Retronauts - 674: The Years-in-Review Revue: 1975 & ’85

Episode Date: March 3, 2025

Jeremy Parish, Benj Edwards, Chris Sims, Kevin Bunch, and Jared Petty look backward in time 40, even 50 years to discuss some of the biggest and most personally beloved video gaming events of 1975 and ’85. To be continued... Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts 

This week in Retronauts, call Matthew Fox because we've got ourselves a party of fives. Oh, damn it, I forgot to look up the number. Hang on, I'm going to look it up. This is Retronaut's episode, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yaday, 74. And I am Jeremy Parrish, as disorganized, and unprepared as ever. We are not looking at notes that I prepared. No, absolutely not. We're flying by the seat of our pants today because that's just how we roll in this new millennium.

So I mentioned that I'm Jeremy Parrish, but gosh, who else do we have here? This is one of those consarned Retronauts East episodes. So there's some people here recording from North Carolina and other places east of the Mississippi. Actually, Chris, you're not. You're not, are you? Where are you, Chris? Some place cold, I know. I'm in beautiful, south Minneapolis, Minnesota.

That's so far north. It doesn't even count as relative to the Mississippi. Yeah, I am, I can be Retronauts North or I can be Retronauts Midwest, which is. whichever you need. Hmm. I mean, Bob and I are both originally from the Midwest. Like, we were born probably like 60 miles from each other. So Retronauts of Midwest is just kind of the default status of retronauts, honestly.

I'll be Retronauts north. Retronauts do north. Yeah, I mean, now we've got Nadia and we've got Bob up in Canada. So yeah, that's a whole auxiliary thing. Anyway, this is not about where you live. This is about everyone else who's here. Who else do we have? Skyping in. Actually, it's on Zoom. Kevin, that's you.

Oh. Oh, I see. Yes. This is Kevin Bunch. Another former Midwesterner, actually. Aha. That's right. You did live in Michigan for a while. Born and raised. Nice. Does anyone ever really live in Michigan? Quote unquote. Yes, absolutely. It is a lifestyle. Okay. it's you know you wear it like a glove or a mitten who else who who was that a person who has not been on the show in a while that's what i think

yeah hey i'm benj edwards i've never been to the midwest it's one of my uh sore points in life one of my really yeah you've never been very achievable like you you're very literal about literal about the flyover states i've been avoiding it like i've been everywhere like all like it's like a you shape in the country um deep south, east, west, never Midwest. I don't know why. So you're avoiding the anti-bingebelt is what you're saying? Yeah, the anti-binge belt. There's like a force field that keeps me away. I don't know. It's radiation. It's called corn. Corn. I just, I hate corn. Damn you, corn. So I wrote this down. We have a full house of heavy hitters today. That's true. Who's the final heavy hitter? I guess I'm the final heavy hitter. I am not from the Midwest. But I have lived there. I am citizen of the world, Jared Petty, formerly of Ohio and Indiana.

See, that's extraordinarily Midwestern. Yeah, they are. Those are not the only places I have lived, but I've lived in both of them. And I left as soon as I could both times. Cool. That's the appropriate approach to Indiana, I feel like. Yeah, Indiana is not great. I like Michigan, but Indiana is not great.

Did I actually get introduced or did you just ask me where I live? I don't think you got formally introduced because everyone just knows you You were on a recent episode so yeah You're just you're or uh you're like the force you're you bind us together You're you're constantly present who are you that's true But in case anyone skip that episode because they didn't want to hear about the devil But who doesn't I certainly did

But I am Chris Sims joining you from Snowbound negative 12 Minneapolis to talk about the games of the fives. That's right. This is our annual, the first of our annual review, years in review reviews. That's two different spellings of the word review. Hominems, they're crazy, folks. I tell you what.

This year we are looking back 30, 40, and 50 years. We would look back 60 years, but there wasn't a whole. lot of video games happening in the year 1965. Kevin Bunch, were there any video games happening in the year 1965? You would be the one to know. Oh, geez. Trying to remember. What year was the

Sumer game? Was that 64? That was like in the, you know, like a thousand years before Christ. Sumer is probably 61-ish. I mean, 62. Like, it's really, early mainframe. Yeah. I'm blank. So that's why we're skipping 65 and going

straight to 75. Yeah. not much to speak of in 65 really now 67 there's a year yeah well that's that's in two years if we're still alive then um so aspirational you you laugh but we are recording this on january 20th 2025 so who knows it's all up in the air right now um perhaps you found this recording this is humanity's last archive that's right this was on voyager 12 this was engraved to a a disc and you are an alien civilization enjoying our recounting of the American Midwest and classic video games. Thank you for listening, aliens. Perhaps you found this recording on a data tape, and it's the only thing on it, just cast into a drawer or on top of a desk somewhere in the aftertimes. See, there are these animals called humans with two arms and two legs, and they walked around. There can be two on the nose binge. This is environmental storytelling, is what Chris is saying.

So they got a piece together the narrative. You can't give it all away up front. They got to learn more. There's a skeleton with a copy of NES Works, Volume 3. He was too good to die, but he had to anyway. Yeah, so we are going to jump ahead to 1975. As usual, as always, with the years in review review, we're not going to get 75, 85, and 95 in a single episode,

especially with five of us here talking about like five things per year apiece. That is just, that's nonsense. We're not going to make it happen. So please stick around for this episode and look forward to another episode at some point in the future when we are all able, at least most of us, to record again. So who here was alive in 75? Not a. You children, you sweet summer children. Jeremy, Jeremy was. Let old, let old man Jeremy tell you about the world of 1975. Everything was brown. and made a corduroy, and we didn't have any gasoline. So in 1975, here is what was going on in addition to video games.

A little thing called Watergate, back when we actually held politicians accountable for their crimes. The war that America was waging in Vietnam ended because we got our asses kicked. The communist forces rolled in and retook South Vietnam. and I've got a personal connection there. My wife made it out on a plane with her family. She was a tiny baby, and they made it out on a plane off the main airport runway a few hours before the North bombed it. So that's a fun little adventure for her, I'm sure. Not that she remembers it, but her parents have told me a lot about it.

Another extremely good things happening in the world, Margaret Thatcher took power in B&K. The Cambodian Civil War ended, and the Khmer Rouge took power there. Man, there's nothing good happening. Some assholes slashed Rembrandt's The Night Watch, a song that only a few years before, King Crimson had sung about. They dedicated an entire song to it, and some jackass slashed it with a knife. Rude. Something good did happen. Greece finally decided to exist.

Before that, Greece, as we know it today, was not. it did not exist in its present form and they finally pulled it all together and I don't know the full details just that without it if this had not happened would we have Spenocopata and Baclavah at you know John Travolta local restaurants no like we would live without Dolmas and that would be a terrible world so it paved the way for Mamma Mia exactly and if we didn't have Amanda Seifred singing what would this world be like um generally a lot of countries were declaring independence from old world empires as the old world order continued to sort of settle out in the wake of World War II. And so, you know, things like

the Dutch Empire and the, like, countries that you didn't even know had empires were still like losing colonies. Lots of stuff happening in Africa with French colonies and British colonies. So everything was kind of falling apart in that sense. But that's not bad. That's good. Lots of independence. Up until 1975, there was no such thing as a fractal. Mandelbrot finally invented the Mandelbrot set. And Nature finally said, I can exist. I can make really weird-looking broccoli. It was very... Trees did not exist before this. Brocolini. It's all things to Mandelbrot. No, brocolini is something different. I'm talking

about the crazy spiral broccoli. I don't know if you've ever seen that stuff. I think that's called brocolini, isn't it? No. Brocolini is just like broccoli Rob. I don't think I've ever seen that. No, it's the best. I got it in a box once that some produce companies shipped to me. And it was crazy. It was crazy. It was spirals. Spiral broccoli does look wild. Yeah. You feel almost guilty eating it. You're like, wow, I'm destroying nature's complexity and turning it into poop. And that seems wrong. But it is high in fiber, so it makes that whole process very efficient. Also in 1975, let's see, HBO debuted the concept of satellite feed live satellite feed television paid pay television stations did exist before that i didn't realize

actually before reading about in 1975 that premium cable was a thing for so long but it did exist already and home box office said let's stream they didn't call it streaming back then let's broadcast a a prize fight with a live satellite feed and that changed the world forever for the worst um in better news the worldwide recession that had been kicked off a few years before by OPEC, really, finally starts to settle down. There was, you know, political machinations happening in the back, but also a lot of countries like the U.S. and the UK were starting to find alternate resources

for petroleum and decrease their dependency on the Middle East. So all of that recession started to recede, at least for another five or six years, when the 80s happened and started with a big deflation. Good times. And finally, the world is graced by the presence of one Jeremy Parrish after millennia of anticipation. Finally, I'm happy to say it finally happened. I was here. So that's 1975 in a nutshell.

Deep history building there. It all culminated in the best part of the year. I mean, this was, it was a lore dump, sometimes literally, but I'm glad I could share it with you. How does it feel to be the best part of 1975? I mean, I've been living with this sensation all my life, so I'm pretty used to it. I just kind of take it for granted at this point. I take a drug to get that sensation. It's pretty nice.

Binge, my drug is called Being High on Life. I couldn't even say it with a straight face. Sorry. I remember doing the time war. drinking those moments win The blackness would be and afford to be calling Let's do the time for again Let's do the time for again

Okay Well let's get to the serious business here Let's talk about video games Because they are serious business as you know, if you've ever seen complaints about vagina bones on the internet. Oh, good Lord. Never heard that. So we're breaking our conversation about video games into four general sort of headers.

There's actually I put it at the end of the notes, but it should be at the top, events and business. And then arcade games, computers, and consoles. And let me tell you, folks, there's not a lot to say about home computers and home consoles in 1975, we are going to do our damnedest. But we should talk about events and business because there were some things that would have knock on effects upon the future. I'm going to go through the list really quickly and just give kind of quick bullet points that I've pulled out from Wikipedia and other cool sources as things of note.

And everyone here has signed up to talk about a few different topics in depth. And when I get to that point, they're going to jump in and take control of the podcast. I'm going to have to rest it back from them after a couple of minutes. So get ready, folks. It's going to be a wild ride as we talk about the events and business of video games in the year in 1975, beginning with the founding of Sammy Corp. Does anyone care? No. I mean, Sammy did end up owning Sega.

Do they still own? Is it still Sega? They still own Sega. They also own Dallas. So it's just a big old catamari of stuff. And it's weird because of those companies, Sammy is the one that probably least deserves it. They're, like, the least cool video game company in that conglomerate. But I guess they had, like, a big, like, vending amusement business and Pachinko and things

like that, gambling machines. So that made them much richer than Sega and Atlas, and that's why they own them both. Jeremy, I will not hear, I will not hear the name of Abadon besmirched. You mean Abidocs? I was thinking it was, isn't it Abidon? Amagon, Amagon. Amagon. Sorry, sorry.

I can't say words right. The finest work. Avidon is like, it's like a demon. Yeah, Abadon is a demon. I'm sorry, I got back to my satanic roots again. I'm still thinking about episode 666. No, it's fine. I mean, we're still reeling from episode 666.

Yeah. Even if you weren't part of it, you're still reeling. That's how, that's the impact that it had. So, yeah, anyway, Sega did not own, or Sammy did not own Sega in 1975. Sega had been around for quite a while already and was doing cool stuff in arcades. I think we might even have some games to talk about there. but Sammy was founded. Anyway, who cares. Also, Inix was founded over in Japan. Inix, which would eventually buy Squarespaceoft and Taito, who are also companies that, like Taito, you know, we're going to talk about space invaders at various points in our lives. That was Taito, but Enix bought them all. Also, IDAS? Yeah. So it's the year of ravenous corporations being birthed. And what, company could be more ravenous than Microsoft, who begins its reign of terror here in the year,

1975. They do begin their reign of terror here in 1975. A couple of college students in their dorm room, just a couple of working class fellows living out their dream, which is not exactly how it happened. But, man, I mean, when I was a college student in the dorm room, I was just eating free Chick-fil-A nuggets that my roommate brought back from his job at Chick-fil-A, that was like the extent of my ambitions. No terror?

