Does Kool-Aid Man Have An Ending?

[Mark Kennedy]

Hi,

 

I am the author (though not the designer) of (the Award winning) Kool-Aid Man Game - though it was not my design.  The game went final the day after I left Mattel and went to work for Atari.  I never reviewed the instructions, and in fact I had to drink a whole bunch of Kool-Aid just to get a copy of the game, since Mattel would not give me one.

 

To answer your question:  No, there is no end to the game.  It does become progressively harder, but I don't think I made it impossible.  That was almost 40 years ago, so I could be wrong. Given the problem Astrosmash had with its scoring, I added special code to handle the overflow case.  That was an inside joke, since thanks to the scrolling hiding the top row of the backtab, I was able to use 64 bits for the score.

 

Of my four Intellivision titles, this was my least favorite.  The only thing I will say in its defense is that it was designed to be played by very small children, so the play was quite simple.  But I completely agree that the result is boring and tedious.  I am proud of the wall breaking transition, as that was quite challenging to implement.  I am also proud of the stationary clock.  It doesn't seem like much, and if you don't know the underlying system it appears unremarkable.  But it was actually a bit of work to pull off.

 

This should be the definitive answer.  Glad to have helped.

 

Just read the instructions.  I see better where the confusion comes from.  I believe that the clock stays the final color from then on.  I'm also certain that code path was never exercised, since no one could stomach this game long enough to complete 13 levels of it.  So, who knows?  Maybe there is a bug there!

Edited March 10, 2022 by Mark Kennedy

[Zendocon]

I was just paying attention to the stationary clock earlier today, when I tried to disable collision detection.  The same technique is used in Bump & Jump to implement the speedometer.  Very impressive!

[Mark Kennedy]

1 hour ago, Zendocon said:

I was just paying attention to the stationary clock earlier today, when I tried to disable collision detection.  The same technique is used in Bump & Jump to implement the speedometer.  Very impressive!

Thanks.  I think rather than disabling detection, it's probably easier just to make it so the Thirsties don't move.  If I recall, I calculate a delta X and delta Y.  You should be able to just make that 0 all the time.  That way they won't bother you as you move around the house.  Also makes catching them by Kool Aid Man pretty easy.  You might also be able just to jump the level number up.  Frankly, I had forgotten that.  Since I wrote it I don't think I ever played more than 1 level.  I just play it enough to show off the wall break and Fantom Fruit Flavors.

 

I think the other big problem with the game is that the house is just too big.  I think we should have removed the blank sections.  It would have sped things up.  I'm wondering if I just didn't get enough sets of eyes actually playing it.  The fact that I was wrapping up the game at the same time as I was making my move to Atari might also have had something to do with it.  Also, and this doesn't speak too well of me, perhaps the fact that it wasn't my design made me care a little less about it.  Of course, at Atari I was doing ports, and those weren't my designs.  But Centipede and Dig Dug had some pretty severe technical challenges to overcome for the platform.  And of course, both those game designs were excellent.

 

My favorite part of the game was what happens when the Thirsties catch one of the kids.  Since it was for young kids, and given that the characters were kids themselves, there couldn't be any actual harm.  They are just "immobilized".  It was the blood curdling scream that accompanies this that was my joke.  I heard that General Foods wanted that changed, but since I had already left (the game went final literally on my last day) they were told it was too risky for someone to go fix it.  That was, of course, nonsense.  Almost anyone could have changed the sound out, but no one wanted to.  And General Foods bought the excuse.  Good times for a 22 year old kid.

[Zendocon]

That's a funny story about the screams.  I had read some of the Kool-Aid Man comics around that time, and I always thought the kids were exploring a Haunted House attraction that went awry.  In the comics, the Thirsties disrupt fun on the beach and at an amusement park.

 

Another feature I noticed yesterday that I wanted to comment on is the "hide sprites behind the foreground" bit, which is utilized at certain longitudes where there are open doorways.  That was a nice touch.  As a kid though, I had wondered why the kids couldn't travel up the staircases in the background, and end up exploring a different set of rooms.

