Looks like Actionauts is ready

[Thomas Jentzsch]

For example, Nukey did some amazing work with Missile Command while keeping the original 4k size (he later expanded it to 8k, but the improvements at 4k were quite impressive.)

Missile Command TB is also still 4K.

[rob fulop]

The fun is coming from the environment I am doing this, the limited hardware and parts of the community. The competion is coming from fellow homebrewers. Those are also giving me the most valuable feedback (since they are the only ones to really understand the technical background, e.g. my 1k games) and encouragement.

 

Again, I can only speak for myself here, but as far as I understand many other homebrewers/developers (some have posted here), their motivation is pretty similar. So, put more money into our hobby and you will sure get more games to buy. But you will also get a major quality drop. And not only on average!

 

(much of the below comes from my blog, btw)

 

 

The competition between 2600 developers 'back in the day' was OUT OF CONTROL. Sure, we were paid salaries, some of the lucky ones were even paid a modest royalty. But let there be NO DOUBT .. when we showed up at the June Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, where Imagic, Activision, and Atari rolled out their new releases for the upcoming Xmas season ... there was SERIOUS competition going on. Deadly serious. The pecking order was Activision, then Imagic, with Atari holding up the rear. My former colleagues at Atari ran over to the Imagic booth, were we smugly showed off Demon Attack, refusing to say ONE WORD about how the graphics were done. But as soon as they left, I remember running over to the Activision booth straight away and seeing Pitfall for the fist time, and just getting SICK over how crisp and clean the execution was .. and how much gameplay was squeezed into a 4K ROM. I was inconsolable for the remainder of the show .... no joke. And the Activision guys were so much more smug then we were .. here's how smug they were.

 

David Crane never even bothered coming to see the Imagic stuff, which really annoyed the stuffing out of me. None of them came by, actually. Whitehead, Miller, Kaplan ... not one of them ever came by. If I wanted to chat with them, since we had all worked together at Atari ... I'd have to go to the Activision booth, and ohh and ahh over Pitfall a few more times. Seriously, I mean, weren't these guys even CURIOUS about what we had done at Imagic? Like Crane can't be bothered to come by and take a little peek, what?

 

It was totally about "one upsmanship" in those days .. and NOTHING to do with money. Not from my perspective anyway. I vowed to myself that the next time Imagic was at this show, a year later, that I would show people something so cool on the VCS, that even David Crane himself would have no choice but to come by our booth and check it out. And then he would start crying. That was my goal. To show Crane something so cool that he would have no choice but to start crying because he didn't know how it was done.

 

And such is when the starfield from Cosmic Ark was born. In that moment of pure competitive resolve. The whole reason I made Cosmic Ark, was to show Crane the starfield and hopefully offer him a tissue.

 

The starfield already existed .. it appeared one day from a total accident, btw ... a few years earlier I was stumbling through making the kernal for Missile Command ... and was trying to reposition the ball graphic over and over again for some reason, and I think maybe I put the wrong value in the wrong place at the wrong time, I dunno ... all of a sudden this cool starfield just APPPEARS on the screen, like a magic trick. I had NO CLUE why, or what was going on. Nobody could figure it out ... but it seemed to be pretty replicable on any unit.

 

Anyway, Cosmic Ark was made for the express reason to show off the starfield trick to Crane and Whitehead .. no other reason. And one year later, there was Cosmic Ark featured in the Imagic booth at CES ... and about two hours after the show opens .. sure enough .. Crane and Whitehead come strolling by .. just as casual as they can be .. "dum de dum, dum de dum". Obviously they could not appear overly interested in Cosmic Ark .. but it was just as obvious that it just TORTURED them ... they walk up and down the aisle three times .. it made me SOOOO happy. Finally Crane just cannot take it anymore, and comes over and ever so subtle, chats me up "how ya doin, Rob? Cosmic Ark looks great, blah blah". We make nice for about three minutes. "I like the way you are using the Playfield for the stars, Rob". GAWD, I was soooo luvin life at that moment. Can he be any more obvious in his attempt to probe how the starfield was made? Of course I said NOT ONE WORD, other than "Yup, it's just the playfield, obviously". Truly a memorable moment in my young life!