I blew it. No terror. Just maybe to my insides, to my guts, but that's about it. Well, I think these guys were probably doing a lot of that, too, from what I read about that time in their lives. But they also really like to pull around with electronics and these newfangled computers, including something that I think Benj is going to talk about in a minute called the Altair, which was the, for all intents and purposes, the first popular home computer

in American history. And, you know, it's a day to think about tech oligarchs anyway. We think about these guys. It sure is. Yeah. One meteor strike could save the world. But, you know, for all the crap we give Bill Gates, and he was a ruthless businessman, unlike most of these guys, he was also actually a really talented software engineer.

And what he did was when he was a college student, he learns about this new computer. And it's like, I want to write basic. for that. I want to create a computer language for this thing no one knows how to use that doesn't have a screen unless you jury rig one to it. So did the concept of basic as a programming language exists before this? Oh, yes. It exists. Yes. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah, he's porting basic. I'm a bit of a basic beat myself, so I don't know these things. Yeah, actually, some of there's a wonderful book of 101 basic games from 1971. She'll take a look at Jeremy, I think he'll enjoy it.

It's really cute. Are they all Star Trek? Star Trek's a new. One of them is Star Trek. And then the later edition has two Star Trek's. Damn. Anyway, Gates does something genuinely inspired and borderline brilliant. He actually succeeds in porting basic to this anemic duct tape together thing that they sort of

called a computer and gets it to work. So much so that in the years that followed, people began to stop paying for his paper tapes for it and just start copying them, which really ticked him off, which started the whole open software versus proprietary software public argument that took place that really began with Microsoft in like 76 over the Altar basic code. And their MO began then. He understood the value of IP even then as the community, which was still deciding what the ethics of computing even were, we're talking about free software and whether or not you

actually owe anybody anything for what they wrote. So Microsoft starts with that foundation as an Altair supporter and quickly gains a reputation as the people you go to to build a basic on your new home computer because the Altair inspires dozens of copycats, most of which never lasts more than six months to a year, but several of which end up asking for basic ports and if they lasted long enough, they got them. And really, Microsoft was the basic porting company for about four or five years. years until IBM approaches them. And at first, they just wanted a basic for Microsoft, too. And Microsoft's, hey, let's do your whole operating system. Let's write something new, et cetera. They buy DOS, do the whole story.

Everybody already goes that. They go into hardware eventually with a Microsoft card for the Apple II, et cetera. But it all begins with them as a basic porting company. And that's their foundation. That's what they stand on and what they become for a long time and how they build their reputation and their considerable financial base. So anyway, that's a thing. Also, eventually, they made the Xbox.

Video games. One of the coolest things about Microsoft that's important for PC software that Jared briefly mentioned is just that they really pioneered the concept of selling pre-written software. So you didn't have to program it yourself. You didn't have to write it yourself. You didn't have to whatever. And so single-handedly putting all those computer magazines with the write-in programs in the back, out of business, it's all their fault.

They hung on for a while, but it was still like, you know, it was like a, ideological position of Bill Gates, that software was intellectual property that was copyrightable and protectable and could be sold and not, you know, infringed and stuff like that. That was like a key cultural innovation of Microsoft. Some people don't like that, but that's what happened. It's very, yeah, it's extremely important. Also, the fact that they were porting basic, in early computers there was, as Ben just pointed out, very little commercial software you could purchase off the rack, and much of it was

Microsoft eventually. But for a while, just the ability to take the computer down from assembly language to basic, most human beings couldn't write Z80 assembly, even if they were smart enough to solder a computer together. But they could learn basic. So it turned the Altair into a much more accessible hobby toy than it would have been before. And really, with several computers that followed, the Microsoft wrote Basic for it, did the same thing. It made the computer a much more accessible thing. Even if you had to write your own stuff, you could port it from another basic, or you could fool with it and kind of make your own thing up and go and then share it, like you said,

in the magazine earlier. That's very common. Yeah. Go ahead. Let's segue into the altar just briefly. You know, we don't have to get deep into this. Are you running this podcast now, binge? Yeah, I just took that.

You said people would be taking over. I said I have to rest it back. So here we go. Here we go. I'm pushing you down. Okay, fine. So we're talking about a computer named for a legendary assassin. Please tell us more

Or like a star Star System No it's name for Altair Of Assassin's Creed for sure So the Altair You know was technically I think they say It was released in late 74

But it really had its big debut In the January issue of January 75 issue of popular electronics Which was probably published in 74 Just based on how these things work But you know it got big in 75 So a couple of things that are important about the Altair is that it created one of the first PC platforms, personal computer platforms, in terms of the S100 bus that it invented. So people cloned it and they made this whole ecosystem of cards that you could plug into these computers.

And then other people made their own motherboards and different CPU cards and interplaying stuff. And then with basic, you know, we had a common platform for computer software that people could, hobbyists could create easily and distribute. And so they were, you know, a lot of, it was a great platform for basic games too. And, you know, a lot of them were the early ones that were from David All's book that Kevin mentioned, you know, a lot of the ones that came over from mainframes and stuff. but they could thrive on these personal computers on this S-100 platform. So it was just a neat little moment in history, and things built off of that. And, you know, once Was did the Apple II later, he said, this is a great system where you can make your own hardware and put in your own cards. So he designed his own bus in Apple II where people could put their own cards, and that made it a bigger ecosystem later.

So this is where all that started in the Altair 8800, created by Mitz. And it uses an Intel 80-80 CPU, which was, you know, the first big-time 8-bit microprocessor. It's probably as good as you were going to get in 74. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and the S-100 bus went on to last quite a long time. I mean, you had CPM S-100 machines in back rooms running well into the late 80s. Yeah, some into the 90s. I remember there are like some Cromemco systems that did like well.

their forecasts and video title or things, they were used up until throughout the 90s. It was amazing. Yeah, Matthew Broderick and War Games is using an M-Sai, which is an Altair 8800 clone. Yeah. Yep. I know that if you go to vintage computer festivals,

you can inevitably find someone doing cool stuff with Altair's or InSize. I remember going to V-CF East one time, and someone had rigged up the Altair, like, a webcam, I guess, is what you would consider it now. Extremely low resolution, but he had it, like, wired up and he had it set up so that you could, like, take pictures from it, which was really fun. He also had, like, Space War running on it with a pair of, like, custom controllers that someone had been selling in the, I think, around 77, 78. There were recreations, because the originals were super prone to breaking, but still, the fact that someone made controllers for this thing, it's pretty, pretty wild. It's still one of the damn coolest-looking computers ever made.

That big blue body with the mechanical silver switches and the blinking lights on the front, they actually were functional. You know, when the thing was first sold, if you didn't have a terminal hooked up to it, it was the only way to program it was to use the lights and the switches, which is nuts. But it looks so good even now. You see that on the Cosmack Elf, too, which was, what, 75, 76, somewhere around there? Yeah, a lot of good-looking design. So there's a lot of futurism in there. I think, you know? So, okay, jumping ahead to home computers, we skipped over a few more events in business.

I want to say that, Benj, you mentioned Waz, Waz, Steve Wozniak. I feel like this is around the time Apple Computer was established. I feel like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak missed an opportunity by calling their company Apple and not Waz, not Waz. But anyway, the only other thing I wanted to mention in terms of events and business for 75 was the establishment of Cinematronics, the company without whom we would not have gone to arcades and heard a booming resident Dragon's Lair. And that's about the only good that came from Cinematronics. So we can move on to home computers now. Oh, they didn't exist except for the Altire, the Altair, the Altair, whatever. So pretty much everything was happening on timeshare, but there were a few notable events relating to video games.

The first one I want to mention, and it looks like Jared is going to jump in here and supplement this. And actually, I don't have too much to say about this because we've done pretty much an entire episode about this platform. And that is the Plato, the large-scale timeshare computer established at the University of Chicago Urbain Champagne, Urbana Champagne. Irvine Champana. I don't, you know, that place in Chicago. It's the Midwest. Who cares? That was established in 1971, very advanced system. And by 1975, it had spread with an early form of kind of the Internet, basically, a network system across campuses and government facilities. And a lot of people were using it. They were making use of its high-resolution amber monitor with a touchscreen functionality. It was way ahead of its time. And when you put all that cool stuff together and time access to a system becomes less precious because it's, you know, propagated and more accessible, people immediately start to say, let's do video game stuff. And 75 is the year that you really start to see some video game innovation happening via Plato, game concepts and themes and mechanics that would trickle into the larger world, you know, a few years later

in the 80s mostly, as home computers became more prevalent. And people started to take these timeshare concepts, these collective creations, and say, how can I make money off of this? And so Plato is really kind of foundational for a lot of genres, but especially the role-playing game and also the rogue-like game. We did a rogue-like episode many, many years ago. I dare not ask how many at this point, but we did talk about the genre's primal roots in the Plato system. Anyway, Jared, you specifically highlighted that you want to talk about the dungeon and D&D, all small case letters. Yeah, dungeon D&D, and really Pett 5, which is down below two, but these are all very related. I'm not going to talk very long

here. Like you said, you've already done an episode about this. The Plato was... as remarkably capable for gaming at the time? That high-resolution screen you mentioned, I mean, you were not kidding. It can draw some really sharp images. Wasn't it like 512 by 512 pixels or something? Yeah, it's much higher resolution than a television at the time. Right. It's monochrome, but you can draw some lovely pictures with it.

And people did. They use them to draw dungeons and knights and monsters and all kinds of fun things. And, you know, university kids are hanging out doing their university thing. And what's really big among poor college kids? in 1975, Dungeons and Dragons. And so everybody and their uncle starts working on different Dungeons and Dragons's conceptual ports to their university Play-Doh systems. No kidding. I should ask my uncle about that.

Maybe he did one. He might have. It's possible. So we have a few. Really, I wanted to comment on this simply because one of my very first jobs in gaming, freelancing, was interviewing Robert Woodhead for Kurt Collada over at HG 101, turning in a truly terrible article from a delightful interview. And Robert was talking about how Plato had influenced wizardry and what had come out of that there, looking at these games he played in college and seen and how he was trying to reinterpret them

for the more limited capabilities of an Apple II and largely succeeded. The dungeon is – the dungeon and D&D probably happened to around the same time. They're both 75. There may have been a game in 74 they were both based on. No one's entirely sure, but they're two of the earlier ones. Petit 5 also. And really all they are are wander around, fight a monster, get some experience, level up, open chests. In the dungeon, you're all on one level, but it's very big. In D&D and Petit, you're in multiple levels, but they're smaller. And they're all very, very unfair and hard. which seems counterintuitive until you remember that D&D's first edition is also incredibly

unintuitive and incredibly hard and really brutal and murders everyone who plays. The games are not fun, but you see how those ideas were refined into much more enjoyable RPGs. A lot of the things that we take for granted, stats based on numbers, turn-based combat, turn-based movement. A lot of that is in most of these games. If you want to play them. You can. They're on Cyber One, which is a website dedicated to preserving kind of an emulated Plato environment. And you go out there and grab them and experience that they're like, they're not inaccessible. I'm not going to say you've got the best time in the world, but you will be impressed and surprised, I think, by how thought out they are. Yeah, they're

amazing. That's nerds for you. It's a whole alternate reality of computing stuff that sort have hit a dead end, unfortunately, from the mainstream. I wouldn't say it's an alternate reality. I would say that it's, you know, it's sort of a primal soup of video games, and so much of what we take for granted today sort of emerged from that, because Plato was played by people who would go on to create some of the foundational game series, like, you know, like wizardry. And so, yeah, like without, without that platform and the sort of collective

communal contributions that people made to game development and software design on that system, I think video games today would look very, very different. So, yeah, so I feel like it's just one of these poorly documented, or not necessarily poorly documented, but maybe like poorly understood by the mainstream of people who play video games, influence, and piece of heritage. It's a velvet underground of Midwestern computing. Like, it wasn't heard by a lot of people, but it was heard by the right people. Yeah, I'd never heard of many people who were influenced by it, though.