 

I'll look today into disabling the Thirsties' movement.  Because of the scrolling, I know all the sprites' positions have to be retained in memory somewhere.  I tried tweaking the difficulty level yesterday where it seems to be stored at $160 and $162, but it didn't seem to make a difference.

 

I'd love to freeze the Thirsties all the way to the right of the playfield.  That way, when I capture them both as Kool-Aid Man, I can screen-capture that graphical artifact I wrote about earlier in this thread.

[Zendocon]

To answer the original question, I just confirmed the game does not go any higher than level 13 (light green timer, set to 9:59).  If you complete both sub-levels with the level set to 13 or higher, you start again at level 13.

 

One thing I never noticed before is at the higher levels, the screen does not pan until the kids are further away from the middle of the screen, limiting your "view-ahead distance".  That in addition to the fact you can't avoid the Thirsties!

 

I made a few ROM pokes to allow the game to start at some level in the range 11-14.  "Level 14" is not an actual difficulty level.  It behaves like the kiddie difficulty level, except the Thirsties do not appear at all until Kool-Aid Man appears!  It's not unlike the ROM poke I did for AD&D Cloudy Mountain to allow for Trainer difficulty.

 

In case you're wondering, at "Level 15" the screen does not pan at all, and the kids can't move off the screen, so you're stuck.  The timer is invisible (black on black).  Maybe there are other playable difficulties past this range, like "Level 99" in Ladybug.  I'll see what I can dig up before I post the poke on my website.

[Zendocon]

15 hours ago, Mark Kennedy said:

Hi,

 

I am the author (though not the designer) of (the Award winning) Kool-Aid Man Game - though it was not my design.  The game went final the day after I left Mattel and went to work for Atari.  I never reviewed the instructions, and in fact I had to drink a whole bunch of Kool-Aid just to get a copy of the game, since Mattel would not give me one.

 

To answer your question:  No, there is no end to the game.  It does become progressively harder, but I don't think I made it impossible.  That was almost 40 years ago, so I could be wrong. Given the problem Astrosmash had with its scoring, I added special code to handle the overflow case.  That was an inside joke, since thanks to the scrolling hiding the top row of the backtab, I was able to use 64 bits for the score.

I played around with the scoring as well.  It's stored as five 3-digit groups in the addresses $20b..$20f.  Poking the value $3e7 to $20f gives you 999 trillion points.

 

Here is a screenshot with a couple screen artifacts.  At "Level 14" the timer is loused up, because the three digits are initialized to values outside the lookup table.  But the "shingles" on the far right are what I was referring to earlier.  As a kid, I discovered this by catching the last of the Thirsties as far to the right as I could go.  The screen pans a little to the right at this point to display the score (probably clears address $30, the horizontal scroll variable), which made this appear.

[Mark Kennedy]

7 hours ago, Zendocon said:

That's a funny story about the screams.  I had read some of the Kool-Aid Man comics around that time, and I always thought the kids were exploring a Haunted House attraction that went awry.  In the comics, the Thirsties disrupt fun on the beach and at an amusement park.

 

Another feature I noticed yesterday that I wanted to comment on is the "hide sprites behind the foreground" bit, which is utilized at certain longitudes where there are open doorways.  That was a nice touch.  As a kid though, I had wondered why the kids couldn't travel up the staircases in the background, and end up exploring a different set of rooms.

 

I'll look today into disabling the Thirsties' movement.  Because of the scrolling, I know all the sprites' positions have to be retained in memory somewhere.  I tried tweaking the difficulty level yesterday where it seems to be stored at $160 and $162, but it didn't seem to make a difference.

 

I'd love to freeze the Thirsties all the way to the right of the playfield.  That way, when I capture them both as Kool-Aid Man, I can screen-capture that graphical artifact I wrote about earlier in this thread.

Freezing them at a specific location in the house should be doable.  I'm sure I had set locations for where they started each level, or maybe they always started at the same place, I don't recall.  I know it wasn't random.

