I’ve been around long enough to know how the Hype Machine works with videogame launches.
First, there’s a teaser announcement. It doesn’t tell you anything, but it’s designed to make you very curious, excited, and speculate about what it could be. The AtariBox website currently has a simple video showing the famous Atari Fuji logo, and the suggestion that a new game console is coming soon.
Next, there’s a bit more information leaked to the right media outlets; Joystiq, Kotaku, Polygon, etc. A few more bare details are leaked, but mostly as unconfirmed rumors. This creates a lot of buzz among the most dedicated followers of games. Gamers are incredibly demanding and fickle, or else ultra-apologist fanboys who will eat up (and forgive) anything. Everyone starts talking about what they hope the new product will be.
Gradually, more mainstream media starts to pick up on the story, and reporting on it. We’re at that point now.
I read the Forbes opinion. The author’s take on it is that gaming consoles have become indistinguishable from each other, there’s too much sameness between Xbox and PlayStation, so (he thinks) maybe Atari can make room for itself in the market by differentiating itself… somehow.
And it’s true. In the old days, there was a lot more variety in game consoles. The hardware developed by various big players and also-rans (alsos-ran?) was widely divergent in its engineering and capabilities, especially in terms of how they handled graphics and sound. Most systems were built around one of two chips: the MOS 6502 or the Zilog Z80, but had vastly different approaches to generating sound and drawing pixels to the TV screen, resulting in characteristics that could not be replicated by any other game console, meaning that each system necessarily had to take a unique approach to implementing a port of a given game design, resulting in vastly different experiences for the same title on various systems (when a title was even released on multiple systems, which wasn’t always a given).
But as engineers iterate, designs gradually converge on what works best. And in 2017 with the launch of the Nintendo Switch, we’re currently at the 9th generation of game consoles.
The thing is, the old consoles were different because their hardware was very different, AND because games were coded in ASM so that they could get every last bit of the very limited hardware’s capability. Neither of those is true now, nor will it ever be again. Computer hardware is extremely expensive to R&D, so open, commodity architectures that are well known to developers will be favored, leading to a convergence in hardware. Games are programmed in high-level languages so that the same code runs on multiple platforms. The result is uniformity.
No new modern console will support some non-standard resolution or unique color palette that will give their games a look uniquely its own. It’ll be 32-bit RGB color, 1080p or 4K, 60Hz or better. Controllers may vary, slightly, but the fact is if a game cant sell on multiple platforms, it won’t get developed (except by Nintendo). So having a unique controller only means you’ll secure a small segment of the market for yourself, while conceding the bulk of the market to games developed to more common/standard controllers. That’s what Nintendo’s approach has been since the Wii. And while NIntendo was successful with the Wii, they stumbled with its follow-up Wii U, and most people believe that Nintendo are only able to continue to be successful on the strength of their first-party IP that they keep exclusive to their platform.
What does that leave Atari? If they think they can go toe to toe against MS and Sony, they’re dreaming. Atari’s R&D and innovation more or less stopped in 1983, despite the last gasps the Lynx handheld and Jaguar console represented. Atari does have some strong IP in their arcade classic titles, but these have been re-released and re-hashed probably on the order of a dozen or more times already, mostly as nostalgia bundles that have been put out for every next-gen console since the SNES, occasionally as “reboots” or “sequels” that never seem to recapture the original magic.
The Ataribox *could* be a cool console, if it embraces retro. I have no interest in a 9th-Gen game system just because it happens to have the Atari name on it. What I *am* excited about is the possibility of a “what if” console, where imaginative game developers do a kind of speculative retro-future take on where 8-bit style games that Atari were known for in the 70s and 80s could have gone — a bit like what steampunk is to science fiction, the Ataribox could be to modern-retro gaming. Think an graphics processor constrained to 8-bit index color graphics, driven by a modern 3+GHz CPU with gigabytes of RAM instead of a few kilobytes, and beautiful (but limited-palette, low-fi) graphics without the sort of severe limitations such as sprites per line, etc.
That’s kind of what I hope it turns out to be. I have no idea, but that would be cool and truly different. Not just another Xbox/PS with a Fuji logo, please.
A Pitfall III that looks and feels like Pitfall I and II, but has all kinds of cool new challenges would be kind of awesome. (Of course, we already have Spelunky… but that’s just it, there’s a ton of retro-inspired modern indie games that could feel right at home on a modern retro console. A few years ago, I had high hopes that the Ouya would be that console. I still think the concept has merit, but whether it can survive and thrive in the market is largely in doubt.)
The thing is, there’s no reason to design special hardware constraints into such a system; a designer can voluntarily impose any such constraints on themselves to produce “retro style” games. That’s what we do now, when we want to.
I’m interested in seeing what the AtariBox is, but my enthusiasm is held in reserve. Why? Simply because at this point we know nothing about it, and because everything about the history of the videogame industry strongly suggests that it’s unlikely to succeed at a level needed to support a large company, and small companies tend to fail.
