Out of the ashes of Computer Space, an unpopular first attempt at an arcade video game which was released by Nutting Associates in 1971, 27-year-old Nolan Bushnell, along with partner Ted Dabney, incorporated Atari, Inc. today in 1972. Their next attempt, the first game released by the new company, would be a slightly bigger success: PONG.
Bushnell and Dabney had created Computer Space under the auspices of an informal company they dubbed Syzygy, pronounced siz-eh-jee, a term meaning the Earth, Moon and Sun in perfect alignment. Thankfully a candle-making commune had already registered that name, so Bushnell took a term from the Japanese game Go he liked to play, and Atari was born.
Dabney, Bushnell, Unknown and Alcorn
PONG was an instant success, a quicky paddle-ball video game hammered out by Atari employee Al Alcorn, the immense profits of which would carry the company for years. Five years later Atari would create the Video Computer System (later renamed the 2600) home console, which initially struggled but would eventually come to define home video games after the licensing of the Taito/Midway hit arcade game Space Invaders for the games machine. Bushnell eventually sold Atari to Warner Communications, and was muscled out by management in 1978. The name Atari became synonymous with home video games, with the company ruling the roost until the great video-game crash of 1983-1984 would utterly destroy the entire industry.
Atari was eventually split into two companies: industry stalwart Jack Tramiel, fresh off his departure from Commodore, would pick up the consumer division of Atari in 1984 to form Atari Corporation, with Warner continuing the arcade division separately as Atari Games, Inc.. They would eventually sell to Namco in 1985. The Tramiel-led Atari would move more deeply into computers with the Atari ST line, while Atari Games made such arcade games as Marble Madness (1984), Super Sprint (1986) and Hard Drivin' (1989).
Bushnell relaxing, 1999
Tramiel eventually merged Atari Corp with hard drive manufacturer JTS, who in turn sold remaining assets to Hasbro in 1998 for a paltry 5 million dollars. French software maker Infogrames would end up purchasing Hasbro in 2000, and rebrand the entire company using the Atari, Inc. name in 2001. Coming around in a neat circle, Nolan Bushnell eventually joined the board of Atari in 2010.
So raise a glass to the company that created the video game industry, 40 years young today. As always, for more history of Atari and the games that helped define it and the rest of the video game landscape, consult your local The Dot Eaters article.
Gamasutra has a great article on how Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, creators of the venerable Space Quest adventure game series during the heydays of Sierra, managed to bury the hatchet and end a 20-year estrangement to work together on the new Kickstarter project that you can help fund. As always, you can read about the history of Space Quest and Sierra in our Dot Eaters article here.
Coming down the ether, otherwise known as Kotaku, comes word that The Two Guys From Andromeda, aka Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy, are setting up shop to produce a new space-themed adventure game. They have a pretty good pedigree for this sort of thing, as they were the creators of the original Space Quest graphical adventure games for Sierra. The SQ games were truly hilarious, spiritual successors of the SF comedy Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books by Douglas Adams, and lampooning a wide spectrum of popular culture.
It's especially surprising to see Murphy back in the game, so to speak, considering his little-hidden distaste for the industry that chewed him up and spit him out after the 6th and final Space Quest game, Roger Wilco inThe Spinal Frontier, released in 1995.
Details are sketchy at this point, but it does appear that things are pulling together, and the GuysFromAndromeda company is currently hiring talent. Whether or not the boys are putting together another Space Quest game or some other (ad)venture, one can be assured the laughter will be heard from one end of the galaxy to the other.
Tramiel speaking at the 25th
anniversary of the C64
One of the leading figures of the early computer revolution, Jack Tramiel has passed away at the age of 83.
Born Idek Tramielski in Lodz, Poland, in 1928, Tramiel would survive the horrors of the Nazi invasion and the Auschwitz concentration camp, eventually emigrating to the U.S. and repaying his liberators by joining the U.S. Army in 1948. While stationed at Fort Dix in New Jersey, Tramiel was put in charge of the office repair department, fixing typewriters. After leaving the Army in 1952, a $25,000 U.S. Army loan enabled him to open his own typewriter repair shop in the Bronx. In order to draw some comparisons to large appliance firms with military names such as Admiral and General, Tramiel took the model name of a Opel brand of car he noticed while riding in a taxi one day, and the Commodore Portable Typewriter company was born.
