Retronauts - 678: Years-in-Review Revue: 1985 Pt. II

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

Break up with basic browsers. Get Opera GX here: https://operagx.gg/Retronauts Sponsored by Opera GX! Jeremy Parish, Benj Edwards, Kevin Bunch, Chris Sims, and Jared Petty channel the power of five to continue their discussion of the ’5s (1975, ’85, and ’95). This time, the focus is on the pivotal gaming events of the year 1985. 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 episode of Retronauts is brought to you by Opera GX. This week in Retronauts, a five-finger discount through time. Hi, everyone, it's Retronauts, and this is Jeremy Parrish, and actually I should have workshopped that introduction a little more, but we don't have time. We've got to get moving. There's so much to cover this episode. We've got to wrap this up. No time for workshopping jokes, just bad jokes all the way through, and that's why Benj is here. Hey, oh! Hey, oh! Yeah, all right. No, anyway, hi, everyone. It's time for Retronauts. This is the second part of our annual years in review review. Last time we did this, we got through 1975 and part of 1985. This time, somehow, we have to wrap up 1985 and all of 1995 to look at all the many things that were happening 30 years ago in video games. I put together the list, and it was just the highlights, and it's a lot. It's going to be a doozy of a podcast. So here, with me, doozying, we also have the aforementioned humorist.

Benge Edwards I just want to warn everybody This is not going to be a fact-based episode for me I'm just going to go by gut feelings on each of these games Because I did not prepare And everyone in my household has been sick for a month constantly It's been crazy So that's my excuse

Yeah I mean it's just like We live in the AI era And nothing is reliable anymore So you do work in AI journalism So I feel like it's just bleeding into your real life at this point It is everything I say is going to be transcribed directly from chat GPT. You cannot trust anything I'm about to tell you.

This is four people talking and also binges technical hallucinations. That's true. Yes. And who was that? Who is that? Who is that also here in Raleigh, North Carolina? Hi. Yeah, this is Jared Petty here in snowy, Raleigh, North Carolina.

It's a lovely day. I don't say that very often. Yeah, it really is. An unusual, splendid wonder to have a little bit of snowfall. And so we're all huddled in our various kitchens across the town here doing what we can to get our daily labors done. And I get to talk about video games, so I'm pretty happy about that. Sweet.

And also here on the East Coast, although that does not look like your kitchen. No, and it is unfortunately snow-free up here. It's Kevin Bunch. Yeah. It all tracked south of me. Interesting. I didn't know that was allowed. Well, welcome, Kevin.

Welcome. We can tell you what snow is like, because I'm sure you never see it up in Baltimore. Never seen it in my entire life. Never once. And finally, someone who deliberately moved to the snowy trackless wastes of the North, the Midwest North, whatever that's called. Mid-North. Golden Eye and I lay snow leather.

What's up? It's Chris Hems. What was that? That was the theme song from 1995's Golden Eye, baby. Was that a 1995 movie? Okay. How I watched you from the shadows as a child. Yeah, they went a long time to make that game after that movie came out.

They did. Well, there was no N64 to put it on in 1995. And we're going to talk about that by its absence, because we're not going to talk about the N64, because that didn't exist yet. Everyone thought I was going to be called Ultra 64 in 1995. And weren't we all wrong? Yes, we were. Yes, we were. Yeah, stupid people.

So anyway, in 1985, we've already talked about console games, but we need to move along to talk about arcade games. Because even though the console industry in America was dying, perhaps even dead up until the end of the year, there was actually quite a bit happening in arcades. And even though arcades were not as big a deal as they had been the years before that, I was still going to arcades at any opportunity. any time I could eat food adjacent to video games, I would beg my parents to do that. And they probably didn't enjoy it because usually the food you eat adjacent to video games was pizza. But they indulged us often enough

that I could still enjoy video games and putt putt. So there is a big rundown of arcade games. I'm going to go through this list and everyone has put their name next to a few items that they want to talk about. When we get to that item, that person is going to jump in and chat. So arcade games, kind of going alphabetically, we have arm wrestling by Nintendo,

reusing, repurposing the punch-out technology so that you could arm wrestle a guy called Bearhugger, I believe. Is that correct? Was Bearhugger in the Canadian guy in arm wrestling? No bald bull was under a mask. I don't remember if anyone else was. I've never actually seen one of these cabs myself. Oh, I've actually seen.

There was a place. that had arm wrestling in one of the aforementioned bad pizza places at the front of the store next to the Nintendo love tester, actually. So I would see arm wrestling every time I came in. And it actually replaced their punchout machine. And I remember punch out more vividly because it had the audio that kept saying, body bow, bloody bow, right, right. Arm wrestling didn't have that memorable snap to it, but they did keep it there a lot longer. Let's see. Let's see. armored scrum object, a.k. A.k. A.k.

Mediocre vertical shooter. Hooray. Bank Panic. Sega's answer to Wild Gunman, a light gun game without a light gun. Have you guys played this one? A little bit. I've never played Bank Panic, no. Little guys pop up in a circular bank vault

rotating around and there are 12 doors opening into this bank vault. And people come to the door and they all open up at once, you choose which are the three doors you want to be on the screen at a given moment. And when the doors open, it's either criminals or innocent people there to make a deposit. And you have to press one of three buttons left, right or center, to shoot the bad guys, but not the innocent people. But you can't shoot the bad guys too early or they say that was not fair. It's very, yeah. Is there an S-G-1,000 port of this, me. Yep. And also, it showed up on master system in Europe.

Okay. That's where I've seen it from. I've never seen the arcade version. That was based on an arcade game. Galloping Ghost has it, so I've seen it there and played it a little bit. It's all right. It's kind of fun. All right. From Namco, we have Baraduke, not related to Marmaduke. It is instead related to Mr. Driller, a space game where you play as a proto-Samus Aaron floating around, shooting stuff, and there's a little Pac-Man looking guys. So interesting. Let's see. Champion Pro Wrestling by Sega, a game that started an NSG-1000, and they said, you know what? This technology, basically a KalikoVision, would make an amazing arcade cabinet in the year 1985. And they did that, by God.

But Sega also put out an adaptation of Bruder Bun's choplifter, which was much more impressive because they put that on the System 1 board, I believe, which was essentially like a juiced-up master system before the master system. And this is like the branching timeline of choplifter. There's choplifter with an exclamation point. That's the authentic computer version. And there's choplifter without an exclamation point. And that's the Sega-inspired arcade version, which generally is more actiony, more fair,

has more varied environments. Like you go out into the ocean and things like that. I like the Sega ones better. But I will say that the original Apple II version of Choplifter is. timeless and has analog controls, which none of the other versions that I'm aware of have makes all the difference. Yeah, a second choplifter's a load of fun. It's a really sprightly version of the game.

No, no, load of run was a different brooder-er-bund game. Yeah, this version of Choplifter made it to Master System and is pretty damn good. Yeah. All right. So now we get to something that someone has highlighted. Kevin Bunch, take it away. So I highlighted the City Connection. So it's an interesting, weird little game where you are a woman named Clarice driving her car around the world.

I'm pretty sure you're just a blonde dude who smokes cigarettes. I have it on good authority. Yes, they did cut her out of the NES version for stupid reasons, I presume. But anyway, so you're driving this little, what is it, like a Honda Cs? It's a Honda City, yeah. Yeah. So you're driving that around. I don't think it's officially licensed, though.

I've looked, and I can't find any indication that they actually said, hey, Honda, let's work out a deal where we use your car. They were just like, here's the Honda City. We're calling the game City Connection. Honda gets no money, though. Put it together. Very brazier out. So anyway, your goal is to drive over all of the roads on every given stage and sort of paint on

them. So it's got sort of that minor 20, 49er thing going or crush roller, except it's a 2D like side scrolling platform kind of game. Yeah, I would say it's a flicky alike. Yeah. And at the same time, a bunch

of cops are trying to stop you. You stop the cops by throwing oil cans at them and then ramming them, which is always fun. Highly illegal. Highly illegal, but Clarice doesn't care. She's an international criminal. Occasionally a cat. See, my theory

my theory on Clarice is that she is the same Clarice in Lupan the Third, Castle of Caliostro. She, after being rescued, she was like, I also would like to live a life of crime like Lupon the third. And so she experiences that life of crime by driving across the world's major cities and defacing the roads. Well, what is she's, in fact, Clarice Starling, and she's fleeing from Hannibal Lecter, perhaps from one city to the next, searching for vital clues to track him down.

That's a time paradox, because silence. so the lambs would not be for another, like, five or six years. Yeah, that's the sequel to City Connection, obviously. She goes straight. Cannibal could the FBI. But, so this is a game I never played back in the day, because I have only ever seen the cabinet, like, one time, and I didn't have the NES version.

But I remember back in college, a friend of mine had this on her, like, bootleg NES clone that her family got from Taiwan when she was a kid. So she's like, yeah, that game's great. We used to play it all the time until the clone NES literally melted and stopped working. So that inspired me when I finally took a trip to Japan to track down a Famicom car, which was super cheap. And she was right, the game is a lot of fun. And it's on Arcade Archives now. I think it might be one of my most played Switch games for whatever reason.

Yeah, I really like the arcade version. The Jellico port is got that Jalico Jank. for good or bad. There's a little bit of fun to it and also a little bit of it. But that arcade game is just delightfully kinetic. Painting the road, you turn really fast, but you've got momentum. So you're always afraid of a collision. But also, if you pull the stick in just the right moment, you can drop the oil can

and get a guy who's going to barrel into you win. Instead, he spins out and lose. It's great. It's got a great feel. Yeah, I really like the arcade game a lot. And the NES one's pretty good, although the audio is very screechy. And this is one of those games that my small child really likes me playing, because he likes games with cars in them.

And he likes games where you cause mischief. So this is sort of the ultimate experience for him. And it's a game where you have to be mindful of cats on the road. It's very civic-minded. If you hit a cat, you lose. And it starts playing. It's sad music plays. Yeah, the Japanese kid's song, I stepped on a cat, which is very fun.

and a little dark. All right. So City Connection, one of the minor classics of the era. Let's see. Also, in 85, we had Commando from Capcom. Just a frontline clone no one's ever heard of. Digduck 2, which goes from side scroller. to top-down view and you break away islands.