In the past few days, I’ve become aware of chatter about two potentially exciting new bits of hardware for Atari 2600 fans: Atari’s AtariBox, and Hyperkin’s RetroN 77.
Atari (well, the company who now owns Atari’s trademarks) has scant information about the AtariBox. Beyond the name, we know basically nothing about it so far.
RetroN 77 is a new console from Hyperkin, which is designed to play real Atari 2600 carts, apparently through emulation via the excellent open source Stella emulator, with real controllers, using the same ports as the original, so compatible with 3rd party Atari controllers, and outputting 1080p over HDMI.
Since I know nothing about the AtariBox yet, my early excitement is for the RetroN 77, but that could easily change. Hopefully Hyperkin will do the venerable VCS justice for the HDTV Age.
My hope for the AtariBox is that it will be a retro-inspired platform that caters to indie developers who want to make games in an old school style, that look like they could have been at home in the late 70’s/early80’s, albeit not strictly constrained by the hardware limits of that time. Think what Shovel Knight was to the NES; I’d love it if AtariBox were a platform for the equivalent of such games for the Atari 2600/5200/7800/400/800/Intellivision/Colecovision era of home videogames.
This is a well known story in the lore of videogame history… There’s a certain amount of misconception about it.
Howard Scott Warshaw likes to talk about how E.T. has the reputation of being the worst game ever, and how between it and the highly regarded Yar’s Revenge, it gives him the greatest range of any game developer. But even he doesn’t think E.T was really the worst of all time. As he carefully states, E.T. is “the game that is widely held to be the worst video game of all time.” That’s a bit distanced from accepting that it is the worst.
It makes for a good story, and he likes to tell the story, and he’s a good storyteller, and he likes to set the record straight when he tells the story, because telling the story takes away the power of the failure to hurt him. He’s a really good sport about it, and a good guy, and was a good game developer when that’s what he was doing. He has a great attitude about failure, and it’s served him well in life. So more power to him.
Howard Scott Warshaw’s game was actually pretty good. I owned E.T. and liked it. It was ambitious, and it definitely had its share of flaws, but it was a much more complicated game than the arcade style action games that Atari was known for, and that was a problem for a lot of gamers who weren’t ready for a deeper game design and complex puzzle solving. The game was difficult, and solving the puzzles was a bit arcane, and the pits that you fall into frequently were rather annoying, but it was not the “worst game of all time” that it has been labeled as.
What it was, it was a huge commercial failure — mainly because Atari overpaid Steven Spielberg $26 million for the license rights to make an exclusive ET videogame. It was one of the better selling games for the Atari, moving 1.5 million units. Unfortunately, Atari had produced 5 million copies, vastly overestimating the market. And reviews of the game were mostly bad, in spite of the high sales. The sales came through more through name recognition and the success of the film, but once people played the game, many of them felt like it wasn’t good enough. And it was rushed. But it’s a very impressive achievement to create something as big and complex as E.T. with the tools that Warshaw had at the time, in as little time as he was given.
Atari were counting on ET to drive more console sales, and it didn’t happen. By 1983, the VCS was a 7 year old dinosaur, and badly needed a replacement. But Atari had a hard time leading the launch of the next generation of hardware, because doing so would have obsoleted their market-dominating 2600 model. They tried with the 5200, but it had several design problems, and this combined with lack of backward compatibility (they did release an adapter later) and expense made it unpopular.
At the time, there wasn’t really a precedent for the idea of computer equipment becoming obsolete in just a few years time, and so many consumers of the day felt like buying a new console every few years, particularly if their old games wouldn’t play on it, was a ripoff. They viewed electronics like a radio or television or record player, which could last for decades if cared for, and newer models could continue to play old media. And old game consoles may still work four decades on, but they are obviously obsolete and can’t play newer games, and newer machines don’t play old Atari games (other than through emulation.)
Meanwhile, Atari corporate had alienated some of their best developers, by refusing to credit them for their work on the cover of the box, or pay royalties, They left to found Activision, which opened the door to any third party releasing games for the 2600, including many fly by night operators who could barely program for the 2600, who put out horrid garbage games that glutted store shelves and gave the Atari a poorer reputation than it deserved, and resulted in the Great Crash.
It’s popular to blame ET for being the cause of the great crash of ’83, but it wasn’t.
For those of you that grew up on the 2600, you know that the system was constantly improving.
Did you ever look for any benchmarks in games, improvements that let you know the “next big step” had occurred?
For me, I always thought that games with any sort of text were huge back in the day (like the Activision logo at the bottom of the screen), as were multi-segmented, multi-colored humanoids in games (such as Pitfall Harry).
This became very important for playground bragging rights as the Intellivision became more and more popular and us VCS acolytes had to ‘defend’ our system.