Commodore adding machine
Moving to Canada to capture exclusivity rights in importing Olivetti typewriters, Tramiel set up shop in Toronto and embarked in some shady deals with Canadian financier C. Powell Morgan which almost landed him in jail. A trip to Japan persuaded Tramiel to enter the burgeoning electronic calculator field, riding to great success on the wave of microprocessor technology. Texas Instruments eventually figured out that it should be making its own devices instead of supplying Commodore with microchips, and undercut Tramiel's prices with their own brand of calculators. Vowing to never be trapped by the whims of a supplier, he purchased chip maker MOS Technologies in 1976 and secured Commodore's future as a manufacturer of cheaper electronic devices.
Commodore PET
With the MOS acquisition, Tramiel also got the services of employee Chuck Peddle, a visionary design wizard who built the PET or Personal Electronic Transactor for Commodore, one of the first mass-produced personal computers that entered the market in 1977, along with the Apple II and the TRS-80 from Tandy. Leverageing the success of the PET, Tramiel pushed his team to create low-cost colour computers, resulting in perhaps his greatest legacy: the blockbusters VIC-20 and Commodore-64. The 64, in particular, was an enormous success, eventually becoming the greatest selling computer of all-time. It is incalculable how many games were sold on this platform, and how many game designers cut their teeth on the system.
The incomparable C64
In early 1984, with Commodore at its apex, Tramiel's clashes with company chairman Irving Gould resulted in his ousting from the company. Ten years later, Commodore itself would pass into oblivion, entering liquidation after a series of disastrous mistakes. A few months after his departure, Tramiel would buy Atari's consumer division from Warner Brothers, desperate to unload the ashes of the once great gaming company, felled by the cratering video game industry. Tramiel trash-canned planned next-generation game consoles at Atari to focus instead on home computers, but was stymied by his former company's purchase of Amiga, Inc. from under his nose, a company who's Amiga computer line of revolutionary 16-bit computers would help keep Commodore afloat. Tramiel would fight back with the Atari ST line of 16-bit computers, which powered Atari Corporation through the rest of the decade and into the 90's. In 1996, Tramiel would merge Atari with a hard drive manufacturer, resulting in the company JTS.
Tramiel and Sons
Leaving behind his wife Helen, as well as their three sons Gary, Sam and Leonard, Jack Tramiel also leaves behind an industry that owes him a great debt for helping to popularize their landscape.
From Elite Systems Ltd., the guys who made the classic space exploration and trade game Elite in 1984, comes World of RETRO Computer GAMES, an iOS app featuring a collection of near-100% accurate replicas of classic computer games.
Bruce Lee climbs the tapestry
And classic is the operative word here. In the free version of the app, Datasoft's action platformer Bruce Lee (1984)is provided free of charge, with three packs of three games each available as in-app purchases for 99 cents a pop. Paying 99 cents up front for the app gets you all the game packs included, along with Bruce Lee. Any self-respecting computer gamer from the 80's will remember Bruce Lee, running and jumping through multiple screens collecting lanterns in order to open up secret doors in order to progress, all the while chased by a stick-wielding ninja and the green Sumo menace Yamo. The game packs contain such gems as Freefall's chess-by-way-of-Tolkien Archon (1983), Epyx's one-on-one fighting game Barbarian a.k.a. Death Sword (1988), and the original The Bard's Tale: Tales of the Unknown (1985) by EA.
