A few weeks ago, Nintendo announced that the next Zelda release, Tears of the Kingdom, will be priced at $69.99 — and fans groused about the price increase, even though new Triple-A titles for console games have been around $60 since the 1990s, which is an awfully good run.
Most of us older gamers can recall games retailing above $70 (in 1990s dollars, no less) in the SNES era, so it’s not like this is without precedence. And with the high inflation we’ve had in the post-pandemic period, it was probably to be expected. It’s really remarkable that prices for flagship triple-A new releases has remained at $60 for so long. Of course, switching from cartridge to optical disc media helped keep prices down for a long time.
Yesterday, Nintendo released Metroid Prime Remastered, a re-release of a GameCube game that was new in 2002, and rapidly sold out of physical copies of the game everywhere priced at $39.99, which can now be found on eBay for $70-100.
Apparently a huge number of people accidentally bought copies of the game that they don’t need, and are now selling them because they can’t return them at the store for some reason. Weirdly, they are getting more reselling the game than they paid at the store.
You can still buy a digital download version of the game for the retail price of $39.99 if you don’t want to get scalped, and given that modern games always require downloading of updates, it’s debatable whether physical media copies really make sense anymore.
So apparently, $70 is too much to pay for a brand new game in a flagship franchise, but $100 is reasonable to pay for a remastered classic from 20 years ago that you could have gotten for $40. Makes sense.
Clearly, fans are willing to pay more for the games they want than Nintendo has been charging. Nintendo has been leaving a lot of money on the table. Allowing this gap to exist created the opportunity where scalpers can swoop in and buy up all available copies of a game in order to re-set the price point and sell it at whatever price the market will bear, for mad profit.
Perhaps it’s time for a large increase in the retail price. If the market is bearing these prices, surely it’s the people who made the game who should be reaping these profits, not whoever slept in the parking lot the night before.
Could Nintendo charge $120-140 for new releases? That would be in line with what the price was for games in the 1990s, adjusted for inflation. And it’s in line with what scalpers can get away with for highly anticipated, high demand releases. Maybe they should. Grab-a dat coin, Mario.
Originally released in 1983, Montezuma’s Revenge is an early platforming game released on a number of home consoles and personal computers. The game’s title is an allusion to the nickname given to traveler’s diarrhea, which was (is?) common when traveling south of the US-Mexico border. People will advise “don’t drink the water” because if you do, without first boiling it or whatever, you’ll end up with dysentery. So, haha, they named a video game “Diahrea”. Brilliant. And probably offensive to South Americans, too. Or at least the Aztecs.
I knew if from its Atari 5200 release. My cousin’s family had the Atari 5200, and whenever I would visit over there, we would get to play the games they had.
These screen caps are from the Colecovision port, but only a real geek would know the difference… and no, this isn’t my playthrough, I’m not that good at the game.
The Atari 5200 boasted superior graphics to the Atari 2600 we knew and loved at home. But it also had shitty, non-centering analog joysticks that made many games harder to play. With a centering joystick, you can release the stick and it returns to center, and all directional input stops. With the 5200 joystick, you had to physically push the stick back in the center, stopping exactly in the “dead zone” where no input is registered — which took a great deal more precision and skill to master. As a result, in a game situation where you wanted to get to some exact spot and then stop on a time, you’d either overshoot your target, or you’d pull back and reverse course or end up drifting slightly in one of the other directions. Either way, it wasn’t good, and usually resulted in disaster — a lost life, or a game over.
Because of the joysticks, I could never do very well at the game, but my cousin had full-time access to the system, and was able to master the controls, and could beat the game without dying. I could only appreciate his skill and enjoy watching him show us how to get through the various screens full of death traps.
Montezuma’s Revenge was also released on Colecovision, Commodore 64, Sega Master System, Apple ][, Atari 8-bit computers, MS-DOS, and even… the Atari 2600, as I would find out some 30+ years later. Had I known, I might have played it more and appreciated it more, and on a system with a decent joystick, I’m sure I would have mastered it myself.