As a kid, were there any big “steps” you guys used to look for in your 2600 games to know Atari had reached its next level?
This is an interesting question.
I got an Atari 2600 when I was in first grade, in 1981. By that time the console had been out for 4 years already. We played it until the Atari 7800 came out, in 1986, but then switched over to NES, about a year later.
There wasn’t much in the way of a “bragging rights” war on the playground where I grew up.
Most kids who had any video game system at all had an Atari 2600, and we were happy to have them. I think many of us didn’t have anything (apart from arcade coin-ops) to compare with. I knew one or perhaps two family friends who had an Intellivision, and one family friend who had a Colecovision, one cousin who had an Atari 5200, one cousin who had an Odyssey2, and one or two people who had some type of home computer that could play games: a Commodore 64 or Apple ][, Atari 8-bit, or maybe an IBM compatible. I knew a lot of kids who didn’t have any videogame console at home, at all.
Some kids just had those little handheld electronic LED-based games made by companies like Coleco, TigerVision, and Mattel, that weren’t quite videogames, but pretended to be.
We played all of them. Although, the LED handhelds were obviously inferior, and we quickly grew tired of them. Everyone thought that video games were cool and fun, and we didn’t pay very much attention at all to whether one system had better graphics. If it was hooked up when we went somewhere, we played it. It was enough that it existed at all, and if it was available, we played it as much as we could.
The Intellivision households had a console that offered better graphics, but had awkward controllers and a smaller library. ColecoVision had the Atari 2600 adapter and slightly less awkward controls compared to the INTV, but still a far cry from the simple, rugged Atari 2600 joystick. It also had a 10-second delay when booting, which we found annoying. We maybe noticed that the graphics were a bit better, but overall it didn’t matter as much as you might think. Graphics were important, but gameplay was by far the most important quality.
And of course we were well aware that the original arcade game always had much better graphics than an Atari 2600 port of the same title. That was understood, to be expected, and forgiven, most of the time (Pac Man and Donkey Kong not so much). But also the arcade games were harder, and were designed to suck quarters out of our pocket, while Atari games were designed to be challenging without being too frustrating, and to give hours of enjoyable play.
Bottom line: If a game was fun, it didn’t matter if it didn’t have the best graphics, but a game with amazing graphics that wasn’t fun to play was something we looked down upon. This has always been true, and always will.
Since the 2600 had been out a few years before my family got ours, I wasn’t all that aware of the release date of different games. Games existed, and when I learned about them for the first time I wasn’t even thinking about whether the game had just come out, or if it had been out for a while, and I had only just heard of it. Games existed; they just were.
I paid a bit more attention to publishers, and liked games by Atari, Activision, Imagic, and M-Network, and Parker Bros. the most. But even the publisher didn’t matter so much as the quality of the game. I would play anything and everything I could get my hands on, and continued to play what I liked, and returned to re-play games that I enjoyed frequently.
That said, we did take note of certain games that seemed to evolve through sequels, such as Pac Man > Ms. Pac Man > Junior Pac Man; Defender > Stargate; Donkey Kong > Donkey Kong, Jr; and Pitfall > Pitfall II.
Sure, some games did have poorer graphics, or simpler play, or just sucked, but aside from the direct sequels where it was obvious, we weren’t all that aware that one game was older or newer, or that one game had extra chips inside the cartridge that enhanced the circuitry inside the console. That was something that I learned about much later, when I was old enough to appreciate the technology and understand it a bit better.
I didn’t think of game technology improving over time within a console’s life cycle; I just thought “Hey this game is better” or “They really packed a lot into this game” or “This game is very sophisticated compared to that game.” In other words, to me it felt more either a design choice to make a game more or less sophisticated, or a matter of the developer’s skill or work ethic to make a game better or worse, than what the technology allowed. I didn’t realize that it took technology such as larger ROM or additional processing chips to make certain games possible.
It only became apparent to me that newer hardware could do stuff that simply wasn’t possible on older hardware when the Atari 5200 came out. I don’t remember when I first played the 5200, but my cousin had one, and I got to play it whenever we’d go over to visit. He was the only kid I knew who had the 5200, and its graphics were amazing compared to the 2600, but again the library was limited and the controllers weren’t as good as the 2600’s joystick. We speculated at the time that the 5200 games could have better graphics because the console and cartridges were physically bigger, but the reality was this had nothing to do with it. Although, reinforcing this errant belief, NES cartridges also were larger, and the NES had significantly better quality games overall. We would have been very surprised back in the day to see just how much empty space was inside those plastic shells.