My usual landing in Infiltrator
As almost always with these things when gaming on iOS devices, the app falters slightly with the control scheme, although this is mitigated somewhat through what Elite calls their iDaptive controls. What this amounts to are contextual buttons that pop up in-game and are completely customizable by the user. You can increase their size and position, adjust transparency to see behind them, and switch from keyboard directional keys to a simulated joystick. The stick is definitely a necessity for most of the games here, in particular for action games like Bruce Lee. The ability to move controls to a more comfortable position is key to keeping things from getting too frustrating, although the low-resolution response of the joystick takes some getting used to. Even with this stilted response, I'd have to say that the controls aren't a dealbreaker with this one. The ultimate workaround for the virtual joystick, of course, is to use ION's iCade, a nifty mini-arcade cabinet that connects with your iPad via bluetooth and provides eight physical buttons and a solid joystick. Retro Games supports the iCade, and using this feature makes all the difference in the world when it comes to controls in the game.
iPad controls done right
There's so much to love here. The games feel spot-on, and give one a visceral thrill to be able to play these classics on a modern mobile device. There are separate apps for both iPhone and iPad, but the latter is the best way to go, as buttons get crazily cramped on some of the games on the small screen. A much appreciated ability to save and load games at any time is another big plus.
It's promised that 100 more games will be made available through in-app purchase, touting such pleasures as Ozark Softscape's seminal M.U.L.E. and Archon's sequel, Archon II: Adept. With a lineup like that, Retro Games should have the mobile classic gaming scene in its pocket.
Had famed author and raconteur Douglas Noel Adams not been so rudely taken from us in 2001, he would be turning 60 today.
Although Adams produced a wealth of material in his life, including the Dirk Gently series of books as well as scripts for the immensely popular and long-running British SF TV series Dr. Who, he will no doubt be best remembered as the author of the increasingly inaccurately named five-book Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy. Dealing with the misadventures of the hapless Arthur Dent, who narrowly escapes the destruction of Earth in order to make way for an interstellar bypass, Hitchhiker's began life as a BBC radio comedy series originally aired in 1978. It was the subsequently released book series that brought Adams to global prominence, and represented my first exposure to his brand of off-beat and knowing humour. It's hard to quantify the effect that these works had on me growing up, because upon my first reading of the original Hitchhiker's book, Adams' attitudes towards life, the universe, and everything were instantly melded with my DNA, forever changing my outlook on the ridiculousness of what was going on around me. I'd say only the books of American humourist Kurt Vonnegut have had such a powerful impact on me, but while Vonnegut looks at the human condition as fairly hopeless and doomed, Adams' approach was a combination of exasperation, whimsey and a kind of cross-eyed optimism.
Apropos to this site, Adams also had a profound impact on computer games. He was an early computer-phile when there was need for such a term, before computers became as ubiquitous as refridgerators in households. Starting out with text adventures, Adams progressed eventually to full-blown graphical extravaganzas, spanning the years between 1984 to 1998. Here is a look at his main contributions to the world of video games.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Infocom 1984
Hitchhiker's Cover
Just as the book was a smash success, so was the computer game based upon it, Adams' first foray into the medium. Approached many times with the idea of turning his most famous work into a game, Adams rebuffed them all, until he got a taste of the exceptionally well-written and wildly popular text adventure games coming out of Infocom in the early 80's. In late 1983, he got in contact with the company. Jumping at the chance, Infocom signed Adams to a six-game contract, with two to be based on the published Hitchhiker's books. It was a natural for Infocom to pair up Adams with Steve Meretzky, the latter producing some of the company's most popular, not to mention most funny, games. In particular, it was Meretzky's Planetfall (and later sequel, Stationfall) that made him such a perfect match, as these games were noted for having an altogether Adams-y sense of humour. Meretzky had not heard of Hitchhiker's before writing Planetfall, but people testing the game remarked how much it reminded them of Adams' works.
Steve Meretsky
During the game's six-month development time, Adams would write passages in England, and send them via computer to Infocom in Boston, where Meretsky would add additional material and then program everything into the game using Infocom's game development system. The two writers would exchange emails daily, a rarity at the time, and phone calls weekly. In mid 1984, with the testing schedule looming in a few weeks and a release window established to take advantage of the Christmas season, Infocom sent Meretzky to England to prod the famous procrastinator Adams to finish his work on the game. At the time, the author was ensconced in the Huntsham Court country inn by his book publisher, hoping to help him focus on the fourth Hitchhiker's book, titled So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish. Hence the two of them hammered out the remaining material for the game in four days. Returning to the U.S., Meretzky must have missed the bucolic scenery and relaxed atmosphere of the English countryside as he delved into an intense three week crunch session to finish the programming of the game. After a brief testing phase, Adams did some rewrites of the material per testing results.