 

So yeah, make no mistake ... the 2600 was ALWAYS about who could show the coolest stuff .. and NEVER about the money. Obviously we all knew that the coolest stuff would usually get the most money anyway at the end of the day, but our motivation was to blow each other away .. plain and simple.

Edited April 14, 2008 by Cybergoth

[Cybergoth]

Fixed the quoting layer in the post above.

[+Random Terrain]

I'm mostly anti-competition, but it helped to give us better Atari 2600 games, so it can't be all bad. I don't care about beating someone else or making them cry, I'd just like to make games that cause people to crap their pants no matter who they are. I'd love to do things that people think are impossible. You need knowledge, skill, talent, and luck for that to happen, though. I'm bound to get lucky sooner or later, so one out of four isn't bad.

[Rom Hunter]

The fun is coming from the environment I am doing this, the limited hardware and parts of the community. The competion is coming from fellow homebrewers. Those are also giving me the most valuable feedback (since they are the only ones to really understand the technical background, e.g. my 1k games) and encouragement.

 

Again, I can only speak for myself here, but as far as I understand many other homebrewers/developers (some have posted here), their motivation is pretty similar. So, put more money into our hobby and you will sure get more games to buy. But you will also get a major quality drop. And not only on average!

 

(much of the below comes from my blog, btw)

 

 

The competition between 2600 developers 'back in the day' was OUT OF CONTROL. Sure, we were paid salaries, some of the lucky ones were even paid a modest royalty. But let there be NO DOUBT .. when we showed up at the June Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, where Imagic, Activision, and Atari rolled out their new releases for the upcoming Xmas season ... there was SERIOUS competition going on. Deadly serious. The pecking order was Activision, then Imagic, with Atari holding up the rear. My former colleagues at Atari ran over to the Imagic booth, were we smugly showed off Demon Attack, refusing to say ONE WORD about how the graphics were done. But as soon as they left, I remember running over to the Activision booth straight away and seeing Pitfall for the fist time, and just getting SICK over how crisp and clean the execution was .. and how much gameplay was squeezed into a 4K ROM. I was inconsolable for the remainder of the show .... no joke. And the Activision guys were so much more smug then we were .. here's how smug they were.

 

David Crane never even bothered coming to see the Imagic stuff, which really annoyed the stuffing out of me. None of them came by, actually. Whitehead, Miller, Kaplan ... not one of them ever came by. If I wanted to chat with them, since we had all worked together at Atari ... I'd have to go to the Activision booth, and ohh and ahh over Pitfall a few more times. Seriously, I mean, weren't these guys even CURIOUS about what we had done at Imagic? Like Crane can't be bothered to come by and take a little peek, what?

 

It was totally about "one upsmanship" in those days .. and NOTHING to do with money. Not from my perspective anyway. I vowed to myself that the next time Imagic was at this show, a year later, that I would show people something so cool on the VCS, that even David Crane himself would have no choice but to come by our booth and check it out. And then he would start crying. That was my goal. To show Crane something so cool that he would have no choice but to start crying because he didn't know how it was done.

 

And such is when the starfield from Cosmic Ark was born. In that moment of pure competitive resolve. The whole reason I made Cosmic Ark, was to show Crane the starfield and hopefully offer him a tissue.

 

The starfield already existed .. it appeared one day from a total accident, btw ... a few years earlier I was stumbling through making the kernal for Missile Command ... and was trying to reposition the ball graphic over and over again for some reason, and I think maybe I put the wrong value in the wrong place at the wrong time, I dunno ... all of a sudden this cool starfield just APPPEARS on the screen, like a magic trick. I had NO CLUE why, or what was going on. Nobody could figure it out ... but it seemed to be pretty replicable on any unit.

