Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 191: The 2019 Years-in-Review Revue, Pt. I

Episode Date: December 31, 2018

The whole East gang's here: Ben, Benj, AND Chris join Jeremy for the traditional New Year's look back at 10/20/30/40 and even 50 (!) years ago. Naturally, the usual Retronauts East banter and digressions take the whole thing so far off track we only get halfway through our planned discussion this time through. See you for the follow-up in 2019!

This week in Retronauts, we explore the power of tens. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts East. I am Jeremy Parrish. And I am in a room with people talking about video games. We're going to talk about many, many video games. It's going to be very exciting. And that's great because we have many, many people here. In fact, this is, to my awareness, the first time we've had the full tetrumvirate of Retronauts East to gather together in one room. So, guys, sound off.

Let's go in order of the mics. So that means it's you first. This is Chris Sims. and I do consider myself the Arne Anderson of this particular four horsemen. I see. And next. And this is Ben Elgin. I'll just go with, I don't know, I'll have the pale horse.

Sure, why not? Okay. I'm Ben Edwards. And I know nothing. And your pestilence? Yeah. All right. Yeah, sure.

We didn't have to go there. Let's do which Ninja Turtle are we? I like the Fantastic Four better. Like I said, I'm not it for Herbie. I'm, okay, I'm pretty obviously, Mike. I'm Shei-Holk. You're Donatello. Wait, so I'm Rath?

That doesn't have. No. I don't know if I can do that. Leonardo. You're D'Olella. You do machines. I do machines. So you guys, I mean, you know, you're kind of the leader of this little gang.

Yeah, no, Leo is boring. He's like Cyclops. No one wants to be Leonardo. No one wants to be Cyclops. He's the neutral. I mean, he's like the Mario. Donatelo. carries the stick, but Leonardo's got up his butt. Can I be Miss Marvel? I literally came in

wanting pizza today. That's all I'm saying. That's, you're all the turtles. You are the turtle tetrumvirate. I don't know if that's a real word, but by God, I contain multitudes of turtles. Anyway, so we're off to a great start here talking about a podcast. We're like an hour late starting, so yeah, that's right, guys. Yep. It's been one of those days. Shouldn't have had the beer at lunch. But you did. So here we go. We're going to talk about video games, as I promised before. Not just any video games, but specifically, this is one of the Retronaut's traditional years in review review. Yes. So as we have done in the past years, we go back in time to celebrate the adamant of a new year by looking back 10, 20, 30, 40 years. It used to be 5, 10, 10, 15,

but now there's more years behind us in which there have been video games so we can't do the five-year thing anymore we'd never get out of the 70s maybe into the 80s but this would go nowhere so yeah so things have changed we're starting and that's right the nicest year of all 1969

and possibly going as far as 2009 depending I don't know this may end up being two episodes because it seems like anytime I put together a plan these days to cover a number of topics, we get halfway through. So this may end up being a two-parter. I don't know. You'll know by the time you download this because it'll be up there and I'll have explained it in the comments. But here in the present, in the past for you, we don't know. The future is a mystery. We're traveling through time. I have no idea what's not going on anymore. No, this makes, this is cool because then we don't actually have to do

this because it's like we're already there and it's already been done. So let's just go home. That's in the future now. Okay. Not the past in the future. Let's not cause a time travel. Ben, sorry.

Ben, what are you doing? I almost opened up a warp in space time. Man, I'm too sleepy for this. I'm jet lag. Okay. All right.

So we're doing decades back from the coming year. So we're all the nines. Ben, why don't you leave this podcast? I have no idea what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing. All right. So we're in 69.

I believe none of us were born then. I certainly was not. Yeah, so this is... And I'm the elder statesman here, so that means this is prehistory. No one was alive. The world did not exist in 1969, and yet there is a fossil record of video games. But barely video games. Yeah, that's what I was going to ask.

Are these, like, actual video games? Because, Ben, I know that you have drawn a distinction between video games and computer games. Yeah. I mean, Lunar Lander was on a video screen. Actually, the first Lunar Lander was text only. Yeah. Remember, I'm the guy I wrote the Lunar Lander article that I went through the only Lunar Lander article that's ever been written, right? Well, it's the first one that identified Jim Storer as the author of the first Lunar Lander, and then I went and interviewed, the guy in 79 who did Howard, Howard, Howard, Scott Morshaw?

No. I forgot his name, Howard Dean, no, that's the guy for the Democratic. Sorry, I drank a beer at lunch and I can't remember. But his name is really cool, and he went on to do asteroids at Atari. He did Lunar Lander first. But so in 69, we are talking about the text-only one. This is on the PDP-8, you know, workstation computer of the day. Well, yeah, there was teletype, and then there was the PDP version.

So by the time we get to PDP, it is definitely a video game because it's on a video terminal. I mean, I can tell you in 69, what was happening in video games was Space War had come out in 62 or whatever, and people were still playing Space War all through the 60s. And then Ralph Baer in 67 created, you know, what became the, what became the, Odyssey later, the first television video games. By 69, they had a brown box demo and they were trying to sell it to Magnavox and other places like that. And that didn't come out until 72.

But in 69, you know, that was the actual moon landing happened for real. And so the high school guy, Ken Storer, wrote a basic game that was a simulation of landing on the moon with like your fuel level. and you have to deal with gravity and various physics and things like that. But it is just text-based, the very first one. Yeah, but it looked like this, and it looked, so the input output is very simple. You just tell it, like, how much fuel you want to burn, and it tells you, you know, what your velocity is and how far above the surface you are.

But, like, behind it, it's got, like, the real equations, like a bunch of physics in there. He said, I think he said, you know, this is a long time. I've wrote this article that I'm talking about 10 years ago, so it's a little fuzzy, but. So it's actually going to. be addressed in the 2009 segment of this. Yeah. But I think he remember, he went in, one of the guys who did the Lunar Landers things went

and actually looked up the actual books for the real Apollo Lunar Lander module of how it worked and the physics behind it and used that as the basis of their simulation. So the next one, the next major simulation, the first graphical one was in 73 on a deck, PDP 11 or something

with a vector terminal. And then Atari, the guy from Atari saw that and then he did the arcade version in 79. So we'll get to that in 79. So, but yeah, I mean, I really don't want to spend any more time in this podcast ever dickering about semantics about video games. Like, you know, this Lunarlander became a video game, highly influential. It was definitely not the first video game.