It's kind of like they said, oh, Quicks, that's a good game. We should just rip that off with Dig-Dug. Very strange choice. Let's see. I put Dragon Buster on here, but that was actually 84, my mistake. The Empire Strikes Back. I never actually saw this. It was a conversion of Star Wars, correct?

It is. Yeah, it's a conversion. I've never actually seen this in arcades. Oh, really? I think Galloping Ghost has it, but I feel like that's the time I've ever seen it. It is a hell of a game. I've gotten to play quite a bit of it. I've been very lucky to see.

They used to have one at Walt Disney World. I go play when I lived in Orlando. And it's a delightful take on Star Wars. It changes things up just enough that you still know how to fly the ship, but everything you're targeting, everything you're moving against now is really more difficult. You're taking down Imperial Walkers. You're taking down Imperial Probe Droid. You're flying through the asteroid belt.

You're doing all the exciting stuff from the early part of Amperial. empire during the Hoth sequence. And they make everything, the Harts Puno Tocable stuff, work really well and feel really rewarding. It is, along with Atari's original, you know, cartridge. It's one of the early Hoth-level games and it plays that out quite nicely. I enjoy it almost as much as the original. I think it's an incredible arcade game.

Okay. Well, we're actually supposed to be like just going through these really quickly, so we can't stop to keep doing that again. I apologize. guys, I will stop being happy. That's okay. That was my fault. I should have gotten the air horn.

I'll do that from now on whenever someone's talking too much. All right. Next up, exit Xe's, aka Savage Bees, a Capcom's first game or second game, one of their mini vertical shooters. Fairyland Story, a Taito published Bubble Bobble alike before Bubble Bobble. Field combat, a very strange game from Jalico where it's kind of like Commando, but you have a UFO that floats along the ground and captures enemy vehicles. Very weird.

And here we have Gauntlet, the game's so good that developer M2 has an original cabinet in their offices. That's the only game they have in their offices. Gauntlet. Yeah, I've talked to the guy that runs M2, Hory. And he started his company around trying to, and actually succeeding in, mimicking the gauntlet's arcade cabinet that was down the street from his apartment growing up. He and his friends got tired to spending their hundred yen coins on it. So he just figured out how to emulate it and then port it. And then eventually that turned into Gauntlet for his first commercial product for Sega. I hadn't thought about this, but Gauntlet would

have been a really expensive proposition to play it in Japan where they basically, you know, it's a dollar per play as opposed to 25 cents. Damn. Yeah, it was, yeah, very expensive game there. I mean, that would inspire me to learn programming and create my own business too. Yeah. That's where the port came from. And go back to 1985, little six-year-old Jared and his uncle Brian in Rolling Acres Mall in Akron, Ohio at the arcade there, and walk in one night. And I still remember the first time I saw a gauntlet. I had seen multiplayer arcade cabinets before, but none had ever made an impression on me. Gauntlet was red and yellow and green and blue for each of the four-player spots. There were stats for each of the characters and how they would act, and

everything was bright and lit up and it talked and it was cooperative, not competitive, which was so unusual for the arcade. It was just, I remember I actually got in trouble with my uncle because I popped up next to a guy and popped some quarters in and started playing with him. And my uncle's like, no, don't interrupt this game. And the guy's like, no, no, no, more come, help. And that was a new idea. And that really knocked me on my ass.

You could understand about two minutes, but it had that marvelous D&D Saturday morning vibe, Conan the Barbarian vibe, that was all kind of in the air, in the zeitgeist of the time, as it were. And it was one of the most rewarding arcade experiences I'd ever had because you got to work together. That timing down clock was really irritating, but it was still worth seeing how far you could get and learning that if you work together, you could get a lot farther. That was really cool. Gauntlet was my favorite game for a very long time favorite arcade game when I was a kid

We played an Atari ST port of it And me and my brother And it was amazing And by the way, Gauntlet 4 is incredible On the Genesis, the music is amazing To just shout out to that And that quest mode man That role-playing like RPG level in that mode

Fantastic Yeah, I used to play that a lot I should spend some time with that You should All right, so I'm going to just name all the extraneous games here really fast, and then we can go back and circle around to talk about the things we want to highlight. Otherwise, we're not even going to make it through 85, and that would be shameful. So, Ghost and Goblins, a platformer that shipped a month

before Super Mario Bros. And is much angrier at you than Super Mario Brothers. Green Beret, a.k.a. Russian attack, platform action game. Admire the choice by Konami marketing to call it Russian attack in those days. Gunsmoke, another vertical shooter from Capcom. Icky, a vertical shooter from Sunsoft. Not great. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Really strange sort of semi-isometric action game where you rescue children, climb ladders,

and it might have the original mine cart level in a video game. And justifiably so, since all the mind cart levels in video games are based on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the film. The Legend of Kage, you are a ninja who jumps insanely high as you travel through Japan and the seasons. Magmacks, it's Zeta Gundam, but shitty. Matt Mania, a wrestling game of some sort, who knows. Modos, you know, I've played this. It's a Namco game, and I don't even remember it.

Good times. My Hero is probably best known for its Sega MyCard conversion, which is broken. The arcade game, there's a pretty decent amount of, like, forgiveness when you attack enemies. But in the Sega Master System version, guys walk up to you and you have, like, about a pixel of active, valid space in which to attack them. So no one's ever made it past the first stage. Ninja princess, also known as Sega Ninja, was remade for Master System as the Ninja. But the original version, you're a girl, and that's cool because dudes are boring. in video games. Everyone's a dude in a video game. It's much cooler to be a lady.

See, look, next game on the list, paper boy, a dude. It wasn't until the sequel, they were like, what if you could also be a paper girl? It took years, years for Atari to innovate the same way the Sega did in 1985. Pitfall 2, the Sega arcade version, much like Choplifter Sega made an arcade adaptation of Pitfall 2, which basically streamlined away the Explaner. exploration and turned the world of the Atari 2,600 game into a linear adventure. Very strange choice. Return of the invaders. The space invaders came back.

It took them a while, but they're here. Ring King, a boxing game, best known for its accidental fallacious. Roadrunner, an isometric-ish action game by Atari based on the cartoon. I have not actually played this one yet. Do you play as Roadrunner or Wiley Coyote? Kevin Bunch, you would know this. You are the Roadrunner. Okay.

That's much less fun than the idea that I had in mind. A game where you play as Wiley Coyote is very depressing and unwinnable. Yes, but so is life. So I think that works out. Wow. Really? Section Z. I'll call also Section Z, if you're British.

The arcade version, kind of bad. The NES version, a couple of years later, kind of cool. Showland Road. Oops, I forgot to look that one up. Oh, well, Space Harrier, it's 3D, but not really. It's big, chunky sprites pretending that they're 3D. It has such cool music and such cool aesthetics. It's like playing an acid trip, he says, never having taken acid, but I have it on good

authority that that's pretty similar to playing Space Harrier. Spalunker, the action version, the arcade version, actually Famicom version and E.S version, and arcade version, yes, of the PC classic Starluster. You are not actually lusting after stars. It is a first person take on a shooting game. Super Punchout. It's like punchout, but it's more super. T&K3 came to America as Iron Tank. It's a vertical shooter by S&K. You are in a tank. It's kind of like Akari Warriors, except you never get out. of the tank, which means it's much better than Akari Warriors. I'll see, there's Terra Cresta, a shooter, Tiger Heli, a shooter, Twin Bee, a shooter, and YAR Kung Fu, a brawling game, a fighting game, one of the very first, along with karate champ. It would be a few years before fighting games were good, as Kevin will attest later, but people did enjoy the YAR Kung Fu, and it does feel kind of like the template for, you know, a lot

of the street fighter type games. There's even a Chinese lady acrobat with Princess Leia cinnamon bun hair. So, you know, it's very, very much a formative work, I would say. This episode of Retronauts is brought to you by Opera GX. Hey folks, remember when browsing the internet was fun? I do, and that means I'm probably old enough for my first colonoscopy. Now, we all use the internet for very different reasons. Me, I like to prowl around the darkest corners looking for previously undiscovered facts to use on podcast just like this one. But maybe you have different needs.

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Anyway, that's the rundown of 85 in the arcades. Now let's talk about the good stuff in more depth. Kevin, what's up with Gradius? So this might be the next most influential shooter after Zevius's release. Because the whole idea here was that Konami wanted to make a Zevius-style game, but they didn't want to make a vertical shooter like Zevius was. So they flipped that on its side, like their older work scramble, which Zevi is kind of aped to begin with.

And then they sort of played with the formula of it. So this is really where power-ups became a major part of shooting games because the whole idea here is you're flying along, you're shooting enemies. Every so often they drop a little glowing orb. When you pick that up and you have a little bar at the bottom of the screen and it will light up one of those is you keep grabbing them. It'll cycle through.

and each of those, you can push another button to activate that particular power-up. So you've got your speed up, you've got your missiles that attack from the air to the ground, you've got a laser that does a lot of damage straight ahead of you. You've got little options that follow you around, and they are completely busted in this game. It's a very formative work. Also, it's the first, I feel like they saw the NOSCA lines and Zs, Savvious, we're like, that's a good idea, but we can one up that. And they threw in the Moai Heads.

Let's head to Polynesia. Yeah. We got something else that's also weird and mysterious. Let's work that in. Although, actually, Moai Heads were, they did appear in Japanese action games and shooters before this. So it's not like, it's not like this is the, there's someone on Reset Era who's put together a thread. Or actually, it's a link to a site. Sorry, it's a thread where the content is compiled in a web.

website. Now I'm getting it right. That traces Moai heads in video games. And they go back, you know, like 82, 83. Amazing. But, but Konami definitely owned them. I mean, Moai Koon had his own video games by God. He's a crazy racer. This was a, this was a pretty big hit for Konami, came out over here as nemesis with a much shittier difficulty curve. But the original is a great piece. It got ported to basically everything. We got a bunch of sequels, most of which are good. So I enjoy Gratius. I got to give it its props. Fair enough. I've always preferred Life Force, but they're all, you know, cut from the same cloth. They're all good. All right. So next up on the talk about it list is Hang On. That's me. I mentioned Space Harrier earlier.