Montezuma’s Revenge was hard. It was what I like to call “Fuck You Hard”. Games in the 80s were often Fuck You Hard, but Montezuma’s Revenge was one of the fuckiest Fuck You Hard games out there. You’ve probably heard of “Nintendo Hard” and seen games like Ghosts N Goblins, you know what I’m talking about. But this was before Nintendo came on the scene, and the only way to describe the difficulty of this game was FU Hard.
You can die in so many different ways in this game. And many of them look confusingly like other things that you need to do in order to avoid dying. If I tried to count them all, I’m sure I’d miss at least half of them. But, here, I’ll try:
There’s snakes (stationary obstacles you jump over) and spiders (crawling obstacles you jmp over), skulls that roll along the floor (guess what, you jump over them), skulls that bounce around (you’re better off running under these), pits full of fire (jump over), electrified wall barriers (careful timing to slip past while they’re down), disappearing floors (covering pits of fire, again more timing or jumping to survive), and, of course, any time you fall more than a rather short distance, you’d die from that too. There’s ledge jumps spaced so that they look like you can make it, but you really can’t. So jumping is often risky.
But there’s certain places where you can jump, and fall a longer-than-safe distance, as long as you catch a rope in mid-air rather than land on the hard floor. But nothing tells you this, you just have to discover, after dying from falls probably dozens of times, that there’s screens where you have to fall a deadly amount of distance as you jump from a high ledge to a safe rope. But… now, get this… if you walk off a ledge, you carry NO horizontal momentum, and will fall immediately straight down. But you can jump sideways, and carry your horizontal momentum through your fall. So at these ledges, you can’t just run off and catch the rope, you have to run, jump, and then catch the rope. Because F U.
And those disappearing floors, they sometimes flicker, seemingly at random, off and on, and it might be long enough for you to cross the pit, but just as well might only last a tenth of a second, and kill you just because this game is F U Hard. But the disappearing floors and the disappearing electrical barriers are both colored the same way, and yet it was deadly to touch the barriers and safe to walk on the floors. So that was counter-intuitive and seemed unfair. Like, you’re just supposed to know that it’s necessary to step on the glowing blue floors that disappear, but it’s deadly to touch the glowing blue walls. Makes sense, right?
Oh, and there’s conveyor belt floors that will make your jump timing and distance super tricky, meaning you’ll probably die a bunch of times because of that. Because this game is F U Hard.
If you could fall more than 3 feet without dying, this wouldn’t be so bad…
And there were places where you could either drop off a ledge, or climb down a ladder, and the ledge height didn’t really look unsafe, but if you tried jumping, you died — the only safe way down was the ladder, sucker.
In a hurry? Looks safe to jump, but don’t try it… only the ladder is safe.
And it was the fiendish arrangement of these things that made them all the more deadly. Slightly mistiming or miscalculating your moves would almost always be fatal. And whenever you died, the game would put you back at the point at which you entered the current room. If you died from touching a skully, snake, or spider, that one enemy would be removed from the screen, and you could try again. If you died from falling, or an unfortunate encounter with fire or electricity, you didn’t even get that. And some of the rooms were filled with a good dozen or so ways to die if you made even one little mistake.
Just look at this jump… You’d think you could maybe reach that disappearing blue platform hovering above you. But no, that’s too high to reach, and if you try to land there, you’ll fall down into the pit and die. You can only jump to the ledge at the right side, and then you can jump back left onto the disappearing ledge, and then you have to turn around quickly and jump to the next ledge, before the disappearing platform you’re now standing on disappears, but also not jump into the skull that’s rolling back and forth on the next platform… Totally brutal.And no, you can’t just walk off the ledge above and land here safely… Instead, you must leap to those ropes on the right side, over the deadly fire pit, and then jump back to the left. Because that seems safer, right?