Released in October 1984, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure became an immediate success, selling over a quarter of a million copies. It rode the top of the game charts for months, and was Infocom's second-best seller, topped only by the company's first game, the legendary Zork.
Douglas Adams and
Steve Meretzky
While faithful to the tone of the books, the game revels in breaking as many of the cardinal rules then established in interactive fiction, including outright lying to the player about available directions to travel in, and even what the player is able to see. In fact, Hitchhiker's is cruelly obtuse, often requiring players to initiate actions outside of any offered information in the game, and at many times only those with knowledge of events in the books would know what to do. It also appears to be a favourite torture of Adams to let you miss some critical piece of equipment during a scene that would cause the game to dead-end later, with no recourse but to reload a save or replay the game. The goals of the game are unclear, except perhaps to retain your sanity as you play it. At times it seems that the game was purposefully created as a ploy to sell more Infocom Invisiclue hint books.
These brutalities aside, the game is an interesting extension of the Hitchhiker's cannon, extending the book metaphor by featuring the literary device of footnotes that offer asides to the action. The actual Hitchhiker's Guide is an inventory item in the game, and features plenty of articles for the player to consult about. The game also takes a philosophical bent, with "no tea" being an inventory item that the player at one point drops after getting some real tea, and is eventually able to carry both tea and no tea at the same time after some synaptic calisthenics. Random events also serve to keep subsequent playthroughs interesting.
The game is also strangely obsessed with fluff of all kinds. It is no fluff-piece, however, but a fitting entry to the Guide. Soul-crushingly frustrating, but fitting none-the-less. As an example, I'll leave you with video of the infamous "Babel Fish Puzzle".
Bureaucracy, Infocom 1987
With the resounding success of the Hitchhiker's game, it was no wonder that Infocom was anxious for a sequel. The problem was that Adams was tiring of producing sequels of his Hitchhiker's material, and suggested instead Bureaucracy, an original game based on his real-life frustrations at trying to get his bank and utility companies to acknowledge a change-of-address after moving households. Infocom, having signed Adams on the idea that he would be bringing his popular Hitchhiker's material with him, balked at the idea, but eventually came to terms with producing an original work with Adams.
Outside of this initial concept, however, Adams began to let the project be bumped by other commitments, and he tapped long-time friend Michael Bywater to eventually finish the project. In line with the initial concept by Adams, the game has the protagonist jumping through hoops to accomplish the most simple tasks, such as withdrawing money from a bank, purchasing an airline ticket or even ordering food at a restaurant. The ultimate goal, of course, is to get the bank to recognize a change-of-address card.
The game starts, in true bureaucratic form, by having the player fill out a "software licence application" form for the game, providing humorous comments as you fill in lines such as your last name, name of boy/girl friend, and whether the player is male or female. The game will then reference you using the opposite of the information provided, such as calling you Mr. if you put your sex down as female. Throughout the game, the blood pressure of the player is shown on the top right of the screen, rising as annoyances occur or when the player enters an invalid command. It is possible to die of an aneurysm if the player lets this rise too high without taking a cooling off period. Following a lead from Hitchhiker's, the game throws many random events at the player.
Unfortunately, the prose in Bureaucracy is a bit twee, and the humour often comes off as forced. It moves from ridiculous to just plain stupid for convenience sake, offering up the idea of having to give a long, drawn-out food order in a restaurant to the waitstaff multiple times as the height of hilarity. It is less the Kafka-esque, paranoid nightmare it wants to be than an annoying, tortuous exercise in tedium. That might be the ultimate point of Bureaucracy, but does that make it an enjoyable game to play? The public didn't think so, as the game sold well under the numbers that Hitchhiker's did. Filed below is a video of the iconic sequence that takes place in the game's Fillmore Fiduciary Trust Bank.