Space Harrier would not have happened without Hang On. Hang on was where Sega said, what if we made 3D games and we don't have the technology for it? So we'll just do really interesting scaling effects, which is something they'd already experimented with in a couple of their earlier hardware boards. But this one, the super scaler board, is its informal term, informal name, was built entirely around taking basically everything in the game is a sprite that can be scaled up through hardware through like the delay of how it's drawn on screen. It doesn't matter. It's a timing-based thing. It's really, really impressive when you see it in action. If you play hang on on the

original arcade machine or if you go to Long Island Retro Expo and you play the X 68,000 where the guy sets it up with like all the accoutrements and includes the arcade stick thing, it's an amazing experience. It's so fast and so relentless. And this also caught people's attention by introducing, I can't remember the Japanese term for it, but it's basically ride on hardware. It's like those little toy motorcycles that you could put 25 cents into at the grocery store and pretend to ride a motorcycle for like, you know, if you were a kid, for like 30 seconds. They said, what if we made that the controller for this video game? So there is a version of Tycon, Tycon version.

And that was a huge deal, because not only was it the coolest-looking arcade game that had ever been made to that point in history, but also you could control it with an actual motorcycle that you steered with your body. I have never played that version of it, but I have to imagine that it's awesome. And I have to imagine that in 1985, it blew people's minds. So this is, to me, this is the game where Sega became a major player. They became like a true force in arcades. They had made some cool stuff before, like Xaxon, Turbo, et cetera. But this is the moment where they were like, hold my beer.

We are going to do the greatest thing ever. We are all in on technological innovations and advancements and experiences in arcades. And also we're going to do some consoles, but mostly arcades. And they pretty much leapfrogged Namco and all their other competitors, Taito, etc. Atari and basically became the arcade force that everyone tried to match. So cheers to hang on. It's really cool. And also the soundtrack for that one also kicks ass. That became Sega's other thing. We're going to make kick ass FM sound, FM synths, for our video games. And they did it by God. I've got like two dozen records of Sega music from arcade games, and it's all awesome.

So anyway, hang on. That's great. It looks like I'm next on the list for Load Runner 3 and 4. You're sick of me talking. So I'm just going to say, it's absolutely wild that Irim created arcade versions of Load Runner and then kept making sequels that developed like their own mythology and narrative. There's like this whole thing going on with Irim's arcade games.

And then all of that has been lost to time, like tears in the rain, because no one republishes the Irim arcade load runners, as far as I'm aware. Oh, no, another Jeremy. It's Teddy Boy from Sega. Well, this was the launch game for the Sega Mark 3, which was their attempt to bring a true arcade experience home, except that it was a generation behind because they had just introduced Tangon, and here they were working off the system. One board spec.

Oh, well. But Teddy Boy, also a flicky style game. Kind of neat. Notable, really, for being the first game to feature a licensed likeness and song by an idol performer, one of the visual idol pop singers that were really big in Japan in the 80s, they said, hey, what about Yoko Ishino, who has this song that's about a teddy boy from the 1950s? This has nothing to do with a video game, but we're going to stick it in there anyway. And it was so good that they removed that music from the American version, so it's all

totally lost anyway. Hooray! Okay, I'm done talking. Time gal. Tell us about it, Kevin. So what if Dragon's Lair did not have Don Bluth animation, but a cute anime girl traveling through time to hunt down, like, I don't know, an evil criminal of some sort? Was this Toe animation? This is, uh, I don't know who did the animation, actually. Sorry. I know Taito published the game. And she was so popular, Time gal, uh, what's the name, Raco, I think? That she became sort of a game center mascot for a few years there.

You could even find pictures from, you know, the mid-80s of Japanese game centers, arcades that just have standies of her hanging around and posters and whatnot. Was she, does she come before or after the dirty pair? When did dirty pair come out? I don't know. She has kind of, might have predated this. I don't know. She does have that same sort of visual design to her outfit, which is, yeah, I hadn't put that together because I don't think about dirty pair that often. But yeah, you're right.

Yeah, it's Everyone should be thinking about dirty pair all the time, Kevin. What are you doing? Yeah, I'm wearing a dirty pair of pants. Does that count? Oh, wow. Oh, no. You've moved to the TMI phase.

I couldn't hold it any longer. I'm Jeremy talking for so long. But yeah, Timegal is a, it is a FMV game in the style of Dragons Lair, space ace, or that. Castle of Cagliostro one that Stern put out. But it's a cliffhanger, that's what it's called. But anyway, yeah, it's a, it's a, I think it's a very good one. It just got recently reissued in Japan for the Switch alongside a Ninja Hayate. So it is reasonably available.

It's definitely worth checking out. Also, they brought, for whatever reason, the character came back in Castle of Shikigami 3 and laments how she's no longer popular in arcades, which Just the delightful way to bring a character back, like 20-odd years later. I have definitely seen this character before and have never played or heard of this game before this conversation. Now you should. Yeah. The thing that really kind of makes this game for me is, yes, you've got like the sexy bikini almost, you know, hot pants anime girl.

but when you lose, it's never brutal or gruesome. She always turns into this, like, super cartoony version of herself, and it's a comical death. So she's in all these, like, horrible science fiction death traps. But then if you mess up, it just suddenly turns super cute. So it really kind of softens the blow. And it actually really kind of makes you want to lose your money so you can see what new and inventive deaths she has because it's like, oh, here's

like this woman who is being chased by a dinosaur, the dinosaur catches her and she turns into basically a little rag doll version of herself. Yeah, the animations. It was a good creative choice. The animations are great, just all around, like the dinosaurs.

The constant seeing the guy laughing at you when you die. Yeah, her death animations, they're just very like cheapified in a lot of cases. And, you know, even when they're being a little, shall we say, cheeky, it's more playful than saucy. Exactly. So, anyway, that's going to wrap it up for 1985's arcade games. I don't know if Timegal actually came to the U.S. in arcades.

It did come on Sega CD. Yeah, I'm not sure. I don't think I've ever seen an American arcade of it. That's where I've seen it. We got Holocene instead. TimeGel on Sega CD. I think I've seen it. I may even own it and I don't even remember.

It's usually a California extreme, but I think that version's an import. Makes sense. All right. All right. So that wraps it up for the arcade scene. of 1985, but we still have to talk about computers. And, you know, I'm looking at the advance of time as this episode goes along. I'm not even going to mention the stuff we're not going to focus on. There were a lot of games on computers. And that's cool. But let's just

talk about the highlights. Okay. I don't know what's going on here. We used to be able to do these episodes. We could do like five years in a single shot. And it was great. And now here we are struggling to make it through a single facet of a single year. What's wrong with us? Are we just that old? Yes. So let's jump into the world of computers in 1985 with Benj just talking about Atari Corps. What? Sorry, Atari Corp. Hari Corps. I would like to join the Atari Corps. It's Strike Force Atari. That's fun. Yeah, so the Atari 520 ST came out in 85, which was the first of the ST line. The 16 slash 32-bit machines that had a Motorola 68,000 CPU.

And I, let's see, I wrote some notes last time because I was about to talk about how much cheaper it was than the Mac. See, the cool thing about it is it had a GUI, a graphical user interface and a mouse at a time when the Mac just came out the year before in 1984. And so you could either buy, like, I guess the Mac 512K came out in 85. That was $2,495, or you could get an Atari with $512K of RAM for $800. And it was color. And it had MIDI ports built in.

And, you know, it could do monochrome or color monitors. And it was an amazing machine. Yeah, the thing that I find interesting about the Atari ST is, you know, we talk about Atari Corp and how they were completely bewildering. with their choices for making console games and the scattershot approach they took and just the fact that they seem to have no direction. But then on the other hand, you have the ST. Basically, Jack Tramel took over Atari

and launched this subsection of Atari based on their computer assets and immediately set to work to create a Macintosh competitor. And I read that they put together the ST in like six months. and had this ready to go out the door a year after the, basically, the company formed. And that's, that's very impressive because it's not some fly-by-night, you know, slipshot piece of crap. It was a really, really well-made machine, well, you know, thoughtfully designed.

People who owned one really loved them. So, you know, you can really see that Tremel's, his heart was in the computer space and not in consoles, just the night and day difference between the ST and, say, the XE game system. It's wild. My understanding is that Tremel was very much in the mindset of make, you know, hardware that's pretty good and people will just sort of put stuff on there and gravitate to it, which does not work for consoles, but I think it works a little better for computers. Yeah, the ST was one of the most pirated systems in history, but Trimel didn't care.

He wanted to sell hardware. So for him it was a great deal I'll sell it like he said Not for the masses but not for the classes but the masses That's the famous quote I remember as a kid he used to read a lot of computer magazines I was obsessed with the ST because it was so relatively affordable And I really wanted a new computer

And I remember they called it to Jackintosh In one article there for Jack Trimmel And I wondered if But there was always this kind of stain because of the Commodore thing And all the legacy that had gone on there and all the vendors that he burnt as to whether or not. It wasn't carried in a lot of stores, but people were still sore about the C-64 and how they hadn't gotten their proper supply of floppy disks and things like that from him.

So that always did pull it back a little next to the Amiga in the marketplace. We got a 1040 ST, which was the next model from 86, I think. And in 86, and it was almost Super Nintendo level graphics or so, which is funny. I didn't think about, like, it's sort of like having a Super NES. in 1986 at home console. You know, it was really amazing and they should have made a console version of it. So I think also Jack Tramil was trying to beat Amiga to market

because everybody knew about the Amiga hardware for a long time and it was an independent company that had been shopped around and offered to Atari and Commodore took up the thing. So I think the Amiga came out later in 85 by, Let's see. The Amigo was announced in July 85, wasn't available in quantity till 86. The delay gave Atari time to deliver the 520 ST in June 1985. So the ST, this is, that's from Wikipedia.

The ST came out a little bit earlier than the Amiga, which was announced that year. And so it's sort of similar machine and capability. It's got a lot of colors. It can do 4,096 colors. It's got, you know, a lot of RAM, but it was more expensive as $1,495 for the Omega 1000. But I think, didn't it have a megabyte of RAM instead of 512K? It eventually had a megabyte of RAM. There were a lot of things you could do with it.

The most important thing was it had the blitter, which the SD didn't. And that was a different way of handling, drawing on screen that's more analogous to the way that we think about sprites now. And so it took people a while to get their heads around it. For a while, a lot of Amiga games are just targeted to ST and they're ported to Amiga, so they both use the same CPU. But later on, you get things like Shadow of the Beast, which, while not a good game, is absolutely gorgeous on Amiga and impossible on ST as anything playable. But it took a while for people to make that difference. So in 85, you couldn't really tell, and the ST looked like the better deal. Yeah, the Amiga, you know, it was also mouse-based.