 

Anyway, Cosmic Ark was made for the express reason to show off the starfield trick to Crane and Whitehead .. no other reason. And one year later, there was Cosmic Ark featured in the Imagic booth at CES ... and about two hours after the show opens .. sure enough .. Crane and Whitehead come strolling by .. just as casual as they can be .. "dum de dum, dum de dum". Obviously they could not appear overly interested in Cosmic Ark .. but it was just as obvious that it just TORTURED them ... they walk up and down the aisle three times .. it made me SOOOO happy. Finally Crane just cannot take it anymore, and comes over and ever so subtle, chats me up "how ya doin, Rob? Cosmic Ark looks great, blah blah". We make nice for about three minutes. "I like the way you are using the Playfield for the stars, Rob". GAWD, I was soooo luvin life at that moment. Can he be any more obvious in his attempt to probe how the starfield was made? Of course I said NOT ONE WORD, other than "Yup, it's just the playfield, obviously". Truly a memorable moment in my young life!

 

So yeah, make no mistake ... the 2600 was ALWAYS about who could show the coolest stuff .. and NEVER about the money. Obviously we all knew that the coolest stuff would usually get the most money anyway at the end of the day, but our motivation was to blow each other away .. plain and simple.

Great story, Rob.

 

Reminds me of the impact that Epyx' multi-colour hi-res Impossible Mission sprite and animation on the C64 made back then.

 

Edited April 14, 2008 by Rom Hunter

[pangasinan]

The fun is coming from the environment I am doing this, the limited hardware and parts of the community. The competion is coming from fellow homebrewers. Those are also giving me the most valuable feedback (since they are the only ones to really understand the technical background, e.g. my 1k games) and encouragement.

 

Again, I can only speak for myself here, but as far as I understand many other homebrewers/developers (some have posted here), their motivation is pretty similar. So, put more money into our hobby and you will sure get more games to buy. But you will also get a major quality drop. And not only on average!

 

(much of the below comes from my blog, btw)

 

 

The competition between 2600 developers 'back in the day' was OUT OF CONTROL. Sure, we were paid salaries, some of the lucky ones were even paid a modest royalty. But let there be NO DOUBT .. when we showed up at the June Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, where Imagic, Activision, and Atari rolled out their new releases for the upcoming Xmas season ... there was SERIOUS competition going on. Deadly serious. The pecking order was Activision, then Imagic, with Atari holding up the rear. My former colleagues at Atari ran over to the Imagic booth, were we smugly showed off Demon Attack, refusing to say ONE WORD about how the graphics were done. But as soon as they left, I remember running over to the Activision booth straight away and seeing Pitfall for the fist time, and just getting SICK over how crisp and clean the execution was .. and how much gameplay was squeezed into a 4K ROM. I was inconsolable for the remainder of the show .... no joke. And the Activision guys were so much more smug then we were .. here's how smug they were.

 

David Crane never even bothered coming to see the Imagic stuff, which really annoyed the stuffing out of me. None of them came by, actually. Whitehead, Miller, Kaplan ... not one of them ever came by. If I wanted to chat with them, since we had all worked together at Atari ... I'd have to go to the Activision booth, and ohh and ahh over Pitfall a few more times. Seriously, I mean, weren't these guys even CURIOUS about what we had done at Imagic? Like Crane can't be bothered to come by and take a little peek, what?

 

It was totally about "one upsmanship" in those days .. and NOTHING to do with money. Not from my perspective anyway. I vowed to myself that the next time Imagic was at this show, a year later, that I would show people something so cool on the VCS, that even David Crane himself would have no choice but to come by our booth and check it out. And then he would start crying. That was my goal. To show Crane something so cool that he would have no choice but to start crying because he didn't know how it was done.

 

And such is when the starfield from Cosmic Ark was born. In that moment of pure competitive resolve. The whole reason I made Cosmic Ark, was to show Crane the starfield and hopefully offer him a tissue.

