I used to work with Dave Sherman, who was the hardware lead on Missile Command to Dave Theurer's software lead. He joined Atari right out of Berkeley during Atari's heyday, and he had a lot of stories about the out of control corporate culture.
I'm sure this happened after Atari was bought, but Dave said the purchasing agents were driving around expensive cars, cars that he as an engineer couldn't afford, the implication that there were obvious kickbacks going on. Programmers were sometimes given coke by their supervisor during crunch time to increase work. Some of the technical talent hired agents to negotiate with Atari -- the thinking being they are in the entertainment business, just like Hollywood.
Best. Game. Ever. Tempest came out when I was in high school, and my buddy and I would rather skip lunch and play this instead of eat each day. We produced a little booklet of each level we kept in our wallets so we could jot down where we had the best luck leaving the flipper while we fired away. I was thrilled to find a working Tempest at the “Game Master” exhibit in San Diego's Balboa Park last summer.
I don't think we could ever make people from this generation understand how awesome and mind grabbing this game was back then. It was like nothing I had ever seen and I just wanted to watch it, mesmerized.
I was born in 1987 and I totally get it. This has always been my favorite retro game; I first encountered it for PS2 I think. I've only found one multicade machine at a local juice bar that had it. I've never before or since been devoted to maintaining high score on a public machine like that before. Unfortunately, that machine is now gone.
I remember going to a classic games exhibition in London around the year 2000, I played Tempest for the first time there, it was one of my favourite games I played at the show.
Yes! Not only Tempest 2000 and Tempest 3000, Minter's Polybius [1] is very similar to Tempest. (It's also just awesome that Minter named his game Polybius.)
"The programmer had to do everything: Write the whole operating system from scratch, design all the graphics, write the tools to do the graphics, create sound tools, and do the sound design – everything from scratch for every game….I’d write the code on programming sheets and turn it in to the typists who’d type them in to a DEC computer, then give us a tape with the resulting compiled/linked program. We’d then take that to a blue box [which used the FORTH programming language] for debugging. We’d mark changes to the code on a listing, give it back to the typists who’d edit our files and give us a new tape. Repeat ad infinitum."
Actually, our compiler has never changed speed. The true compiler is our brain. A programmer in the 80's and a programmer today have the same brain compiler speed.
Before you can write any program, you have to build, run and execute it in your head. That's the challenge most of us face today. Hardware/Software doesn't matter much. The average indie developer is writing games in about 20k-50k line of code. Doesn't matter if it's 6502/z80 asm code in 80's or Unity/C# or Java code in 2018.
In my memory the sound of an arcade is Tempest. If I think about it for a moment, other sounds come into focus, but Tempest is the first and primary sound I can identify.
Tempest epitomizes early arcade games, to me. It was subject to all the same technical limits of games of the era, but it seemed to be apart from them; there's nothing you'd need to add to make it better. The sound and the look of it, from the intro screen on, is just really iconic.
Tempest 2000 on the Atari Jaguar is still one of my favorite games of all time. I can’t think of any other game that can get me into that pure zen mind/no-mind state as quickly and for as long.
I was playing it at the video games exhibit at the Smithsonian a couple of years ago and setting all the high scores and eventually a small audience was watching me play and asking me questions about it. I wasn’t sure if the game was the exhibit or I was.
Two weird bits of trivia about T2K, it supports spinner input via a secret key combo.[0]
Later on T3K for the Nuon (a system which nearly nobody knows about) also supported spinner input but the spinner controller was never actually released.
It wasn’t until 13 years later[1] a buddy and I reversed the settings to enable spinner control via a modified controller, which are extremely rare themselves because who buys a game controller for a DVD player?
Have you tried Jeff Minter's other riffs on Tempest and/or any of his other games? Jeff did T2k; his other Tempest riffs include Space Giraffe (360/PC), TXK (PSVita), and Tempest 4000 (forthcoming, maybe). I also highly recommend Polybius (ps4, vr helmet optional)
I miss the feel of hardware controllers that didn't go through so many layers of software. The tempest controller the best of all of them. Low latency and completely consistent response.
I knew a guy that specialized in repairing these types of games. I was fascinated in hearing about how the game controlled the scanning of the electron beam from the normal CRT horizontal scan. I was always curious of what was the genesis for the idea to use a CRT in this way. The first thing I had always thought about was sending this method of scanning an audio signal to let it draw the sound. For the time period, I can only imagine the images would have been pretty cool party visuals.
Thanks for sharing this! It instantly brings back good memories -- running simple BASIC programs when I was a kid, on a tektronix 4050 workstation my dad brought home from time to time (he worked for tektronix during the eighties). I believe it had something similar to these XY displays. Those smooth lines and distinct glow... you have to see it with your own eyes.
For simple stuff like audio we clipped the wires to an old TV deflection coils. The impedance was within reason for a speaker so direct connection to an amplifier worked. Unfortunately we didn't have component video on that old thing so no good control of the color. For gaming non-linearity was relevant and they had analog circuitry on board to compensate for that.
Think vector arcade games grew out of oscilloscopes where some smart tinkerers found they could use the oscilloscope as a display screen for rudimentary games.