It had a GUI, had a graphical windowing system, operating system and stuff. So it was another sort of competing with the Mac. And 85 was the year of the graphical user interfaces. Windows 1 was, I think it was announced in 83 and came out in 85, something like that. So everybody was sort of in the computer space jumping on that thing. But at the same time, like you got these two powerhouse sort of multimedia machines, the ST and the Amiga that had these really great gaming capabilities. And so they were amazing gaming platforms.

All right. So, long story short, the ST was the ants to the Amiga's Bug's Life. So, Jared, tell us about the game balance of power, or are you just talking about like the global balance of power here? We're talking about both. It's not an episode of Retronauts if I don't come on and talk about balance of power, which I think has happened on the last two episodes I've been on. So balance of power is brilliant. It's a Chris Crawford game from 19. It's a very early Macintosh game. Once about a time, they made the Macintosh, and it wasn't very useful because it didn't have a lot of RAM, and you couldn't store many pages of text on it or many drawings. And a year later, they're like, you know, we really ought to add, you know, $512K to this thing

and suddenly it became useful. And one of the first things somebody did with that RAM was designed balance of power, a game designed around a GUI and that sharp monochromatic screen. Simplest premise in the world. You either play the U.S. or the Soviets, your choice each game. and you've got to get through eight turns, each turn corresponding to a year. Every year you're trying to garner more influence than your international rival, and you get influenced by taking certain economic, political actions, and they're menu-driven.

So you'll just, you do something. But then the other guy does something. Then you do something. Then they respond. Then you respond. Then they respond. And situations that start small or diplomatically begin to escalate, showing how global politics are a really complex and difficult place to put your toe. You're never quite sure what's going to happen.

happen. You can make your best guess. And then sometimes random events will happen. A terrorist will blow up a building somewhere, or there'll be a famine in some country that one of you influences, and that'll bring the stakes up. And suddenly, before you know it, your satellite states are at the edge of war with one another. You're trying to talk each other down, but also you don't want to be the one to lose the turn. The key to the game is that if either of you goes too far, World War III starts and the game's over, and everyone loses. So it's a game about brinksmanship. It's all about consequences and trying to get as much as you can while understanding that there's a moment where you must back down. And calculating where that is

is extremely difficult. It is the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night when I lay and think about stuff like, you know, say our shifting policy on the Ukraine, which could have ramifications that we would never, ever, ever imagine, except, you know, seasoned diplomats that we're allowed to keep their jobs. It's really scary, really good. I encourage it was ported to everything under the sun to go out and find this and play it because it's, it was even on Windows 1.0. There's a weird one. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think it's one of the few Windows 1 games ever released. It was enormously popular at the time. All right, balance of power. I'm sure you'll have more to say about this somewhere in the future, Jared, so I'll let you hold on to

that for next time. But for now, Benj, why don't you tell us about the Bards Tale? Yeah, I don't, you know, my brother played this a ton on the Apple 2. His friend had an Apple 2C, which came out in 84, so this came out in 85. And the coolest thing is it's like, it's a first person role-playing game. It's party-based, and it's created by Interplay, designed by Michael Cranford. It has like pseudo-3-D first-person graphics. They're all sprite-based, but you're walking one, one-scent.

sale at a time, one grid space with a view, similar to, I guess, wizardry probably did that first or something, and the Ultima dungeon stuff was first person, but this, the whole game is like that. And so you go through towns and then through dungeons, and there's a lot of fun monsters. I love the monster pictures, and you just, when you run into an encounter with monsters, you know, it sort of opens up in a window and you see pictures of the monsters kind of animated and it tells you what's going on and you pick how you fight them, you can cast spells, you can attack them.

And it was ported to lots of, you know, DOS and Commodore 64 and other platforms. And it was just a really fun, great, had a great feel to it. And, you know, it had a story about a bard telling this tale, you know, a musician. And that was a neat framing plot device for this series. And Bard's Tale 2 is awesome, too. I think my brother played that one more. But I just think it's a great thing to just highlight real quick as a influential game from that year. All right.

And Kevin, tell us about deja vu, getting back to that Mac experience. Yeah, this is one that I admittedly played mostly on the NES, but I have played a bit of the Mac one in the original. This was the first in the Mac Venture series of games by Air. icon. So this is sort of a point and click adventure game, but it's all first person point of view. You're sort of clicking from room to room space

to space. And this one is a detective story where you wake up in a bathroom, you don't know who you are, what's going on because you have amnesia and you sort of piece together. Like, oh, I've been drugged, oh, someone's dead, oh, I should

probably figure out what happened here. And you have sort of a time limit before you pass out and die from whatever you've been injected with. So you have to solve this mystery and clear your name, because there's also been evidence laid out throughout the game world to sort of frame you for the murder that's been, or the attempted murder that's been taking place. So it's a, it's a fascinating game. I have never been a giant mystery person, at least when I was a kid, sort of

come around more in my older age, but I feel like this might have been the game that first sort of laid that seed in my head, like, oh, this can be a really fun and interesting genre. I think this is interesting. I like it more than the other Mac Ventures. I like it more than uninvited in Shadowgate, and I haven't really messed with deja vu too much, but yeah, this is a really fun one. I really like the setting for this one more than the more fantasy-themed or horror-themed one. I remember playing the NES version of this and getting really hung up on the very first thing that happens, which is that you can take a coat off of a hook, and you put it on, and then hanging on the hook under the coat was like a gun and a shoulder holster.

And you can't put that on after you've put on the coat. Like, that doesn't make sense to me. Like, you can't wear a shoulder holster over a trench coat. And that, it really, I was like, okay, it was a real fox grain chicken puzzle for me trying to figure out how to do the things in the right order so that I personally would not be stressed about it. So the game doesn't care is what I'm taking from this. No, the game does not care. This was entirely me. This is beautiful.

That's in the DSM manual. That's one of those Dejaveu disorder they call it Listen, I was a very anxious child You made your own puzzle Yeah, yeah Because look, am I wrong? Imagine wearing a trench coat with a shoulder

Rehorsal over it. Ridiculous? Ridiculous. Especially after Labor Day. It's fine if the trench coat's not white. It's a good point. Hey, everyone, Hey, everyone, it's Jeremy interrupting this podcast for another advertisement. But this advertisement is about me.

And not just me, but the retronauts in general. We're going to be at Midwest Gaming Classic again this year, and we're going to talk to you if you come to see us. Things are a little weird with international travel right now, so repping retronauts this year at Midwest Gaming Classic will be myself, Kevin Bunch, and friend of the show, Brian Clark. But what we lack in numbers we're going to make up for with awesomeness because we are talking about Chrono Trigger,

the greatest RPG of all time, asterisk, and its 30th anniversary. We'll also be presenting smaller individual panels. Shortly before the Retronaut's presentation Saturday night, I'm going to be talking about some interesting videotapes, VHS tapes from Japan, from the 80s, talking about video games, showing

off video game history. Who knew people cared about video game history back in the 80s? And finally at some point, schedule time to be determined, we'll all be signing our books in addition to fellow press run books author, Mark Flitman. So come on out and see us, bring our beloved books

along, or some money to buy new copy, and have a heck of a good time Saturday, April 5th, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at the Midwest Gaming Classic. So I feel like we're nearly an hour. So I feel like we're nearly an hour, into this, we're not going to make it through 1985 and 95. It's just not going to happen. So maybe we shift back down to like second gear out of sixth and just take it slow, finish up

85, and then someday we'll come back around to do 95. If we even care. Do we care about 1995? Did anything good happen in 1995? Where people still play video games back then? Oh, okay, well. We care. So, so let's take a collective vote here. Are we, okay with slow rolling this? Well, I think it would be fun to spend the whole episode on 95 because it was a, wasn't it a really busy year? I mean, it was a very technical year. Did you see the list that I put together of just high lights?

That wasn't even everything. I mean, I think there were more games released for Super NES in 1995 than released on all consoles in 1985. Actually, I know that's the case. I think there might have been more games on Super NES than all games released in 85, period. Wow. It was... And I still have to talk about the Atari Jaguar that year, too, you know?

So it's got a... That's a whole episode itself. Sure. Yeah. Super episode on 95. I'm in support of this, let's just finish 85 plan. That sounds reasonable and good. Okay.

Well, I feel kind of bad now because I gave arcade games of 85 short shrift. But you know what? Pitfall to you didn't deserve it. Nope. So let's say, there are a few very influential games in 19... 85 that we're not, yeah, 85 for computers that we're not going to talk about in depth. But A-Train is one of them. One of the very first train simulations by Art Dink, maybe the first.

Train simulation by Art Dink, I guess that makes sense because there's no number after it. And they're still making these damn games. It is a thing. However, I will say that I don't believe A-Train has the cool controllers that Dengu does. So that's a knock against it. There was a game called Chucky Egg 2, and Stewart is not. on this episode, so we will learn nothing about it this time. None of us knows anything about Chucky Egg 2. I know about the British cool word here. I know about Chucky Egg 1, but

Oh, okay. Well, how do you think the sequel was different aside from? I've never even, I didn't know that there was a Chucky Egg 2 until just this moment. All right. The Chucky Egg 1 is great. I assume if it's more of the same, then that's probably a good thing. See, I can play it with dizzy in my mind. How is Chucky Egg different than Dizzy? Chucky Egg's like a single screen game where you're sort of moving around different platforms

collecting eggs before birds come and kill you. And every stage is like a new layout. I think there's like eight and then it loops and makes it more difficult. And you know, looking it up, apparently Chucky Egg 2 has

120 screens or it's more of like a jet set Willie sort of thing. I don't know. I don't know if it's any good, but it sounds interesting. That's a lot of eggs. That's like a Costco heist right there. Oh, yeah. The price of Chucky Egg is going through the roof lately.

I mean, honestly, it's just been, I admit, I wanted to buy one and two, but they're just like 10 times more than they used to be. That's why I got backyard Chucky Egg chickens to get my own Chucky Eggs any time I want. By the way, what is behind the British obsession with eggs in video games? I want somebody to explain that. Eggs are delicious. And, you know... They're very easy to draw with limited graphical sets.

Ah. If you have a Zetex Spectrum, all you can do is basically make single-colored circles or ovals. Plus, I assume after, you know, years of post-war austerity and then Thatcher economics, the egg is about all anyone could afford. Yep. Okay, so... We really did slow roll that one. Yep. Hey.