 

The starfield already existed .. it appeared one day from a total accident, btw ... a few years earlier I was stumbling through making the kernal for Missile Command ... and was trying to reposition the ball graphic over and over again for some reason, and I think maybe I put the wrong value in the wrong place at the wrong time, I dunno ... all of a sudden this cool starfield just APPPEARS on the screen, like a magic trick. I had NO CLUE why, or what was going on. Nobody could figure it out ... but it seemed to be pretty replicable on any unit.

 

Anyway, Cosmic Ark was made for the express reason to show off the starfield trick to Crane and Whitehead .. no other reason. And one year later, there was Cosmic Ark featured in the Imagic booth at CES ... and about two hours after the show opens .. sure enough .. Crane and Whitehead come strolling by .. just as casual as they can be .. "dum de dum, dum de dum". Obviously they could not appear overly interested in Cosmic Ark .. but it was just as obvious that it just TORTURED them ... they walk up and down the aisle three times .. it made me SOOOO happy. Finally Crane just cannot take it anymore, and comes over and ever so subtle, chats me up "how ya doin, Rob? Cosmic Ark looks great, blah blah". We make nice for about three minutes. "I like the way you are using the Playfield for the stars, Rob". GAWD, I was soooo luvin life at that moment. Can he be any more obvious in his attempt to probe how the starfield was made? Of course I said NOT ONE WORD, other than "Yup, it's just the playfield, obviously". Truly a memorable moment in my young life!

 

So yeah, make no mistake ... the 2600 was ALWAYS about who could show the coolest stuff .. and NEVER about the money. Obviously we all knew that the coolest stuff would usually get the most money anyway at the end of the day, but our motivation was to blow each other away .. plain and simple.

Fascinating,absolutely fascinating story,thanks for sharing it with us.

[lhfreak]

The fun is coming from the environment I am doing this, the limited hardware and parts of the community. The competion is coming from fellow homebrewers. Those are also giving me the most valuable feedback (since they are the only ones to really understand the technical background, e.g. my 1k games) and encouragement.

 

Again, I can only speak for myself here, but as far as I understand many other homebrewers/developers (some have posted here), their motivation is pretty similar. So, put more money into our hobby and you will sure get more games to buy. But you will also get a major quality drop. And not only on average!

 

(much of the below comes from my blog, btw)

 

 

The competition between 2600 developers 'back in the day' was OUT OF CONTROL. Sure, we were paid salaries, some of the lucky ones were even paid a modest royalty. But let there be NO DOUBT .. when we showed up at the June Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, where Imagic, Activision, and Atari rolled out their new releases for the upcoming Xmas season ... there was SERIOUS competition going on. Deadly serious. The pecking order was Activision, then Imagic, with Atari holding up the rear. My former colleagues at Atari ran over to the Imagic booth, were we smugly showed off Demon Attack, refusing to say ONE WORD about how the graphics were done. But as soon as they left, I remember running over to the Activision booth straight away and seeing Pitfall for the fist time, and just getting SICK over how crisp and clean the execution was .. and how much gameplay was squeezed into a 4K ROM. I was inconsolable for the remainder of the show .... no joke. And the Activision guys were so much more smug then we were .. here's how smug they were.

 

David Crane never even bothered coming to see the Imagic stuff, which really annoyed the stuffing out of me. None of them came by, actually. Whitehead, Miller, Kaplan ... not one of them ever came by. If I wanted to chat with them, since we had all worked together at Atari ... I'd have to go to the Activision booth, and ohh and ahh over Pitfall a few more times. Seriously, I mean, weren't these guys even CURIOUS about what we had done at Imagic? Like Crane can't be bothered to come by and take a little peek, what?

 

It was totally about "one upsmanship" in those days .. and NOTHING to do with money. Not from my perspective anyway. I vowed to myself that the next time Imagic was at this show, a year later, that I would show people something so cool on the VCS, that even David Crane himself would have no choice but to come by our booth and check it out. And then he would start crying. That was my goal. To show Crane something so cool that he would have no choice but to start crying because he didn't know how it was done.