Just safely jumping from platform to platform and avoiding the flames, skulls, and poisonous critters isn’t hard enough. You have to do that AND have the right number of the right colored keys to open the locked doors you’ll find, and if you don’t have the right keys, you’ll have to go back and find them — going through all those deadly obstacles over again, and backwards.
To make things worse, there’s a few rooms in the pyramid that are identical to each other, making it likely that you’ll get disoriented and think that you’ve looped around somehow… nope. It’s just to mess with your head, and get you to turn back and go the wrong way.
And just when you think you’re feeling comfortable with these things, the game throws dark rooms at you, where you can’t see the walls, making any gaps in the floor that might be there invisible.
Are there any pits?
This game doesn’t just fuck you. It fucks your mom.
And the only way to get through it is to get good.
The brutal difficulty made it difficult for me to appreciate all of the things this game did that were innovative. But, especially in hindsight, this game did a lot of really cool things that paved the way for the smash-hit Super Mario Bros. the following year.
First, you had a simple inventory system. You could carry up to 5 slots of items ranging from different colored keys to torches and swords.
These were just things you carried until they were consumed, there was no button to press to select them or use them. Keys were single-use items that opened color-corresponding doors found throughout the game. Swords were single-use items that could save you from a deadly encounter with a skull, spider, or snake. Torches were used immediately upon obtaining them, and conferred temporary invincibility to death from deadly creatures. (I guess the idea was that the torch allowed you to see better, and so avoid them?)
You could also find treasures, in the form of huge gems, that you could collect for points, but the treasures didn’t go into your inventory — they just added to your score. Enough points, and you could earn an extra life. And you needed those, because of all the death.
The level design wasn’t just run and jump past obstacles, it required having an understanding of the spatial relationship between the screens, knowing where you could find keys, and figuring out how to get through the pyramid using an optimal path that conserved keys, let you have the right colored keys at the right time, and avoided unnecessary backtracking, and avoided the most difficult of the jumping puzzles. Considering the soft-locking that the colored doors represent, you could make a case that Montezuma’s Revenge had some early pre-Metroidvania aspects to it.
I didn’t play the game enough to be able to notice it back in the day, but the level design of the game lays out a series of single-screen rooms arranged in the shape of a pyramid, which is neat if you do happen to notice it, because it reinforces the idea that you’re a treasure hunter exploring a meso-American pyramid. And also tells you that, if you know how high up in the pyramid you are, you also have some idea how wide the floor of the pyramid you’re on is. Which may help you to figure out how to get through the pyramid better.
About to win. Want to win? Just jump into the middle of this huge flaming pit of death…
If you can make it all the way through a level, you’re rewarded with a treasure room, a free zone where you can try to grab as many gemstones as possible before you inevitably fall through a bottomless pit that warps you to the start of the next level, where you can do it all over again. It’s a bit like the Coin Heaven secret areas in Super Mario Bros., only a year ahead of when SMB was released.
Back at the beginning… but 80,000 points richer!
The original developer of Montezuma’s Revenge recently completed a kickstarter to release an NES port of the game, and as well released the game on Steam, with both updated and classic graphics, and now available through NormalDistribution.com. I’ve been playing the Steam build, and it’s still hard as fuck, and I wish they gave you some way of cheating, infinite lives or invulnerability mode or something. But it’s worth a look to appreciate the design of the game.
My copy of the NES cartridge is due to be delivered tomorrow. I bet I still can’t beat it.
Pong (1972, Atari) was the first commercially successful arcade video game cabinet. It marks its 50th anniversary this year.
Often considered “the first video game”, it was not. But it was the first popular, commercially successful video game. Atari released Pong after Computer Space, which was a bit more complex to play, and wasn’t as well received. Pong was simple enough that it was easy to pick up and play. This success made it a pioneering milestone in the history of video games. A simple, yet engaging 2D simulation of table tennis, Pong was a sensation at the time of its release, and spawned an industry which quickly established itself as a culturally significant fixture.
Coin-operated arcade machines were already a thing by this time, but prior to the video game revolution they were electro-mechanical games like pinball tables and shooting gallery games.