Hey. All right. Billy Hatcher. There's a game called the Idolon, which I've never played, but I know people love. Maybe I should have played the Iodon, but there was an episode about it back in the early days of the Retronauts reboot. So go back and listen to that. Please enjoy. Fight Night, a very terrible sort of influential boxing game.

No? It's terrible. You say terrible? Well, I mean, I played the Atari 800 version last night just by. accident when I was messing around, and it's just, it was terrible. My accident? Whoa. Yeah, I mean, I was just sort of going through.

Who launched this game on my Atari 800? Yeah. It seems very specific, actually. I've been playing the, or I've played the 7,800 one, and it's also not great. So I'm assuming this game is just not great generally. Just the accolade, did it? I don't remember. Anyway.

Well, I've got to cover that in my videos pretty soon, so I'm glad to hear this perspective. I don't feel bad about trashing it if I don't like it. It won't be one of those like, oh, I guess I wasn't there at the time. It must be really good, and I just can't see it. I can just say, oh, no, this is crap. It looks nice. It looks okay in a screenshot. Like, that's it.

But it's like, it's no punch out or anything. You know, it's just slow and janky and stuff. Anyway. How does it compare to Wade Hickston's double punch or whatever that was called? I've never played that. I don't even know who Wade Hickston is. Did you make him up? It was a Game Boy Advance game.

Okay. Anyway, let's move on to something. Chris, you've been waiting an episode and a half to talk. So finally, this is your opportunity. You've got 30 minutes go. Tell us about G.I. Joe for Commodore 64. Yes, hello. I'm here.

Oh, Chris Sims. Welcome. Yes. No, Jeremy, you and I, I know, are big G.I. Joe guys. And this game comes out pretty early in the life cycle of G.I. Joe as a franchise introduced in 82 in Marvel Comics. And then, yeah, you've got a right behind me. Battle Android trooper. I actually don't have any Joe's in...

Not just a Battle Android Trooper, but the new Iron Grenadier Battle Android Trooper with a golden chainsaw. That's how cool it is. G.I. Joe has always been weirdly underrepresented in video games, I feel like, because it's... When you look at it as a concept, it is more suited to video games than anything else. Like, it's more suited to video games than it is to comics, and there have been 350 issues of G.I. Joe, but this one is interesting because you, you select your Joe from the kind of stock cast of early GI Joes, and then you pick a, a cobra opponent, and you're put onto a little scene, and you shoot them with a gun to death. As one should. Like, if you go and watch the, let's play out on YouTube, like, the first thing that happens is you,

Uh, you, uh, the guy like snake eyes versus Baroness and he, he puts two in the dome. Wow. Uh, and that, of course, puts them in jail. So I guess they're special jail guns. Uh, but I do like, you know, it's for the time and for the limitations that they're working with. Like, it's a pretty interesting and kind of thorough G.I. Joe game. Like, it's got a nice roster of opponents that includes Destro and Copac commander, Baroness, major blood is in there.

It's got a nice roster of of heroes you can play as. And then each time you select a level, you get a cutscene of the characters departing the pit. So you get like, and where the level that you pick determines what happens in that cutscene.

Like some of them you drive to in like an awestriker or you fly to to get Wild Bill to to take you. It's pretty cool, honestly. Now, when you leave the pit, is it like the battle base that you saw in the cartoon? Or is it actually the chaplain's assistant, the mechanics, what is it? The motor pool.

The motor pool for the chaplain's assistant building at the Fort Wadsworth base in New Jersey. No, it's the cartoon base. Okay. Which I don't, I think you might be right. I don't think that's actually called the pit in the show. But it's, you know, it's cool. If I was a, well, I mean, I was a G.I. Joe fan in 1985, but if I was like a G.I. Joe fan in 1985 who was aware of the world, then I think I would have had a lot of fun with this game. Yeah, it's pretty solid.

And it's weird that this format of Pick a Joe, pick an opponent, pick an arena, didn't. like, wasn't followed up on in G.I. Joe games, like, for the next 20 years. Because, again, G.I. Joe is essentially Overwatch. Like, it's just, it's that. I mean, now you can play as Snake Eyes and Fortnite, so I guess there's that. Yeah, like, Fortnite, the, uh, I hate to say it, never played it, but it does seem like the perfect video game because Snake Eyes can fight Goku and Batman. True. And John Cena. By the way, a small programming note, remember we did a micro.

on G.I. Joe, me and Chris, Jeremy, me and Chris in 2017. I don't know, 2018, one of those episodes. A while back. Yeah. Yep. So if anybody loves G.I. Joe and Chris talking about, I go find that episode. It's really cool. Yeah.

The only other place where you can find me talking about G.I. Joe at length. Someone who has used a picture of Destro as his face on the internet since 2005. I actually put together what I think is an amazing pitch for a G.I. Joe game at Limited Run, we were trying to pitch the licensers on the property. And my setup was so good. It encompassed both the lore of G.I. Joe, the toys and also the concept of collecting the toys all into one. it would have been the best G.I. Joe game of all time, but it did not happen. And that is, that is deeply regrettable. You should write an angry letter to Hasbro. Please don't actually do that. I mean, you could probably make it on Commodore 64 at this point. I don't know. Commodore 64 has the juice for what I had in mind. There were, there were some like, you know, trading elements to it. Getting kind of that Pokemon thing. I mean, there is a gating mechanism tied to flagpoints. So maybe you need the Commodore 128. Yeah, I'm thinking this. There we go. This needs multiple megabytes to harness Jeremy's power.

It might. Anyway, I remember someone telling me about this C-64 G.I. Joe game in like 1990-ish. And I was like, oh, you were lying to me. There's never been a game like that. Like, where you're just, you know, snake eyes killing Zartan? What's going on? That's so stupid. You would never do that.

Yeah. It turns out I was wrong. and I owe that person, whoever the hell it was, an apology. Sorry, classmate. You can feel the fingerprints of Archon all over it, like that idea of picking one character light, one character dark in an arena to find it out in that's unique. It's definitely draws from Arcon. And I think that's why it's on the C64, because that's where Arcon flourished the most. I think they just took that idea and ran with it in a way that was beautifully appropriate.

The Archon came to mind when I was just looking at screenshots of this. I don't know if I've ever played this game. Just the arena, battle arena thing, yeah. There's a, there's a, a teenage mutant ninja turtles, Hades-like out right now. Really? That's, yeah, that's pretty fun. Because it's, I mean, if you like the Ninja Turtles and you like Hades, guess what? It's those two things.

But again, another setup that would be perfect for G.I. Joe. I don't know why these things aren't happening. Isn't Hades a roguelike? So a Hades-like is a roguelike-like like? Well, it's, I mean, it's specifically a Hades, like, it is, you know, the isometric, like, it's a Hades like. This has become the wistful bitterness G.I. Joe podcast, what we wish to happen. But no, like, if you've never, like, I don't know how it plays. I haven't played it, but I did go and watch it played. Because, again, until I saw it on the list, I was also surprised. I didn't, I thought the, what was it, the Atlantis?

Factor, I thought that was the first G.I. Joe game back on, on... That was the second G.I. Joe game on an ES. Yeah, it was. The first one was just called G.I. Joe, a real American hero. Oh, that might be the... Chris is double behind. And the first G.I. Joe game ever, isn't it that 2,600 one that you play with the Pabler Strike, yeah.

Yeah. Amazing. I don't know anything. Triple behind. Please address all of your complaints. You do fight a giant snake in that one. You got to give it that. I bet. Cobra literally. I bet we covered all these on that micro episode five or six years ago, Chris, and just don't remember. I remember that one that was like the arcade, like, shooter one that was like wild.

It was like Devastators, basically. Yeah. But not Devastator like the Transformer. That would have been a cool G.I. Joe versus Transformers crossover, but no. Now, that's a video game that is waiting to happen, except there's never been a good Transformers game. So maybe that one by Platinum. studios, which again, you'd think would be right up there. Just a slam dunk, right?

But no. Well, it didn't happen. All right. All right. Anyway, so that's G.I. Joe. There was also that year a game for MSX and C.C. 64 called the Goonies, which I have not played. I've only played the Famicom NES versions of the Goonies.

Have any of you played the MSX or C-64 versions of the Goonies? Yes, I have. And it's that puzzle. I'm sorry, Jeremy, can you just say the Goonies a couple more times? The Goonies. Yeah, it's a very puzzly take on the Goonies. It does not have the feel of the NES game at all. It's not action-oriented.

You're moving a couple of characters around, starting in the house, making your way under the house. You're going through the story still. But it's very much kind of classical, graphical adventure game puzzle solving with slight action elements. You have to do timing-based things. So, you know, it's like maybe at Mansion. Sometimes you've got to make sure you get across the room before somebody else does. It's fun. It's a really pretty fun computer game that follows the plot of the movie.

I recommend it to anybody that's got an hour and doesn't get too frustrated by it. old video game puzzles. I get very frustrated by those. So that game is not for me. I'll stick to the NES version. Thank you. Although that has some frustrating puzzles, too. So I guess we're screwed, no matter what.

Let's see, Grimlins, the Adventure, hacker, Hardball. Hardball is worth talking about because that is, I would say, one of the most influential baseball games of all time, right up there with RBI baseball and major league baseball. whatever it was called, World Championship Major League Baseball for Intellivision? Yes, that's the one. Hardball does the TV broadcast thing, kind of the camera behind the pitcher viewpoint, instead of putting the camera perspective behind the batter or overhead. And you see this immediately copied by Jalico with Bases Loaded, which I think has become more famous, or at least was during the late 80s. But Hardball was kind of their first.

produced by Accolade, a company that existed to be ahead of Atari in the phone directory. Yeah, I am pretty sure that at the beginning of the Princess Bride, it's hardball that Fred Savage is playing. Probably for the XE game system or the Atari 800. I'm going to say, this was a Bob Whitehead joint. He was a big baseball fan. He did home run on the 2600. I was not really happy with how that turned out. And years later, when they started working on the Commodore 64 at Accolade, he took another crack at the sport and really nailed it.