 

And such is when the starfield from Cosmic Ark was born. In that moment of pure competitive resolve. The whole reason I made Cosmic Ark, was to show Crane the starfield and hopefully offer him a tissue.

 

The starfield already existed .. it appeared one day from a total accident, btw ... a few years earlier I was stumbling through making the kernal for Missile Command ... and was trying to reposition the ball graphic over and over again for some reason, and I think maybe I put the wrong value in the wrong place at the wrong time, I dunno ... all of a sudden this cool starfield just APPPEARS on the screen, like a magic trick. I had NO CLUE why, or what was going on. Nobody could figure it out ... but it seemed to be pretty replicable on any unit.

 

Anyway, Cosmic Ark was made for the express reason to show off the starfield trick to Crane and Whitehead .. no other reason. And one year later, there was Cosmic Ark featured in the Imagic booth at CES ... and about two hours after the show opens .. sure enough .. Crane and Whitehead come strolling by .. just as casual as they can be .. "dum de dum, dum de dum". Obviously they could not appear overly interested in Cosmic Ark .. but it was just as obvious that it just TORTURED them ... they walk up and down the aisle three times .. it made me SOOOO happy. Finally Crane just cannot take it anymore, and comes over and ever so subtle, chats me up "how ya doin, Rob? Cosmic Ark looks great, blah blah". We make nice for about three minutes. "I like the way you are using the Playfield for the stars, Rob". GAWD, I was soooo luvin life at that moment. Can he be any more obvious in his attempt to probe how the starfield was made? Of course I said NOT ONE WORD, other than "Yup, it's just the playfield, obviously". Truly a memorable moment in my young life!

 

So yeah, make no mistake ... the 2600 was ALWAYS about who could show the coolest stuff .. and NEVER about the money. Obviously we all knew that the coolest stuff would usually get the most money anyway at the end of the day, but our motivation was to blow each other away .. plain and simple.

 

 

I wish there was a book filled with stories like this......Thanks Rob!

[Crazy Climber]

If I were you Rob I would write a book about the early days of programming Video Games, I don't think it would hit the best seller list or anything but I think it would be pretty sucessful and hit quite a large group of people, not just Atari 2600 fans but new programmers also. Just an idea. There are even a few people here that could help get it started That would be very cool.

[ianoid]

I would say a book of stories from the programmers would be great, with anecdotes and whatnot from the guys- like an anthology from the early days. Rolenta, get on it! Ha!

 

I missed the first hundred Sorry for the emails Rob, I am clearly one of dozens who must have been confused. If I had known competition would be so stiff, I would have ordered sooner, I just was putting it off as something to do for a couple of days. Hopefully I'll get something in the next load of bits coming out. Plus I didn't check this forum.

 

I'm not sure why anyone could complain about the expense when they are such a game player, yadda yadda. I'm sure those who fall into that category can wait for the ROM to be released.

 

Also, those who get uppity about expense are just clueless to what it takes to put together one of these releases. Al's prices are a testament to his ruthless efficiency and expertise. Only the folks who routinely release games can do it at a lower and lower price point with boxes and instructions. People game experience at this. For a programmer to do this is almost unprecidented (who else self-released an unreleased game that they programmed BITD?) in the modern age of collecting, and I think it's silly to complain. Of course there is a ton of silliness on teh internets.

[Zwackery]

I would also be VERY interested in a collection of stories, anecdotes, memories, and other tales from video gaming history.

[rolenta]

I would say a book of stories from the programmers would be great, with anecdotes and whatnot from the guys- like an anthology from the early days. Rolenta, get on it! Ha!

 

I talked to Dave Crane about such a book a few years ago, but at the time he was too busy to write one.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Great story, Rob!

 

And IMO it perfectly explains why the games for the 2600 where getting that brilliant over time. No money in the world could (and still can!) drive a real programmer as far as competition does. With or without being smug.