 

Yea, the graphics for the fantom staircases have been commented on by others.  I agree that they probably shouldn't have been there, as the movement was already confusing enough.  And that the stool became a 1 step staircase was always a little tricky to convey.

 

Another issue with the game is that without an explanation of what your goal and the rules are, the game is basically unplayable.  I don't think we thought about that much at the time.  I actually don't remember any discussion of it whatsoever.  If you spend 5 minutes with Scooby Doo, even without any fore knowledge, you will get what you are supposed to do.  Not so with KAMG.

 

On another note, it's funny you listing the offsets.  If you gave me the printout of the source code, I'm not sure how long it would it take me to understand it again.  I don't envy you doing it from disassembly and no comments (not that I ever used many comments in my code).  At least you would have variable names.

[Zendocon]

56 minutes ago, Mark Kennedy said:

Freezing them at a specific location in the house should be doable.  I'm sure I had set locations for where they started each level, or maybe they always started at the same place, I don't recall.  I know it wasn't random.

 

Yea, the graphics for the fantom staircases have been commented on by others.  I agree that they probably shouldn't have been there, as the movement was already confusing enough.  And that the stool became a 1 step staircase was always a little tricky to convey.

 

Another issue with the game is that without an explanation of what your goal and the rules are, the game is basically unplayable.  I don't think we thought about that much at the time.  I actually don't remember any discussion of it whatsoever.  If you spend 5 minutes with Scooby Doo, even without any fore knowledge, you will get what you are supposed to do.  Not so with KAMG.

 

On another note, it's funny you listing the offsets.  If you gave me the printout of the source code, I'm not sure how long it would it take me to understand it again.  I don't envy you doing it from disassembly and no comments (not that I ever used many comments in my code).  At least you would have variable names.

I'm pretty sure the Thirsties are in the same location each time.

 

The first time we played, we thought you had to put the stool one card to the east of the table.  But we read the manual, so we knew what we were supposed to do.  Tron Maze-A-Tron was a different story.

 

I've been doing disassembly for a while now, ever since I decided to have the last word with Vectron.  Plus I developed one of the original 4 indie titles, knowing only what was in Your Friend The EXEC.  By now, it's actually quite fun.

[Mark Kennedy]

14 minutes ago, Zendocon said:

I'm pretty sure the Thirsties are in the same location each time.

 

The first time we played, we thought you had to put the stool one card to the east of the table.  But we read the manual, so we knew what we were supposed to do.  Tron Maze-A-Tron was a different story.

 

I've been doing disassembly for a while now, ever since I decided to have the last word with Vectron.  Plus I developed one of the original 4 indie titles, knowing only what was in Your Friend The EXEC.  By now, it's actually quite fun.

Very good.  The relocating them, and stopping them from moving, should be fairly straightforward.

 

[+Lathe26]

<deleted>

[Zendocon]

20 hours ago, Mark Kennedy said:

Very good.  The relocating them, and stopping them from moving, should be fairly straightforward.

Yes and no.  Stopping the Thirsties from moving vertically was the best I could do.  I also had to tweak their starting positions to put them out of reach, just above the kids when they're on the top floor.  All the objects' horizontal positions, with respect to the entire playfield, are maintained elsewhere in memory.  Trying to stop the Thirsties horizontally created problems in the Kool-Aid Man phase.

 

I posted the ROM pokes on my website.  The other thing I did was change the difficulty choices to 10, 11, 12, and 13.

 

There are also pokes commented out to enable "Level 14" which I described earlier, and to make the kids invincible.  Invincibility is no longer necessary with the Thirsties unable to reach the kids.  It's implemented by freezing at 0 the memory location that indicates whether the kids have been separated, and so they never become "immobilized."

 

I also found your name in the ROM header and had hoped to display it on the title screen, as I did for John Sohl with the Astrosmash hack.  But the string doesn't have a null-delimiter, and there's no existing code to display it.  I'll see if I can find a way.

