pace of the koi are all tuned so that the first thing a new player does is look, not tap.
Borrowing carefully
The six varieties in the pond — Kohaku, Yamabuki, Platinum, Benigoi, Karasu and Showa — are real, and the game keeps their names rather than inventing colours. The article on the six koi goes through each one. The pond floors are painted after the kinds of bottom a real pond has: pebble, sand, stone, mossed stone. The water is drawn with the caustic light that real sunlight makes on a pond floor, with ripples from the koi and a wake behind each one when it swims.
Where the game departs from a real pond it does so openly. Koi do not swim in straight lines to an edge and vanish; predators do not sit at the edge of a pond with a lane that turns from orange to red. Those are puzzle rules dressed in the pond’s clothes. The one rule the game keeps from the real thing is the reason it works: the koi are there to be watched, and you will do better in every pond if you watch before you touch.
The koi you keep
Koi keepers name their fish and remember them. The collection in Koi Drift — 101 cards, each earned by reaching a numbered pond on the journey — is the game’s version of that. The cards carry names and small stories, and a card you have earned can be set as your Guardian, a koi that swims with you and grants a single run-power. The last card waits at pond 1000. After it, the collection ends and the drift goes on, which is roughly the relationship a keeper has with a pond: the fish are the reason to begin, and the water is the reason to stay.