Starcade Archive

This is Starcade!

Let me shine a light on a collection of videos at the Internet Archive, episodes of the classic arcade game series Starcade.

The show ran on Ted Turner's WTBS cable channel from 1982 - 1983, and in syndication the following year.  Billed as the first video arcade game show, Starcade featured players facing off against each other on the popular arcade games of the time.  Watching the episodes is like glimpsing coin-op Valhalla, with shiny Tron, Super Zaxxon and Stargate cabinets filling the backstage.  It prefectly captures the 80's in video amber.

We might not have arcades in our neighbourhoods anymore, but we still have Starcade.

PONG Turns 40

The First Serve

On November 29, 1972, a recently incorporated company in California named Atari announced the release of its first product, an electronic video arcade game called PONG.  Two players would stand at the wood-grain and yellow cabinet, twiddling the control knobs that moved two paddles displayed on a B&W TV screen.  With the paddles they would play an electronically abstract game of table tennis, batting a little white blip back and forth in an attempt to "Avoid Missing Ball For High Score", as the simple gameplay instructions prompted.

Conceived by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell and designed by Al Alcorn, Pong was a smash success, giving birth to the video game industry.  Fast-forward nearly 40 years later, in 2011 that industry was worth US$65 billion dollars.

Among other celebrations of Pong's 40th birthday, an attempt to enter the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's largest game of Pong was made on Nov. 16, 2012.  A 22-story version of the game, complete with festive lighting, was played on the side of the Downtown Marriott hotel in Kansas City, MO.

In a lead-up to the anniversary, earlier this year Atari announced the Pong Indie Developer Challenge.  Offering a grand prize of up to $100,000, the company solicited independent app developers to submit their take on the venerable Pong.  The three winners were announced on Aug. 2, and they will participate in a profit sharing scheme divided between the three Pong apps that will see them collect royalties up to the winning prize amounts.  The top winner, the freemium-based PONG World by zGames, can be snagged at the iOS App Store here.

Pong put Atari on the road to becoming the fastest growing company in American history.  It's no stretch to consider that when you say Pong is 40 years-old today, you're also saying the video game industry is 40 years-old.  So like those tipsy patrons of Andy Capp's bar in Sunnyvale California, who played the original Pong prototype until it broke and convinced Bushnell and Atari to produce the game commercially, raise a glass to the grand-daddy of the video game industry.  Your serve, PONG!

You can play an updated version of PONG online at Atari.com for free.  For more information on the history of Pong and Atari, consult your local Dot Eaters article.

Retroclip: Thayer's Quest

Thayer's Quest
cabinet

After the enormous success of laser arcade game Dragon's Lair, Rick Dyer and his RDI Video Systems company created another groundbreaking laser coin-op game in 1984, called Thayer's Quest.  Its story was more closely based on Shadoan, the Tolkien-esqe source material that Dyer had conceived earlier and from which he had spun off Dragon's Lair.

Thayer was an astounding attempt to produce a sword & sorcery RPG epic for the arcades.  Eschewing joysticks and buttons, Thayer had a full-size membrane keyboard mounted on the cabinet, which players used to input choices during the game.  At the start, you could enter your name, and then be personally refered to via speech synthesis.  Shown on the keyboard were various inventory items that Thayer could use at certain spots to advance the plot.  The game even had a save game system, where the last ten players could return to continue their progress after losing their last life.

The innovation found in Thayer's Quest makes it a very special and unusual arcade game indeed.  Posted below is our gameplay video.  For more information on Thayer's Quest, Dragon's Lair and the rest of the 80's laser game craze, consult your local Dot Eaters entry.

Nintendo Admits It Has A Wii Mini

Recently we seem to be in the timeline of our current generation of video game consoles where companies, anxious to generate renewed interest in their hardware without actually producing something new that would cannibalize sales of their current offerings, simply produce refreshes of their current machines.  This involves reducing the size and amount of inner circuitry of their lines, in order to look more sleek and save on production costs and thusly lower retail prices. Atari and Mattel both attempted to stave off obsolescence by remodelling their flagship consoles in the early 80's, producing the 2600 jr. and Intellivision II respectively.