 

For me, those stories are pure gold!

 

BTW: Cosmic Ark was one of the 4 games I could afford buying back then. And it was and still is one of my favourite ones. Though back then, obviously not for the technical achievement, but for the game play. I really wanted to discover all those little "beasties".

 

Unfortunately my reflexes during the meteor shower weren't good enough. So I used two photo sensors from my "Fischer Technik" electronics construction kit for the left and right meteors attached to a relais module which triggered the joystick input. Everything was fine until the 6th beastie or so, but then the relais module was getting too slow. So I increased the input voltage (coming from a Lego railway transformer) a little bit and finally got to see one more beastie. I increased the voltage even more, but the relais didn't want to switch fast enough.

 

So I had to wait more than 15 years until I found out about all beasties hidden in Cosmic Ark.

 

BTW#2: Do you remember if there was a 2-player simultaneous (cooperative) mode planned for Cosmic Ark? The code seems to suggest so (see the AddScore SUBROUTINE in the disassembled code attached to the link above).

Edited April 14, 2008 by Thomas Jentzsch

[rob fulop]

If I were you Rob I would write a book about the early days of programming Video Games, I don't think it would hit the best seller list or anything but I think it would be pretty sucessful and hit quite a large group of people, not just Atari 2600 fans but new programmers also. Just an idea. There are even a few people here that could help get it started That would be very cool.

Yeah, Yeah ... I can just hear the shrieking now ...

 

"$29.95 for a BOOK! I can go onto Amazon and buy a book for $11.89! And what's this $2.42 for shipping, hmmm? what's THAT about?"

 

I may do a book one day .. but it would probably not be 2600 centric .. obviously Atari and Imagic would occupy the early chapters of the book ... but not be the whole focus.

Edited April 14, 2008 by rob fulop

[rob fulop]

Great story, Rob!

 

And IMO it perfectly explains why the games for the 2600 where getting that brilliant over time. No money in the world could (and still can!) drive a real programmer as far as competition does. With or without being smug.

 

For me, those stories are pure gold!

 

BTW: Cosmic Ark was one of the 4 games I could afford buying back then. And it was and still is one of my favourite ones. Though back then, obviously not for the technical achievement, but for the game play. I really wanted to discover all those little "beasties".

 

Unfortunately my reflexes during the meteor shower weren't good enough. So I used two photo sensors from my "Fischer Technik" electronics construction kit for the left and right meteors attached to a relais module which triggered the joystick input. Everything was fine until the 6th beastie or so, but then the relais module was getting too slow. So I increased the input voltage (coming from a Lego railway transformer) a little bit and finally got to see one more beastie. I increased the voltage even more, but the relais didn't want to switch fast enough.

 

So I had to wait more than 15 years until I found out about all beasties hidden in Cosmic Ark.

 

BTW#2: Do you remember if there was a 2-player simultaneous (cooperative) mode planned for Cosmic Ark? The code seems to suggest so (see the AddScore SUBROUTINE in the disassembled code attached to the link above).

Yeah, I wanted a two player cooperative game where one player plays the "Space Zap" like game .. and the other player picks up the little weasels .. didn't that make it through? I totally forgot about that mode until you mentioned it. Whooops! It's not like it's a complicated thing to stick in there ... simply swapping which joystick port to read. Duh.

Edited April 14, 2008 by rob fulop

[rolenta]

"$29.95 for a BOOK! I can go onto Amazon and buy a book for $11.89! And what's this $2.42 for shipping, hmmm? what's THAT about?"

 

With the postal increases coming next month, $2.42 will be cheap for a book.

[rob fulop]

I would say a book of stories from the programmers would be great, with anecdotes and whatnot from the guys- like an anthology from the early days. Rolenta, get on it! Ha!

 

I talked to Dave Crane about such a book a few years ago, but at the time he was too busy to write one.

