Takeover

[tlindner]

I recently discovered this game and decided to give it a try. My sister and I sat down to learn and play it. I loved it. She... not so much.

We're going to be live streaming at Portland Retro Gaming Expo. So if anyone wants to come by and challenge me with this game, I'm all for it. Or any other game, to be honest.

 

 

 

 

[mr_me]

Like Sea Battle and some other "for two players only" games, few people can play Takeover.  I was looking forward to the video, unfortunately, it's on the short side.  And I agree, this would have been one of the better cartridges, had it come out in 1982.  Takeover uses the graphics mode, color squares, for the background.  It's at a blocky, quarter resolution so the real world maps don't look so good, but it allows for four times the information using background graphics. 

 

When the Intellivision Flashback came out, Intellivision Productions made a Takeover instructions pdf and overlay image available.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160114085720/http://www.intellivisiongames.com/flashback_games.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20160406165818/http://www.intellivisiongames.com/flashback_instructions/Takeover.pdf

 

 

[mthompson]

I made that PDF manual for Keith back when the Flashback came out. It's really nothing more than the text-only programming notes that had been available for years. Several years later I made a proper Mattel-style manual for myself and a friend so we could play the game. If you really want to learn how to play and get the most out of the game, I recommend you check this newer manual out.

 

Takeover Manual.pdf

Edited June 26, 2022 by mthompson

[Walter Ives]

It's very misleading to characterize Takeover as a "never released" game cartridge. The original Intellivision games were all developed under the auspices of Mattel's Preliminary Design department, whose basic charter was to investigate new ideas. The ideas that worked were turned into product and released; the ones that didn't were left simmering. None were ever abandoned completely. For example, Jeff Rochlis wanted a line of "gaming network" cartridges. The idea was to bundle sufficient casino-style games into each cartridge of the network to give customers good value for their money. This was done with "Blackjack and Poker." Some work was done on several other gambling games as part of a "preliminary design" style investigation. One of these, a slot machine simulation, was never incorporated into a game cartridge but later became the basis for a TV Poww game, for which purpose it was perfect.

Takeover was similarly one of dozens, if not hundreds, of ideas that were in various stages of being investigated. It's going a bit far to call all such ideas "never released cartridges." I'm sure Barbie's clothes designers created tens of thousands of drawings, would you call all of them that didn't result in a product "never released outfits?" Obviously not.

Both APh and Richard Chang had long felt that colored-square mode graphics were too crude for the Intellivision cachet but were intrigued enough with the idea of Takeover to investigate it a little anyway. What you have is the result of an investigation that took about a month and a half to write.

The philosophy of the game is that you're the commander in chief and you give your armies orders which they follow autonomously, but in real time. Giving complex commands requires complex controls, so you can't just pick up this game and play it—you have to both read the manual and take some time getting familiar with the controls. And as for those awkward Intellivision "buttons" you complain about in the video, just imagine how much easier the game would be to play if you could use an Atari joystick to input your commands. It would be so obvious how to do that you could completely dispense with the manual.

The rough cut prototype that you're playing runs much too slowly at the beginning and much too fast toward the end—things can get absolutely frantic. APh knew this and was planning to implement automatically variable time dilation as a next step. But adjusting that to be just right was going to take a lot of playing time and it didn't want to spend the effort unless everyone, including marketing, could see past the graphics. It also wanted to try several other types of commands. Takeover is therefore historically interesting as an example of one of many, many ideas that were investigated rather than as an ostensibly completed cartridge that wasn't released.

Although the Mediterranean scenario is more interesting to play, the Australian map was created it in hopes it wouldn't come across as quite as blocky.

I don't believe new armies are generated according to a random number generator—I think the generation rate is a fixed function of the amount of territory that you've conquered, that is to say the territory you've turned into your own color. That's the whole reason to conquer territory and have it change color as  you do so. Also, it incentivizes your opponent to take territory away from you, so you have to defend it. I also believe that territory near a city is weighted more heavily in army creation for that city than territory farther away, but that may have still been on the to-do list. Also, cities are supposed to gradually conquer territory immediately adjacent to them without needing an army as long as there are no enemy forces nearby, but that may have been on the to-do list as well. So you want to establish lots of cities, but you want them to be far enough apart so they don't cannibalize each other's army generation ability. You might want to experiment a bit.

In any event, game play consists of balancing territory conquest, road building, city building, placement of defensive forces and fighting your autonomous armies, all in real time. Later in the game, when you have a lot of armies, things can get quite hectic. You'll find your armies doing what you ordered them to do, not what you wanted them to do. All in 4K of ROM and 256 bytes of RAM. How is that even possible? For comparison, this post alone requires more than 4K.

So here's a challenge for y'all. Give the game a real shot, a shot that it was not given in 1982. Learn to play it. Spend enough time with it to play it well (like you had to do for Baseball). Look past its easily correctable deficiencies (like the fact that it plays too slow in the beginning and too fast at the end). Imagine a few additional commands (like one that lets an army conquer territory on either side of its path at the cost of moving more slowly, or one that lets an army be be programmed to stop after moving a certain number of squares, or one that sends an army to a specific place) despite the fact that it makes the controls more complex. Now put yourself in the place of Mattel's highly paid VP of Marketing: do you or do you not green light finishing the game, despite the risk that its crude graphics may hurt Intellivision's reputation for premium graphics? (Utopia's graphics are not exactly stunning....)

The Intellivision team had no problem with the fact that some people don't like games you can't just pick up and play. It tried to create something for everybody, and to accommodate these folks it created Sharp Shot, Astrosmash and Roulette.

Well, maybe not Roulette—its betting strategy can get a little complicated and most people have to read the manual to take advantage of it all. But Sharp Shot and Astrosmash for sure.

Well, people also miss the most important rule for Sharp Shot. So Astrosmash.

 

WJI

 

 

 

 

[mr_me]

3 hours ago, Walter Ives said:

...

APh knew this and was planning to implement automatically variable time dilation as a next step.

...

What you have is the result of an investigation that took about a month and a half to write.

...

How do you know these things?

By 1981, Gabriel Baum would have been overseeing software development, and he didn't want to release Sharp Shot.

 

Try Land Battle, Takeover is real simple in comparison.  Takeover is easy to learn, instructions are short, controls are not complicated.  The biggest problem is finding someone to play with.  Being able to send your armies to a target location would have been a good feature.  Not sure how you would play this game with a one button controller.  These types of games is how Mattel wanted to distinguish itself from the competition.  That might have been less so as time went on and they started to see what the big sellers were.  Mattel's marketing was still hung up on screenshots, even though the next generation systems with higher resolution graphics were out in 1982.

 

Edit:

I posted this summary review on Takeover a few years ago.

https://atariage.com/forums/topic/246578-anyone-got-a-review-of-takeover/?do=findComment&comment=3390429

 

 

Edited June 27, 2022 by mr_me