Wii Mini

Both the Xbox 360 and PS3 have undergone shrinkage with "slim" versions, and now Nintendo, with the release of its next generation Wii U console safely behind them, has announced what it calls the Wii Mini.  Priced at $99.99, the smaller form-factor comes with a red Wii Remote Plus and Nunchuk controller, to match the console's colour.  What it doesn't include, however, is any online capability, nor Gamecube compatibility.  The console also seems to be a Canadian exclusive, at least over the 2012 Christmas season.  Nintendo is mum on any details about other countries getting a release, so currently only Canada has tiny Wii's.  Don't worry though, we're not embarrassed. Although I don't think I'd be telling anyone I had a Wii Mini.  Especially in the clubs.  Be sure to ask your Future Shop salesman about his Wii Mini on Dec. 7.

Okay, I'll stop now.  Although I still think they should have called it the "WeeWii".  Maybe in Scotland.

1983 - E.T.'s Final Home Recreated

ET Box Cover

Perfectly captured in forlorn sepia tones is the fate of the E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial game by Atari, infamous for helping sink the company and its flagship console the 2600, and thus the rest of the U.S. video game industry in 1983 - 1984.  Created by artist Pauline Acalin, these 6x6 digital prints feature the rejected 8-bit fugitive wandering a landfill, while the ghosts of slightly more popular electronic aliens look on mourning his fate.  The work is simply titled "1983".

The hand-signed prints can be purchased at the Yetee Gallery space on Storenvy, for $20.  For more information on the E.T. game and the great video game crash, consult your local Dot Eaters entry.

via Kotaku

Quote Mining: Straight outta Hartford, CT

Do you know the powerhouse 3rd gen console discussed in this quote?

Answer:

Mr. Dressup Honoured by Google Doodle.

Early ad for Mr. Dressup

Ernie Coombs was a mainstay of children's programming on the CBC, as the title character of Mr. Dressup, running on the network from 1967 to 1996.  Along with his puppet friends Casey and Finnegan,  he was a gentle and friendly accompaniment to my formative gaming years of PONG and Atari.  He passed away in 2001.

That Google has chosen to celebrate what would have been his 85th birthday really... wait for it...

Tickles me.

Google.com

Save Us Dikembe Mutombo, You're Our Only Hope...

Title Screen

Old Spice, a company that is rapidly defining how to do incredibly effective viral marketing, has created a new, online retro-style game starring retired NBA basketball star Dikembe Mutombo.  Titled Dikembe Mutombo's 4 1/2 Weeks to Save the World, the former baller is on a quest to carve new dates into the Mayan calendar, and thus save the world from extinction at the end of the year.

The game is very funny and highly surreal, as only a classic 8-bit game can be.  It's also pretty fun to play.  The game is rolling out in instalments, with the first stage now live at oldspicesavestheworld.com.  Be sure to say Hi to Science, the Bear for us.

via Complex Gaming

Tank Game for Mattel Aquarius

This is an interesting find, from NuGeneration Gaming.  It is a video of gameplay from Space Ram, a tank game on the Mattel Aquarius personal computer.

The Aquarius was Mattel's attempt to enter the burgeoning personal computer market, released in 1983.  It's strange that Mattel would attempt to market a computer alongside the ECS or Entertainment Computer System that they also sold as an add-on to their Intellivision console, designed to turn the Master Component into a full-fledged computer.  I guess it shows that the company had no real confidence in either system.  At any rate, the Aquarius failed miserably as a home computer of the era.  The writing was on the wall internally at Mattel; programmers had their own slogan for the machine, referring to its obsolete specifications by 1983 : "The System for the 70's".

For more information on Mattel Electronics and the Aquarius computer, consult your local Dot Eaters entry.

Market percentages of game platforms and genres analyzed.

This is a graph of the percentages that various gaming platforms and genres have made up of the video game market, from 1975 to present day.  It's completely fascinating.

Culled from a database of 24,000 video games from VideoGameGeek, these charts vividly describe the roller-coaster ride of the rising and falling whims of the video game market. Witness as arcade games dominate the percentage, and then get steadily hammered down into nothingness.  Watch helplessly as generations of video game systems yield to their successors, who yield to the next wave, in an electronic circadian rhythm.

To me, it's very much like watching a colourful evolutionary chart, where organisms emerge from their primordial pong, crawl gasping into the sun of commercial acceptance, who then are driven extinct by more evolved species better able to adapt to the marketplace.  It puts The Dot Eaters into perspective: It's like breaking apart the rock strata of video game history and examining the fossils, in a medium of electrons and brightly coloured photons that is anything but chiselled in stone.

Reading this chart, I also can't help but think of the companies, programmers and players who are swept around helplessly in the ebb and flow of the ever-shifting, ever-raging video game current.

via ncikVGG of Reddit.com.