You know, like all the people I've ever interviewed, no one mentioned Plato using it or seeing it or knowing what it was or playing it. But I was, I'm like Eastern people and Western people, like the people I talk to, like East Coast, Boston, you know, West Coast had their own thing going on. So, like, the Midwest. Yeah, Boston had their own thing at MIT. Yeah. Anyway, they were PDP kids over there. Yeah. Everyone loves deck.

So one other thing worth mentioning in the computer space that year, I feel like Kevin put this there, Super Star Trek published in Creative Computing. I did add that. Yes. This is written by Bob Lido. So it's not just Star Trek, it's Super Star Trek. Yes. Does it have TransWarp? Is that what it's saying?

So basically, real quick, the original Star Trek. game was written in 71 by Mike Mayfield and got popularized, 72, 73 was included in the 101 basic computer games book. This fellow, Bob Lidam, he had access to, I think, a data general Nova at work, and he was programming in some of these games, and he programmed him to Star Trek. Him and his buddies really liked it, but he felt like it could do better. So he went about sort of polishing it up and adding a bunch of new mechanics, replaced some of the more obscure aspects of the original game to make it more user-friendly, punched up all the messages.

So, like, they sounded like they were coming from actual characters. And then he, you know, resubmitted it to David Al, had him check it out for, you know, because that's where he referred from the original one. And in 75, David All published it in Creative Computing. and it's gone on to become exceptionally influential and popular, arguably as much as the original version. So that's it for computers. Not a lot happening there because people were still figuring out, like, what is a computer?

You know, it's very confusing. Also, we can talk about the console space because not a lot was happening there. Technically, consoles did exist, but only just. The Odyssey, Magnivoc's Odyssey, had debuted in, 72, is that correct? Yeah. And so 1975 saw the launch of not the Odyssey 2, that would be later, but the Odyssey 100 and 200.

They skipped way ahead of 2 all the way to the triple digits, but they were basically just the Odyssey, right? I feel like Kevin or Jared, this would be a thing you would know. Or binge. Yeah, they're stripped down. They're basically just like the ping pong game, really. I think that's the best way of describing it. Okay, so the Odyssey 100 and 200, variance on the Odyssey stripped down new hardware design.

Neat. Another notable thing about the year 1975 for consoles is that finally, we started to see some consoles being made in countries that were not the USA. Over in Europe, you had the ED 2201, not to be mistaken for that other ED robot thing that was later, the telespiel, which is German for telegame. Wow, neat. And that was all part of, you know, kind of the trend of people making video games because they saw how successful The Odyssey was and they saw how successful Pong was in arcades. And Atari even made a Home Pong console. But before we talk about that, we've got to talk about the Home Pong console that came out before Home Pong, which was the electric, the Epoch TV Electro Tennis, which beat Home Pong to the market by about six months. It's just that it was a different market.

it was the Japanese market, not the American market. But nevertheless, Epoch did kick off a line, a lineage of Japanese consoles in 1975 before Atari technically had their first home console, which is kind of a neat little detail. Electrotenis is the one Epoch console I've never been able to track down at a reasonable price. But it was a long sort of wide odyssey, basically. It didn't have the interchangeable jumper things. It just had several built-in games to it. But, you know, primarily it played Pong, but it was, you know, the hardcore style

where you could move your paddle forward and backward as opposed to just up and down. So it gave you kind of free range of motion within the space on the screen. So it needed two dials for each player. And, of course, both players were mounted, like the controls were mounted, into the same single unit. There were no detachable controls, et cetera. But, you know, hey,

here is a console being made by a Japanese company in collaboration, maybe with Magnavox, actually, now that I think about it, I know they were, I forgot to write this down, but I know it was made in collaboration with an American engineering firm electronics companies. So it might have been Magnavox. So basically it was just, if that's the case, it was just the Odyssey. But from that point, Epoch would continue releasing its own LSI devices, and that would eventually become the first, arguably the first successful Japanese console with interchangeable carts, the cassette vision, and Epoch would continue making machines all the way into the 90s, although they moved away from consoles after Nintendo ate their lunch and started making

barcode battler handhelds, where you could scan barcodes and use them to fight other people's barcodes, my calorie made is more powerful than your calpus. So that's just the fact of life in modern Japan. Yeah, it looks like that. That's a start there. That TV tennis, electro tennis thing is fascinating. I had never really

heard of that, but yeah, people say it's developed in cooperation with Magnavox. It may use the same chip set as the 100, honestly 100, which apparently used 4TI chips. So, and that came out about October 75. And according to

Wikipedia anyway, the electro tennis is September of 75. And that's interesting, they both beat Atari to the market there, which was, I don't know, some fall, winter 75 with the Sears thing. I must have just struck that...

It was holiday season. I must just struck that Electro tennis has such a cool name. Like, I want to play electric tennis. Yeah. Like, a Sega released Electro tennis next year, I would totally buy that. Picture like Pong, but there's like electrical bolts on screen, I can, like, deflect the ball in weird directions or, like, electrocute you.

I was just thinking, like, the res guy with a paddle. Oh, that's great. Yeah. Look, we should be game developers. Anyway, all of these things that we've been talking about under consoles kind of don't matter because the one that ate everyone's lunch came out a couple months later via Atari, and that is home pong, the platform that sort of set the standard. Yeah, so this one, I think I took it.

Home Pong was really Atari entering a different space. And, you know, at this point, they had been a coin-op company, and they saw that there was room to grow in the home market, because at this point it was basically just Magnovox. So they commissioned a herald Lee to design a version of this. I think you worked with Al-Alcorn as the original designer of Pong, to make a Pong for the home. and they also recognized that they needed to be able to sell this thing and get it through the FCC and all that fun stuff. So they ended up going to Sears, and Sears was the biggest retailer in the U.S. at the time. They really could make or break a product.

And they had their own in-house FCC-compliant lab. So getting an agreement with Sears to sell Pong, exclusively through their stores for 75 and then to other stores after that point was a big deal for Atari because not only did it give them access to Sears' gigantic storefronts, but it also let them sail right through all of the FCC requirements that would eventually trip up basically every other company that would try to make home pong clones in the coming couple of years. and even computer manufacturers and console, like programmable consoles. So this was a pretty successful product for Atari. I feel like the Odyssey line was still more recognizable for the general public for a few more years. But Atari definitely upped its game here, so to speak. I think Sears ordered 150,000 units for their holiday season.

and Atari had to scramble to figure out how to manufacture them and stuff like that. And it was neat because Home Pong, I think, I don't remember if the Odyssey had on-screen scoring. Do you? The Odyssey 100. Not the original. The Odyssey 100, which I had one, but it never worked. I don't think it did. I think it had a little, like, tracker on the physical console.

You had to just push the number up. So as an innovation, the, the, just like. the arcade pong. It had on-screen scoring which is cool and sound effects or whatever and it retailed for like $98 around that and I just read that maybe it came out

somewhere around like late October, early November so it was sort of contemporaneous with the Odyssey 100 release and you know this is like a box that has the little paddle controllers or little dials that are on the console itself and

they're like industrial grade pops to Like, I have one I'm trying to clean, and I cannot get those things open. Yeah. So, Kevin, you're the, you're, Mr. Atari. Was home pong the one that they were showing off in the Sears Tower and the antenna was screwing with it or the only upstairs in the demo, or was that the VCS? I can't remember. I don't remember off the top of my head.

I remember the story, but I don't remember which memory it was. I think it's home pong. I think it was Pong. They're trying to sell it to Sears and they're up in the top of the Sears Tower and can't figure out what it won't work since because. the Sears Tower is a giant transmission antenna like two floors above them. That would check out given that they had to

figure out all the RF interference stuff with Pong. Whereas with the 2,600, the Sears was on board with them, pretty much from the get-go, and they just were able to hammer that out really smoothly. That's why they use Channel 3, right? I mean, you know, you could change between Channel 3 and 4 with a lot of those earlier consoles because they weren't used

very frequently. I think Channel 5 was usually the lowest number used most frequently in broadcasting. There's probably legal reasons for that, but I don't know what they are. Because this episode is all about the fives. Yeah. So in 1975, consoles were basically table tennis. But arcades, they were breaking out. They were going beyond just table tennis. Sometimes they were real tennis. Sometimes they were table hockey.

I don't know. Like, it's a wild world. Anything went in the world of arcades in 1975. And by anything, I mean, there were basically like three or four genres, shooting, racing, sports. But you see more companies entering the market, the arcade market, manufacturers and distributors, more ideas and game concepts being explored, more diverse technology, so on and so forth.

So we are going to talk about some of the highlights of arcade gaming in 1975, such as they were. It was still a very, it was a baby industry, just a little tiny guy. You just wanted to cuddle it. But you start by cuddling a game called Bulletmark, which doesn't sound cuddly at all. I don't actually know anything about this game. I just wrote it down because it has a fun name. But you also have a game called Destruction Derby, which later became Death Race, and that's not cuddly at all.

Jared, what's up with that? Let's do some murder in our vehicle. Yeah, that's what that's about. So it's a cyber truck the video game. It can't guess, honestly, except, well, no. Or Cybertruck, the video game, you just drive around and explode on your own. This one, you have to run into other people and get them to explode. So, yeah, Destruction Derby was, hey, what if, what makes a driving game more fun running into other cars?

That is kind of a fun thing. It crashes other cars, drive it around. It's a two-player game, and that's where the real fun comes because it's a score chase. And you're just trying to demolish other vehicles, run over them, crush them. It's really not too bad. But Destruction Derby fell into kind of a weird rights thing. And so, Exidy, the creator, was like, well, why don't we rebrand it? And so being the enterprising, red-blooded young business people that they were, they thought, you know, what'll sell better than running into cars?

I know, running into people. So they made some bodacious new cabinet art with skulls on it. They rebranded the game, changed the cars you ran over into little, like, stick figure. people, changed other gameplay a little bit to make it a little more difficult and therefore more fun, it turned out for the two-clair mode, and went to town. The reason I chose to mention this one, it's been talked about the death because of its violence and being a very early controversial video game, but I wanted to talk about it because I've played a lot of it, and it's a lot of fun.

Death Race is, despite its extremely simple premise, just racing to run over more people and squash more like pedestrians than the other person in the last. limited amount of time is really enjoyable. The controls are intuitive. They're fluid. It's smooth for a 1975 game feels pretty good. Doesn't feel as janky as some of them do. They have one at the Museum Mechanique in San Francisco.

I used to go there and play at a great deal. And they also have one at Calix practically every year. And if you ever got a chance to play Death Race or Destruction Derby, I think you should. Not just for the tuck-it-away experience, but give a little time, you find there's some real technique to it. I think it's one of the better, like, more playable early arcade games from the 1970s where you're like, oh yeah, I could still play that and have a good time. Every time I go to San Francisco, I go to the music mechanic and play death race. Do you like it? Yeah, I like it. It's smooth and interesting. It's got a wheel and a pedal,

and it has a real nice sort of analog feel of how the car spins around and hits the players and that's great. I mean, not players. The people people. But yeah, it's just fun because it's such an early game, arcade game, and it's one of the oldest arcade games that's that capable

and interesting, you know, that's not Pong, kind of. Right, and it's great with two people. Like, I think you, if you go and play it by yourself, you have fun, you get a friend, it's just great. I'll just say, you know, the Midwest does have a copy of this game at the Galloping Ghost. Score one for the Midwest.