In 1972 dollars, $0.25 is worth about $1.78 in 2022 dollars. That’s how much people paid to play Pong back when it was new. It’s a bit surprising to consider that a single credit to play a video game once cost this much. I’ve always been willing to put a quarter in a game, but I’ve always felt reluctant to insert more than that for a single credit, no matter what the game was.
Home Pong systems quickly appeared in the market, introducing the video game console to hundreds of thousands of homes. Pong is older than I am. I was born in 1975, and as such it was a few years before my time, but I still remember it well — in its home incarnations. But I don’t have any experience of what it was like when it was brand new. I never saw a Pong arcade cabinet in the wild, not until many years later, when I got to see and play one at the CCAG Show one year, in 2004 or 2005. I was surprised by how small the cabinet was, compared to the arcade cabinets I was more familiar with from childhood.
My first video game memories date to 1981 or ’82. We got an Atari 2600 for Christmas, I think in 81, and at this time I was barely old enough to see over the control deck of a stand-up arcade cabinet to play. Games like Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac Man, and Donkey Kong were in their heyday. Pong was already almost a decade old, but we still knew about it. Even if I didn’t see it in any arcade, there were still home console versions of it.
Arcade games were literally everywhere by this time. It was the Golden Age of arcade games, and a very special time in history for those of us who were young then. You could go to a convenience store or gas station, and there’d be a couple of them out by the door. Sometimes other vending machines were found nearby: gumball machines, or soda machines, and the vending machines never went away. But in the early 80s, video games were in these spaces as well, even in the space after the checkout at the supermarket. Bored kids would drain quarters into them while waiting for their parent to pay for the week’s groceries. In 1982, a quarter was worth about $0.74 in 2022 dollars.
This ubiquity made games mainstream, not just something you could only find to play at arcades and carnival midways, but something you could find almost anywhere. They encouraged, even invited you to loiter. Whether you had a quarter, or just had to watch someone else play, it was exciting to be around these tall cabinets, full of technology and glowing, electronic life.
Galaxian. Moon Patrol. Pac Man. Space Invaders. Scramble. Frogger. Joust. Dig Dug. They were mesmerizing to watch, and if you were younger than 6 you could pretend you were playing during the demo sequence and it felt real, and you got that rush of excitement for free. Put in a quarter and you’d maybe last a minute or two, often less, and you’d lose all your lives before you could even get started, so it kind of hurt. But I wanted to become their master.
And it wasn’t long before I wanted to create games of my own.
Today (12/1/22), I received the tracking number for my copy of the game. It’s been a long five years of waiting and pandemic-induced delays, and it’s great to see that the project has come to a successful conclusion.
I got to see an early demo of the game and play it a bit at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo in 2018, and was impressed even then with the quality of the game. Full Quiet is definitely impressive, easily on par with the greatest releases on the system, and reminds me of some of the Konami/Ultra and Capcom games I loved back in the day, reminding me a bit of games like Metroid, Snake’s Revenge, Rush’N Attack, and Trojan, while being distinctly its own thing.
I’m so excited to finally get to play the game, and am really looking forward to it as my Christmas present to myself this year. Look for an update with a review in the near future.
Today’s Google Doodle is in honor of Jerry Lawson, the engineer who designed Channel F, the first gaming console to use removable cartridges. Today would have been his 82nd birthday.
Prior to this innovation, video game consoles were dedicated, meaning that they could only play a single pre-programmed and hard-coded game (usually Pong or some variation thereof.) Lawson’s innovation opened the door to longer console life, providing a cheaper means to extend the usefulness of the console base by making it simple to swap out the software that ran on it, allowing gamers to accrue a library of games that could all be played on one system, rather than having to disconnect and hook up a different system for each game they wished to own.
Sadly Jerry is no longer with us, as he passed away in 2011, but he is immortalized through his engineering accomplishments, which hundreds of millions of gamers have been able to appreciate over a span of nearly 50 years and counting.