Starship Titanic, Simon & Schuster Interactive 1998
Over ten years later, Adams returned to interactive media with Starship Titanic, a graphical adventure along the lines of the blockbuster Myst. The titular ship had first surfaced in Adams' second Hitchhiker's book, Life, the Universe and Everything. It was described as "a majestic and luxurious cruise-liner launched from the great shipbuilding asteroid complexes of Artri-factovol", and which on its maiden voyage "did not even manage to complete its very first radio message - an SOS - before undergoing a sudden and gratuitous total existence failure.". The game changes this slightly, by having the big ship crash into a house on earth, who's owner, the player, enters the crippled ship, converses with a crew of robots and other characters, and attempts to find the parts needed to repair the ship. It was developed by a digital media company founded by Adams, Richard Creasey and Robbie Stamp in 1996 called The Digital Village. The three man writing team of Adams, Neil Richards and Michael Bywater were backed by a 20-30 person production team, all working over two years to make the game.
The idea was to combine the lush graphics of Myst with the textual engagement found in the games of Infocom. To facilitate this conversation between player and computer, the game employed an advanced communication system dubbed SpookiTalk. It featured a database of over 10,000 phrased responses, in order to allow the player to naturally converse with the ship's characters, including members of the Monty Python comedy troupe Terry Jones as a deranged parrot, and John Cleese as a distracted bomb. Adams himself makes several cameos in the game. 16 hours of dialog was recorded for responses given back to the player.
While the graphics are certainly luscious, and the characters humorous, Starship Titanic struck ice-comets with its inconsistent handling of player interactions and confusing-to-the-point-of-dementia puzzles, problems that would sink any adventure game. The game was met with middling sales in contrast to the feverish hype that had preceded it, in a market that had moved on from static Myst-y adventures to the visceral action of FPS games like Doom. To many, its fate seemed as sealed as the original doomed vessel it takes its inspiration from. Here is the debut trailer for the game:
Little did the world know that Adams himself would succumb to a "total existence failure" a few years later, leaving, as Adams biographer Neil Gaiman would note, "a Douglas Adams-sized hole in the universe.". But while the man is gone, his work lives on, inspiring users and game creators alike to search for what the question actually is.
Someone who grew up during the birth and golden age of video games would also have to be at least passingly familiar with the electronic pastime it replaced... pinball. In practically every arcade there would be at least a few pinball machines vying for the attention of someone looking for something a bit more physical than Pac-Man. I remember one of the troika of video game palaces here in downtown Toronto being the Pinball Spot. After carefully traversing down the slick-tiled steep and dark stairway, one would be greeted by a huge square basement of video delights, as well as a long line of pinball machines stretched back along the left wall. It was a pinballer's paradise to be sure.
Hoping to recapture that sultry allure is FarSight Studio's Pinball Arcade for iOS devices. There is no shortage of pinball game simulations for game devices these days, so how does Pinball Arcade shape up against the competition? PA's main hook is the painstaking detail that has gone into the recreation of the featured tables. Tales of the Arabian Nights is unlocked when the game is installed, with The Black Hole, Ripley's Believe It or Not and Theatre of Magic available for paid download in-game. These games range from between $1.99 to $3.99, and you can pick up all three in a pack for $8.99. The app itself is 99 cents. Other classic tables are promised in future updates.
The tables are great to play, lovingly constructed with no detail overlooked. Each table also features a tutorial to take you through the scoring system, as well as an interesting text screen outlining the history of the machine. Problems arise, however, with the game's physics. Pinball games are the epitome of 'feel' in coin-op amusement. How the ball interacts with the flippers, the speed it travels around the board, and the player's ability to influence these events are all critical elements to a pinball game's success. There is a tangible connection between player and pinball. I believe it is possible to recreate this connection and 'feel' in a computer simulation, but Pinball Arcade doesn't quite feel like it. For all the love and care that the creators obviously poured into the tables, they skimped a bit on ball physics. It moves wonkily quite often, changing speed or direction for no good reason. The ball's movement off the flippers feels a bit strange too, all of which equals a bit of frustration on the player's part and failure to close that gap between the physicality of pinball and the cold calculations of computer simulation.
Wacky ball movement notwithstanding, I would still heartily recommend this app to all you Pinball Wizards out there. Pinball Arcade sure plays a mean pinball.