Midwest win. When it was rebranded, was it a tie-in to the movie Death Race 2000 that came out in 1975? Everything I read says it's a rip-off, not a rebrand. Like, not a tie-in. Interesting. That could be wrong. There's still some sketchy history around that. But the stuff I've been able to find says that it's not an official tie-in, but they used a name that was very similar to a movie that was happening at the time.

to pick up some extra, you know, because, I mean, we're going to get the shark jaws in a second, and a lot of that was going on around this time. This industry. You didn't get legit licenses until the Fonz. Yeah, this was, industry was tiny, so they would have been like, what do you mean video games? Do you want to license this? What the hell is that? Anyway. It's like, you know, your fanfiction.combeck original character.

No one's going to see you over it. Yeah. So two notes on Destruction Derby slash death race. it would take 30 years for someone to realize that there is actually something more fun to do with racing games than hitting other cars, and that's rubbing other cars, thanks to Criterion's Burnout 3. But 30 years is a long time to hold the crown. So lots of respect there. To 20 years later, in 1995, Synosis and Reflections put out a game called Destruction Derby on PS1 and Saturn. Is that anything to do with this game, or is it just they said, well, there's a defunct trademark.

Let's go for it. Not a clue. All right. I mean. These are the incisive answers you come to retronauts for. I'll say Exitie was dead in the 90s. I mean, demolition derbies were a real thing in real life with real cars, right? But this isn't destruction.

This isn't demolition derby. It's destruction derby. Okay. Well, it wasn't death race originally called demolition derby. I'm looking at a flyer of it right now. From Chicago coin. So it doesn't look like this has anything to do with Exidy's game. They're not mentioned in the Wikipedia write-up, which is linked from GameFax.

So what more research could you possibly do on the internet these days? Pretty much none. I was going to say Exidy was defuncter. Right. So. Yeah. So they just swooped in and said, oh, you're not using that anymore, dead company? Cool.

It's ours now. Youink. Yeah. Lots of respect for that, too. Okay. So that was Destruction Derby. Now we move on alphabetically to Fred O'Tronic, Tronic, Tronic. Kevin, what's up with that? That's such a nerdy video game name. Yeah. And there's a reason why it was not successful, I imagine. So this was basically, probably a big factor. So this was RCA trying to come up with ideas on what to do with their 1801 microprocessor. And the original designers of it had the idea. idea very early on that they should make video games, like we're talking 1970, 71. And once they finally had a chip that they could actually produce, this was their first

idea, really, was to make a couple arcade machines. And it was really like forward thinking. The idea was, okay, we'll have this motherboard with the microprocessor, memory, all that stuff, and we'll change the games out on cartridges. And they made six of these. They put them on location tests in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. They were not particularly successful. So they ended up dropping this and reworking it into what became the RCA Studio 2 and the Cosmac VIP computer. But, you know, some of these ROMs do exist online. I was able to help get them rescued off some old data tapes some years ago and they are emulated. And they're kind of neat. There's one that's sort of like blockades surround that sort of game before that existed.

There's a sword fighting game. There's like a very simple tag game and there's a bowling game. There's a couple others that may exist. We're trying to hammer that out. But yeah, so this was sort of in the zeitgeist at the time, just this idea of using microprocessors for arcade machines. Like they weren't the only company trying it. They weren't a successful company trying it. But they were trying it.

And that's kind of neat. just was developed by Joseph Weissbecker probably Yep Joe Weisbecker As far as I know he wrote all the games They didn't even have like little ending music Stings when you When game over

According to his daughter Joyce Like that was supposed to be his attempt at The song Was it when you're gone Just sort of like the idea of Well the computer is waving farewell to you As the game ends Yeah I wrote a big article about his daughter

Joyce in 2017 for Fast Company. So if anyone's interested, she got her career started making RCA Studio 2 games and was probably the first female video game designer in history. Oh, we also preserved her first ever, like, program that we know of jackpot. It's a little slot machine game for the Fred prototype that they were working on. That's really cool. Mm-hmm. Down by the ocean

It was so dismal I was just standing a shackle My face The horse put away In the cur that you died It was you You'll never return Into my arms

Get you a gun gun Gun Never return In my arms Get you a gun gun Gun gun Gun gun Gunn

Gun, gun. Goodbye. So Fredotronic was not a successful, what do you call it, micro-processor-based game. But the next game on this list was actually a pretty big hit, and kind of was a microprocessor-based game. It was called Gun Fight. And Gun Fight was created by Tomohiro. Nishikato, the guy who would go on to create a little thing called Space Invaders, published and designed by Taito in Japan, and was just, I think, a TTL game in its Japanese incarnation.

But they licensed it to Midway. And Midway, instead of just reprint, you know, like re-taking the existing specs, they said, why don't we recreate this game for our own system, which was based on Microsoft? So it became the first successful, I would say, microprocessor-based game in arcades. It was also very different than any other games that had come before it, I would say. I can't think of anything, not that I'm a huge expert on early 1970s arcade games, but I don't know of anything that had that sort of gameplay style where you, it's player versus players.

So I guess on some level it's kind of saying, hey, Pong, but, except that. This allows you to control a little cowboy, fighting another cowboy, and you move freely around a desertcape, and there are obstacles, like Conestoga wagons and cacti and so on and so forth, sorry, cactuses, and you can duck behind them because you're trying to shoot the other person. So it's the first cover-based shooter, if you really want to stretch that definition to the breaking point. And generally it was just very successful. It was a hit in Japan.

It was a hit in America. It became pretty widely copied. Nintendo released a game called Sheriff, for example, that they still reference in things like Wario Ware. So it has quite a legacy to it and was, you know, at the same time, thanks to Midway and the fact that their engineers were absolute maniacs, a pretty technologically forward-thinking moment in arcade game history. So that's cool.

Gunfight. Yeah, gunfight's really cool. I'm glad you mentioned the cover-based aspect. I think that the gunfight is a refinement and more enjoyable version of, like, key games, is tank. You know, it takes away the tank controls, but it keeps the good stuff. It makes you more maneuverable, makes you, gives you more... You just made some Resident Evil fans real, real mad. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

You know, you still got the cover, but it turns the cover into metaphors that you recognize. You were talking about the wagon, things like that. And it just makes it feel more right. You've got a better control of where your guy's going, a better control where he's firing, better control over being able to stick to the cover. You're not constantly lumbering around in tank half the time when you die. It's because you miscalculated where you can turn because the controls are awkward. And I really think it's cool that you, like, focused in on that, like, a late. These are Jeremy. That was neat.

That's me. Laser focused. If you know me, you know, I'm always sharp and never rambling or aimless, ever. You know, you got to give a gunfight one other accolade is that Nishikato, when he was coming up with space invaders, he was inspired by this Western version of his game, gunfight. Because he thought it was not as good as his TTL one, but he's like, the technology underlying this is really important. I need to figure this out. So, like, he couldn't import the whole board, like, development system. So he, like, bought all the parts and built it up. So Space Invaders kind of designed after the gunfight hardware.

Yeah, CPU-based instead of. Yeah. So Kevin and I, this is a plug. We recently did an episode about early 70s arcade games and TTL games and stuff. So if you're really interested in that, there's a little side tunnel to get lost in rabbit hole, as they say. Yeah, I kind of feel like TTL games of the 70s are sort of the last great frontier of video game preservation because each of those has to be recreated, you know, through emulation or an FPGA individually because all of them use different chips. Everything's super custom. So that's, to me, that's kind of like the mountain that's going to be a while before anyone conquers it. And as a result, it's one of the more abstruse periods of video gaming history because it's just so hard to experience those games without tracking down the very rare machines that still exist to play on.

So that's one of those areas that I want to learn more about, but it's not really practical. So another cool TTL-based game that was pretty innovative and influential. I'm going to let Benj talk about this was Indy 800. It's not 8500. It's 300 better than the real thing.

Yep. I think this was the first arcade game. I mean, this is so early, 75, but to have eight simultaneous players, maybe. I don't know. Is this before Tank 8? I don't know, actually. I feel like it was before 10-8.

Yeah, it may have been. This is, so it had eight steering wheels all arranged around a sort of square where in the center, everyone would look down at the screen, and it was color, which is cool, because that helped you differentiate whose car was whose, you know, black and white, it would be tricky. It would be really frustrating. But, so it used a 25-inch full-color display, and it was built. Which was massive for the time, 25 inches. That's rolling deep pockets in 1975. This, yeah, I mean, this cabinet must have been cost of fortune to produce. And it was, you know, it built off of a series of racing games made by Atari, starting with Grand Tract 10.

And key games and stuff had Sprint and some things like that, their version of it. And they had Grand Chack 10, Grand Tract 20. And I think was the key, was the indie versions? I can't remember now. I should be the expert on this, but Indy 800 was followed up Indy 500, which I think was like Grand Track 20 as key games or something, you know, published by key games. So, yeah, it's just crazy because I want to play this. I've never played it. I would love to play this in person.

And Kevin, didn't you say you saw people playing this at some show? There's a video online you can find of people playing it. I think there's just like a couple of these units still surviving because it was very much like a deluxe product. I have borrowed that footage for my own videos before, shamelessly, but with credit, because I am a good journalist. Yeah, so Indy 800 really kind of speaks to this sort of gimmickery that would become a trademark of arcade games, you know, for as long as arcade games would exist. Arcade games really leaned into the social component, the multiplayer experience, and, you know, once consoles came along and became sort of, um, codified, they really leaned into having experiences that were not possible to have at home. So I feel like this kind of laid the groundwork for a lot of the weird stuff.

Would we have Dance Dance Revolution without Indy 800? I say no. I want to correct something I said earlier, just to get this right, which is that Indy 800 was published by Atari under the Atari name. Indy 500, as far as I could tell, was just the Atari 2,600 game. later. This is later, though. And that was published by Atari for the 2600. It's sort of like a version of Grand Track

10 and 20. Grand Track 10 was Atari, and I think it was the Sprint series that was no, sprint. I don't know. I don't know what I'm saying, but everything I said up to this point was correct in this last addendum here. All right. Yeah. I'm glad

you could almost clarify that. Almost. Yeah. While we're clarifying while you were talking about that, I went back and looked, and I wrong. Gunfight beat Tank to market by at least a month. Wow. This is a terrible episode. Yeah, that's just me screwing up. But, yeah, I thought Tank was the inspiration for it, and I was wrong. I haven't been wrong yet. I think original Tank was 74, but I think Tank 8 was later. November of 74, so I guess it did beat it to market. Okay, good. I'm wrong.

Chris, it's easy. I just corrected myself. Let's just take this part out, because I'm wrong. No, no, we should leave it. I mean, this is all part of the challenge of talking about things that happened so long ago that we were not there for. I mean, yes, I was alive by that point, but I got to tell you at three months of age, I was not hanging out at the bars playing Indy 800 against seven other people. I just, it was a while before I'd get to that point of my life. So we can only go by secondhand information. And when, you know, conversations take a turn that we didn't anticipate or plan on, we just have to kind of wing it. So, thank God we have the Internet.

Turns out I was right. And Tank was earlier. But it turns out that Atari 800 or that, no, I'm going to stop talking. I was going to say Chris said he wasn't wrong, but it's easy to be right when you don't say anything, right, Chris? You should just chip in random. Just chip in some random inaccurate information here. To make it even, Chris. I might get elected if I do.

Factoid. Chat GPT this. Confedulate. So we can move on to talking about shark jaws, and I will be incorrect here and say that both Peter Benchley and Steven Spielberg were on board with this game. They actually designed it themselves. Yeah. So they made the logo then? Absolutely. Absolutely.

Okay. Other notable games, Steeplechase, which I feel would have sort of, descendants show up on consoles through the Atari era. Something called the Super UBI cocktail table. We have the Democratic Socialists out here demanding UBI. But in 1975, we had Super UBI. That's how far behind the game we are in the society. There's something that I put on here just because the name is fun, TV Flipper.

I assume that's like the coffee tape. No, I've played that game where you. you have the coffee table that you upend and you have to like maximize your score with the number. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Great game, but the version I played was in the 2000s. That's what my mom calls the remote

control. The TV flipper. Yeah. It'd be cool if there was a game about actually flipping a television sit over and breaking it. I mean, that would be great. So there you go. I mean, during the Wii era, we had that for real. Oh, God.