[Mark Kennedy]

On 3/11/2022 at 10:00 AM, Zendocon said:

Yes and no.  Stopping the Thirsties from moving vertically was the best I could do.  I also had to tweak their starting positions to put them out of reach, just above the kids when they're on the top floor.  All the objects' horizontal positions, with respect to the entire playfield, are maintained elsewhere in memory.  Trying to stop the Thirsties horizontally created problems in the Kool-Aid Man phase.

 

I posted the ROM pokes on my website.  The other thing I did was change the difficulty choices to 10, 11, 12, and 13.

 

There are also pokes commented out to enable "Level 14" which I described earlier, and to make the kids invincible.  Invincibility is no longer necessary with the Thirsties unable to reach the kids.  It's implemented by freezing at 0 the memory location that indicates whether the kids have been separated, and so they never become "immobilized."

 

I also found your name in the ROM header and had hoped to display it on the title screen, as I did for John Sohl with the Astrosmash hack.  But the string doesn't have a null-delimiter, and there's no existing code to display it.  I'll see if I can find a way.

I had forgotten that I embedded my name in the code.  Mattel was not big on Easter Eggs, nor giving programmers credit.  I did put my name into both Centipede and Dig Dug.  I even left a message for the Mattel reverse-engineers inside Centipede, which I had to sneak past the Atari folk who check our game before it goes out.  They reviewed source code, they didn't look at the binary, so I got away with it.

[Morpheus]

On 3/10/2022 at 2:49 AM, Mark Kennedy said:

But I completely agree that the result is boring and tedious.

Mark, you should go back coding and make an improved version of Kool-Aid!??

[Zendocon]

2 hours ago, Mark Kennedy said:

I had forgotten that I embedded my name in the code.  Mattel was not big on Easter Eggs, nor giving programmers credit.  I did put my name into both Centipede and Dig Dug.  I even left a message for the Mattel reverse-engineers inside Centipede, which I had to sneak past the Atari folk who check our game before it goes out.  They reviewed source code, they didn't look at the binary, so I got away with it.

I did post an updated ROM hack with your name on the title screen.  Basically, the ROM header title is actually "AUTHOR: MARK KENNEDY" which is 20 characters in length, the exact character width of the display.  Prior to that string were six spaces and the Null delimiter (so it never displayed), so I moved that string and overwrote the spaces and added a Null character after the string.  Printing "Kool-Aid Man" on the title screen is done with extra code.  I moved that text up one row.

 

I also hacked Dig Dug to activate the Easter Egg to display your name on the title.

[Zendocon]

That reminds me.  I did peek at the Centipede code, because I couldn't get it working in emulation at first.  Turns out it has a unique memory map.  The starting address is $7000, but the address range is $6000-7fff, disregarding the usual $5xxx range.  The result is that the first thing someone sees in disassembly is the string "Why are you disassembling the code? That's not nice." rather than a ROM header.

[fsuinnc]

I have never, ever, ever, been able to get past the first level. I can't say that I have tried lately but my recollection is that the children just move so slow and once a thirsty gets close I can't get away. The truth is while I love playing video games I'm not generally very good at most of them. 

side note : Back in the early eighties while in College my best friend and I were in sort of "in charge" of mixing up the punch for our fraternity parties. (Drinking age was 18 then) Anyway, We would basically mix Everclear (at 190 proof) with lots of kool-aid and water. I saved the cool aid points off the sides of the can and mailed off for the game. Didn't really have an interest in the game at the time, just loved the intellivision so I felt I had to have it. 

 

[+thegoldenband]

Great that we know there's nothing past Level 13 (barring hacks and editing RAM values).

 

At this point, does it seem as though Level 13 constitutes a bona fide "kill screen"? I'm always intrigued by classic-era games (and especially Intellivision games) that have a definitive win condition, or that otherwise have a hard limit to progress. It'd be interesting to see if the folks at TASVideos, who have done some Intellivision runs, can find a way to get past 13.

[larryvgs]

Wow.  Never thought when I signed up to AtariAge just to reply to a topic on Kool-Aid Man from years ago that it would get so much response in the past week including from the author!