It still didn’t occur to me that there could be extra chips inside certain carts that made them capable of more sophisticated graphics and game play within the Atari 2600 library. It was certainly one of the factors that enabled the popular, but older 2600 to continue to stay relevant in the market years after newer consoles had been introduced. But it wasn’t like we knew why the games that came out in 1982-84 often had better graphics than games that came out in 1977-81; we just knew they were good games and it seemed like maybe the developers were getting better at making them as time went on, but it wasn’t like the best of the old games weren’t still great. And there was certainly a lot of titles that were released on the 2600 late in its life cycle that were inferior to games that had been released years earlier. What was possible continued to improve over time, but actual quality varied quite a bit over the life span of the system, and seemed to have more to do with how much the developer cared (or had budget for) than with the year the game was produced in.
When the 7800 came out, we felt that it was the best Atari to have, as it had backward compatibility with the old 2600 library (that was still every bit worth playing) plus decent joysticks (at least they centered automatically!)
Of course when the NES came out, it was immediately obvious that it was a quantum leap over even the 7800, due to its vastly superior sound capability, which allowed all games to have a musical soundtrack to it that could not be equaled on any Atari console. The design of many NES games was more sophisticated as well, offering adventuring quests with stories and puzzles and complex maps and item inventories where the Atari 7800 just offered more of the same action-oriented Arcade games that we’d seen for years.
Yet, still not everything across the board was improved. At first I didn’t care for the NES gamepad, which didn’t have a joystick, but instead featured this odd thumb-cross we didn’t yet know to call a D-pad, which at first I found very uncomfortable and even painful to use, although my hands quickly adapted and got used to it.
Again, the quality of the game play was what hooked me and got me to play through the hand cramps and blisters until my hands developed the stamina to hold the uncomfortable little rectangle. NES games didn’t just offer superior graphics and music, but more sophisticated types of play, where exploring and adventure became the dominant style of play, ascending to on par with twitchy hand-eye coordination skill and action. When the NES came out, everyone knew that a new age had dawned, and that the venerable Atari was obsolete. Most of us moved on, but a few never forgot.
Megamania, published in 1982 by Activision for the Atari VCS and designed and programmed by Steve Cartwright, is one of the all time great video games, and is a standout on the Atari 2600 console and in the vertical fixed shooter genre. Inspired by the Sega arcade game Astro Blaster, but vastly better, it is an extremely well refined shooter for its time, and is a fun and challenging game to this day.
Above: Astro Blaster, an 1981 arcade game by Sega that bears some resemblance to Activision’s 1982 hit on the Atari VCS, Megamania.
Astro Blaster had many features, including digitized speech, that made it technically impressive for its day, but the design did not integrate the features particularly well, making the game overly complicated and clunky. By comparison, Megamania offers a stripped down, almost poetic experience, with elegant symmetry and proportions. Far from a ripoff of an original game, if anything it’s a refinement. Megamania expresses its beauty through minimalism and an elegant orderliness to its structure. This game is all about action and motion, and the original version just gets these things right. There is a rhythm to the game that a good player will develop a feel for, and learn to use to his advantage.
A major hit for Activision on the 2600, Megamania was later ported to the Atari 5200, and Atari 8-bit computer line, but the original remains the best play experience despite modest graphical improvements in the later releases. I’ll be discussing the original VCS version of the game for the rest of this article.
Here’s how Megamania looked on the Atari 2600:
Due to the hardware limitations of the 2600, the player is permitted only one shot on the screen at a time. The player can steer the shot with their ship as it travels upward, giving them the ability to guide their missile into the target. Somehow, despite their varied and erratic motion, the enemies often seem to line up just right so that if you’re in the right position and have the right timing, your next shot will rapidly find your next target, enabling you to clear the wave quickly and resulting in great satisfaction. But if you’re off target, the same proportions of speed and distance that line up your shots on target will cause you to miss frustratingly. It’s an elegant symmetry that provides both challenge (when the player’s timing is off) and reward (when it is on) with the same few, simple mathematical relationships, giving the game a subtle beauty.
The object in Megamania is to survive wave after wave of zany household objects that come at you from the top of the screen, as you shoot up at them for points. Your ship has an energy meter that slowly winds down, providing a time limit to complete the wave; when you complete a wave, your remaining energy meter is converted to bonus points, then refills, and the next wave begins. The waves repeat in cycles, in the following order: Hamburgers, Cookies, Bugs, Radial Tires, Diamonds, Steam Irons, Bow Ties, and Dice.
There are two variations in the play mechanics, having to do with the way your shots behave:
In variation 1, the ship will fire continuously as long as the fire button is held down, and the shots are steerable, moving in line with the player as the player moves. This generates the rhythm that makes the game so fun, as I will show with some detailed explanation to follow.
In variation 2, the player must press the fire button each time to fire a shot, and the shot moves vertically only; once it leaves the gun it cannot be guided by the player.