Like, you know, space war existed by this point or computer space or I get the too confused. It was Space War, right? Yeah. Yeah, that was Ken Russell. No, he was a documentary director. Steve Russell. Steve Russell. Yeah.

Ken Russell made movies. They were probably pornographic, no, what I'm thinking about it. I don't know. But in 69, you know, Nolan Bushnell had graduated in 68 from University of Utah, I think, is what it was. And then he came and worked at Apex at 69. He met Ted Dabney that year, and they started collaborating, which would become computer space. When they started working on that in 70, and it came out in 71. Those were happening in 69.

And you know what else happened in 1969? Abbey Road. That's true. But no, the moon landing. We talked about that. Yeah, you mentioned in passing, but I mean, that's kind of a big deal. It was, you know, for the first time, a human being was on a physical body that was not the Earth. That's a historic huge impact thing. Like, it's massive. It's really excited about science, about exploration, about space, and of course, all these things fed into stories and video games. Right. I mean, that was the direct inspiration for Lunarlander. It was like, here. is a high school student who was like, I can land on the moon also.

And in my computer. Yeah, exactly. And that's, you know, that's, or whoever's computer. I doubt he had a PDP in his room. He was his high school, PDP 8 or whatever. I just want to say that is the greatest achievement in human history. What? Lunar landing?

The moon landing. Yeah. I have very passionate about this. I have my picture taken with the Saturn 5 engines. That's why you're super excited about Sailing. I don't know. Sailor moon, right? It's all the moon, baby.

Have you read the right stuff? I've thought the Mercury astronauts. It's so good. You know, I think it is important to talk about, you know, cultural contexts and, you know, historic contexts. So this was all very much a time of exploration and, you know, according to the fossil record that predates our existence, like according to the people who have made up things about the past that we can't prove ourselves. This was a time of rapid innovation and technological advancement. And back when people were actually excited about science. remember you don't remember when it was a cool thing yeah as opposed to like something that half the people in the world want to deny even exists yeah that was that was a good time very exciting of course you know space the space race was all ultimately about like getting a strategic advantage over russia so there was the pragmatic angle to it conflict and evil and that sort of thing but hey it was still like you know people sitting around little tiny tube televisions waiting breathlessly to hear if someone had landed on the moon.

If we shot a bullet filled with people at an object hundreds of thousands of miles away, hundreds of thousands. 262,000 miles? Yeah, there we can't remember what it is. Something like that, yeah. Like a quarter of a million. It's a long way away. And we hit it. And they didn't die.

And then they came back. And that was so amazing. So, yeah, like that's, that is right there, the inspiration for Lunar Lander, which would go on to become a pretty influential video. game in its own right. Shout out to Michael Collins. Yeah. The one no one remembers. Even, yeah.

Jethra Atoll remembers him. There's a song called for Michael Collins, Jeffrey, and me. There's a... It has nothing to do with Michael Collins, but they remembered him in the name of their song. Even looking back to Space War, I know this is not a 62 one, but space war was inspired by, you know, the space race and everything, obviously at the time. That was more the actual government side of things, like, oh, let's blow things up in space. Yeah, but I'm just saying that was the atmosphere.

sphere of the time. Everyone was talking about satellites and who was going to be the first man in space and all that stuff. And yet CBS was like, Star Trek, no, let's cancel that a few months before the moon landing. No one cares about space because they have, you know, great insight and vision. Anyway, yeah, so Lunar Lander has been remade many times. And we'll talk about that in 1979. But even now, people continue to remake the Atari version and the text version and take their own interpretations of it. I covered a version of it for, Game Boy that only came out in Japan. And the actual Lunar Lander part of it is only a tiny fraction.

But I guess that's a better thing to talk about in 79. I'm with you land. Oh, it's a shame that it's had to be here. The mother's ship is just a bled from your trade made for you. And when you fly It's so pleasing to fly Just a little It's a little bit here

It's on The other notable game That, uh, that, you know, poking around and looking at history that I found for 1969 It's called, It's called space travel, which, Binge, are you familiar with this one? Actually, believe it or not,

even though I pride myself as a early video game and computer historian, I had never heard of this until you wrote it on the notes. That's how scary it is. Yeah, I was poking around and I found this mentioned on Wikipedia. I was like, really? So I looked around and the, you know, it links to a bunch of references that seem legit. So it's either an extremely complex long con to fool this podcast to make us look stupid or else it is a video game. And I use the word video game loosely because, you know, from, from what I can understand, it was an aimless space sandbox. It was not like a game with a mission or a structure or or, you know, like conflict or anything like that.

So it's no man sky. Yeah, kind of. Yeah. Like you're, I mean, but there's still conflict and stuff in no man sky. Whereas this is just like go to different planets and keep farting around. Yeah, I read it. It's created by Ken Thompson, one of the Unix guys, the fathers of Unix and at Bell Labs or something. And it was a simulation of flying through space in the solar system in a two-dimensional perspective. Right.

Landing on the planets that you can and sinking forever and being crushed. in Jupiter's gravity well. Oh, that's fun. I don't know. Anyway, I like Wikipedia's summation of the game. It was never distributed beyond its initial locations. As a result, it had no effect on future video games. So even now, like even, you know, what is this?

Like 50 years ago, you have this little tide pool of concepts. And, you know, we've talked a lot about Plato development and things like that. And you get a lot of that. Like people were doing cool, innovative, interesting things. but they were doing them in these closed systems that very few people had access to or shared systems, but computers were just such a scarce resource at the time.