That was those remotes. TV cracker. Yeah, my TV got cracked by a Wii remote. Damn. One of the kids from my church broke it. Got it. Got it with a wrist strap. Yeah.

It tells you right in the thing. Oh, she was wearing the wrist strap. She just punched my television. Was she wearing the wee condom? No. Wow, that's not what it is. Oh, there's the problem. Never mind.

We always get silly around noon and it's like we get hungry. This is what we hit. We used to have to break. Some people get hungry. We just get stupid. So let's wrap this conversation about the meager games, arcade games of 1975, with wheels. Yeah, so this was Midway's localized version of Taito Speed Race, which was notable for being another Nishado joint. That came out in 74, and it's interesting that it's a very different racing game from any of the ones Atari's done.

like Atari had all these top-down racers. You see the whole track. You're driving around it. So they're really interested in like the mechanics of turning and following the road. Whereas speed race and wheels, the Western release, that's really focused on the speed aspect. So you're driving like straight up a road. If you've played, I don't know, street race around the Atari or something in that vein that you have the same idea. But it's much more fast pace.

It's a very speedy. It's a TTR game, of course. And it was a big hit for Tito, and I'm assuming a reasonable hit for Midway because they kept licensing Tito projects. So it's pretty cool. I'd love to try it out sometime. Again, it's a 70s game. It reminds me of Grand Prix Activision, the Activision game where you're going, you know, and avoiding cars. I wonder if that was kind of cloning this a little bit.

I feel like Grand Prix was pulling from street racing. which was probably pulling from this. So, yeah, by orders of degrees. Fascinating. Come from the diamonds, rich like cream. Stronger and harder than a bad girl's dream. Make a bad one good. Make your own right.

Power love that keep you home at night. Don't need money. Don't take fame. Don't need no credit card right. train All right, so let's sudden when it's true

sometimes But if I just save your life, that's a power of love All right, so let's draw a line under 1975. We're done. It's over.

Move on. Let's travel forward in time in the fancy DeLorean 10 years to 1985. And it's a very different world. It's less brown. There's less cordurore. There's more pastels, more padded shoulders, more cocaine.

A lot more cocaine. What was happening? I don't know. There was a lot of cocaine in 1975. I was four and I was using it, man. It was great. Who else was alive in 1985? Are we all in the world of us at this point?

I was alive, but I wouldn't say I was aware. I mean, when do you feel that you did become aware, Chris? Maybe 2008, about. So that's when you became woke. I understand. This was the year we all got together as children and recorded the first retronauts podcast on cassette tape, right? Yeah, our 1975 look back was very different in 1985 than it is now. So here's some stuff that was happening on planet Earth in the year 1985.

A lot of people got together and sang a song. called We Are the World. I had to sing that in kindergarten to my school. Oh, yes. That was something that every elementary school had to sing. He was in that. Yeah. Despite not being a musical star?

Despite not being a musical. It was USA for Africa. So it was, did this happen before Live Aid or was Live Aid first? Because the Live Aid was, you know, feed the world. That was, yeah, I feel like it was a bunch of British people were like, why do we do something good for the world instead of just conquering it? And so they sang a song that was, you know, about how it never snows anywhere in Africa. Africa, the entire continent, bone dry in the winter.

It's crazy. So the bunch of Americans were like, well, we can do that, but we can do it bigger. And so we did. And so everyone was singing bad songs and sending all the proceeds to Africans so that they could eat food. It was a well-meaning time in the world. But maybe not the best considered. I don't know. I feel like all of that is, as the kids today would say, a bit cringe.

But not as cringe as New Coke. Uh-oh. Chris just sent something to everyone. Am I in trouble now? Oh, my God. Dan Aykroyd. Singing, we all the world. What?

Well, there he is. Huh? Wow. How about that? I mean, Dan Aykroy strikes me as more likely to do something benevolent than his co-star Chevy Chase. so this makes sense. I'm pretty sure, Chris, got into a time machine and inserted Dan Aykroyd into the We Are the World thing.

That's an entire show of history. This was post-Bloose Brothers, so he had that musical chop. Oh, that's right. Oh, yes. Was he Jake or Elwood? I think he was Elwood, right? He was Alwood. And was John Belushi dead by this point?

Yes. Okay. So that's why it was just Dan Aykroyd and not Dan Aykirid and John Belushi. It all makes sense now. Thank you for piecing that. puzzle together for me. Anyway, new Coke, does anyone remember the kerfuffle around New Coke, or were you all still too young?

A little bit. I remember it well. Yeah, I remember it quite a bit. Just a little bit, a little bit. I was a tiny kid. I was still a kid, very young, so I was like, it tastes sweet, Coke tastes sweet. I don't get it, but some people were real angry. I mean, I remember going to a grocery store and seeing this different Coke there and we're like, what the heck is going on?

And then they made classic Coke. I don't know if it was the same year. The New Coke became Coke 2. Yeah, and I couldn't rise of the leg of it. Figure that out. This is when my parents began drinking Diet Coke. They were so P-Oed by New Coke that they just decided to go ahead over to Diet Coke because it was healthy here anyway. They didn't stop giving Coke their business.

They didn't switch over to Pepsi, which was basically the same thing as New Coke. No, switching over to Pepsi for my mom and dad would have been an act of sacrilege. that, yeah. Did you grow up in a part of the country where soft drinks were called Coke by default? Yes. Okay. Yeah. Same here.

It is a weird move to have a product that is so strongly identified with what it is that it becomes the word for what it is. And then to go like, but what if we made it different? Yeah. Yeah. I can't think of anyone in the modern world. Oh, you did it. Sorry. I know the line.

It always goes so well. My last thought about soft drinks is that most people today who are not alive in the 80s don't realize how much we drank soda. Like, I drank soft drinks all day long throughout the entire 80s. Like, yeah, we had a thousand cavities and whatever. I never got fat, though. It's weird. But, hey, it was unhealthy. Well, that's good for you.

You never got fat. Fine. Yeah, congratulations. Congratulations. I did. No, New Coke was a release. strange choice because Coca-Cola was an American icon. When people thought of America, like, that's one of the symbols. I mean, you look at Pac-Man Plus and one of the bonus items you can get

as a Coke can. And like the dynamic ribbon, as they call it, shows up as iconography and cartoons and video games and all sorts of stuff. This was just one of the foundational objects of capitalism, really. And... L'A Cola and Captain Connick. Some coaked up executives at Coke said, we can do better, and they were wrong. So, yeah, that was just, you know,

a great symbol of the 1980s, really, just second-guessing yourself, doing stupid things, bad choices. It affects the way that Coke operates to this day, honestly. Coke lost so much on New Coke, so much prestige in particular, that that's when they began to shift their marketing

famously from the position of, hey, let's build more market share to now let's just remain market leader. Coke really advertises not to lose business now rather than trying to gain new. And this is when that shift began to occur. I mean, this is the company whose product gave us Santa Claus. Like, why would you do that? You absolute bell ins, as they would say, where they were singing, feed the world. We should do a whole podcast on Coke and how it ties into video games.

Now, I think this is the whole podcast right now. Okay. Yeah. Pepsi invaders. Yeah. The Coca-Cola Kid. Exactly. All soda tie-ins.

That would be a fun episode. I'd be up for that if you ever want to do it. Hey, those seven-up games are pretty good. Does Captain Ovalon count? Kind of. So briefly, briefly, other things happening in 1985. They finally found the Titanic. They found the hall beneath the water.

And James Cameron said, I'm going to be so rich, once I get through this Terminator thing, DNA was used as court evidence for the first time, launching 23 and me many years later to steal all of our personal information. The most personal of information, really. Let's see, they decommissioned Route 66. Another American icon brought to an end. Like between New Coke and the end of Route 66, it's like the last vestiges of the old republic had been swept away. Um, let's see. It's inappropriate for today. Mm-hmm. Uh, Ronald Reagan began his second term and Gorbachev, Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of the USSR, which, um, brought about lots of changes in the world. Um, there was a lot of bad things, a lot of bad things were happening in the Middle East, which seems to be the case in all of these recaps, a lot of abductions and conflicts much,

much more, much more, uh, frequently and at much larger scale. than we see today, despite all the, you know, the difficulties over Palestine and Israel, like, conflicts in the Middle East were much wider spread and had a much more, much more potential to explode into bad things happening elsewhere. So it was very fraught. But the one good thing that did happen, I guess, was that the USSR, as it kind of began to wind down in general, general, under Gorbachev, began the process of building an exit strategy from Afghanistan. So that was one hotspot in the world that at least was beginning to cool down. But not before we got Rambo 3.

Other bad stuff, the world's, the worst airline disaster in history happened that year. And looking through a recap of 1985, airplanes crashed a lot more often back then. Like, as bad as Boeing has made things in the past couple of years with their utter lack of competence and the United Fleet falling apart on us, at least it falls apart on the ground for the most part. And so your flight gets canceled or delayed. I can speak to this from my travel experiences all throughout last year. But in the 80s, like, there were a lot of airplane crashes. And I do remember, like, hearing about Delta flights and Jal flights and so forth, just kind of. announced in air disasters, but Jow 123, Japan Airlines 123, killed almost 600 people in a single crash, which is absolutely terrible. And airline safety has gotten a lot better since then. We'll see if, you know, how this new era of deregulation that we're entering affects that. But I feel like 1985 was kind of the nadier of safety in that area. And then things started to get.

much, much better in the following years. So, you know, that's something good at least. Did anything good happen in 1985? How about Huey Lewis and the news put out some good tracks? Sports? Sports. Some people like it. It was back to the future.

But we're not talking about entertainment. We're talking about world events. Entertainment is just... It's a grim time. That's the... It was. The 80s were rough. That's why we had such good entertainment, right?

We needed to escape. I need Max Hedgeron. Max Hedrum, I want to say, was a little earlier in the UK and a little later in the U.S., but I could be mistaken. Anyway, a good thing that did happen was that the DNS registry was established, effectively laying the groundwork for the World Wide Web, which maybe that's not good anymore, but it used to be really good. I would not be able to make a living, if not for the World Wide Web. So I like that. And also, the GNU or New Manifesto was launched. launched, finally a decade later pushing back against the tyranny of Microsoft and saying,

no, software should be free. So we finally, finally move things in the other direction. So that's the world of 1985. It's pretty much shit. But at least the video games were really good. Let's talk about the video games business. Speaking of Microsoft, after 10 years, they finally decided to release an operating system. Windows 1.0 debuts, that whole DOS thing. We're not counting that.

Who cares? Windows 1.0, it's like the Macintosh, but worse. Yeah, it's really bad. On the console side of things, Nintendo launches the Nintendo Entertainment System and also the versus system in arcades, replacing their existing lineup of arcade cabinets that are dedicated to a single game. Now you can play a lot of games on a single system, but for three minutes. And more significantly, I would say, Atari Corp and Atari games both made their debut, both of which were. were spun out of Atari, Inc., which died horribly in 1984 and was sold off for parts. And these were the parts.

And some of the parts worked very, very well. Some of the parts, as I've discovered with my recent journey through the NES era of Atari 2,600, 7800, XEGS, and 5200 games, leaves you scratch in your head. Some weird choices there. But that's okay because Atari was primarily, Atari Corp was primarily a computer company, and we will talk about that. But first, let's start with the console side of things. And then we can tackle computers and arcade games probably next episode, because we are getting on the hour and a half mark.

So, 1985, consoles. Did you own a console in 1985? And if so, which one was it? My family owned a Colico Vision, and we had two games for it. It was very cool. In 85, I had a Colico Adam with a. the number of remainder CalicoVision games, and I had an Atari 2,600 plug-in for that thing.