40 years after the final game in the SwordQuest series was canceled, Atari is finally about to release the long-forgotten AirWorld chapter.
A teaser video showing gameplay shows that the game appears to be keeping with the style of the first three chapters, EarthWorld, FireWorld, and WaterWorld. Whether that’s good or not is debatable, but the gameplay does look like it’s a little better than the entries that preceded it, and I do have to give Digital Eclipse a lot of credit for keeping the style of the Atari 2600’s crude system limitations.
The Swordquest games were rather cryptic and not all that enjoyable to play, and not exactly worth the time to play them today, apart from as a historical curiosity, but were part of a massive contest held by Atari in the early 1980s, which helped them to attain a legendary status.
Apparently it goes on sale November 11th, as part of the Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration collection, on “all major platforms”. I take it to mean that there will not be a cartridge version of the game playable on the original Atari VCS hardware.
Meifumado was a good–looking indie game with detailed 16-bit style pixel art and smooth animation that OldBit pitched on Kickstarter earlier this year. It reminded me of a hit indie game from a few years back, Shank, but with a samurai theme and setting.
Meifumado was a good looking indie game with detailed 16-bit style pixel art and smooth animation that OldBit pitched on Kickstarter earlier this year.
Today Kickstarter took down their project page temporarily pending resolution of a copyright dispute from one of the project’s contributors, who claims they have not been paid for the music they contributed, which was used in the trailer video.
Description of copyrighted material: The music in the trailer is created by me , but I havent received any payment and cant reached the creator and devs of the game. I dont know the developers personally and only had briefly contact during the creation of the trailer music.
Several backers are asking for an update, but receive no information, like me. This comes off as a scam.
Under the section “Team” I and my music are mentioned and linked too.
Bc of this situation I am asking to be removed from the text and campaign page and further more ask the kickstarter team to look into the situation.
I am very saddend and disappointed by all of this, esp. for everyone who supported this project. Everyone has been very patient, but I worry a bit that the frustration at some point might be redirected at me, as its seems I am the only “real” and reachable person.
Backers have not heard from OldBit since the project achieved its funding goal — no updates from the project team in months. Meifumado’s twitter account has been silent since April 1 of this year. The project had a page on Steam, which also appears to have been set up and abandoned not long after.
It’s looking more and more like this project was a scam, or fell apart due to poor project management or bad business practices. Kickstarter is not returning funds to backers at this time, and likely will not do so per Kickstarter’s terms of service.
Some indie dev teams are made up of non-professionals, complete amateurs, and skilled kids who can collaborate despite lack of formal business structure, and based on the account given above by Moritz, and its lack of proofreading, it seems like that must have been the case with the Meifumado project.
It remains to be seen how this will resolve.
Update: Meifumado’s kickstarter page is back up, apparently the copyright issue must have been resolved. But there still has been no update from the team since the project hit its goal. There is virtually no chance that the project is still being worked on at this point.
The company that calls itself Atari these days is releasing the fourth and final game in the SwordQuest series, as part of the brand’s 50th Anniversary Celebration. Atari was founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell, Al Alcorn, and Ted Dabny, making 2022 the 50th anniversary of the brand’s existence.
The SwordQuest series was an ambitious, ahead of its time, puzzle/quest game, intricately tied into a real-world contest to solve each game. The first three games in the series: EarthWorld, FireWorld, and WaterWorld were released, but the final game, AirWorld, was never developed and was canceled amid the 1983 video game crash.
Each game was packaged with a comic book which told the story and held hidden clues which the player would follow while playing the game to try to discover the secret. Players who solved the puzzle were entered into a contest where they could real jewel-encrusted gold prizes, worth $25,000 according to Atari: a scepter, a crown, and a cup. I think the plan for the fourth prize was a sword, but like the game you’d need to beat for a chance to win it, it was never made.