They were not a commodity in everyone's home. So they were coming up with ideas. They did neat things. Maybe it influenced some people who saw it and they went on to create commercial products that eventually reached the public. But many of these just like happened and died. And who knows what kinds of interesting innovations

have been lost because of that. This is why I never say, when I do an article or something, I never say this is the absolute first. of this kind of thing, because there are others that were done by people in these limited venues that weren't distributed that you can discover later. There's all kinds of things popped up like that. I like saying something is the first, because inevitably, something else turns out to be

the first, and then you can like, and actually, here's the real first. I did that to myself, when I did the Carol Shaw thing, I said, Carol Shaw was the first female video game developer, and then it was like, oops, I've discovered that there was another one. And then so I wrote a different article about Joyce Weissbecker, who predated her by a year or two, and then, you know, I made myself wrong. But that's history as a process of, you know, revising and revisiting things. Yeah, I feel like the value in putting things down and saying, like, here's where it started, maybe not definitively, but kind of like putting that down as a placeholder because then it gives people sort of an anchor point to say, well, what happened before that? So it's kind of, we were talking about this at lunch, actually, not that it does. any good to anyone listening to this podcast at home, but, you know, the idea of like telling a story,

well, there's always context around the story. There's, you know, the world keeps happening around the narrative that you spend. And this is a great example of that. Yeah. And by the way, Lunarlander was originally written in focal, not basic. I'm looking at my article. God, you made yourself wrong again. That's okay. I can't remember everything. Ben Jebris has gone back to his favorite source, which is, of course, Ben Jebordes. Yeah, I'm so full of myself. All right. So as much as I love 1969, I mean, Brian Adams even saying about it, we have to move along to 10 years ahead. 1979. So let's talk about 1979. I was alive at that point. I don't remember it that well. I remember vaguely like some life circumstances. I remember having one of the very first happy meals that had Star Trek the motion picture on it. And I didn't really know what Star Trek was, but I thought it was cool because there were spaceships and aliens and stuff.

And there was a bald woman. And I was like, huh, that's weird. That started your love for bald woman. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I was going to Harvard in 79. I was at their daycare. The Harvard Daycare? Yeah, yeah.

Is that why you're so smart? Yeah, it must be. They just started you on the high achievement. Like, yeah, yeah. They didn't give you just alphabet blocks, but it had like Thorn and other obsolete letters on it. Like, learn the true alphabet, young man. Yeah, totally. All right.

But, yeah, Star Trek the Motion Picture did come out that year. After 10 years, you know, 10 years after CBS said, this is stupid, no one cares about space. Then, you know, they kept developing it for a decade. And eventually a movie came out, and it was a huge disappointment to everyone. But we got Star Trek 2 out of it, so it's all good. And the premise of that movie is, what if just everybody wore pajamas all the time? What everyone was comfy?

It's like the year 2018. turns out. Sorry. Also in that year, a much more, I think, successful space movie Alien came out, which married like horror to science fiction. And it was the first movie to really, I mean, Star Trek or Star Wars kind of did like the, here's like a lived in science fiction universe, but we could do a, we should do a whole episode on Alien because it's amazing.

Yeah, that would be good. But yeah, that was happening around the same time. And at the very end of the year, Pink Floyd released. the wall. So these are the things that I care about. There's other stuff that happened in 79, but I don't care. Doesn't matter. Was there a rush album? There was permanent waves. Oh, man. That's a good one. And no pause for research on that one. That was out of thin air. That was out of thin air. I knew you'd have that. Oh, yeah. Fact away. I think there's a couple of... There was a guy named Carter in the White House. He was making

peanuts. Yeah. I think there's a couple other things that bear mentioning, since we're going to be getting into them with video games. Seventy-nine is one year after Superman the movie which was a huge deal and it's two years after Star Wars which you may have heard of so those were both big things

that would be reflected isn't Star Wars that movie about social justice warriors yes okay I like that one yeah I like the new ones they're good yeah so so definitely a lot of kind of like you know

I feel like moving into the things that would sort of become pillars of pop culture throughout the 80s and even now, to that, for that matter. So I feel like video games were in kind of a different place because at that point, Space Invaders was a year old. The Atari VCS was two years old. Pong was only four years before that.

Like home Pong, Pong for home systems. So people were still making Pong clones because that was still a thing people wanted to play. So, you know, video games were still very much in that sort of primitive abstract space. So pretty much what you had in terms of the things that mattered for platforms where people launched video games were Atari's VCS, the 400 and 800 computers were released that year, and then the arcade machines. Actually, no, there is one more thing worth talking about. PCs were starting to kind of enter the world, but there was a brand new video game system released that year, the very first handheld game console ever.

Milton Bradley's microvision with its amazing 16 by 16 resolution. Holy crap, can you believe that fidelity? Yeah, I have one. I have one of those. Actually, I just sold it to a museum, but it's really, you sold it to a museum. That's so mercenary. Hey, it's not one of those things like it's the only one in the whole world.

You're a belloc and not an indie. Don't be a belloc. I gave him a good deal. It's like half the price on eBay here. Yeah. Anyway, so microvision is cool. It's got a tiny little LED screen, and the cartridges, LCD screen, sorry, LCD screen, and the cartridges have the actual processor in it.

The cartridges are like an overlay built into the software and the CPU in it, and it plugs into a base unit that only has a little paddle thing on at the bottom to a knob that moves back and forth. And then there are buttons sort of, there's a touchpad with, The overlays on the cartridge Let you push different buttons based on the game They say different things and stuff And so I had the Star Trek one, Phaser Strike It was pretty neat

It launched with seven games It had a better launch than Nintendo 64 Wow Yeah It's a neat thing A lot of them these days don't work very well Yeah, I have one that is definitely not working Yeah mine was still in pretty good shape

Luckily There's something about the LCD screens That like rots out They leak or something Okay, the diodes like that gets in there or something. Also, speaking of this... Delaminate, whatever. Speaking of this in Nintendo, I read an interesting thing that said that some of the people

working Nintendo seen this thing and had said later that it influenced the development of the game and watch. Well, you never hear that in the histories that we call for the articles we write, huh? Wow. But, yeah, it launched with seven games. One of them was based on Star Trek because Star Trek was a thing that was happening again. And, you know, Star Trek, I've continued to be popular, actually more popular in syndication than it was in its original television runs. So it, like, remained in the public consciousness.