A New Godly Kickstarter Project by Peter Molyneux

Peter Molyneux helped define the "God Game" genre with Populous, developed by his Bullfrog game development house and published by EA in 1989 for Amiga and Atari-ST computers.  In the game, players controlled the fates of a race of little people wandering around varying landscapes, smiting them with boiling volcanoes or spreading pestilence across the lands, or nurturing them with flat fertile soil on which to build homes and prosper and multiply. You were either up against a CPU-controlled rival race of beings, or, in an early instance of online play, against another human via dial-up connection.

While the game was a blast to play, after awhile things would inevitably devolve into a "land flattening" simulation, with players scrambling to smooth the landscape faster than his opponent in order to expand housing for his own minions, resulting in higher influence and more and stronger followers.

The repetitiveness of the game was not its only shortcoming.  It had a very unwieldy user interface that took up 1/2 of the screen,  squeezing the player's actual view of the landscape for precious screen real-estate.  Populous made true believers out of computer gamers and created Molyneux's name in the industry, but that gigantic block of icons has been a personal cross he's borne for decades.  It eventually fuelled the "gesture-only" interface that powered the UI in his magnum opus god game Black&White, doing away with most on-screen icons but not entirely successfully.

Thus, it comes to pass that Molyneux and 22Cans, an indie development house he begat earlier this year, have launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new project called Godus, that promises to redefine the god game genre as much as Populous established it 23 years ago.  Of course, your excitement level about this venture depends on whether or not you still trust promises coming from Molyneux, who has developed somewhat of a sketchy reputation for promising big, paradigm-shifting game elements while hyping an effort during development, only to fan on the actual implementation of these elements and apologizing afterword when the game is released.  Rinse and repeat.

Although, you have to admit that really only those of us who slavishly follow every little detail of the development of his games throw stones over the results.  Those people who just walk into the game without knowledge of things promised are generally happy with it.  I hope you'll join me in keeping the faith that Godus and Molyneux aren't leading us down the garden (of Eden) path once again.

You can check out the Godus Kickstarter project here.

Here's our Populous gameplay video, for those not as old as Methuselah.  For a  history of the genesis of EA, consult your local Dot Eaters entry.

via neoseeker.com

Atari's Groove Tube

Smack dab between the release of home PONG in 1975 and the VCS in 1977 came the Atari Video Music in 1976.  The brainchild of home PONG creator Bob Brown, you would plug your stereo via RCA jacks into this piece of ordinance, and output to your TV via a RF connector.  Thusly, the Atari Video Music would display trippy graphical patterns on your TV, in time to your music.  The box is hard-wired analog, with nary a processor in sight.  Think of it as an early version of today's mp3 player visualizers.  You can grok the effect in this YouTube video:

Read more about the device here at Technabob.  What would your choice of "mind-enhancer" be when watching this thing?

It is pitch black...

Perhaps you're like me, and one of the very first gaming experiences you had on a computer was a text adventure.

Sometimes a person is lucky enough to have a first experience, a first taste of something, that is so amazingly, compellingly good that it forever shapes how they think about that thing.  For me, that first thing was Infocom's Zork, and it gave me a lifelong love of computers and gaming.

The text adventure was a genre that ruled the landscape of early computer gaming, until advancing graphics technology inevitably supplanted text as the canvas for creating worlds on personal computers. GET LAMP, a documentary directed by Jason Scott, takes a close look at the genre, from its inception as Will Crowther's original cave-diving Adventure, to its perfection at Infocom, to its effective demise in the late 80's and resurgence in the modern era as home-grown Interactive Fiction.

As the premiere text adventure company of the era, a particular light is shone on Infocom, producer of  classics such as the aformentioned Zork games, Deadline, Suspended, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy... the list is exhaustive.  Interviews of those involved are numerous and informative, and form a captivating narrative about the company and what it was like to work there.  It's fascinating to hear the founders and game designers talk about how they were convinced they were on the cusp of creating a new type of literature that would stand the test of time.  Now we look back with 20/20 vision and it seems so obvious that the writing was on the wall for Infocom even as it began making games, that inherent in the very idea of text adventure computer games is the seed that will sow the company's destruction.  It was inevitable that game designers, inspired by Infocom games, would eventually want to move on from monochromatic text and turn the lights on to see what is actually there.  As well, hobbyist IF writers and players also feature in segments that highlight the fact that text adventures have survived and thrived after the demise of Infocom.  Be sure to keep an eye out for a secret item in these interview segments.