Variation 2 requires more hand-eye coordination and greater attention from the player, and is therefore much more challenging, but I find that the feel of the game is not nearly as immersive as when you are able to steer your shots. In variation one, you feel at one with both your ship and its missile, and while you steer your shots to hit your target, you must simultaneously dodge to keep your ship safe. This creates an inherent conflict that causes the player to constantly be making decisions at a subconscious level. In variation 2, once your shot is launched, you have no further influence over it, and can only watch until it hits something or leaves the screen, leaving you only to avoid enemies and their fire until you can fire again yourself. And since there is no auto-fire in variation 2, the subtly clever timing that results from the relationship between the distance and position of the enemies, their speed, and the speed of your missile, is lost.
The sound effects, while rudimentary, are strong, and fill the game with noise from start to finish, despite being limited to your laser shot, enemy destruction, the energy meter countdown and refresh, and player death. The enemies, rather than explode, disappear with a brassy, synthesized “clang!” , while you fizzle away into nothingness when you are hit by a missile or collide with an enemy. The effects are blaring, loud and harsh, but with the volume turned down low they serve well.
The wave cycle in Megamania is particularly well paced, with a fantastic challenge curve, and a structure that reminds me of a sonnet or a fugue. Certain waves (metaphorically) “rhyme” with others, being similar in their motion patterns. Patterns established in earlier waves are elaborated upon in subsequent “rhyming” waves.
The odd-numbered waves (Hamburgers, Bugs, Diamonds, and Bow Ties) all move horizontally from left to right across the screen. In the first cycle, their motion is constant, while in the second and subsequent waves, their motion pauses periodically for a few seconds, then suddenly accelerates before settling down to normal, and then repeats. Starting with the Bugs wave, the horizontal scrolling waves add a vertical undulation to their motion, which becomes more pronounced with Diamonds and Bow Ties. Diamonds and Bow Ties “rhyme” further with each other by having a “winking” or “spinning” appearance. These are the easiest waves to clear, as the enemies pose no collision risk to the player, who can only be destroyed by enemy shots or running out of energy in these levels. As the first, third, fifth, and seventh levels in the wave cycle, they provide a breather between the more challenging waves. Each odd-numbered wave may be seen as an elaboration of the previous in the series: Hamburgers move horizontally; bugs move horizontally, and with a slight undulating vertical dip; diamonds move horizontally, have a more pronounced dip, and spin; and bow ties move horizontally, have the most dramatic undulation, and spin.
The even numbered waves all feature objects that pass vertically through the screen.
Wave 2, cookies, introduces the player to vertical motion gradually, as the cookies move primarily horizontally, while doing a two-step drop periodically, and reverse their horizontal motion as well. Cookies move in unison, all moving left or all moving right at the same time. Wave 4, radial tires, kinetically “rhymes” with cookies, but the radial tires dip more quickly, and the wave introduces a more complex motion where alternating rows of tires move left or right simultaneously. These levels are particularly dangerous, as in later cycles they descend increasingly rapidly, but a skilled player will learn, after the panic subsides, to make small, economical moves, and let the shots line up and rapidly take out strings of enemies quickly. At this point the levels remain challenging, but reliably beatable by a skilled player. You’ll die quickly if you get out of rhythm and fail to clear out enough enemies to give you adequate space to dodge, or if the computer gets lucky with one of its shots, but if you’re on your toes and in the zone you should be able to clear these waves with only an occasional death.
The next two even-numbered waves are of special difficulty, although their unique patterns do not “rhyme” with each other.
Wave 6, Steam Irons, uses a deceptive and tricky pattern. Three columns of steam irons descend, pausing and then sweeping irregularly from side to size at a speed that is very difficult for the player to track, as they seem to deftly weave right around your shots, and then descend again. The spacing of the formation is such that the player must shoot out at least one from each column, or else that column becomes an unbreakable chain when the column reaches bottom and wraps around to the top again, providing insufficient space between the rows to allow the player to squeeze in and get a shot off. If the player fails to take out at least one steam iron from each column, it is guaranteed that he will die at least once before completing the wave. The interesting thing about wave six is that it is the one wave in the entire game where the behavior pattern never varies, no matter how many times the player cycles through the game, the steam irons always move the same. Despite the lack of increasing challenge, the behavior is so frustrating and erratic that players often ascribe a sinister artificial intelligence to the steam irons. They are a constant threat to the player, no matter their skill level.
Wave 8, Dice, are special in that they are the only wave that is always the same color, yellow, no matter how many cycles the player completes. Dice are also unique in that they are the only objects that do not fire any shots at the player, and are therefore dangerous only due to collisions. Yet this is more than enough to make dice the most challenging wave to survive. The first dice wave is also the only level in the game where the objects move straight down. While their speed in the first cycle may seem overwhelming, their simple vertical motion makes it a fairly safe level. Simply stand your ground beneath a falling pair of dice and shoot, and your shot will surely find its mark, protecting you. But in the second and subsequent cycles, the dice move horizontally as well, in rows that alternate left and right, and create an almost bullet hell-ish level where dodging takes a great deal of finesse. The player has to move constantly on the dice levels to avoid fatal collisions, making it the most strenuous and challenging level, a climactic finish to the wave cycle. A skilled player can still beat the level without getting hit, but it requires great concentration and timing.