When I talked to him years ago, he was still extremely proud of hardball and how well it did and how well it came out. This was a very popular game for them. I think it might be one of their big sellers. It was a graphical showcase, too, for the X-E. You know, it's on the back of the box, I think, if I recall correctly, and they advertised it a lot. a screenshot of it looking pretty good for games of that time. And they made a few more hardballs after this first one. Yeah, I think it showed up on Sega Genesis and some other platforms as well.

Like it made it into the console space. However, I will say that there has never been a photo of someone taking a bath in a tub full of hardball discs or cartridges, unlike bases loaded, where people have bathed in Moero Pro Yakyu cartridges. because they sell for like a hundred yen. I've bathed in weirder things. I don't doubt it. Let's see.

Also, in 1985 on computers, a game called International Karate, which I've never played. But I know it is well regarded. There is a place very close to our office called Karate International. And I am so tempted to stop in there and just be really annoying and make stupid jokes about this old video game. But I don't want to get arrested. And so I've held back. Not going to do it. It's tempted.

Tempting. We play World Championship karate, which is like the same thing on the TAR 800, and it was really, really good. There's some story behind it. I'm going to say the U.S. version that was World Karate Championship or whatever. The original one, this was a Spectrum game, of course. And, yeah, this actually spawned a lawsuit between Epix and Data East over how similar it was to Karate Champ. and Epix was found guilty of infringing on Data East's copyright, I think, for the karate champ name and all that fun stuff. And then they went to court again against Capcom with Street Fighter infringement.

Yeah, so that was all reversed. I guess what goes around comes around. Yeah, that was all reversed in appeals and said, like, no, you cannot monopolize an entire sport. and that in turn, when Capcom tried to monopolize fighting games, Data East was like, well, hey, we lost this international karate suit, so they can't win for the same argument, and that worked out for them. The game itself is pretty neat. I feel like I've mostly played International Karate Plus,

which is like the sequel, sort of. And I want to say one of them had a secret code in like the Commodore version where you, I think if you push like the G-T, your character would like pull out of gun and just shoot the other person. I might be getting mixed up with another karate game. I never heard that one. Yeah. Are you thinking of Bushito Blade? No, this was a Commodore game.

Or the final boss has a gun and everyone else has swords and it really sucks. I'll just say the World Karate Championship was one of the games me and my brother played the most on Atari 800. And so that's the Epic's version of this. And it was just, it's fun. It has, it's like a karate match where you win by three points and you have to do some funky joystick controls kind of like karate champ in the arcade

where you push it up and it you know up and right punches right up and down you know whatever not up a down down down and right you know punches low and all these things and it was tricky but hilarious how you'd knock a guy out anyway it's funny when you're yeah those

tricky controls I mean almost all of the old computers outside of the Apple two used one button interfaces yeah the Atari's used it the Commodore stuff Amiga all used that And so you never had enough fire buttons to work with. And some action games got pretty janky like that. And I see plus, I think one of the things that made it work was they mapped the controls in such a way that it was easy to play within those limitations.

That made it so much fun. Oh, yeah. So you jump and you move with a stick by itself. And then if you hold down the button and push the different directions, it does different punches and kicks and things. So it's, yeah, it's tricky, but it's how they did it without all these buttons. Anyway. Also on the British front, we have the sequel to JetBlue. Set Willie, which was the sequel to Manic Minor, Jet Set Willie 2. So Jet Set Willie kind of became a

Rambo thing where you have the one game and then the sequel has a new name and then the sequel to that sequel takes on the second game's name. That's very exciting. I don't know enough about this, but I think it's great that Jet Set Willie did eventually escape the attic and managed to make it into a sequel because that was a difficulty thing for some, a difficult thing for some people. Kings Quest got a sequel. I'm sure it was equally opaque. I don't know if anyone has played Kings Quest 2.

Maybe, but I wasn't a huge fan of the really punishing early Kings Quest games because they're very difficult. I mean, I played Kings Quest 1 a lot trying to beat it, but it's just you die randomly and it's frustrating. Yeah, two is just as mean. It would be. Good times. Let's see. also Kings Valley Coronaus Rift

Little computer people Benj you are a little computer person Why don't you tell us all about it? Oh, thank you. So are you, Jeremy. We're about the same height, aren't we? We are, we are. No, I just thought you're like a little person

in my computer. I see you right there. Okay, thank God. See, when you're short like I am, you just have this chip on your shoulder, your whole life. No, now we are celebrated. We are the short kings, thank you.

Okay, good. Little computer people was developed by David Crane, published by Activision. It's sort of considered a precursor to the Sims just because it's an interesting little life simulation game. It's more of a amusement toy

than a game because the cool thing is each copy of little computer people had a unique serial number which was like a random seed that would make the game have its own properties and its own, you know, each character had its own personality per

disc and that kind of stuff. And so no two copies were exactly the like with the character and name and appearance and stuff. And so you're basically just, you load this game up and you see a little dollhouse type display of a house side view and a little person moving around in it. And you can suggest what this person can do. And it can, you can give it gifts like that come to its mailbox or its front door. I can't remember. And you can sort of play games and write. type letters back and forth, and you have to give him food and tell him to sleep and stuff

like that. And it's neat because you can just watch this guy's life as he does random things in his house and just leave it running, you know, and it's sort of, it's got a sort of clock cycle. I don't remember if it's real time or not at the moment, but I used to put this on for my kids on the Atari ST, you know, decade ago for them playing around with games that they could interface with. And so I was on the Apple 2, Commodore 64, Atari-St, maybe some other platforms, but it was called a house on a disc in the marketing. What fascinates me about this is that every single

disc has like a different seed, if you will, and that changes how all the characters behave. So, you know, there may be one dump of this game out there, but it's not necessarily going to be the same version of it that someone might have played as a kid or from their disc even now, which is really interesting. Yeah, that's true. That's cool.

This game was remade by Square, or not remade, but ported by Square to Famicom Disc System and called Apple Town Story. And I feel like it loses a little something in translation, but it is cool that this game did kind of make its way to consoles, even if it was only in Japan. That is neat. It's sort of limited.

I wish you could do more with the game, but it was unique, very unique for its time. Yeah, it's more of like a voyeurism sim. Just watch other people's lives. Let's see. Also on computers that year, 1985, Lord of the Rings one, Master of Magic. If anyone has anything to say about these games, jump in.

A mind forever voyaging, voyaging, voyaging. Yeah, this one, that's me. That's me. Yeah, Infocom's masterpiece, I think it's the best thing they ever did. The story is beautiful, poignant, and haunting. You play as an AI on a server rack in a Dakota laboratory. Your only connection to the outside world is a human counterpart, the lab worker, that takes care of you. you are built with the purpose of being able to go into yourself and travel through time.

You can simulate time travel. People will feed you variables on plans the government has, and you can go and live out the world as it will be if those plans are implemented. A Trumpian libertarian group has just taken over the American government and has instituted sweeping cuts and reforms to everything. And your job is to keep going in first 10 years, then 20, then 30, and scope out how it's all going to play out. So you keep traveling into yourself, into the simulated world of this little town where you're kind of walking around like a human, even though you're an AI, and you're in yourself. Then you come out to discover every time you talk to the lab worker to report that something is happening outside the walls of the lab. That's a mystery, but it's getting more and more dangerous. And you're discovering that the farther in the future you go, the more society's falling apart.

But somebody desperately doesn't want this to be found out. But you're stuck in a box. It's an incredible, incredible thriller. I love this game. And there's nothing quite like it I've ever played. Wow. That is how you sell a game, man. I want to play it now.

I haven't played this one. I don't know if I could play it right now. It sounds a little too on the nose. Like so much for escapism. Yeah. No, the game that seems more in step with the modern times is Monty on the run. I would like to be on the run, get away from here. But I am not Monty.

I'm Jeremy. So alas, I'm here talking about old video games. Let's see. Next up is also a game about being on the run. It is called the Oregon Trail. It's not just about being on the run, but also getting the runs. Yeah, it is about getting the runs. Let's not over belaborate.

Oregon Trail has been around since the 70s. It's still around today. The 1985 version for Apple 2 is the definitive version, the best balance, the most replayable. It's the one that teaches you the most while being the least obnoxious. This is the one to play. It's the one that people did play. It's like barely anyone got to play the 70s one. But this is like this reissue.

This was the big deal. Yeah. Yeah. It's still a delightful video game. The one with graphics instead of teletype text. based game, basically. Racing destruction set, a very influential, it's called racing destruction, but it's actually one of the first construction games, kind of building on the level editor and load runner,

allowing you to make your own racing games, tracks and things like that, had sort of an isometric perspective. It's spirit kind of lived on with the Super NES games, RPM racing, and rock and roll racing. Um, very much the same spirit, although, you know, the big thing about racing destruction set was the level editor, uh, which allowed you to do cool stuff. But this was one of those EA games back when EA was like, let us celebrate and lift up the people who make video games and celebrate them as artists as opposed to whatever they're doing now. Now we move along to rescue on fractalus, which Kevin wants to tell us about. Oh, man, this game's great. So, flashback to 82, Atari makes a deal with Lucasfilm. They're going to fund basically them to build out their own video game studio. And in exchange, Atari gets right of first refusal for all works that they publish for X amount of time.

So this is one of the first two games that they assembled at Lucasfilm games alongside Ballblazer, which also rules. Atari, you know, went through its troubles, shall we say, in 84. So this game kind of slipped off of their release radar. I know Lucasfilm was really mad about it. But it did eventually start trickling out in 85, finally made it to Atari platforms the following year. But the idea here is that it's like a cockpit view sort of game.

You're flying a sort of a rescue fighter. And there's a big space battle going on in orbit of this planet fractalus. And your job is to go down to the planet itself and rescue pilots from fighters that have crashed landed. The terrain is generated through fractal technology. So the frame rate is super chunky, but it looks really cool. It looks like nothing else really available at the time, except maybe, I don't know, hang on, except this is more proto-polygons in its own way. At the same time, these aliens, known as the Jaggies,

they have saucers down there trying to shoot you down. They have gun emplacements. But you're trying to dodge those, shoot them but yourself, and you're looking for these down ships. So you land near them. You have to turn off your shields, open your bay doors, to let the little pilots run in and get inside. Once you rescue a certain number, you can take off to orbit and go to the next level.