I think I had about, by then, expansion module number one or number three. Indeed. And I had about, I think about, honestly, about 60 games off a discount rack from that thing by then. So, yeah, I had quite a few video games at home at the time. We had a $2,600 and a bunch of discount store games, probably like, I don't know, 30 or so that my parents had gotten for, you know,

pennies on the dollar. I was two, so I wasn't really playing them at that point, but they were there. But you could drool on the controller and make it unusable for everyone. Yeah, I mean, I started playing them when I was like three or four, so it didn't take long. But it was there. You know, by 85, I might also had the Apple 2. I can't remember for sure. We had an Apple 2C at that time.

That's not a console. Yeah, okay. What are you doing here? Atari 800 was our game console in 85, without a doubt. It's also not a console. That's halfway there. Yeah, it's a computer, but it's like a hybrid. It didn't become a console until 1987 with the XEGS.

Nah, it's a hybrid. History has completely short shifted. What's the freaking metaphor? I need him for that. Short change, the Atari 800, it should be considered like a hybrid in both categories. Anyway, we had that. We probably had an Atari 2,600 at the same time, too, although we didn't, I think we didn't really get one until later. We had one and then sold it and then got it back.

I don't remember. But we were, me and my brother were playing the Atari 800. Chris, I know. I know that you were not aware in 1985, but did your family have a console of any sort? Do you know? I wouldn't get my NES for another couple of years. But I believe that by Christmas of 1985, my aunt and uncle did get one. And that would have been like the first time I had seen, like, actual video games.

Got a console or got an NES? Got an NES, yeah. They were in New York? Was it not out? No, 85 was the test launch where their marketing team went to FAAO Schwartz and a couple of other shops in New York City and said, if you will let us sell this, we will put no risk against your stocking of it. Like, display this for us and anything that doesn't sell will buy back at full price. please please please just let us put a video game console out there we know it'll sell honest to god

and it was a success but uh unless you happen to be in new york or know someone who worked there yeah that it did it had to be 86 that they that they had it because i remember seeing it that christmas and then i got it in 87 for my birthday nice yeah so yeah consoles i mean that just rolls right into the state of the American console market in 1985, which was a disaster. It was terrible. I sat down recently with Kevin's excellent Atari Archive.org website, where he has release dates for all consoles up to the 7800 Pro system, basically broken down by release date. And from what I can tell, there were between 20 and 25 console games released in the U.S. before the NES, aside from the NES launch, which was, you know, a limited market segment.

But that's it. The entire year, like one or two games a month on average for all of 1985, because things had been so disastrous in 1983 and 84 that retailers said, we're done here. We're not buying any more of your stock. We will not take on new supplies of video games. We've got all this crap over in the corner that we're selling. at a loss. We don't want to do this anymore. This is a fad. It burst. It's no longer good. We don't want anything to do with it. And that's what made Nintendo's test marketing so challenging because they

had to find some sucker who would say, okay, fine. You can have a section of our store during the most important shopping season of the year for your stupid video game robot. And it worked out for them, but it wasn't a given thing, a sure thing. And there just weren't a lot of games being published and I think most of them were for the they weren't for the 2,600. They were for... Were they for the Colico Vision? Yes, that's right.

Clecovision had a... The first half, yeah. Yeah, because Calico got out of the game in like April or Bay. Yeah, they basically like cleared out everything that they had in the queue and said we're done. Right. So that was it. That was the American console market and it was dead. But that wasn't the case everywhere else. I mean,

Europe didn't really have a console market because they were like consoles. No, we've got our Z-X Spectrum. That's all we care about, our C-64. But in Japan, consoles were booming. This was the beginning of the Famicom boom in earnest. Third parties had jumped on the Famicom in mid-1984 with Namco and Hudson games. And those sold like gangbusters. The console itself started to really move in shops. And so all of a sudden, anyone who had any kind of video game competency whatsoever was like, we should get in on this business. And a ton of games were released for Famicom in Japan that year, just for Famicom. Plus, you know, Sega was still out there peddling the SG-1000. Epok was out there peddling its super cassette vision.

And I think was there also one cassette vision game that year? There might have been. No, I think that died off in 84. But yeah, there was still stuff happening. There was a lot of stuff happening in Japan. was a vinyl market. And that's kind of where the resurgence of consoles in the latter half of the 80s sort of took shape. Those games started coming to the West and suddenly you got the NES. You got the master system. And then you had the American companies who were like, oh, cool, we can sell our games in stores again. That's very exciting. And so you had Atari and INTV after taking over the Intellivision from Mattel, a whole resurgence. And really, that fact, Foundation was laid in 85 in Japan, and at the very end of 85, a little glimmer of the future.

Like, you know, it was basically like, here's the, the Stinger at the end of the Marvel movie for your next movie. That was the NES launch. They're assembling a team. Rob's in the lead. So a lot of cool stuff happening in consoles, even if we in America were not necessarily privy to it. The NES launched in America. Someone added that it's an underrated console who, Which of you cards did that? Was that you binge?

Me, sorry. Yeah. That's my... I know, I know. You rascal, you. I know. Sorry. It was a good joke.

I appreciate it. Yeah, the NES. What a great console. I've never played it. Just a lovable little guy. Yeah. Out there giving you the blinking lights of death. Oh, I was going to talk about wrecking crew.

Okay, we'll get there. Okay, yeah. We're kind of going through the list. First, the consoles. the NES launched in America in a tiny little, like I said, Marvel Stinger. That was October 15th. Three days later in Japan, Sega launched the Mark 3, which was actually just the SG-1000, but not.

It's a really weird, it's the SG-1,000 and Mark 3, aka Master System, have a strange relationship because they are kind of the same console, hence Sega Mark 3. It's the third iteration of the SG-1000, but at the same time, there's, they're not quite the same. They run on the same processor, the same Z-80, but they have totally different video systems. And even though the Mark 3 can run SG-1000 games, they all look terrible because they used a different video chip that does not have access to the Ti-TMS color palette that was so characteristic of the SG-1000 and the, what else was the CalicoVision. There were a few other systems

that used that same TMS chip and the Arcadia. The original MSX used it. It did. And the Arcadia, I think. Didn't it? Maybe I'm thinking of something else. Oh, no, no.

It's the Tomi Tudor used that. Ooh. Anyway. Oh, yeah. So it has this kind of like the TMS chip that all these consoles and computers used. Obviously, the T9494A also, had this very sort of soft pastel.

color palette, lots of like Sherbert oranges and gentle blues. The SG-1000, or the Mark 3, the Master System, has a much more vibrant color palette, more aggressive, high-contrast colors. So when you try to play an SG-1000 game on Mark 3 or Master System, which I made this mistake in my early SG-1000 works videos, they look like ass, like you can barely see blues against black. They just, it's not good. But technically, it is the same console. So go figure that out. There were a couple of games that Sega. published for SG-1000 that had a Mark-3 compatibility mode in them. I want to say Pitfall 2 was one of those, and they integrated support for the master

system Mark-3 color palette. So when you plug it into that system, it actually looks tolerable, not great, not as good as it's supposed to, but still, like, acceptable. You're not like, oh, my eyes, what happened? So that's the weird little thing. Anyway, the SG-1,000 also had an iteration before the Mark 3, Nintendo, or sorry, Sega totally changed up the software format. Like the original SG-1,000 console shipped with cartridges,

and somewhere along the way, Sega was like, what if we stopped doing cartridges and put everything on little credit card size chip cards instead, which, you know, it's a cool format, but it's really weird to change gears like that midstream. So in order to play SG-1,000 games from like July 85 through the end, you had to buy an adapter for your system that would plug into the cartridge port and accept the card. Then the Mark 3 came along and it had the card support built into the system. There was a card slot, but it didn't have the right color palette. Sometimes Sega is awesome and sometimes Sega just makes you say, guys, what are you doing? What are you doing?

You absolute Nimrods. You could just do whatever you wanted back then. And that's why Sammy owns them now, really. I guess so, yeah. But, you know, those little cards gave us Q cards by extension. No, absolutely. It's a great format. I love the format.

It's so good, so compact. It takes up so little room on the shelf. It's so satisfying. Like, that card format was what got me to create SG 1000 works because I bought a few of those little card games. It was like, man, these are so good. I want a full shelf of them. And then I said, why don't I just do an entire video series and book about this?

and that's because I'm a weird obsessive dork. Don't be like me, kids. It's a bad idea. The one other game system that launched in 1985, console-wise, was a handheld called the Epic, Epoch Game Pocket Computer, which was basically the midpoint between Microvision and Game Boy. It was a very chunky little guy, basically, like, imagine the original Atari Links and then make it 50% bigger, but give it a tiny black and white screen. But the tiny black and white screen had like 84 by 84 pixel resolution, which was way better than the 16 by 16 of the microvision. So it was kind of an iteration toward what would become the Game Boy. Yeah, it had a high-endif resolution.

You could play a real game on it. And that was delightful. Yeah. Or a scramble clone. I love that awesome feature it has where the cartridges slide under a translucent window. So you can see what cartridge is playing while it's plugged in. It's useless, but it looks really cool. It's great industrial design.

Yeah, absolutely. But it was a huge failure for some reason, maybe the price. I don't know. But they only made like five cartridges for it at launch, and that was it. Maybe it was a huge failure just because it was too big. I mean, there's probably that too, but I don't know. It's a joke. It's comfortable in the hands.

It was three feet wide. It's pretty comfortable in the hands. Jeremy sold me one of his, and I'm deeply thankful for it. I actually... You had one, really? I think it's a mystery. I still have one. They're really rare.

It's one of mine. I have two, had two. Now Jared has one. Okay. Thanks, Jeremy. You're welcome. Ben, do you want my other one? Yeah, that'd be great.

I'd love it. Okay. Thanks. I have a history of this. Like, Chris Covel had this early. Like, when I was doing slideshows about history of, you know, this is like 2007. And there's no information about this console online. I was doing a history of these handheld games.

And I had to get a lot of information from Chris Covell about it. And it was just so weird for Westerners at the time. But, yeah, you characterized it perfectly as a midpoint between the microvision and the Gameboy. Dot Matrix. Indeed. LCD. Sorry. Yeah.

So those are the systems. Most of the games that came out in 85 of note were Nintendo games. I'm trying to think. Are there any Atari 2,600 games worth mentioning? What do you think? Cosmic computer is pretty fun, I guess. I like that one. Yeah, it's kind of like Defender, but a crazy taxi?

Yeah, like you're picking up people to take them to work, I guess, but in space. It's a very neat concept. My understanding is it was one that Activision had developed earlier and didn't feel like it was worth releasing. But in 85, they wanted to sort of test the waters on the market, see if there was enough to hold new games. So they put that and Ghostbusters out. And clearly it was not because they did not make any more 2,600 games for several years. Yeah, I mean, the real question is, how did they get those into stores in the first place? Because buyers were like, uh-uh.

I guess retailers were like, well, Activision. Oh, and here is a game for a console that has millions. of units installed throughout the country, based on the most popular movie in the world, I guess we could do that. So I could see how they got Ghostbusters into stores. Cosmic Commuter, just maybe kited on that, like, it was a two-for-one deal. I don't know. And I guess the Kalikovision game Allusions is pretty cool.

It's like a, God, I don't know how to describe it. It's sort of like a puzzly-type game. It was originally written for the Intellivision. That one did not come out. but the production house that made it, they also had a Calico version and they did sell that one to Calico. That's pretty cool.

It's worth checking out. the remnant American systems, but let's talk about the Nintendo stuff. Ben, you seem to want to talk about wrecking crew, Mario's final freelance job before becoming a true hero. Yeah, I changed my mind. Let's just... Okay, so let's not talk about wrecking crew. I can recap it.

Okay, executive summary of wrecking crew starred Mario as a demolition worker with Luigi available in multiplayer. Is that true? I don't think that's true. It is, yeah. Why did I write that down? The versus version may be simultaneous. Right. I think it's alternate.

Anyway, I don't know. I don't like other people, so I never play multiplayer. Yeah, I think it's not simultaneous for my ever, forever frustration, because I wanted to play it with my brother. It introduced Forman Spike as an early Mario antagonist, which is, he's interesting that he appears in the movie, Super Mario movie, but he originated in wrecking crew. So he's like a yellow, sort of precursor to Wario in a way. It's really interesting. I love that there's a Mario game where your primary antagonist is your boss. That's great.