If we think of the eight waves that make up the wave cycle as a stanza in a poem, then the “rhyme scheme” suggested by the structure of the eight waves is as follows: A, B, A, B, A, C, A, D. The difficulty curve of a cycle is interesting, in that it does not simply progress in a linear fashion, but instead plots two different curves: the odd-numbered waves follow a more linear progression, while the even-numbered waves follow a steeper progression. This gives the challenge curve a continually escalating trend line while still affording the player a “breather” between two more difficult levels.
After three or four cycles, the difficulty does not ramp up further, and the game turns into an endurance match to see how many cycles the player can endure. If you can make it to 999,999 points, the game ends, effectively a killscreen.
One of the more interesting things to realize about the mechanics of Megamania is that (with the exception of the first Dice wave) the horizontal speed of all the enemies in the game matches the player’s horizontal speed. After the first cycle in the odd-numbered waves when the enemies accelerate to double time. The rest of the time, the horizontal speed of the enemy objects always matches the player’s horizontal speed exactly. This, combined with the shot-steering in variation 1 makes tracking the enemy objects easier, since you, your shot, and the enemy all move at the same speed, it is trivial to line up and guide the shot into the enemy on the odd-numbered waves. It also means that if you are behind an enemy, there is no way to catch up. Interestingly, players often don’t realize this, and novices and even moderately experienced players will persist in trying, to no avail, to catch up with an enemy that is just past the reach of their fire. Once you realize that it is impossible to catch up, and stop chasing, the player gains an insight that will lead them to higher skill levels — it is very common for a player chasing an enemy that they cannot possibly hit to accidentally run into an enemy missile, or run out of room at the edge of the screen and get pinned. But once you learn to avoid these two common causes of death, you become better at dodging, and the game opens up and becomes easier.
Another important realization is that the positioning of the enemies often is such that when you connect with a shot to destroy one, your very next shot will also connect with another enemy if you don’t move. It’s very common to chain together “string” of two, three or even more hits in a row, in very rapid sequence. This is key to success, and especially critical on the later cycles on the even-numbered waves, where the falling enemies present a collision danger, and taking a chain of them out immediately when the wave begins is crucial to carving out enough space to enable you to dodge and survive. When you realize this, the game becomes less about chasing aggressively and aiming, and more about being in the right position, and letting the enemies come to you. This is where the auto fire feature of variation 1 comes in to play, as once you have connected with a target, you are likely to hit again with your very next shot, and may start a chain of hits just by holding position and keeping the fire button pressed.
A final note of strategy helps with avoiding being shot by enemy missiles. Only two enemy missiles are capable being on the screen at any given point in time. What’s more, there are only two enemies at any given time who are capable of firing. If you see an enemy shooting bullets, you should avoid it and concentrate on eliminating the enemies that are not shooting, as they are less of a thread and easier to safely destroy. Don’t go under them when they stop moving, and wait for them to move again before tracking them. Then, take out the shooting enemies when they are moving, by matching pace with them. Enemy shots do not steer, so if you move in sync directly below a horizontally-moving enemy that enemy cannot hit you, and you cannot miss them. The most dangerous time in the odd-numbered stages is when are moving against their motion, from right to left, since this is the only time when you are likely to hit an enemy missiles.
Wrapping a formation of enemies
Another point of refinement that I find interesting is in the way the enemy objects wrap around the edge of the screen. Enemies in Megamania move together in large formations, but the way they wrap around the edge of the screen is interesting.
What I find innovative in this is that it doesn’t matter how large the formation is — looking at the odd-numbered waves, if you don’t shoot any of the enemies, they will form an unbroken chain as the first to appear wrap immediately behind the last. If you shoot a few, leaving holes in the formation, the holes persist and are not closed up — except if you shrink the formation at the leading or trailing edge. When that happens, the formation wraps sooner, closing the gap between the last still-extant enemy in the formation and the first. Thus, when the last Hamburger, Bug, Diamond, or Bow Tie is left in the wave, when it reaches the right edge of the screen, it wraps immediately to the left, rather than waiting for the space taken up by the no-longer-existing members of its formation. This is important because it avoids wasting the player’s time, as the energy meter winds down while no enemies are visible on the screen.
The tight, precise nature of the motion of the enemies makes Megamania a satisfying and exciting play experience, and feels complete despite a relatively small feature set. Megamania demonstrate that refinement and polish matter far more than feature count.