There's it a day-night cycle on the planet. Apparently, it has very fast rotation because every few minutes it flips from day to night. And sometimes the down fighters, they don't have human pilots, they have aliens who want to get inside your ship and kill you. So that's always fun, too. That was a fun discovery the first time I was playing this game, and I just automatically let one of them in the ship. and they started smashing everything up until I panicked and flew back to orbit and spaced everybody, which, according to David Fox on Blue Sky, about two weeks ago, was the correct choice in that particular situation. Wow.

It's a great game. It's a great start for Lucasfilm, which went on to become LucasArts and make lots of cool stuff. I think it's eminently playable now, even if the frame rate kind of sucks. By the way, we have to mention that this technology, this engine was used for the Idleon and also Coronis Rift, which is this fractal thing. And the cool thing about the Idleon is that they took this fractal 3D, pseudo-3D terrain generator and turned it upside down to be like caves. And so in that game, it's a first-person fantasy shooter, the Idleon. It's like a proto-first-person shooter. It's incredible.

because these were at least, you know, 84-85-ish, I think one of them said, okay, they were in 85, Idle on is December 85, and they got sort of overlooked by a lot of, like, they aren't very widely celebrated, we're widely played as kind of a quiet time in video games and stuff, you know, between the crash and everything and Nintendo, but the Idleon is incredible. You should play it as well. So anyway, so those three were all the same kind of fractal engine technology. Huh. So you did know something about the Idle one. I did. You just skipped it faster than I could jump in, you know. Well, you found your good opportunity. Yep. Glad you managed to work that in. Yeah, I would kind of describe rescue on Frectalus as choplifter from a first-person perspective with procedural generation. And that was an idea that was starting to kind of take off, I think, on computers. I mean, you know, Rogue dates back to 1980.

And I think there were some procedural games on Playtime before that in the 70s. Mm-hmm. Yeah. But I recently kind of realized that Impossible Mission by Epics in 1984 was kind of a seed-based procedurally generated action game. No one ever talks about that. Like, I started to look it up and say, like, well, are people citing this as an early, like, influential example? of procedural generation in games. And I couldn't find it on a single list.

But there it is. Like, every time you play, the layout of the base changes. And that's the entire problem with the Atari 7800 version is that sometimes the randomized layout will create a situation where you can't get all the items that you need because of the way things are dispersed through the rooms. But, yeah, it was very striking to me that people just don't seem to care that impossible mission

was this kind of early example of doing really what every indie game these days is doing and taking kind of like a framework and filling it out procedurally. The point being that Rescue and Fractalis does that but with

terrain generation and didn't they base the terrain generation concept kind of on the Genesis sequence from Star Trek 2? Wasn't that ILM that created that computer sequence, and then they just kind of rolled with that into Lucas Film Games and said, we're doing a video game based on this.

Or am I just making that up because it sounds cool? I mean, that was ILM who did that sequence in Star Trek, too. I know. Yeah. It does sound cool. I'm not sure if that is the sequence of events, but I would like to think it is. Rescu and Frectalos looks like the Genesis simulation on the computer screen. and the Captain Kirk watches before realizing, oh, wow, I just destroyed the galaxy, my bad.

Also, talking about seed generation, I seem to remember that's what River Raid does on the Atari as well. Yeah, it gives you one seed, like it doesn't randomize the seed every load-up, but ostensibly, you could, you know, mod the game just by changing that seed and getting a whole new river layout. Yeah, interesting. All right. So that was Rescrow and Fragalus. There is also a little game I like to call Romance the Three Kingdoms. It is not actually a dating sim. There probably is a dating sim in which the three kingdoms of Chinese history do date as human avatars, but this is not that. It is just a simulation war game. This, along with Nobunaga's ambition, was Coe's big entree into computer

simulations, and this is an extraordinarily influential game. Very complex. It is a simulation of a period in Chinese history where you take basically the role of one of the kingdoms fighting for supremacy and you have to worry about your peasants and how they feel and how they're eating and also decking out your army and so on and so forth. A very complex, difficult game made it to every conceivable system imaginable. They continue to make sequels. I think they're up to like 14 now or something. The whole Dynasty Warrior's spinoff is a spinoff of Romance of the Three Kingdoms based on Coe's interpretation of these historical figures.

Just a massive, massively important game. And I have zero aptitude for games like this, so that's all you're getting from me. Yeah. My brother played Nobunaga's ambition on the NES. That's all I know. That was similar, but a much smaller scale because Japan is much smaller than China, although you could play a variant where there were like 50 different fiefs as opposed to three. That's wild. I tried one of those. And before I even got to make a

move, I was destroyed by neighboring feasts. So, you know, not every wannabe daimyo was cut out to rule Japan and become the shogun. It's history. I would really like to find out more about this dating sim that you proposed. It's got to be out there. I'm ready for dokey, dokey, singoku club. There you go. Like, how could the

visual novel romance crowd look at the history of video games and see Romance of the Three Kingdoms and think, you know what? That would work. You got to get with Lubu. That's the trick. Yeah. All right. Moving forward in time, many centuries

silent service, a submarine simulation that is maybe best known for its NES port, which I believe Konami brought, back when they were doing that thing where we're like, hey, we should take some American computer games that are extraordinarily ill-suited to be on NES and publish them in America because Americans like that, right? No, we don't. You know, a friend of mine had silent service for the NES when I was a kid, and we used to played a fair bit. I actually do like it.

I agree it's a very poor fit for the NES, but the game is fascinating. It's kind of fun, its own weird little submarine simulation way. As I recall, his dad was a World War II vet, so of course he had to get all these World War II type games. Yeah, we had the PC version. This is a Sid Meyer game from Micro Proz. So it's, I remember, I did an interview with Sidmeyer, many, many God, like almost 20 years ago now, 18, something.

And we probably talked about it. It's not called Gamma Sutra anymore. Whatever it's called now, game developer. Yeah. Something. It's somewhere out there. But anyway. Yeah, silent service.

There you go. All right. Silent service. We are silent about this game. Let's see, also in the military theme-ish, Spy v. Spy 2. The sequel to Spy v. Spy v. Spy. bigger, bolder, batter, and did the gray spy ever show up in these games? Or was it always just black versus white? I think it's just black and white. We just played the first

one. Yeah, the second one actually did get an NES port, well, Famicom port, but only in Japan. It never came to the U.S. It came out in Japan around the same time that the first spy versus spy came here. Really great choice there, guys. Way to go Kimco. But I feel like I feel like throwing the gray spy in there for like a third player spoiler would have been really cool. It would have been xenophobe a couple of years early, but no, they blew it. In this house, we love and respect to the gray spy. The gray spy is cool. She's great because she rarely showed up.

So when she did, it was always a fun surprise. And we were like, oh, damn, it's the gray spy. Yeah, gray spy rules the best spy, actually. morally gray, physically gray, she's just gray, and great. You can't spell great without gray. I mean, you can, but you shouldn't. G-R-E-Y-T. Yes, great.

Next up, summer games too, because summer games, one, wasn't enough, and winter games and California games, and so when it's a world games, they just had to keep making these games. I feel like I struggle with Epic's. I feel like I struggle with Epic's. games because it's not 1985 and I'm not playing them on C-64, which was probably the sort of Petri dish, the environment where they actually worked. I've only played them on consoles many years later, and I don't love it. California games was awesome. Also, I mean,

we played summer games one on the Atari 800 a lot, and it was really fun. We'd do like a whole Olympics event, go through it and try to beat people's, each other's high scores. And it was fun so I think they were good in that time in that context yeah yeah that's the thing is yeah they're some of the most like tied they they are games that are extraordinarily tied to a time and a place and a platform um more so than many video games it's really remarkable like how the the video game platform or a franchise that ages like milk i feel like that's a lot of computer games like they are they really are time and place that kind of Especially because of interface innovations, like when you had a keyboard, there is like the impulse to have every key do a different thing, you know, push it.

And then when you had a controller, people had to innovate and figure out different interface that's simpler and more context-based and stuff. And so a lot of those old games don't translate very well to modern consoles or modern sensibilities, interface sensibilities. Anyway, yeah, there you go. All right. Jared had to take off a little early. But maybe Benj could talk about Ultima 4, Quest of the Avatar, but not the Navi Avatar. This is the big one. Yeah, this is the big one that I've never really played very much, which is funny. We had Ultima 3 Exodus on the Atari ST when I was a kid.

And then we skipped straight to Ultima 6, so on the PC. And then that was like, then I played Ultima 8 and Ultima 9. Anyway, but Ultima 4 is famous because it's an avatar, and this is the one that introduced the system of virtues that Richard Garriott developed. And I did a podcast a long time ago called The Culture of Tech in 2017, where I interviewed Richard Garriott about how he developed the virtue system, which was really fun for this game. And he drew on a lot of different types of philosophy to sort of boil morality down to a set

of virtues and how they interrelate with each other. And this game is neat because you have a choice to choose a moral. path in the game instead of just being, you know, you can be good or bad and you can, you know, there's not, I think that, I don't know, I don't want to mess it up, but because, but it's, it's a, it was a very influential game, uh, for its time. And Jared would like be so eloquent talking about. I wish you were here. He would be. Yeah. Um, but sadly he's not. So just imagine. Yeah. Close your eyes and picture yourself on a beach listening to Jared Petty talk about the, wonders of Ultima for the virtues of the virtue system, et cetera, et cetera. I want to say, no, a big, a big influential game.

Just one other thing about this is the avatar concept originated from this game and Richard has, Gary, has a, aka Lord British, I should mention, has a beef with the other guy who claims he coined

the term avatar, which was Chip Morning Star or Randy Farmer. who did Habitat on the Commodore 64. He claims he coined the term avatar, but it's both, you know, it's a projection of yourself in real life into this other world, and it draws upon the, like, a Hindu concept of avatar. Yeah, I was going to say neither of them invented the idea of avatar.

Yeah, but this is like the, whenever you say your avatar in an online world, it comes back to these two concepts of this game, which is, you know, everybody says avatar these days. for games and whatever so and the movie avatar is a similar sort of concept projecting yourself into another world anyway that originated in this game basically so very cool So the morality system that we mentioned in Ultima 4 was very explicit in that game. It was very much front and center. The idea is that you are not going around to beat different bosses and collect great treasures,

but to basically become the paradigm of different moral causes. But at the same time, you did have a game, a sequel to Dragon Slayer coming out of Japan on PCs there that had a karma system, and that was Zanadu, a Dragon Slayer 2, a game that is probably best known now because it was the expansion pack featured the first professional game compositions by Yuzo Kosh. Chiro, and started the trend of these very pokey games having profoundly amazing music. You get that a lot with British games, too, like, you know, Spectrum games from the late 80s that are just struggling to do anything, but the music is mind-blowingly awesome. And you kind of got that with the Zanadu expansion pack.