Yeah. Someone was probably working through some stuff. Yeah, the role that Forman Spike has in the game is interesting because you're trying to take down, you know, this skyscraper or whatever. You're part of the demolition crew, and he's your boss. But while you're trying to like break things apart and avoiding angry, sentient ring. and eggplants and whatever, as one does, he's out there not trying to get work done. He just, like, comes up behind you, like on the backside of the stage and tries to find the panels that you're trying to knock down, and then he'll hit those panels with a hammer and

cause you to drop to the bottom of the stage, which in some stages means you just have to climb back up and get back to work. But in other stages means that you're screwed because they are constructed in a way where you have to work your way down and there's no way back up. So he can be very frustrating. It's a strange action puzzle game. Yes.

And it came out in Japan about, I want to say, like, four months before Super Mario Brothers and is not made by the EAD team under Miyamoto. It was a Nintendo R&D one game under Gunpeyokoi and so forth. So it's got that kind of doing its own weird little thing with Mario style that you would see later

in Super Mario Land. So it's a quirky little title, but it is, you know, one of the mini NES games to feature Mario at launch. So there is something to be said for that. There's also something that we said that it had a level editor

mode, which is really cool. And if you had played it on Famicom, you could record your level designs to tape. And if you did not have a Famicom, because we did not have support on the NES for the tape cassette drive that only came out in

Japan, you could try to save it, and it would hang the game forever, the end. Yeah, nice. Love that. Oh, no, it would pause. It would, like, write to tape, but no tape was attached, and then it would just go on with the game after a few minutes. But if I tried to read from tape,

then it would screw you over, because it never got, like, code, so it just hang. I wonder if anybody's ever hacked up cassette tape support for the American NES somehow so they could use it. I'm sure it's possible. they'd have to, I think it would have to use the pins on the bottom of the system. Yeah, but I think that that would be possible.

But is it worth doing? Absolutely not. Fascinating. All right. So some other interesting games, balloon fight, all-time classic, total rip-off of joust, but better. Joust doesn't have balloon trip. And it doesn't have hiptonaka music. And wasn't, that was also an early, the guy.

You know? Yeah, a Wada game. Yep. That was the game that gave Super Mario Brothers its swimming physics. Because the story there is that the programmer, the arcade version of balloon fight, couldn't get the flight motion smooth enough. He wasn't using the right form of math. So they called in Iwada because Iwada had actually programmed a

Famicom version, NES version of Joust, which originally reached market. Back in the early days, when Nintendo was trying to convince Atari to distribute the NES in America, they had Iwada code versions of some American games that they could show it to Atari to say, hey, look, our system can play all these games that Americans love and that you have on your systems, but they're better. And one of those was joust. So he knew how to do that. do the physics right, the flight physics. So they called him in, and he did a patch job on versus balloon fight and made the flight physics really good. And then when it came time to create Super Mario Brothers, the flight physics were just carried over, like that code was carried

over to the swimming mechanics and Super Mario Brothers. So that's a fun little detail. I totally blinked out on the name of the programmer. But he was like, he was the guy. for Nintendo. He programmed so many of those early NES games. Oh, well. Let's see. Over on Sega side, early in the year, you have Girls Garden. A game programmed and designed by a future felon

by the name of Yuji Naka. And it's a pretty fun little game. You have to run around as a little guy, or no, as a little girl, collecting flowers, but only when they're in full bloom, avoiding bears that want to eat you. and once you have enough flowers, you take them to a boy, and he says, oh, I love you, and decides not to run away with the girl.

The other girl, who is the time meter, she's slowly making her way toward the boy at the top of the screen, and you have to get all the flowers to him before she gets there. Otherwise, he's just a fickle asshole, and he's just going to dump you for that other girl because you didn't have enough flowers. That's how I won my wife of flowers like that is exactly the same. Fantastic. Good job on that. Thank you. Were you eaten by bears at any point?

Almost several times, yes, while climbing a mountain. Yeah. Over on Famicom, you had Brooder Bun's Raid on Bungling Bay programmed originally for C64 by Will Wright. Hudson brought it to Famicom and then later to NES. Actually, Bruderbund. Anyway, they had a big success with loadrunner, so they said, What's next? Let's do another Bruderbund game. For some reason, they picked right on Bungling Bay, which is not that fun a game. But it was a technical Marvel because it had free scrolling in all directions, which people had not seen on Famicom to that point, or maybe on any console. On the Japanese train tracks. No, you might be thinking of locomotion. These are games that I only know from watching NES works. You're a helicopter in this one, and you have to go around bombing enemy bases. Meanwhile, the enemies are like sending flights after your. aircraft carrier, so you have to defend your aircraft carrier while bombing enemy bases.

It's very challenging. It's fun enough, and I like it, but the story's been told many times. He had more fun designing the levels than he did making the game, and that's where SimCity eventually came from. So also of note on consoles, both SG-1000 and Famicom got Space Invaders. It took this long for a proper, authorized, licensed port of Space Invaders to make it to Japanese consoles, which is kind of unbelievable. The game launched in 78 in arcades and was like the big thing, and everyone had a

Space Invaders knockoff, but the actual game didn't show up until 85. That's a, like, what were they thinking? They could have made so much money before that, but they didn't. Let's see. We had the debut of a little company called Micronix with elevator action for Famicom, but their version, everyone dumps on Micronics and justifiably so, because they made pretty bad ports of games, but their elevator action for NES and Famicom is way better than Ghost Studio Tose's elevator action for SG-1000, which shipped at the same

time. I do not recommend the SG-1000 version of elevator action unless you hate life and everyone around you. Konami finally ducked into the console business. They gave us hyper-Olympic and hyper-sports for Famicom and SG-1000. on Famicom, they released a little controller that just had a button. Two buttons, actually. Two buttons. No D-pad or anything. It's just two buttons, one to run, one to jump.

And you cannot play apparently a Hyper Sports or Hyper Olympic without this special controller called the Hyper Shot. So that's a fun fact. That's hilarious. I did not know that. Nintendo was prepping for the American launch. They released Stackup and GiroMite for Famicom. One of those games is pretty fun, and the other is not actually complete.

And they were so eager to just get those out the door and get them into the U.S. market that they did not give them new title screens for the American version. So when you plug them into your NES, you get robot block and robot gyro, even though that's not what it says on the box. Cool thing. They have the adapter. in them. That's what the the gyromites have the Famicom adapter

built into the cartridge, which is really cool. Yep. Great for pillaging. Let's see. Other stuff that came out that year. Do I need to talk about the Tower of Draga again? I feel like probably. Yes. Absolutely. Yes, you do. No. No, no. Do it.

Okay. Bench says no. I always listen to Benj. Okay, fine. Do it. I'm outvoted anyway. You always listen to me. This isn't a true. That's never been true. I thought just this once I could make an exception. Yeah, thanks. No, the Tower Dragha was kind of Namco's next big thing after Zevius. It was an attempt to basically turn the action RPG, which was budding and taking form into an arcade-style game.

And it was pretty cool in arcades. It was pretty much impossible to beat just by sitting down and saying, I'm going to play this game. Like, no, it's impossible. Everything is hidden. It's unforgiving. It's unrelenting. You're a little guy with a sword. and you move slowly around the dungeon.

And to attack things, you have to lower your shield and walk at it with your sword outstretched, and it's probably going to kill you instead. But every stage has something hidden in it. And if you know the secret for making that hidden thing reveal itself, you can walk faster, you can have a stronger sword, you can have a mouth magic potion to make you invincible or restore your health. You get special rings, you get a pickaxe that let you break through walls.

But there's no way to know how to make you invincible. to find these things until you stumble upon them yourself. And with every level, the secret to finding the things becomes more and more arcane. So people began sharing notes in arcades and like leaving notebooks at the Tower of Draaga arcade machines where they would say, you know, level three bump into the northernmost wall and a thing will appear. And so that's how people kind of conquered this game in arcades. But it feels like it was a much more natural fit on consoles because it's a very demanding game, very time-consuming. And so it kind of became a big hit on Famicom and seems to have been a direct inspiration for The Legend of Zelda, among other games.

And it was inspired itself by Heid by T&E Soft a couple of years before for MSX. We in America know Hydeleid is a terrible game that came out in 1989. But when you played in 1984, when it actually shipped for home computers, you're like, oh, this was a pretty big deal and pretty cool at the time. time. Tower of Draga was an attempt to kind of distill that into an arcade essence and make it more direct and just like a level by level progression. And so that was a big influential game. The best thing about Tower of Draga is that it gave us Quest of Key its sequel. And the best thing about Quest of Key is it gave us R&O trying to beat Quest of Key on Game Center CX, which is one of the most fiendishly rewarding bits of sadism I've ever witnessed.

What's that show in general, really? Yeah, it is. But I think I think it's a particular highlight of the series. Top five episode, I think, is our Notre Dame Be Quest of Key. I'll have to watch that sometime. It's pretty great. Let's see. Also out there was Battle City for Famicom, another Namco game. And this one I discovered is like the most popular game on Russian clone systems, the dindies and so forth. It is like, when I published a video on this, I got so many comments from people who were like, oh, I played this on a clone card. I didn't know what this was. So the clone cartridges or the bootleg cartridges had a bunch of those Mapper Zero games, the ones that didn't need memorandum. remanagement chips. And they would put, you know, 20, 40, 80 of those on a single cartridge. And for whatever reason, Tank Command, or sorry, Battle City is just hugely popular in certain

territories. And people would not stop telling me how much they loved it. It was really an interesting insight into the rest of the world. And, you know, someone else's lived experiences that are very different from what we had here in the U.S. And they're all wrong. Are they? Hey, this is the bootleg MVP, man. Invalid opinions. It's a completely invalid. You can't invalidate that. I completely disavow all of their feelings.

Wow, rude. Hey, isn't that like a tank clone? A tank? Yeah, but you can blow up the levels. There are water hazards. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's a sequel to... There's also a level of construction.

It's a sequel to Tank Battalion, which is an arcade game. I used to play a lot as a kid. And really, by sequel, it's more of a little. remake. But you're in a like, think it's more like Pac-Man in a destructible maze and instead of running over dots you're shooting tanks. That's kind of what's going on.

That's a pretty good description. Yeah. And they love it in Russia. They're not shooting the dots? Also in 85 Super Mario Brothers. We don't really need to talk about that. No one cares. Never played it. That was kind of a big deal. It was the best-selling game for a long time in

Japan. It was the best-selling book, the strategy guide. was number one bestseller. It was huge. Everyone was like, oh, this is the game we have to rip off now. And we in America take it for granted because it was a launch game for the NES. It was like the pack-in. It was the free game. Who cares? It was fun. But, you know, after a while you get sick of it, you want to play something else. But in Japan, that was like everything that the Famicom was leading up to two years of game development and learning and software design refinement led to Super Mario Brothers, the

apex of what you could do with the Famicom hardware. And it was mind-blowing at the time. So Americans, don't take that game for granted. It was kick an ass. That's my claim. Fortunately, Americans take nothing for granted ever.

That's never got me some trouble. For granted. Also of note, Challenger by Hudson. Has anyone played this? I have. Yeah. The game where Indiana Jones rescues Princess Leah from Pink Darth Vader on a train. Yeah, on a train. I try to like Challenger. I can see what they're going for, but I don't actually find it fun. What are they going for, Jared?

They're going for trying to create something that's more story-driven that's not Donkey Kong climbing a hill. They're going for trying to recapture something almost cinematic. I mean, this is a game that's really trying to create seats out of movies. And unfortunately, they don't understand that to do that, you have to make the character capable of being precisely controlled or reliably controlled. He's worse. He's more finicky than Arthur and Ghost and Goblins. I've never played this.