Actually I just recently ran into Dave, a few months ago. Dunno if people know I've been a pretty serious poker player for about 20 years or so ... play the World Series every year (last year I came in 41th out of 2700 in one of the events .. woo hoo !). Anyway sometimes I play locally on Sundays at a large card room near San Francisco. Sure enough ... who is at my starting table than David Crane! It was a hoot! I hadn't seen him in like 15 years since he helped out on Night Trap. Sadly, we never tangled in a pot together But it was fun to catch up with him. He is still doing Flash games with the Kitchen brothers.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Yeah, I wanted a two player cooperative game where one player plays the "Space Zap" like game .. and the other player picks up the little weasels .. didn't that make it through? I totally forgot about that mode until you mentioned it. Whooops! It's not like it's a complicated thing to stick in there ... simply swapping which joystick port to read. Duh.

Sorry, I meant non-cooperative. All variables for score are duplicated and the subroutine for adding to the score allows an offset to select which set of score to increase. But only the first set of score variables is used.

 

The variation you describe is in there and it's the only 2-player variation

[rob fulop]

Yeah, I wanted a two player cooperative game where one player plays the "Space Zap" like game .. and the other player picks up the little weasels .. didn't that make it through? I totally forgot about that mode until you mentioned it. Whooops! It's not like it's a complicated thing to stick in there ... simply swapping which joystick port to read. Duh.

Sorry, I meant non-cooperative. All variables for score are duplicated and the subroutine for adding to the score allows an offset to select which set of score to increase. But only the first set of score variables is used.

 

The variation you describe is in there and it's the only 2-player variation

I would imagine the two player competitive mode was cut in the interests of time .. I was out of room in the ROM, and the issue with scrunching bytes, as I'm certain you are painfully aware of given your 1K games, is that such can introduce all sorts of creepy little bugs, you have to do a whole new QA, etc .. which is all time consuming stuff when you are racing to get to the next Consumer Electronics Show. The year Ark was introduced, if I recall .. we actually rented a big motor home so that we could put our dev system in the back and get two extra days of programming time driving across the country instead of flying so we could be editing code right up to the MOMENT before the show launched. It was all about trading off time vs quality .. and I probably cut the two player competitive mode out late in the process since I didn't want to scrunch more bytes than I needed to.

[black dog]

I was on the original reserve list and received the first 3 emails, but didn't receive this last one. Was it sent out to everyone on the reserve list? I definetly want to purchase one when the next batch is ready.

[+bcombee]

I would also be VERY interested in a collection of stories, anecdotes, memories, and other tales from video gaming history.

 

Be sure to check out Halcyon Days at http://www.dadgum.com/halcyon/ -- it's a collection of interviews with classic game and computer programmers that was done about ten years ago and now is free on the web. I still have my floppy disc copy of these

[Thomas Jentzsch]

I would imagine the two player competitive mode was cut in the interests of time .. I was out of room in the ROM, and the issue with scrunching bytes, as I'm certain you are painfully aware of given your 1K games, is that such can introduce all sorts of creepy little bugs, you have to do a whole new QA, etc .. which is all time consuming stuff when you are racing to get to the next Consumer Electronics Show. The year Ark was introduced, if I recall .. we actually rented a big motor home so that we could put our dev system in the back and get two extra days of programming time driving across the country instead of flying so we could be editing code right up to the MOMENT before the show launched. It was all about trading off time vs quality .. and I probably cut the two player competitive mode out late in the process since I didn't want to scrunch more bytes than I needed to.

That makes perfect sense, thanks.

 

Fortunately, today we hobby programmers don't have to worry that much about deadlines anymore.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

While we are at it, one more question:

 

I noticed that Imagic games use "fractional addition techniques" which makes good PAL conversions much easier but also requires additional RAM and ROM space. Activision did ignore this and therefore their PAL conversions usually play slower than the NTSC versions.

 

So, was there a requirement from Imagic do use that technique? And did you know that Activision was "cheating" and didn't?

[godzillajoe]

"And then he would start crying. That was my goal."