It basically inspired people to create pornographic slash fiction. Like, that was the first in the world. People like, Kirk and Spock, oh, yeah, they've got a thing. The origin of scenes. Yeah. Like, the fan culture there was huge. So it really, like, Star Trek is an episode unto itself for sure. But it's interesting that this system for Milton Bradley launched with a Star Trek tie-in. What the hell was phaser strike binge? What I recall is sort of two diagonal lines coming out of the lower left and lower right corners of the screen that are sort of like where the bullets come out and something. Phasers, Benj. Phasers.

Phasers. The light energy particle weaponry. Phased energy. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So they shoot out, you know, I think there's little dots on the screen and you shoot things to try to. I hit up the dots. And, of course, they're all such huge pixels, huge squares that there's no detail whatsoever.

Right. So, like, that could be a D7 cruiser, but it could be like Superman. Who knows? It's just a square. It's just a square, guys. I think I just shot God. What did he need it with a Starship anyway? Yep.

So, and I had bowling, I think. So how did bowling work? I can't imagine. Like, there's barely enough pixel resolution to get all the pins in there. Honestly, I powered it back up to test it again this year and played two games. and the other ones I hadn't played in like 20 years since I bought it or whatever, 15 years. So I don't remember what Bowling is like.

Got it. But I had it. Right. Okay. So there's a Connect 4 game. That sounds kind of tricky in 16 by 16. Well, 16 by 16 I can see because it adds up right. Yeah. But it's one bit color. It's monochrome. So if you have a 16 by 16 grid that can either be white or black,

how do you do connect for? I wish the microvision I had work because I have wanted to play these games, but it's just a, it's a difficult. Blockbuster is the cool one. It's the one that's built in. Well, I came with it. It's not built in. It's a plug-in out, right? Yeah, it's pretty much breakout. And I think it's designed for that, just that's quite has a knob. So it's basically the portable Apple 2. It's just as Apple 2 was designed to play breakout, this was designed to play Blockbuster. Yeah, portable version. And I had MindBuster, but I have no idea what it was like. I can't even remember. All right. I'm glad

everyone's listening to this podcast and getting lots of of hard, useful information about video game history. You get to hear about everything I forgot. That's what this podcast is. We've forgotten more than you ever knew about video games, audience. So, yeah. Okay, anyway, so I don't know, microvision is a cool little sidebar.

I'm glad it existed. It was, like, it was, I wouldn't say ahead of its time, but it definitely was too early. Like, the technology just wasn't quite there. I feel like, you know, Epic would do a pretty good job five years later with the pocket game computer. which, you know, actually did have enough graphical resolution to make it somewhat worthwhile. You could get Sokoban on there and some other games.

I think it only had like six games or something, though, totally. And it's now very expensive, so I've never played that one either. That's how I first met Chris Covell. I forgot how you pronounce the name, but... Covell, I don't know. And he had a page on the epic pocket computer. And in 2009, I did an article that was like a slideshow of the history of all handheld game systems. at that time, and that's when, because it was for the microvision, and that's when I first

learned about the epoch, epic, pocket computer. And it was a very interesting, obscure, rare sort of thing, but that was another year, so I guess we should skip it. That's okay. I mean, we'll talk about it someday. Yeah. Stick around for five years, folks. Look forward to it. Maybe by then I'll be able to afford it. Let's see. So going back to Atari, I guess both console and arcades. They were sort of straddling it. Do you want to talk about the 400 and 800 computers? Those were, those were pretty great. Those were like the 5200 was a consoleized

Atari 400 wasn't it? Yeah, that came out in 82. Right. So it came later, but I mean, it was based on the technology that they launched in 79. Yes, indeed. I think the vague story I've gotten from talking to some Atari veterans here and there of the years

just sort of, you know, I know the guys who created the Atari 400 stuff, but I never actually sat down and interviewed him about it, which is stupid because it's like my favorite computer and console, because I grew up with that's why I want you to talk about it now yeah so but they essentially Atari needed a follow up for the 2600 console and Nolan um was still around at Atari at that time Nolan Bushnell and he was pushing to abandon the 2600 and start with a new platform that was more

sophisticated because the 2600 was incredibly primitive and just through a freak of the way it was designed they could add to it every time but the the Atari 800 and 400 platform was really advanced because it had these custom chips for graphics, for sprite-based graphics and, you know, sound generation and things like that, that were incredibly advanced at the time, including, it was like sort of like having the first graphical accelerated computer game console because they had custom. They had a CTIA chip that became a GTIA is what they call it later,

and that let you manipulate these sprites on the screen. You could have a bunch of them in a lot of smooth action and a lot of good sound and stuff. But at the same time when they were developing this follow-up game console, the Apple 2 launched and became incredibly successful. So Atari had been bought by Warner and they were like, well, maybe we could get a little slice of that personal computer pie at the same time. So then they started turning it into a home computer. And then it became like it has a keyboard. and then some of the engineers wanted to make it like an Apple 2

where you could put any card you want into it but Apple 2 got around this FCC thing where every other computer that had an RF modulator in it which is the box that allows you to put out this simulated antenna signal that hooks your TV set with the audio and sound everyone with an RF modulator

has to have all this shielding and crazy metal inside to keep it from interfering with other devices and other TVs and things yeah because it's not like creating a physical connection. It's basically like broadcast. Yeah, it's like a simulated broadcasting studio in your computer broadcasting to the antenna jack on your TV.

And so Apple II got around that. They didn't include an RF modulator. You know, I was like using security monitors and they had another, they had like another operation called SuperMod. Some other guy made a SuperMod RF mod. They just made a little

plug for it on the board and that guy came in and sold it after they sold it. So they didn't have to do anything. They had this wide open system. But the Atari 800, they had to shield it down so much that they had to invent the serial I.O. interface where all these peripherals plug in, all these crazy ways, and they all need their own CPUs and stuff to connect to each other. Although, one interesting thing about that is that it later inspired, I think, a little bit of the development of USB Universal Serial Bus, because Joe DeCure worked on that later, too. They should have ended that way sooner. As someone who dealt with Scussie through the 90s Yeah

USB couldn't have come sooner It could have come much sooner Yeah Yep so now I lost I don't know what I was talking about But you're talking about the 800 Yeah the 800 Yeah so it was a

A very advanced computer for its time And I think it was hobbled by the fact That Atari didn't want any third party Developers Creating software for it for the first couple of years And so it wasn't obvious how to do that I don't think they were allowing publishers to publish third-party stuff until like 82, 83 or something.