You're trying to do precise movements with him, and it just doesn't work. It also has dual format perspectives. Like, there's the action scenes that are side-scrolling and, you know, some platforming when you go into caverns and stuff. But then once you get past the first stage, you're in an overworld, like a top-down world. and you're running around exploring. And it's very abstract because you go someplace and you're like, oh, this is going to take me to the next level.

And it's actually a pit that kills you. Yep. It drops you into a chasm. It's really cool. Wow. No, it's interesting. But yes, the platforming control in this game is ass. And it had the poor fortune to ship like a week after Super Mario Brothers,

which had perfect controls. Right. Best in class. No one had ever done it like that before. So bad luck Hudson. But worse luck was muscle tag team match, which came out in Japan as Kinnikuman, a tie-in with the anime. The Japanese version is only different in terms of the title and the fact that it has an actual Nazi as one of the characters you can select. They took him out for the American version.

Let's see. There was Spalunker, which was part of this kind of trend of turning popular American computer games into console games that were incredibly difficult and unfriendly and generally not much fun, but became kind of. of like begrudging classics in Japan because everyone was buying games and anything that made it to market in 85 sold like a million units. So everyone has played Spalunker and they don't necessarily like it, but it still has traction and they keep remaking it and putting new versions out. There was a multiplayer version for Switch a few years back, so that tells you everything. Last time I was in Tokyo, I played Spolunker in my trade machine just because I was in Japan. that felt right.

Yeah, the Famicom got a lot of PC ports, actually. There was Bokoska Wars, which was kind of the first real-time strategy game and makes no sense if you're just like, pick up the ROM and play it without instructions. And so it's become sort of this infamous hated game for people who did their NES ROM trawls back in the day. But, you know, it's another one of those like Hyde-Lide. You look into the legacy and, oh, you kind of understand what's going on there. Bomberman started as an MSX game.

A little guy in suspenders and a bowler hat eventually became the load runner guy and turned into a robot or something. I don't know. Anyway, Bomberman, it's kind of timeless, very popular. Single player only in that first one, right? Yep, yep. Not actually that much fun. But he's the guy. And there's a tie-in to the sequel or to the like a connection at the end of Load Runner.

Or no, at the end of Bomberman, isn't it? That's right. Yeah. He says it becomes load runner at the end. That's right. He finally escapes the maze and becomes load runner. Another PC port, Dexter, which was really, really cool on computers. It was basically like Macross the video game with a transforming, transforming robot jet fighter that could shoot cool spiraling lasers around the screen.

It could not do that on Famicom and his kind of butt. Yeah, it's not great. No. Yeah, the Famicom has. trouble drawing a line like that, doesn't it? Isn't that the main problem with the laser? There's a lot of problems, really. But, yeah, it was just a poor choice.

But again, that one sold like a million copies and everyone hates it. But they owned it and they still have fondness for it. So that gets remade too. Sokobon made it to both Epoch Game Pocket Computer and the SG-1000. Sokobon is awesome. It's like one of the greatest games ever made. See, I know you're just trolling me now. You're just trolling me.

Sokobon, if you've ever done a serious study of the Game Boy platform, is your nemesis, actually. I can say this from personal experience. Why are there a million Sokobon games? Is that what you're trying to say? There's so many. So many. In the early days, that's all it was. Later it became all Pokemon games.

But at the beginning, it was on Sokabon games. See, I do not suffer in the same way you do, Jeremy. I was not forced to play through every single game ever released and make videos about it. Yeah, forced. That's right. That's what happened to me. Jeremy, has there ever been a Pokemon, Sokobon? No, I don't believe there has. Although, maybe in one of the Pokemon mystery dungeon games, because a trademark of Sharon the Wanderer, mystery dungeon, is that there is always a Sokobon mode. So it's entirely possible that that is something that they put in the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games. I don't know.

I even going to have to look that up. Also, coming over from computers to Famicom, we're going to wrap this. up, Portopio Rinzoku Satujinjikin, the original murder mystery game. It was a huge hit on both computers and Famicom. Most importantly, it laid the groundwork for Dragon Quest. I've talked about this a lot, so I'm not going to, I'm not going to belabor the point. If you want to know more about it, go listen to the rest of Retronauts because I talk about it every episode. And then finally, 1942 came to Famicom, courtesy of my chronics, and it also sucks ass. It is an assault on the ears and all the other senses.

Even your sense of smell. You're like, what is that? River Raid is a far better shooter than the 1942 on the NES. Yeah. River Raid on the 2,600 blows. River Raid was 84, though, right? 82. 82.

Heck. Yeah. My God. All right. Go back in time, play River Raid. Avoid 1942. But that's another one. Everyone bought it both in the U.S.

and Japan. And so there is this habit people have of regurgitating it. Like, they brought this game of all games, all Capcom selections, they could have brought to Game Boy Color. Digital Eclipse was like, let's do that in Ghost and Goblins, the terrible Micronix games. Why would they do that to us? I don't know. You want me to go yell at mine? I think it's because there is no God and we have been abandoned by the universe.

This is completely true. Because I don't remember Take take me home Because I don't remember Take take me on Oh no Because I've been a prisoner All my life

And I can see you Anyway console titles of 1985. There were many, many more notable arcade games and computer games in 1985, but we can't keep going like this because it's just been two hours of me forcing all of you to listen to me ramble, and my rambling is getting worse and worse. So we need to draw a line here for 85 and come back, reconvene some other day when all of you can talk and I can just sit there.

And like Chris, I will not say anything wrong because I will just listen. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed listening to Jeremy talk, as I always do. It's been a good episode, in my opinion. I've enjoyed this discussion, but I just feel guilty because there's been a lot of me just holding court. And I never want retronauts to be just that. So next time, I need you guys to sometimes rest control away. Ben, you got off to a great start.

You were like, we're going to talk about the Altair 8800 now. Yeah, I was going to force you. I was going to force you to talk about the Amiga and the Atari, but that's going to have to wait. Too late. And then I've got this fever going and I just sort of started to sag. You need more cowbell. We didn't even mention dokey, dokey, penguin land. Jeremy, how could you?

We didn't. It's very sad. That's a good game. We can talk about it under the auspices of the SC-3,000 when we talk about computers. How's that? Sounds good. All right. We'll get back to that.

What I want to do is jump ahead to 86 when my shall comes out and then we'll do this great deadly towers, you know, 30 minutes of deadly towers. talking about that next year. We'll look forward to that next year. But in the meantime... What's the Hionkio Alien retrospective? That's 79, so we've got to get to... There is no way there's still...

There's no way there's still going to be a world in in 2029. Come on you. We'll see. We'll see. The Hionkeo aliens will be there. I think the cockroaches will continue downloading retronauts. I have pha-a-a-a-i. All the super-intelligent AI will love this show, and they'll learn from it, and they will

They'll teach their children about it and replicate us, and it'll be great. So we'll all live forever. Shodon is going to keep us around for entertainment. It'll be like, I have no mouth, but I must podcast. So I think with that, we need to call today. Thanks, everyone, for listening to this two-plus hour discursive assault on the senses regarding the years 1975 and and to some degree, they're video games. I have been Jeremy Parrish, but most importantly, this has been retronauts.

And because this is a public-facing episode, if you would like to hear more discourse on video games, such as last year and the year before, when we talked about the games of 74, 84, 83, 804, I don't know, anyway, we do this thing every year. I've kind of lost my oxygen in this room, so I don't remember what I'm saying. but you can hear more coherent conversations about video games by going to Retronauts.com or better yet subscribing to patreon.com. You can support the show through your subscriptions, not your prescriptions, your subscriptions. You can buy me a prescription to an oxygen bottle with your support. That's something that would be very helpful. Get some blood glucose going on to my brain.

So yeah, that's Patreon.com slash Retronauts. to us support the show. If you subscribe at the $5 a month or more levels, then you get bonus episodes every other week day, every other Friday. That's it. Yes. And on weekends every weekend, you get bonus content, little mini podcast and a column by Diamond Fight. Lots of good stuff. Discord access. I highly recommended. As inflation continues, Retronauts, patron subscriptions continue to be one of the best entertainment deals in the world. So that's patreon.com slash retronauts. That's the pitch.

Gentlemen, please tell us where we can find you. Ben, you look like you're about to pass out, kind of like I feel. So please let us know where we can find you before you fall over. I am everywhere. I am like a mist that pervades the universe. You will find me wherever. Wherever you look, I will be there.

And it will be good and abiding. So, Jared, where can we find you? I'd look for me over at Blue Sky now. I think that's the best place to find me because I think my days on, I've been off Twitter for years now, but I think my days on threads are coming to an end as well, looks like. So, yeah, come find me on Blue Sky on Petty, comma, Jared. And I do hope you will come find me on Blue Sky because I like talking with people. And if you want to come by and say hello, Petty, comma, Jared there.

Chris, where can we find you online? Well, if you'd like to hear me talking, because we didn't get to the G.I. Joe game for Commodore 64. No, that's next time. We'll get there. That's what I was going to talk about primarily. I'm sorry. Sorry. But you can hear me talking quite a bit every week on the War Rocket Ajax podcast, a podcast about comics, pop culture, occasionally video games, table talk games, pro wrestling, but mostly comic books with my co-host Matt Wilson. And you can also find me on Apocrypal's, the podcast where two nonbelievers read through the Bible, but we trying not to be jerks about it, a comedy show where we treat scripture and apocrypha

and hagiographies exactly the same way that we treat Spider-Man comics, but you have to understand that we treat Spider-Man comics very seriously. You can also find my writing at t-H-E-I-S-B.com. I recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of starting my blog in 2005 by deleting everything. And now there are two, I think, very good pieces up there, one of which I know Jeremy will like if he reads it because it's about Star Trek. I do like some Star Trek. And so does Kevin Bunch. Where can we find you on the internet? I'm on Blue Sky at Atariarchive.org, which is also my website and my YouTube series and my book that you can get through limited run and a Patreon. So, yeah, check me out.

Jared, or not Jared, sorry, binge, where can we find you on the internet? I am no longer a corporal being. I have become part of the fabric of the jewels. So you can't find binge anywhere. Sorry, everyone. You can find me. Bengeedwards.com. Oh, there was that.

There you are. That's B-I-N-G-E, right? Yes. We're going to read all of your work in one shot. My mother-in-law actually thinks that my name is spelled like that. I kid you not. That's okay. my in-laws are from Vietnam, and they have the hardest time with the name Jeremy.

Like, that is just not something that is natural in that language. So I'm with you. We love them anyway. The pains of in-laws who struggle with our names. Anyway, you can find me at Blue Sky as jperish. That blue sky. I just use J. Parrish, not Jeremy Parrish, because I understand it's a tough name for some people. So J. Parrish,

blue sky, dot social. You can find me on YouTube. Unfortunately, I am Jeremy Parrish there, but if you can look up NES works or say, Gaiden, you'll find me. What else? Oh, yes, here on Retronauts, I do this. And finally, you can find me also at Limited Run Games, doing

things like drawing Castlevania maps in exhaustive detail. I need a break from the Castlevania maps, honestly. I never thought I'd say that, but Lordy. Have you ever done Rigar? I started to, yeah, actually. I love RIGAR so much. If you do that, I'll buy it from you.

Like, I'll buy a print or the original. If you do a RIGAR map, man, I love RaiGAR. All right. It's a fever talking. I will keep that in mind. Yeah. Fever talking. I'm never going to map deadly towers, however.

Absolutely. It's okay. It's a terrible map. I mean, the maps make no sense, really, if you think about it. It's true. And they're so big. There's like a thousand rooms. Stupid.

All right. This has been it for this episode of Retronauts, but I'm going to try to get these people together again someday to talk about stuff that everyone can weigh in on, and it won't just be me blasting you with the words. So please look forward to that. Have a nice day. Go take a nap. We are the world.

We are the children. Yes, sir. We are the ones that make a pride of me. So let's not give it. There's a choice we'll make it. We're saving our own lives It's true We make a better day

Just you and me We are the world We are the children We are children We are the ones To make the brighter I'm saying