Mark says he didn't think he made it impossible, but the difficulty increase between Level 12 and Level 13 is pretty drastic.  I would love to see anyone post a video on how to get past Level 13, without disabling the Thirsties detection or freezing them of course.  Nice to know though that there is no Level 14 and that it just repeats Level 13.  And to the poster who said he could never get past the early levels, all you need to do is spend as little time on the middle floors as possible just to get what you need, and to keep to the lower or upper floors.  On the later levels, if the screen doesn't scroll until you get too close to the edge, and you don't have time enough to react to the smarter Thirsties, just retreat to the center of the screen so you have the most space on either side of you, and wait for the Thirsties to show up so you have the most screen time to react and avoid them.  But as I said, for me on Level 13 the Thirsties are heat-seeking missiles that are unavoidable.  It may be Mark's least favorite game of the ones he worked on, but I really enjoyed it, and the music and Kool-Aid Man's "Ohh Yeah!" when you complete the first stage are still awesome today.

[Mark Kennedy]

On 3/12/2022 at 1:33 PM, Zendocon said:

That reminds me.  I did peek at the Centipede code, because I couldn't get it working in emulation at first.  Turns out it has a unique memory map.  The starting address is $7000, but the address range is $6000-7fff, disregarding the usual $5xxx range.  The result is that the first thing someone sees in disassembly is the string "Why are you disassembling the code? That's not nice." rather than a ROM header.

Yes, for the Atari games we bypassed the Exec and used the functionality that the console would look for code at 7000, and if it found it, would jump to it.  There is a jump over the message.  BTW, to get this past the Atari folk, I just disassembled it and left it in the code as nonsense instructions, stripping off the ASCII that the listing would always have along the right hand side.  I figured that whoever looked at it wouldn't know it was nonsense instructions.  It worked.

[Mark Kennedy]

18 hours ago, larryvgs said:

Wow.  Never thought when I signed up to AtariAge just to reply to a topic on Kool-Aid Man from years ago that it would get so much response in the past week including from the author!

Mark says he didn't think he made it impossible, but the difficulty increase between Level 12 and Level 13 is pretty drastic.  I would love to see anyone post a video on how to get past Level 13, without disabling the Thirsties detection or freezing them of course.  Nice to know though that there is no Level 14 and that it just repeats Level 13.  And to the poster who said he could never get past the early levels, all you need to do is spend as little time on the middle floors as possible just to get what you need, and to keep to the lower or upper floors.  On the later levels, if the screen doesn't scroll until you get too close to the edge, and you don't have time enough to react to the smarter Thirsties, just retreat to the center of the screen so you have the most space on either side of you, and wait for the Thirsties to show up so you have the most screen time to react and avoid them.  But as I said, for me on Level 13 the Thirsties are heat-seeking missiles that are unavoidable.  It may be Mark's least favorite game of the ones he worked on, but I really enjoyed it, and the music and Kool-Aid Man's "Ohh Yeah!" when you complete the first stage are still awesome today.

I thought I posted this, but I don't see it.  The music was the original Kool Aid music, and General Foods insisted on its inclusion.  The Ohh Yeah! screen seemed like the logical place to put it.

 

This screen, and the part of the game where you capture the Thirsties and Fantom Fruit Flavors (an idea I believe that came from my ex-wife), are the part of the game I always enjoyed.

[Zendocon]

4 hours ago, Mark Kennedy said:

I thought I posted this, but I don't see it.  The music was the original Kool Aid music, and General Foods insisted on its inclusion.  The Ohh Yeah! screen seemed like the logical place to put it.

I remember the jingle from the end part:

"Kool-Aid Kool-Aid, tastes great.

Kool-Aid Kool-Aid, can't wait."

[digdugnate]

@Mark Kennedy - thanks so much for the personal insight and commentary on the game!  It's a fascinating read. 

[Rev]

The ending that should of been. 

[Mark Kennedy]

3 hours ago, digdugnate said:

@Mark Kennedy - thanks so much for the personal insight and commentary on the game!  It's a fascinating read. 

I'm glad you enjoyed it.  It's been fun reminiscing. 

[Zendocon]

Here's an idea for a sequel.  Who needs Jonestown references?