I can't remember 80. It seems really difficult to lock that down on a computer. Where you have access to like a command line, right? Yeah, I don't think there's any copy protection or anything like that. It was just like a corporate mandate to not really open it up. Like they didn't send out dev kits to all these third-party people. Right. Develop for my system.

No one had dead kits back then. Well, yeah, you know what I mean The computer was the dev kit Did they kind of do like the Nintendo thing Like Nintendo would do 10 years later If they saw You know software they didn't approve of They tell a retailer well, no

You're in violation of our agreement We're not giving you all the sweet Atari software that you want So you're going to lose money I actually don't know the answer yet That's something that's fuzzy in my history yet But I'll figure it out Once I write my article about it But the Sid Meyer got started on Atari 800.

A lot of people got started developing games in Basic on the Atari 800. The Atari computer platform was around for a long time. Like the 400 and 800 were pretty durable throughout the 80s. Didn't they eventually evolve into the XE? Yeah, they... Like, how was the XE related to the 400? They were just like advanced versions. Yeah, there were the XE computers, the 65 and the 130 or whatever.

And then there was the XE games. system, which was launched in 87. I think that was a big fan of the look of that one with the rainbow buttons, the castles. Which is funny, that's Atari's last console before the Jaguar was based on 1979 technology. It's pretty much the exact same thing, just with a fancy case with pastel buttons. The buttons really make a difference, though. It's a testament to the quality of the design of that. I think J. Minor, the guy who later went on to develop a lot of the chips in the Amiga was involved in the

custom silicon for the Atari 800. And it was a really beautiful advanced machine for its time. And so that they could keep selling it for a decade, almost a decade is pretty amazing, even though it wasn't like the IBM PC or anything. It was just a serviceable machine. They tried to sell it with the 5200. They retrofitted it into a console. Well, you know, I like that you described it as, you know, like classy because that's how

I've always seen that system. the software, the packaging always was just like, you know, it was selling you the same games that you could buy on 2,600, but they were presented in these really elegant boxes. Like, you know, they had the kind of border along the top. They have art. It was always really nice, like painted art or airbrushed art. And then, you know, the top third of the box is just like black with like a gold line through it. And then it would have the name of the game at the Optima typeface, which is like a really clean, elegant typeface. And And, you know, it kind of created this consistency across the line. And I always saw those as a kid. And I was like, well, you know, I'm sure that the Colico version of whatever the hell, Pac-Man, or I guess I wasn't on a Clico, but, you know, the Pac-Man, the Calico version of this is nice. But the Atari version looks so pretty. Like, that's so, it just speaks to me. It just says, like, this is a classy, high-spec version.

You need to own this instead. Yeah, they had this retro sci-fi art focus going on. on that was just so pretty, like, you know, we just ran a, ran a thing on the forums with, with rating box arts. And there were a whole bunch of the old Atari ones that, you know, they're just for having this, you know, looks like an old sci-fi pulp novel aesthetic that they just brought straight over. Kind of.

But, I mean, at the same time, like, the typography and the overall design of it was very much, like, classy 80s, as opposed to, like, Memphis-style pop 80s or, you know, like, you know, stranger things, neon 80s. It was, it was more like the, you know, penguin, books or something like this is a higher higher step their graphic design was always top notch in fact the book art of Atari by tim lapitina yeah his name is beautiful celebration of all that and i i think Atari was different it was really the first video game company as who thought of games as a new medium a new artistic medium like film and music versus all the competitors at the time

fell behind because they just thought of video games as another way to package and sell their chips like Fairchild and these other, you know, APF and others, they just had this like, oh, we've got semiconductor line. There's the thing we can stick semiconductors in and sell it. And so none of it was like the artistry of beauty of games. But Atari really focused on the art of it and the entertainment of it and the visceral excitement of video games as a new medium. And they hit on a lot of stuff that really stuck.

So back, you know, we've been talking about this hardware that took them through the whole next decade. but actually back in 79 in our year here, I feel like it was one of the first big waves of things that got really popular and ended up influencing video games basically forever. So we have the vector version of Lunar Lander that we were already talking about that was brought to life.

Yeah, and let's jump over to talk about some of the stuff Atari created for the arcades because it was kind of a big deal. Yeah, so there was Lunar Lander. So another huge one was Asteroids, which has just been remade five million times by everyone. You know, you still see people riffing on that formula of, you know, the just things running around in space with inertia and using your thrusters to affect your inertia. I was looking at my article.

The guy I mentioned earlier was Howard Delman, the guy at Atari. Okay. And he was the creator of Lunarlander, and I remember calling him at the last minute before I had to finish that article. I have no idea how I got his phone number. but I just called them up and say, hey, are you the guy who made Lunar Lander? It's like, yeah. Like, where did you see it?

So he saw it at a NASA lab when he was visiting. He saw the GT40 version from 1973 that was graphical. And they made the arcade, and it was fairly well received, but it was kind of a dud in general. And so I think what they had all these Lunar Lander machines sitting around, and they wanted something to do with the vector hardware. And I think they converted a lot of them to asteroids. could be and Howard Dillman worked I think he's one of the asteroids guys creators

and it makes sense that that was more successful in our arcade set right yeah I mean Lunar Lander is very precise in 50s I was going to say particular yeah yeah yeah you want to talk about Lunar Lander the arcade version versus what it was like as a as a mainframe text game because it that takes you know I was like actually looking at Ben because it seems like you're really fired up here I mean yeah I remember I remember I I've definitely remember I've played the vector version. And so you have, so it's a vector display. So everything's in, you know, these dark white lines on black.

And you've got this lunar surface, which there's various surfaces generated. And you can see there's like flat spots that are your safe places to land. Right. And you've got your lunar module also in your little vector graphics. But it's got the same sort of, you know, actual physics equations behind it that the text version have started with. And so you're just sitting there and you're falling under the influence of gravity and you have your thrusters and you can thrust down or side to side and affect your trajectory.