Voting results for Ludum Dare #29 were announced earlier tonight. My Jam entry, Alamagordo, fared pretty well, considering:
Rank (of 1004)
Category
Score (of 5)
Coolness
100%
#69
Humor(Jam)
3.60
#110
Theme(Jam)
3.70
#424
Mood(Jam)
2.97
#546
Audio(Jam)
2.53
#581
Graphics(Jam)
2.80
#592
Innovation(Jam)
2.52
#648
Fun(Jam)
2.33
#662
Overall(Jam)
2.58
The 69 and 110 rankings are the best that I’ve done so far in a Ludum Dare judging, narrowly edging the #70 ranking I received for Humor in my LD25 game, Bad Puppy.
Considering that Alamogordo was a last minute entry that I threw together in about 10 hours development time, and was intended as more of a joke entry than a game with ambition, I’m pretty pleased at how it was received, overall. I was going for humor and theme, and the other categories weren’t as important for me — I only cared about making the game look, sound, and feel like an Atari 2600 game, and I’m reasonably pleased with my work in that regard. It’s admittedly not very fun to play, nor innovative, nor very good overall, so I feel like my scores are pretty fair overall. I was also very pleased by the fact that I was able to build the game very quickly, with no false starts, rework, or getting stuck in debugging. In my previous LD games, I often found that I’d get stuck on a technical problem that should have been easier to solve than it turned out to be, I think mainly due to self-imposed pressure. This time, I felt mentally unhurried, confident that I was capable of doing what I had set out to do, that I knew how to do what I was doing, and didn’t have to spend any amount of time experimenting and figuring it out, and that helped me to build a clean, well-organized project. Although the game isn’t much, I’m pleased with the code that I wrote for it.
I almost didn’t submit a game this time around. For some reason, I couldn’t get my creativity going. I thought that Beneath the Surface was such an excellent theme, too, with great potential. When they announced it, I started trying to think of a game that would happen underground, or under water. But all I could think of was the setting, not what you’d do there. My brain was being an enemy to me.
So I stayed up until about 6 AM Saturday morning, and still hadn’t thought of any good ideas. My best idea of the night came to me when the Neil Young song, “The Needle and the Damage Done” popped into my head, and I briefly considered making a game about heroin use and damaging the skin beneath the surface. If I wanted to do that right, I needed to make a chiptune cover of the song, and I still can’t do music properly. One day…
So, I put that idea aside, and then nothing else came to me. I slept in until around 11:30, and spent most of the afternoon sitting around, waiting for inspiration to hit me, but nothing happened.
I dicked around on the internet, reading stuff, and started reading all these articles about the New Mexico landfill dig, where they were trying to determine if the legends of massive amounts of unsold Atari merchandise being buried in the desert were really true.
Turns out, they were true!
I found the story fascinating, because why would people still care that much that they’d dig around in a land fill trying to find that stuff. It’s not as though E.T. was a rare and valuable game. To me, the story wasn’t fascinating, it was people’s fascination with the story that was fascinating. It seemed to be getting a lot of coverage in the media.
I still didn’t have any ideas for what would be a good game, and by around 5 or 6, I had given up and resigned myself to not producing anything this time around, and felt pretty down about my failure to come up with any good ideas. I had a relaxing Saturday evening, went to bed, had a pretty normal Sunday, and then, around 7pm it occurred to me that the land fill dig was happening beneath the surface of New Mexico. Beneath the surface…
Beneath the surface…
Beneath the surface…
Beneath the surface…
neath the surface…
the surface…
surface…
urface…
face…
And I got this visual in my head of the pits in the E.T. video game, and connected that to the landfill, and immediately realized that there was a potential game in there.
Digging in the Alamogordo, New Mexico landfill, in a pit from the E.T. video game, searching for the secret stash of E.T. videogames. I knew exactly what I wanted it to be, not really a challenging game, just an idle time waster that paid homage to the legend and the events of the weekend. I had less than 2 hours before Compo deadline, and knew I’d never make it, but this would need to be a Jam entry anyway, as I wanted to use graphics and audio sampled from the E.T. video game.
Unfortunately I was already on my way to spend the evening with friends, and I didn’t get home until close to 11pm. By 11:30, I had just gotten started, and I worked through the night until 6:30am, and which I had most of the level laid out and working. Movement and collisions were very buggy, but the game was basically playable by this point.
I took a power nap, worked Monday, and then cranked out bugfixes until I got everything working right. All told, the game took about 10 hours to build. My fastest development time ever. Howard Scott Warshaw took 5 weeks to make E.T., his fastest development time ever.
I used that time rather well, struggling only a little bit with the bug fixes, and all I really needed to fix those bugs was to step away from the project and return to it fresh — once I did that, it was fairly easy to redesign the code that handled movement and fix the problems I’d been having in the wee hours of the morning earlier in the day. Throughout the project there was very little re-work, almost nothing thrown away, and everything that I built was done in such a way that it doesn’t feel like a mess. The project code is actually pretty decent. Almost every LD48 that I’ve done so far, I’ve struggled with some stupid error in a feature that should be very basic and easy to do, and ends up sucking a lot of my time away from the project, but this time, I worked effectively from start to end. Only, I had just about 10 hours of work put into the project over the entire weekend.