 

Too funny.

[rob fulop]

I would imagine the two player competitive mode was cut in the interests of time .. I was out of room in the ROM, and the issue with scrunching bytes, as I'm certain you are painfully aware of given your 1K games, is that such can introduce all sorts of creepy little bugs, you have to do a whole new QA, etc .. which is all time consuming stuff when you are racing to get to the next Consumer Electronics Show. The year Ark was introduced, if I recall .. we actually rented a big motor home so that we could put our dev system in the back and get two extra days of programming time driving across the country instead of flying so we could be editing code right up to the MOMENT before the show launched. It was all about trading off time vs quality .. and I probably cut the two player competitive mode out late in the process since I didn't want to scrunch more bytes than I needed to.

That makes perfect sense, thanks.

 

Fortunately, today we hobby programmers don't have to worry that much about deadlines anymore.

Yeah, that's too bad. Hard deadlines force us to "put up or shut up". The pressure of a looming deadline that cannot be moved creates real momentum and real hard tradeoffs made that cannot be put off any longer. Nolan Bushnell used to say that 90 percent of the real work done in the games business happened during the 10 days prior to a big trade show. And he was dead on at the time, and I believe nothing has changed today. Deadlines force you to get it DONE, make the painful cuts, toss out the crap you don't need .. the tossing out part is critical.

 

I used to call the tossing out part .. 'killing my children" .. when I ruthlessly ripped out an early feature that either never worked right and kept breaking something else .. or I never got to polishing quite right anyway and so it always stuck out. They are called "my children" because typically these are the features that got me and everybody else all worked up early on, and then over time, we realize that they really don't work any more and we have so much better stuff now anyway, that the only reason to keep the feature there is because of some nostalgic reason that only the dev team cares about anyway .. "oh we can't toss that ... don't you remember how excited we were the first time we got it working?". So one day I just rip the thing out and I usually felt better about it immediately. Any writer or filmmaker knows this as well ... you have to be ruthlessly savage in your willingness to kill your children when you make stuff to a deadline .. and without a deadline .. well ... all I can say is gawd help you .. like when is it ever done?

 

And then if you don't kill certain children, they haunt you FOREVER. A good example is in FATHOM, the way the dolphin jumps out of the water. That animation, actually, was completed before the game was even started. Michael Becker and I were talking about dolphins one day, and the next morning, he shows me a rough version of a dolphin jumping out of the water. So I stuck it up on the screen, and started writing a kernal where the dolphin could swim around under the water. And the game grew from there.

 

But I never really liked how the dolphin jumping out of the water never really seemlessly segued from the dolphin swimming up from under the water .. it's a real cheat, obviously .. at some point I take away joystick control from the user and just smash the animation up on the screen .. letting the user control the dolphin again when it lands. The "right" way to do it would be to actually move the dolphin itself OUT of the water and either morph it into a seagull right in front of your eyes ... OR .. have the dolphin arc and dive back in to the water ... with a little splash animation. Such is how I wanted it to work, anyway.

 

But nobody could bare the thought of tossing out the little dolphin jump animation .. after all .. such had been the genesis of the whole game ... that animation was truly a "precious little child" .. and my wanting to "kill it" was quickly shot down by Dennis Koble ... and when we disagreed .. Dennis brought in the marketing people, and Bill Grubb, the CEO .. and they beat me up pretty bad that it was fine as it is. So that little animation remained ... and to this day .. I can't look at Fathom because of it .. it's just sooooo annoying knowing that another week or so would have made the dolphin jump sequence sooooooo much cooler. Ever since then, I make it a point to kill my children a LOT earlier in the dev cycle .. tossing out our early first efforts that looked great the first time, but as we got better at the task at hand, quickly became "second rate" .. until if left in the whole .. becomes a true eyesore.

Edited April 15, 2008 by Albert

[Mot]

What is the story behind the Imagic company video featuring Atlantus?

 

They say at the end that Demon Attack did better (I think).