And, you know, you got to get onto a flat space at a low enough velocity that you hit the ground without your ship breaking up. And it's, you know, it's simple but difficult to get right. It's entirely action-oriented, too, instead of the previous ones. The first graphical one had a light pen that you could tap on to do some thrusters and things and it wasn't as fluid and like the Atari one. And the other one, you obviously had to type commands, the first one.

No, you're right. The game really does add an action element to something that was a text-based game. And some of the remakes are interesting. The most interesting being the Game Boy one that I mentioned before, which was developed by Packin Video, only released in Japan. But it's a weird one.

because first of all, it's the actual lunar lander phase of it is just like a third of the game, if that much. It actually starts out with a shuttle launch and you have to basically keep the shuttles thrust at a certain level while also maintaining like it's kind of vertical and horizontal position on screen. Otherwise, you don't specifically take off and that's bad. But if you do take off, then you go into space and then you can choose like where on the moon you want to land. and there's different, you know, seas and craters and so forth. And, you know, they have different levels of difficulty. So then that's where you enter the lunar lander phase. And it's pretty much, you know, what you expect from a lunar lander simulation.

It's done with the Game Boy graphics. And it's kind of unfair because meteors are constantly falling. And there's no way that if a meteor is heading towards you, that you can evade it. Like, you just can't respond that quickly. But you still have, like, the rotation and thrust and you're trying to land as gently as possible. and there's different places within the crater, like different plateaus and shelves and that sort of thing. And depending on the size and the complexity of maneuvering to one of those spaces,

you get more points if you land on it. And then you enter a third phase, which is like really weird. It's a top-down sequence, and you're walking around to the moon trying to find resources, and there's aliens walking around. And they're not, like, aggressive, but you have to avoid them. And you, like, can cause flowers to grow. I'm in the lunar soil. It's a really weird game.

That's also based on the NASA equations. Right. It's only like 33% the actual lunar lander. But yeah. So the Atari one, you know, even though it's real time now, it's still a very kind of just fiddly, delicate little game. And it's just, you know, it's you and your skill versus this one scenario. And so you can kind of see why they convert those over for our arcade where people just

want something flashy to come and play. the asteroids is a much more visceral, fast-paced kind of thing. Yeah, if you think about the Lunar Lander's sort of anti-Atari style, because it's not as like... No, no, no, I disagree. I feel like Lunar Lander is very much the same thing that they did on Atari 2,600, the same year with Adventure, where they took a game, a genre that was, you know, a concept that was like text-based, it was very slow and methodical, and turned it into an action experience. It could be ported easily to, in one case,

the arcades, or in another case, to a controller that had, you know, a stick and a button. So adventure is basically an RPG, like a role-playing game distilled down into this kind of quick reaction-based game where you, you know, you have a maze, you have to figure out how to maneuver it, you have to find some items, take them to the right places, you have to pick up weapons and use them to defeat the monsters, you have to avoid a bat. Like, it's taking a lot of concepts that were in adventures, in games like colossal cave adventure and hunt the wumpus and so forth. And it just distilled those down into a quick and accessible action experience. And, you know, if you know how to play adventure, you can, you can beat

the game in like five minutes. Yeah. It's, well, it's very much a combination of, of these action features while still keeping the sort of exploration feel that you had from those old text things. So you have, so you have things where you can actually, you know, stab a dragon in real time with the spear because you can do that now in a graphical setting. But you've still got all these different castles to explore that have mazes in them, you know, it's not necessarily clear where to go at the beginning. You have to poke your way around and figure out what tool you need to pick up and where you need to use it. And so it's sort of combining the visceral action with still this more kind of exploratory cerebral style of figuring out this whole scenario.

Ben, do you have any special insights into this game, given that you used to work with Warren Robinette who programmed the game? Yeah, we can't talk about adventure without me named dropping Warren Robinette. I named dropped him for you. But you did. You did. You saved me. So yeah, Warren Adventure was pretty much Warren Robinette's baby. He did the whole thing himself. And, you know, this comes into into play because of the thing where it has the first Easter egg, which I'm sure has probably been talked about here before, where if you pick up this almost invisible pixel, you can get into a secret room and it has Warren Robinette's name in there. And like, like having known the guy, you know, he is the most soft-spoken.

self-effacing guy you will ever meet. You know, you would not think that of someone putting his own name in, but it was just the circumstances of how the industry worked at the time that, you know, everyone who worked for Atari was on, you know, a slim salary and saw no royalties or credit for anything they did. And this was sort of just the beginning of a way to say, you know, we should be giving the creator's credit for this. And it actually worked out that, you know, after, so he did it on his own.

No one knew it was in there until people eventually found it. playing the game, and corporate found out, and he wasn't actually working for Atari anymore at the time. But eventually, they kind of embraced it and said, oh, these like Easter eggs are things that people will look for and get them talking about the game. And so, like, sure, keep doing it. Like secrets. Yeah. Yeah, secrets. And it did gradually, I think, start to lead to lead towards a world where the actual developers were given more credit in the games. By the way, it wasn't the actual technical first Easter egg. People had found some others like on the fair child or whatever just I know somebody out there will but it's the first

well-known one definitely that was widely new for sure because others weren't discovered till like five years ago or something or known about maybe hey you out there in the cold getting lonely getting old can you feel me hey you standing in the aisles with itchy feet Fainting smiles, can you feel me? Hey, you don't help them to bury the life. Don't get in without a fight. Hey, everybody, it's Bob, inviting you to skip the midnight ball drop and celebrate the new year the right way

by coming to see Retronauts at MagFest. I'll be hitting the event at National Harbor on Saturday, January 5th, with Jeremy and Chris Sims to discuss the musical legacy of Nintendo's R&D1 Division by way of a panel called Stairway to Rhythm Heaven. It'll also be the first ever east-west retronauts

crossover, be there, or forever be haunted by crippling FOMO. Remember that's Saturday, January 5th at Magfest. From all your friends at Podcast 1, Thank you for a wonderful 2018, and we hope 2019 is even better. Hey, it's Adam Carolla. This is Heather Dubrow from Heather Dubrow's world.

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Life is like a box of... Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Oh, gosh. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast, nationwide network, and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save.