After recent threads here about oscilloscope music, I was wondering if this game style was essentially an XY view type of concept.
Also, I know that the ROM emulators had issues getting games to work on nonCRT screens as the games had to do some interesting programming "tricks" to deal with the quirks of NTSC. I wonder if the vector game emulation teams had any additional issues to deal with to get the game to work on nonCRT displays?
What kind of CPU drove the logic? This seems to be missing from the article. It describes an iterative compile/debug cycle but leaves out the part where why the DEC computer was needed to make a tape for a Forth debugging machine - we are never told how that Forth thing made the final leap to the stand up cabinet hardware or if the tape thing also went to the cabinet after it was debugged.
The game used a 6502 for the main CPU, but had a custom system called "Math box" that handled the 3D computations:
> The Math Box was built around the AMD 2901 Bit Slice which contained an Arithmetic/Logic Unit, a 16-deep dual port RAM, two registers, and a multiplexer. Each one was only 4-bits but had hooks so that it could be expanded. Four were used to produce a 16-bit machine and they were controlled by another State Machine.
> Battlezone was the first game to use a new development system: the Blue Box and White Box duo. The Blue Box was programmed in Forth and controlled the emulator/analyzer in the White Box. It also had an external 8" floppy disk drive as well as a serial port for connecting to the VAX. Unfortunately, it did not have a full featured editor/assembler. Editing/assembling/linking was originally done on the department's PDP11 Model 20s which placed the output file on an 8" floppy, which could then be loaded by the Blue Box.
> Later, when we got the first VAX, the Blue Box could be used as a terminal and the VAX was used to edit, assemble and link the program, and the output could be downloaded into the Blue Box/White Box.
Games were cross-assembled on a VAX (using a modified version of the DEC macro assembler).
I never saw the "blue FORTH box" but it was probably a ROM emulator of some kind that you downloaded code to, with some FORTH words for doing low-level stuff like debugging, resetting the target and diagnostics. The game itself was not written in FORTH.
I'd forgotten that some programmers depended on other people keyboarding their source code. I think this was largely a coin-op thing; the other engineering departments never practiced that.
> and a software bug inadvertently created by Theurer, where a 12% chance of 40 credits being obtained by a player scoring 170,000 points in one game can occur
I'd love to know the details of that bug. All I've been able to find is this quote which doesn't really explain things:
The fact you can earn 40 free games with a certain score was the fault of developer Dave Theurer himself. He had created a special security code to protect against piracy which checked the placement of different objects. If the objects were not in the correct place, the game would shut down. Before the game was shipped, however, Theurer, who would fuss over minute details, noticed an Atari logo was off-center. He adjusted it slightly. This small change caused the code to malfunction and the player to earn 40 free credits if a certain score was reached.
Also, I seem to recall the bug makes an appearance in the plot of Ready Player One.
Like many games at the time the code in the ROMs had tamper protection. The basic idea is to detect if the ROM has been altered and if so assume it is a pirated copy and do something to cause the game to fail. Pirates could still make exact copies but they'd have to retain copyright notices and trademarks which makes them more vulnerable to detection and prosecution.
At the last minute Dave changed the position of some logos on screen but forgot to update the copy protection. When an illegal copy was detected the game would use some of the digits of the score obtained at the end of the game to zap bytes in memory if the overall score itself was within some range. This kind of random scrambling that only happens semi-randomly is better than copy protection that triggers deterministically. Imagine if the game did a checksum of its ROM and immediately said "Illegal Copy Detected - Program Halted". It would make it easier to find the copy protection routines and disable them.
So the first version that shipped thought it was an illegal copy and triggered the random scrambling. It so happens that sometimes the random scrambling would result in giving the player 40 credits.
When I was a kid, I had a Windows 95-era floppy with Battlezone, Centipede, Asteroids, Missile Command and Tempest. Wish I still had it; one of the best parts was the .chm (or .hlp? I forget what was the older one) help file has a big section on the development of each game.
so i just watched the 23 minute gameplay video linked in the article. after 5 minutes, i realized how much i sucked at this game. it's amazing that even after so many years of game design progress, these old style games still grab my attention.
Came out when I was in high school and I had already passed the baton to the next generation of arcade gamers. But I loved to watch a skilled player play (but not as much as I liked to watch a skilled player play Defender). Modern big-budget, big-team games are missing something that could only be achieved by a single gifted game developer such as Dave Theurer.
The only art that gets made when there are no constraints is uninteresting and massive. Size. Modern games are big in every dimension. Atari had a medium that artists had to work within.
" pick an idea from an already-approved (Atari) catalogue of ideas..,"
Now that's a book I'd like to see. I wonder if it ever made it out of the company to the world at large.
I'm sure this happened after Atari was bought, but Dave said the purchasing agents were driving around expensive cars, cars that he as an engineer couldn't afford, the implication that there were obvious kickbacks going on. Programmers were sometimes given coke by their supervisor during crunch time to increase work. Some of the technical talent hired agents to negotiate with Atari -- the thinking being they are in the entertainment business, just like Hollywood.