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Gamasutra's Game Design Essentials: 20 Atari Games


Fort Apocalypse

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From May 30, 2008, but it's a great article I just saw for the first time today:

* Gamasutra's Game Design Essentials: 20 Atari Games

Interesting article. The UK magazine Retro Gamer has had articles on Gauntlet, Paper Boy and Marble Madness in the past too. Last month it had a big article on Pac Man. Its the only retro computer mag that I get on a regular basis. Well worth the read if you can get it.

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Good article, though a few oddities stood out:

Here's a cool bit of trivia. Sonic the Hedgehog is often regarded as the first platform game to have an "idle animation," where if you don't touch the controls for a few seconds your guy stands and looks at you, tapping his foot.

Do people seriously think that? Just off the top of my head, Boulderdash comes to mind - it preceded Sonic by seven years and isn't an obscure game; having multiple home and coin-op ports.

 

Also, to have an entire section about 720 Degrees without even mentioning the unique controller just seems odd.

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This is proving to be a really good read so far.

 

Regarding Marble Madness

The coolest fact revealed by the document is that, in the original concept, the trackball had motors attached to it, so its motion would match that of the marble on-screen. If it rolled down a ramp and the player didn't want to go, he'd have to fight the motor to stay up there!

Whoa! THAT would have been f'in awesome! :cool:

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This is proving to be a really good read so far.

 

Regarding Marble Madness

The coolest fact revealed by the document is that, in the original concept, the trackball had motors attached to it, so its motion would match that of the marble on-screen. If it rolled down a ramp and the player didn't want to go, he'd have to fight the motor to stay up there!

Whoa! THAT would have been f'in awesome! :cool:

If it worked. Which it wouldn't have. The history of coin-ops is littered with ambitious, over-complicated controllers that couldn't handle the beating.

Edited by vdub_bobby
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If it worked. Which it wouldn't have. The history of coin-ops is littered with ambitious, over-complicated controllers that couldn't handle the beating.

Force feedback was really nothing new, and I don't see anything over-complicated about this concept. It really could have been just about as simple as attaching a motor directly to each of the shafts, a protection circuit to prevent motor generated voltage backfeediing into the motor controller, and a fairly straight forward basic motor controller driven by the code. All you need are two i/o bytes to drive it. Simplest coding application would be to break them down into nybbles and use straight binary for a 16 step resistance level for each direction. If you want to do a bit of bit shifting math, you could make it 128 steps. Mechanically all I could see being needed is for the shafts to be rubber coated to prevent slippage which might make for jerky movement.

 

:ponder:

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Good article, though a few oddities stood out:
Here's a cool bit of trivia. Sonic the Hedgehog is often regarded as the first platform game to have an "idle animation," where if you don't touch the controls for a few seconds your guy stands and looks at you, tapping his foot.

Do people seriously think that? Just off the top of my head, Boulderdash comes to mind - it preceded Sonic by seven years and isn't an obscure game; having multiple home and coin-op ports.

 

Also, to have an entire section about 720 Degrees without even mentioning the unique controller just seems odd.

I immediately thought of Boulderdash, too. *But*, I think the key phrase here is "platform game." I don't think you could classify Boulderdash as a platform game. So maybe they're correct, although I don't know enough about the history of video games to know one way or the other.

 

Michael

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