Okay, I want you want me, I'd be you need, I'd be you to be. Okay, so to wrap up the Atari stuff, Someone earlier, I think it was Chris, mentioned that Superman came out in 1978, and Superman the video game came out in 79. What can you tell us about that one, Chris? It's a weird one. It doesn't make any sense. And you get your powers by kissing Lois Lane. I mean, that sounds okay.

Is that not canon? That is not. I'm afraid that is not canonical. But I mean, any kind of complex Atari 2,600 game is going to be kind of weird because there's such a level of abstraction that had to happen. that you do kind of, when you play it, you're kind of like, what's happening? Like, there was an idea in the programmer's heads and it didn't necessarily translate clearly to these tiny, extremely primitive graphics in four kilobytes of space. Yeah, weirdly enough, it is not as weird as the later one where the Statue of Liberty

tells you to go fight crime. That one was made in Japan, so they were just like, what do we know about New York? There's a statue, a green statue of a lady, and she, fights crime or something? Yeah, that sounds right. Hates crime. I mean, New York is full of crime, so she must be unhappy about it. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. I have a story about Superman, a little story.

Tell it. Back in 2008, when I was working for Jeremy at one-up doing freelancing, I wrote an article about the whatever anniversary of, maybe it's 2007, I don't remember, of the 2600. And in that

article, I wrote that Superman was the first, like, licensed video game or something like that. Or maybe it's Pele's soccer. But, you know, one of those, I think Superman was either the first or very close to the first time that someone took a property from outside of video games and turned it into a video game, you know, like a licensed game. So it predates Star Trek phaser strike?

Yes, I'm pretty sure. But that's a good question. I think, I think Microvision was late in the year, so probably. Yeah, so the copy editor at one-up email name said, or whatever, the fact checker said, what is your source for this information? I'm like, I just looked at a list of every video game that's ever been released up to Superman, and this is the first one.

So there you go. That's my story. See, and you were saying earlier, the stories have to have, like, conflict and resolution, and that one just kind of petered out. So not every story has to follow the three-chapter, the three-act story.

But I got victory in the end. So it was like a champion. Well done. Okay. Also, that year, Star Raiders. Does anyone know anything about Star Raiders? I've never played it. I do.

It's what they called the killer app for the Atari 800. Doug Newbauer, is the guy who created it. He was the, I mean, this is the first convincing simulation of space with the stars flying around. You're piloting a ship from a first person point of view, and you can shoot out of your view like you're in a cockpit. But you just see stars flowing. Kind of like the way phaser strike worked where you were like sort of a first person perspective, but much, much better. Yeah, but actually good.

Like, yeah, you're right. Okay. It's pretty much like what phaser strike should have been, but it wasn't. But couldn't because it was 16 by 16, one-bit graphics. Yeah. So the cool thing about Star Raiders is just it has this fluid simulation of a star field as you're turning your ship sort of in 360 degrees as the stars sweep around and things. and then the aliens come up and you shoot them.

And then you can switch to a different screen where you can warp to a different sector and attack the aliens or sort of dock at a base or something I can't remember. But it was very high-tech at that time for a computer considering the fluidity of the graphics, the frame rate. You know, if you looked at a game on Apple 2,

Apple 2 couldn't pull that off with the same, like just flowing beautiful stars as you're swirling around flying through space. This is like, you know, this was a whole new thing. So it was a really groundbreaking game for that platform. And it sounds like the structure of it would be kind of lifted for a lot of those Star Trek games that were not properly licensed, the ones that circulated throughout the 80s on computers, whereas I remember playing one on like a K-Pro, I think, with a

maybe a three-line text display. And, you know, it would give you like a description of where you were and, oh, Klingons attack, fire phasers. Yeah, you have to go to the star base. They all pulled from those Star Trek games and probably Star Raiders pulled from earlier Star Trek mainframe games that had that sector thing going on and the Klingons. You're fighting the Klingons and stuff. More of a more of a turn-based thing. So Star Raiders was the first sort of first person real-time space shooter thing where you could really feel like you're flying a ship through space. It's really amazing. In fact, I used to play it as a kid and just turn it on and just fly around because it was so incredible looking.

All right, moving beyond the world of Atari, there's Namco, who in 1979 gave us the game's QDQ, Bombi, and Galaxian. And we've talked about all of these in our Namco Arcade History episode. So go look up our Namco Arcade History episodes and listen to those. You can hear all about them. Perhaps more interesting. Well, actually, on a related note, Sega released Monaco GP, a racing game. We've also talked about that in our Sega arcade history episodes. So check that out.

We have not talked, however, about, even though we talk about a lot of Nintendo stuff, we have not talked about Nintendo's 1979 releases all that much. I'm pretty sure this is the first time anyone on Retronauts has used the words monkey magic consecutively. But that was a Nintendo game. I don't know what that is. It's based on the monkey magic TV show, right? I don't know, is it?

There's a monkey magic TV show? It was a monkey magic TV show that was weirdly popular in Australia. Was it an anime? No. It's a live action show. Is it based on the Journey to the West story? Sort of, yes. It is the source of the video game that Areno plays that people call in to try and help

him with on GameCatr CX. Doesn't that happen a lot? The ones they call in. and he's answered the phone and they're trying to tell him what he has to do. Super Monkey Daibokin, was that the one? Yes.

The world's worst game? Yes. Yeah, okay. So that's another journey to the West thing. I mean, that's just like the classic Sayuki, you know, Sun Goku and all that. It's given us Dragon Ball and God knows what else. So I think it probably,

I think this probably was inspired somewhat by the Journey to the West because it is a, you know, a sort of breakout game, but instead of just breaking a sheet of wall or a wall of bricks, like a sheet of bricks, whatever, the bricks are arranged in the shape of a monkey's face. And if I'm not mistaken, the monkey is wearing like a golden, not a crown, but like a, what do you call that? Like a, not a bandana, bracelet. I don't know. Sure. It's just like a golden circlet. Ah, that's a circle it around his head. Am I imagining that or is that correct? I think it looks more like it's on the color, but it's, I mean, I could definitely,

I could definitely believe this was inspired by a journey to the West monkey, but, but yeah, basically it's breakout right there. He's talking about the red hat on the monkey's head in the picture. Oh, well. Not in the video game itself. Okay. It's kind of there in a day, too. Yeah, there's a monkey with a red hat on its head in the flyer heart.