The games were very cryptic, and would have been suitable for older (teenage and up) gamers. As a 7 year old, I didn’t really understand what was going on in these games, but spent hours wandering around, trying to collect the objects from the rooms to figure out what they did, and what you were supposed to do in the game, but never really understood that the game required the comic books in order to solve the real puzzles and beat the game. You controlled a man who ran around a top-down “overworld” which consisted of mostly empty rooms with doorways to each of the cardinal directions. The only difference between the overworld rooms was their color, and sometimes items that were found there. Many of the rooms had a challenge that you had to overcome before you could enter. This challenge consisted of one of a selection of mini-games where you had to evade obstacles in order to pass from one side of the screen to the other. Typically if you fail the challenge, you get knocked back and have to start over, or you can give up and back out. EarthWorld, FireWorld, and WaterWorld had color schemes and graphical themes corresponding to their respective elements, as well as tie-ins with things like the Zodiac.
The mini-games were challenging enough, and were fun enough, when they weren’t infuriatingly unfair.
EarthWorld and FireWorld are very common, but WaterWorld is a rare cartridge. It was produced in limited numbers and I think it was only available by mail order or some kind of limited time special order offer. A friend had a copy, which I was fortunate to be able to play when I as a kid, and I never realized that it was so rare. As a result WaterWorld is an expensive collector’s item, although as a game it’s not really any better than the other two, which, apart from their contest allure to win real-world gold prizes, are not really great games by modern standards, barely worth replaying now.
Not much is known about AirWorld yet, but we can expect it will likely be similar in format as the first three, but perhaps more refined, than the other SwordQuest games. We do know that it will play on the 2600, and that it was not a re-discovered unreleased game, but was developed only recently. I’m actually curious to see what it’s like, and looking forward to playing it, just to be able to complete it. A re-issue of WaterWorld that I could buy at a reasonable price would be nice, but Atari’s re-releases of 2600 games have been priced at $100, which is about what a loose copy of WaterWorld is worth. There’s no word as yet on whether there will be a new contest with a big-ticket gold prize, but I’m not holding my breath.
When finally released, SwordQuest AirWorld will set a record for the longest time between initial announcement and release — about 40 years — beating Metroid: Dread (16 years) and Duke Nukem Forever (15 years) by over a decade. (Of the three Duke Nukem Forever was supposedly under continual development, and was never canceled, making it the longest continual game development project.)
Message: Hello friend! I saw your posts about Dungeons and Doomknights and I was wondering if you could send me a copy of the rom?
I know this is a bit blunt however I can’t find a digital copy of the game anywhere including for purchase. I am a really big fan of the creators and would really love a chance to play the game. Thank you!
I replied:
Hello, Dean,
I’m not at liberty to share the ROM. It is a copyrighted work.
If you’re a big fan of the creators, you should want for them to be paid for their work. This will enable them to create more games for you to enjoy. $14 is not a lot of money to pay for a game such as this.
You’re welcome,
–Chris
I think ripping ROMs and sharing ROM files for abandonware titles is an ethically very-light-grey area, and would like to see copyright law revised to make it fully legal. But please do not hurt developers, particularly small indie and homebrew developers, by asking around for ROMs for recently released commercial products.
It’s one thing if the creator/rights holder releases the game for free, it’s quite another to go about asking reviewers for an unauthorized copy. If you understood how much effort was taken to create the work you’re seeking, you would appreciate how little they are asking for a legit copy.
I love Free/open source software, but not everything is. And that’s OK.
Respect creators. By paying them.
Update
“Dean” wrote back to me, to let me know that he tried to purchase the ROM from Hero Mart, at the link I provided, and the purchase failed. He wrote to their customer support and they confirmed that the ROM is no longer for sale, and Hero Mart have since taken the item off their site.
I do think it’s unfortunate that they chose to discontinue sale of the game so quickly. I can’t understand why they would want to do that. It’s their choice, but to me it runs counter to the spirit of the homebrew community, which is trying to keep old systems alive.
Update 2: rom and cart are back on sale https://www.heromart.com/collections/dungeons-doomknights-collection