Call them text adventures, or adventure games, or the more grandiose interactive fiction, these types of games created entire worlds only with words on a screen.  GET LAMP brightly illuminates the forgotten dark corners, hallways and caverns of these worlds and the people who crafted them.  Good thing too, because you don't want to end up reading these words:

...you were eaten by a Grue.

Nintendo Draws First Blood

Nintendo's latest game console, their first shot across the bow in the next generation of video game machines, was released yesterday.  The hook is once again a re-imagining of the gaming controller, although here, instead of motion control, the Wii U taps into the gaming tablet rage by having a large screen embedded into the controller.

There seems to be a lot of potential here, including allowing one player to influence the play field on their screen while others struggle against his influence with regular Wii controllers, or even being able to move the game completely onto the controller while someone else watches the TV.  It comes off as a mish-mash to me, however.  Do we want motion control in our controllers, or do we want a big screen?  Also, I'd be very worried handing over a controller with a screen to my 4 and 6 year old sons.

At any rate, here's hoping the Wii U boosts Nintendo's sagging bottom line, and doesn't become the company's Atari 7800.  As always, for more information on the history of Nintendo, consult your local Dot Eaters entry.

When The Moon Hits Your Ear....

It struck me today how certain things can make a big difference in the quality of classic video games.  Programmers didn't have a lot to work with, so they had to really put their heart into what they were doing.

Take Moon Cresta, for instance.  It's yet another Galaxian clone, riding the coat-tails of the game that unshackled the alien invaders from marching single file across the screen as sitting ducks, and sent them swirling down at the player like cosmic Stukkas.  Moon Cresta would be nothing special, if not for its wonderful sound design.  From the majestic opening theme to the squirrelly screams of the dying aliens to the insistent imperatives that pressure you as you play, it's wonderful stuff that really helps fill in the gaps left by the limited graphics available at the time.

Sounds were one of the most important ways of games to draw you in while wandering around a noisy arcade (remember those things?), and Moon Cresta really shoots for the moon in auditory quality.  Here's a video to help you hear what I mean.

Ultima Underworld: The Abyssmal Voice Acting

While I love the game Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, I always have to sit through the lengthy cinematic at the beginning and chuckle at the horrible voice acting.  It's unfortunate too, because in all other respects it's an exciting and visually stunning intro that I'm sure amazed a few people back in the day on their x486 PCs.

Once the sprites start opening their mouths though, whoo boy.  It sounds like the programmers just recorded a rather dull high school play and just animated to that.

Here's our gameplay video, judge for yourself whether the actors should be thrown into the Stygian Abyss:

Blast... or be blasted!

The more I play Blaster, released by Williams in 1983, the more the game amazes me.

Designed by Defender creators Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar, it features a startling 3-D perspective as you soar over an alien landscape, blasting giant robots and rescuing floating astronauts.  The visual effects are nothing short of amazing, especially considering the time at which the game was made.  It's no surprise that several designers at Williams would eventually move on to work on the ground-breaking Amiga computer at Commodore.  Added to the allure of this and several other Williams games, such as Bubbles and Sinistar, is that it came in an indestructible plastic cabinet, named Duramold by the company.  Rumour has it, however, that the plastic would shrink over time, causing the monitor inside to eventually be ejected.

Enjoy a video we made of Blaster gameplay, and as always, for more information on Blaster, Jarvis, Defender, and other things Williams, please consult your local Dot Eaters entry.

AVGN Movie Trailer Released

I don't know if you've seen the videos from The Angry Video Game Nerd, aka James Rolfe, but you should.  In a vast web series, the AVGN tortures himself by playing the crappiest games ever made, and inevitably becomes enraged that such dross was ever foisted onto an unsuspecting public.

Just released is the trailer for a feature-length film made by and starring Rolfe, and it looks like it won't disappoint the fans.  The movie details the Nerd's attempt to uncover the fabled burial site where, as the bottom was falling out of the video game industry in 1983, Atari took millions of unsold cartridges of their excremental E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial game and dumped them into a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico.  They then covered the whole thing in concrete and walked away like nothing happened.

Rolfe and his team expect the movie to be released in 2013, but there's no promises.  You can check out the trailer here, and be sure to check out Rolfe's other tirades as well.  For more information on the crash, E.T. and the great video game dump, consult your local Dot Eaters entry here.