The game itself, well there’s nothing much to it, but it does feel somewhat like one of those terrible shovelware titles that caused the Great Crash of ’83.
So, there it is, an homage to terrible games. Since that’s what it is, it somewhat excuses it from itself being a fairly terrible game. At least the programming is fairly decent, …beneath the surface.
I didn’t complete an entry for Ludum Dare 29, and am a bit disappointed in myself. Although the theme “Beneath the surface” is an excellent theme suitable to all kinds of ideas, I struggled to come up with a concept that fit well with the theme. I thought about under ground, under water, and digging a bit, and I thought about skin, and metaphorical ideas, but these didn’t inspire a core play mechanic or goal, so I never really got to a playable game concept.
I need to figure out how to get myself into a creative mind on demand.
Update
Around 7pm, inspiration struck. I made a game after all. I made it in only about 6 hours, so it is not a very good game, but the idea was a fitting one, and I knew that I would be able to build it in under a day.
Alamogordo, my entry for the LD29 Jam, is based on the legend of the buried E.T. cartridges in Alamogordo, New Mexico, that were dug up over the weekend.
Yesterday, in a landfill in New Mexico, copies of E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial for Atari 2600 were unearthed, apparently confirming rumors of their mass burial in 1983.
I recalled hearing this story at some point, many years ago, but I don’t recall exactly when. It’s been repeated often enough. A number of Atari employees said that it was true, but as I recall the company officially denied it, leading to speculation as to whether it was really true or not. Likely the denials were to avoid admitting that the business was in trouble.
While the find confirms that Atari product was buried in the landfill, it’s still unclear how accurate the rumors really were. Over the years, I heard many things about the burial:
Supposedly, according to some, the games were crushed (whether by a compactor, or a steam roller or other heavy vehicle, it’s unclear) before burial, in order to take up less room in the landfill, or to prevent their being dug up and salvaged. This appears not to be true, as intact cartridges apparently have been recovered in what appears to be nearly pristine condition (unless of course the recovery story is a fabrication).
I also heard that the games were covered over with a layer of cement. This seems likely an embellishment. To my knowledge, landfills do not typically use cement to cover over layers of deposited waste, although they do sometimes use earth to bury waste in order to reduce pests such as rats and seagulls, reduce the odor, and prevent winds from blowing the waste away. Cement is expensive, and there’s really no reason for it, since this isn’t radioactive waste, but I always thought that it suggested a deep shame on Atari’s part, that they wanted to hide the fact so much that they would cover it up with cement, like a murderer burying a victim in the basement under a cement floor.
Supposedly, something like 5 million copies of E.T. were manufactured, and most were unsold, so the number of games buried in the landfill is supposedly a vast number. So far what I’ve read of what’s been reported has said that a few hundred copies have been recovered. So it remains to be seen whether more will be found at the site.
E.T. is remembered as one of the worst games of all time, but this is actually a somewhat unfair label to pin on the game. It sold quite well, 1.5 million copies, which is an unqualified hit, but for the fact that it was greatly overproduced. Selling well isn’t quite the same thing as being a good game, and the game did have a fair share of negative reviews. The complaints for the most part had to do with the difficulty of avoiding falling into pits that exist nearly in nearly every screen of the game, and play a prominent part in the game, but which don’t exist at all in the movie. Movie adaptation games often suffer from poor treatment, and failing to faithfully follow the plot of the movie story. Of course, the same can also be said of film adaptations of books. Apart from the pits, the game does actually include a lot of plot elements from the film, and somewhat reasonably follows the plot. What’s more important is not that the game re-tell the movie, but that it be a good game. E.T. may or may not be a good game, that’s a subjective judgement. But from a technical standpoint it was relatively well executed, including numerous innovations and technical feats that were impressive considering the hardware limitations. Apart from the pits, the game also suffered from a strange zone-based mechanic that was difficult to understand without referencing the manual. At the time E.T. was released, most games were simple arcade action style games involving shooting and dodging. E.T. involved a complex quest for pieces of the phone he uses to call home to arrange to be picked up by his people’s space ship, and many players likely simply weren’t ready for a complex game like this, and disliked it more for that reason than anything.
E.T. is often blamed for causing the Crash of 1983. It’s more accurate to say that the Crash of 1983 contributed to E.T.’s sales falling far below expectations, resulting in huge losses due to overproduction. As such, it was more a victim of the Crash than a cause of it. It was certainly a high profile commercial failure, but the real cause was a lack of quality control among the dozens of fly-by-night companies that sprung up to capitalize on the immense success of the Atari 2600. Atari could not control third parties through licensing, and the market was flooded with poor games, many of which were far worse than E.T.
