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A History of Robotron
blacklily8 writes "Gamasutra has published our history of Robotron: 2084, Eugene Jarvis' ultimate twitch-game of 1982. Robotron's frantic gameplay, intense difficulty, and elegant control scheme made it a hit in the arcade and a favorite of countless retrogamers. The illustrated article compares the game with Jarvis' earlier hit, Defender, describes its gameplay in detail, and traces its roots and impact on later games such as Smash T.V. and Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved. Robotron's gameplay may be intimidating, but never too complex to grasp — with both hands!"
Always liked Jeff Minter's clone of it - Llamatron. Still downloadable for free, and I still play it in DOS Box now and again. To those who haven't tried it - have a quick search and give it a go.
What depresses me is that it's hard. Very hard. Not only myself who thought that, but my friends who were playing it at the time agreed too. Having a hard game isn't depressing in itself though, so why is this one different?
Because about a year I watched Jeff Minter, in a Google Talk about indie game development, said he wrote it to be easy. Well, thanks Jeff. That's just great. There's ten years of my gaming self-esteem down the drain...
Cheers,
Ian
One of my personal interests in this era of gaming, which doesn't have a direct analog today, is the arcade->console adaptation route, and the technical, artistic, and gameplay challenges involved. I guess I've always known that such adaptations were common, but until recently I didn't really understand just how deeply such adaptations/ports were affected by the differences between special-purpose arcade hardware and generic and generally underpowered console hardware, and what sorts of heroic efforts porters went to to try to get something even vaguely like the cabinet to run on a home machine (sometimes in vain). That's probably the single thing I found most interesting about a recent book on the Atari VCS that opened my eyes on that. I'd read all sorts of stuff previously about the VCS (aka 2600) hardware, and different stuff about its cultural, business, and social role, but pulling the two together by looking at how the tech affects the culture and vice versa is really fascinating to me. I think ports are a particularly good lens to look at that through, because they focus sharply on how the tech affected what the designer could or couldn't do; the aforementioned book's examples of the disastrous Pac-Man port, on the one hand, and the unfaithful but interesting/successful adaptation of Star Castle into Yars' Revenge , on the other, are particularly thought-provoking.
So I really like that aspect of this article, tracing how Robotron was and wasn't successfully adapted to home machines, and which parts specifically of the arcade version survived the translation and were still compelling in the home version. Although we don't have nearly the same hardware limitations on home machines these days, I think we're in a way still struggling with similar issues about "what worked in the arcade, and how can we adapt it?"--- e.g. the discussion in this article of custom controllers to make the home version more authentic reminds me of our current era's custom controllers (Rock Band's peripherals being the best-selling). And, more broadly, we're trying to figure out whether platforms matter, and if so, how. The Wii has a compelling "what's different" angle for its platform, but is that a one-time, peripheral-only thing? Do the Xbox 360, PC, and PS3 have interesting differences going for them? Do physical arcade cabinets still matter?
More generally, I think it's one way of getting at a sort of design science that's still lacking for games, and I like how this article tries to break that down. Obviously much of game design is not really "science", but other design fields still do carefully analyze existing works, try to identify which elements specifically mattered, etc.; you might be doing something that's artistic/subjective in a lot of respects, but that doesn't mean you have to do it blind. I mean, if I want to learn architecture, there are a lot of books I can buy. I can buy a book specifically on the Bauhaus style, or some sub-style of it, or one particular architect's style. But, despite their huge role in popular culture, I can't buy a book about the design style of, say, Microprose 4X games, analyzing what elements they had in common or didn't, their relationship to other games of the era, how technical aspects influenced the design and vice versa, etc., etc. As a player, I can probably tell you some stuff off the top of my head, and I think there really is a book to be written there--- or an in-depth article on the internet if you can't interest a publisher--- but nobody's written it.
So I guess that's a long-winded way of saying: yes, more of this!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The article doesn't mention why there were two joysticks for the game: one to control movement, the other to control direction of fire. So you could travel in one direction while firing in another. Great freedom of movement that made the game very popular because it was such a diversion from most other games.
This is probably one of the coolest bits of trivia from the era: Jarvis had been in an accident, and his arm was in a cast when they started work on the game. It would have been impossible for him to work on the game with a typical "stick and button" approach and he decided the dual-stick design made it easier for him to design and play the game.
[...] The dual joystick control design resulted from two experiences in Jarvis's life: an automobile accident and playing Berzerk. Prior to beginning development, Jarvis injured his right hand in an accident--his hand was still in a cast when he returned to work, which prevented him from using a traditional joystick with a button. While in rehabilitation, he thought of Berzerk. Though Jarvis enjoyed the game and similar titles, he was dissatisfied with the control scheme; Berzerk used a single joystick to move the on-screen character and a button to fire the weapon, which would shoot the same direction the character was facing. Jarvis noticed that if the button was held down, the character would remain stationary and the joystick could be used to fire in any direction. This method of play inspired Jarvis to add a second joystick dedicated to aiming the direction projectiles were shot.[10] Jarvis and DeMar created a prototype using a Stargate system board and two Atari 2600 controllers attached to a control panel. In retrospect, Jarvis considers the design a contradiction that blends "incredible freedom of movement" with ease of use.
One thing this (and many articles) overlook about Robotron is how its "bonus collection" morality sharply differed from other games of the time. Many contemporaries, especially Japanese games, used bonus point pickups as a lure to your death. For example, unless you're working from a known pattern, going after fruits in Pac Man is a great way to get yourself killed. I remember one early video game book whose intro said, succinctly, that "greed kills" in video games.
Except in Robotron. The bonus structure for saving the family gave you 1,000 points for the first, 2,000 for the second, and so on until you maxed it out at 5,000 per save. Since you generally got a extra life at 20,000 or 25,000 points (operator setting), you could get free life with just six saves, and a second for another four. Once the counter was at 5,000, it's a sensible tradeoff to go for risky saves: the payoff in extending your game is usually worth the very real risk of dying instead. Indeed, while Namco-style games awarded free lives on very long intervals (3-4 Galaga waves, for example), and thereby valued getting through most waves safely, Robotron had a flow of fast death and rebirth, with players often earning and losing one or more lives on each wave. Provided you could earn more lives than you lost, even at a fairly low margin, you could keep going, which is why taking risks to save the humans was a winning strategy.