But Zanadu, I feel like it was a very influential work on games like The Legend of Zelda in the, you know, travel around these different towns, kind of running and jumping, but then you enter buildings and it goes to a top-down view, and it's very much sort of turn-based action RPG-ish. But there was a karma system in this game, and if you killed the wrong kinds of enemies, you would become less powerful and have trouble beating the game as if it weren't difficult enough already. except it's not really explicitly stated like which monsters are okay for you to kill and which are not so it was even more obtuse and opaque than you would expect from an RPG of this era and the kids loved it

that it ate up so much time it was a hugely popular game it sold like half a million copies which on a Japanese personal computer in the mid-80s was just an unbelievable number and I think Nihon Falcom is still

running on the proceeds that they generated with this game 40 years ago. It's just, it was such a huge hit and such, you know, just such a huge part of the gaming landscape at that point. Very, very influential. I guess Zanadu has finally been released here by way of an untranslated adaptation via Aga console on Switch. I think Zanadu did make it as part of that line. I don't know that that's the best way to experience it. But you can get it that way. It's, you know, they did try to bring Zanadu over here for NES. And Hudson said, oh, we should make it a, you know, a console-style game and call it Famicom Xanadu or Fazanadu. And Hudson apparently really, or not Hudson, Neon Falcom really hates that version of the game. They think it is garbage because it strays so

much from the original Zanadu, but it is so much more playable and accessible and friendly. It's actually a damn masterpiece, and they're wrong. Anyway, that's me telling people about their business. So looking it up, I guess the PC-88 version that's on the egg console, so the menus are all in English, so it's mostly like the ending that's still in Japanese, so ostensibly you should be able to figure it out. Okay. I couldn't say for sure, but that's just what I'm looking up.

Yeah, I haven't messed with egg console games yet. I think it's cool that they're coming, but I do wish that more effort was put into localizing them, as opposed to just sort of like saying, hey, Americans, here you go. Here are some computer games from 40 years ago that you may or may not find accessible. Go wild. Bold of them, but, you know, not the way I would go about it. At least they're giving me some early compiles. games. It's true.

Is Gardick on there yet? The original Gartick? Ooh, I need to download that for sure. All right. One last game, we are definitely not going to make it to 1995 because we are an hour, 45 minutes into this podcast already, and we all have to go to bed now. The final game on this exciting journey through 1985's computer releases is Tetris, which technically came out in 1985 for a computer that was inaccessible to almost everyone in

the world. But nevertheless, that is the origin of Tetris. Alexey Pajitnov published it on the Electronica 60, if I'm not mistaken, at a Soviet university. And it did eventually make its way trickle out into the world through MirroSoft and Atari and Nintendo and Sega and all those other people clamoring to license it because it is, in fact, a really good game. trickle down economics in action it's trickle out Reagan era and despite what the the Tetris company claims this is not an 84 game they keep pushing that you tell them you tell them Tetris you know is pretty good someone should talk about it at some point celebrate it right about it doing that's fine

good news it's going to ship as a dedicated console soon or dedicated handheld as part of the Tetris Anniversary Collection that Digital Eclipse is publishing. That sounds cool. Actually, I think I saw that Limited Run is doing a physical edition of it. I actually had not heard about that. So if I didn't misread that yesterday, that's actually kind of cool. And I'm going to abuse my position there to get my hands on one of those handholds, as one should. That's cool.

What's the point? Tetris handhelds before, though, like in the early 2000s. I don't know, LCD games where you can play it. Those are pretty cool. Oh, sure. There's the McNugget Tetris from China. Yeah. So what's special about this handheld, this new handheld?

This one's probably good, is my guess. It's some, like, new variant on Tetris. Like, I guess, you know, the spec for Tetris is always changing. It's always evolving. Ah. So, like, the, uh, the, uh, the, um, The Nintendo Tetris on Game Boy, they can't do that one anymore because it doesn't have infinite spin and things like that. So this is, I guess, you know, fifth edition Tetris or whatever.

It's like D&D. I don't know. Yeah, so it has the shadow pieces that are falling down. I don't like that, that show you where it's going to fall, that kind of thing, probably. I have a little side thing just because since we've, you know, everybody's talked about Tetris. I was just playing a game called High Rise on the Atari 800 the other day. I posted about it on Blue Sky And it was from 82

MicroLearn It's sort of a weird precursor to Tetris that no one knows about I doubt it was I don't know if it was actually influential of Tetris I doubt Alexei Pagetnau played it But it has these pieces that look like

Tetris pieces that fall down And you select the ones you want You put them on a ramp and you eject them upside down into a stack That has to hold it so of weight physically so you can climb to the top and it's a really

cool little game just a little Easter egg deer interesting I've never heard of this game but it does look high rise Tetris E

it's not really like Tetris-esque but it's like the great grandfather of falling block puzzle games in a way that people don't understand you know like it has some sort of similar structural

you have to make a structure out of these pieces that you're given so set sizes Anyway, they are the lemons that life gives you to make lemonade. Exactly. Just like Tetris. Yeah, I want to check this out sometime.

It seems interesting. Anyway, so that is 1985. We did not even get close to talking about 1995. So I guess I'm going to robe everyone back into one of these sessions and we'll wrap up the 2025 years in review review as a trio. That's there's a first time for everything. I'm sure next year, if we're still all alive, we'll end up doing four years or four episodes worth of conversation.

because that just seems to be how all this nonsense is unfolding. That's just the way it is. I can't help it. These are the rules. I don't make them. I'm just the host. Listen, there's a lot to talk about with 76, right? Yeah, absolutely.

And then we get to 77, and there's a whole talking heads album about it. Yes. So that is Retronaut's episode, whatever the hell this was. Thank you all for joining us. Thank you. I was speaking to my co-hosts here. Thank you all for listening to us, and I'm speaking to the people in the audience out there. Retronauts, of course, is a phenomenal podcast that you can listen to on the internet at places like Retronauts.com and also on various services, pretty much any sort of podcatcher and hosting service besides Spotify because they suck and are evil, and we don't have the show there.

But everywhere else, just look up retro knots. It's like astronauts, not like retro zero. Don't get that confused. Sometimes people do. And then they're disappointed and sad because they can't seem to find the podcast. You can support us if you enjoyed this somehow. If you thought Jeremy Parrish ranting for an hour about computer games from 1985 was awesome. Well, good news.

You can keep that sort of thing flowing by keeping the money flowing. subscribe to us on Patreon. That is how the show is funded. That is how I am able to give these people here on the show with me some money for taking the time to listen to me scream about 1985 computer games. Patreon.com slash Retronauts subscribe and you get every episode a week early with no advertisements in a higher audio fidelity level, which is awesome on its own. At some advanced tiers, you can do things like get a ton of exclusive content every one. week and every weekend, or even select topics for us to discuss. And I will scream about some other topic and rant about it for two hours in exchange for your American dollars. Thank you

very much for your support. Anyway, gentlemen, please tell us where we can find you. I am Benj Edwards. You can find me on blue sky at Benj Edwards.com, whatever my name is on there, which is weird, how they do there. You know, my identity is linked to my domain name. I don't make the rules there either. It doesn't make sense. But I do not frequent X very much anymore for very, should, obviously obvious reasons. And you can, I write for Ars Technica about AI stuff. And that's me.

Nice. Chris Sims, your time is coming soon. We'll get to 95 eventually. Eventually. Eventually. I swear. I got up early for this. Well, you know.

needed to tell us about G.I. Joe. That's true. And if you'd like to hear me actually talking on a podcast, I do a bunch of them. You can find me by going to T.H.E.esb.com. That is my website. It's got some things that I've written that are good and fun to read. You can also find me weekly on the War Rocket Ajax podcast and irregularly on the Apocrypal's podcast, which is relevant to other recent appearances that I've made on this show about the satanic panic. And an upcoming appearance. You don't have to get up early for that. one though I promise. Good, good. And also, you can hire me to write a video game for you. If you need someone to write a video game, I've done that and I'm not doing it currently. So please go to my website and find out how you can get these ill-informed GI Joe opinions for things beyond the comics and cartoon. The stuff about the comics cartoon, very well informed, I assure you, for your very I am. Chris, did you get the compendium, the Kickstarter thing that came out with all the GI Joe comics? No, I mean, I've already got them all. Yes, but now you can get them in a large box, and if you drop it out of your window, it will kill a person underneath. Look, I can't justify quadruple dipping on G.I. Joe comics.

On the other hand, in for a penny, in for a pound, right? Yeah, it's like 20 pounds. I do have eight different versions of G.I. Joe 21. in various formats. They keep cranking that one out. It's a good one. Anyway, Kevin Bunch, where can we find you? If you like hearing me talk about archaic video games, boy, howdy.

I'm on Blue Sky under Atariarchive.org, which is my website's domain as well. I've been actually updating that recently now that I have a link to it through Blue Sky, so enjoy that. I've also got my YouTube series, Atari Archive, which kick this whole thing off, where I'm going through the 2,600 library, game by game, in chronological order, digging out into the history of each of these releases and, you know, even entire genres. And I have a book delving into similar topics that's out now through Limited Run Games, Atari Archive, Volume 1. Highly recommended, it's good. And finally, you can find, well, Jared, who has... had to drop off to deal with some stuff. I believe he is on Blue Sky as Petty comma Jared.

Dot blue sky. Dot social. Just look him up. Jared Petty. He's great. Follow him. As for me, you can find me also on Blue Sky as J. Parrish.

dot social. J. Parrish. dot Blue Sky. Social. Yes. You can find me on YouTube at Limited Run Games. And here on Retronauts. Plus various other places.

I just show up around like I'm this bad penny. and that makes me special and precious because they're going to stop making pennies. So savor me while you can. Anyway, thanks everyone for listening back to our recollections of better times. There are more recollections of better times coming again soon. Eventually, we will get to 1995 and it's going to rule because we're actually going to get sidebarred talking about Krono Trigger and Yoshi's Island for an hour, and that's okay. I don't know what I'm going to be.

And so many, you know, I'm going to be. And so, yeah, I'm going to be. Thank you. Thank you.