But, yeah, it's pretty much breakout, but with some fancy things. But I was thinking when you said a wall of sheet, somebody should make a physics-based breakout with drywall and like a real steel ball that bounces off. I feel better if you weren't pointing at my wall as you said that. Okay, so monkey magic breakout clone, radar scope. We have talked about that one because it was a famous bomb. Nintendo made a mini-games actually in the shape of space invaders with, you know, minor improvements. and enhancements, and they were okay. They did okay.

And then they said, this game, for some reason, they decided this, this radar scope game is going to be a huge hit in America. Let's manufacture thousands of them and ship them overseas on a slow boat. And by the time they all got to America, whatever mania for space invaders might have existed here had evaporated. And so Nintendo was left with thousands of unsold units. of radar scope sitting in their American warehouse and that took up a lot of space that cost a lot of money and the machines themselves cost a lot of money. And in desperation,

they were like, please young artist named Shigir Miyamoto, do something with us. Give us a game that we can rework these boards and cabinets into. And he came up with a little thing called Pickman. No, wait, it was Donkey Kong. But it's also kind of a shame because it actually looks it looks kind of neat. It's okay. It's got kind of like a 3D effect. Yeah, it's got this perspective. So you've got this kind of like dotted grid

in perspective going off towards being coming in. It's a contemporary of Galaxian. So I think compared to Galaxian, it's more impressive. You know, Galaxian predates it probably by half a year or so. But there's really no reason this game couldn't have had the place in the collective gamer mindset that Galaxian ended up having.

But no, Galaxian one somehow. So maybe the Apocry Full Story is not true. Maybe something else happened at Nintendo that made them not sell these things. No, I mean, it's pretty well established. It's like a first-party recollection. Or is it? Yeah, it is, actually. That, you know, they ended up with these unsold units, and so they had to rework that hardware into Donkey Kong. Yeah, I know. Like, the early Donkey Kong, you know, the label art is like a sticker that was applied over the radar scope art. So, I'm sure for collectors, like, if you can find one of those in good shape, that's like a Holy Grail or something. But in any case, Radar Scope is mostly interesting for what it did not do.

And there was also a game called Sheriff, which is one of the very few early Nintendo arcade games that they sometimes reference in stuff like Wario Ware. And this was like a sort of a top down, almost kind of like combat for Atari. Like you are a sheriff in, you know, the Wild West and you're like running around cacti and yeah, you're like shooting at bad guys. There was a game called Gun Fight by Midway that became outlaw on Atari consoles that was sort of two sheriffs facing off and they can shoot at different angles at each other. This kind of reminds me of that, but it's not like it because the sheriff can shoot other things around him on the screen. As far as I know, I've never played it.

I was like a little mini game from Stardue Valley. It is? Is it? I never played the minigames very much in that game. I didn't play any of that game. You haven't played Starry? I'm not a Harvest Moon fan. I have Sardue Valley.

But this is so great. Yeah, but I don't have time to invest in raising a farm and getting married. It's so calming. Yeah. Star D'Valie is better than any Harvest Moon game. All of them put together. Yeah, the thing is, so the idea of playing video games, I love it. But so here's a weird, sad fact about me.

Like 10 years ago, I got hooked on Etri and Odyssey, Netri and Odyssey 2. and those would be my like unwinding games at night. So I'd like sit in bed and and work my way through the dungeons for like half an hour or an hour. That was great. It was fun. But eventually my body and my brain started to say, well, here's Etrin Odyssey. It's time to go to sleep. So I would play for less and less time as, you know, as time went along.

My sessions would grow shorter and then I would grow drowsy and go to sleep. And now anytime I play a portable game in bed, I am asleep with an hour. five minutes. So that, I mean, I'm really good at falling asleep. You can play Stardue Valley real time, but not in like a narcolectic way. Where every day is a day. Okay, well, maybe that's how I should approach it. But it's just, you know, like the idea of sitting in bed with a switch playing for an hour. Do it out of bed. Because it's so, it's, well, I mean, even if I'm like on the

sofa or something. I mean, I played it on Steam first. Steam. It was not on the PC, you know? This is the tragedy of Jeremy Parrish. It's okay. After all these years video games, just put him right to sleep. Wait, wait. all have these weird things. We were just talking about lunch. I just want to play on handheld systems, though. It's just that if I play on handheld systems at night, I want to be kind of recumbent when I'm doing it and, you know, take it easy and recline, and then I fall asleep. You are a recumbent kind of thing. I am. But I was just saying, like, I think I don't play a lot of games obsessively. I can't really get into them that much. So one comes along like Stardue Valley, I play the heck out of it. And I was just saying, lunch, I'm not really a gamer. And then Jeremy said, I said, yeah, why are you even on this podcast. Get the hell out of here. Isn't that what I said? No. He said, but you make and sell a complete line of joysticks. You started a business to create

video game joysticks. So I'm not really buying that you're not a gamer. And it sounds like you play a lot more games than I do because I just go to sleep. I just play each one for ten seconds a piece pretty much. I play a lot of video games, quote unquote, a lot. You're like, this is a great title screencast. I'll tell you what's more

Before I get off the floor Don't bring me down All right, so anyway So anyway, moving along from Sheriff and so on And whatever sidebar that was, S&K-Nihon Kikaku, or Kehats, I can't remember what it's called. We just talked about it. Someone knows, I don't.

The New Japan plan. Okay. They made their debut in 1979 with Osma Wars, which was that one of the DLC games that just came out today for the S&K 40th anniversary collection? I can't remember if Osmo Wars was one of them. I think it might have been. If it's not, then there's not. there's probably a good reason that it wasn't.

Yeah, let's look. Let's call Frank. No, I got an email from NIS today. Yeah, let's see. Yeah, Osmo Wars just came out on Switch today as of this recording, which was a few weeks ago as of the time you're listening to this. So, yeah, people can actually play that out. Play that and check it out. It is S&K's first game.

It is a, that's right, it's a space shooter. Okay, well, there you go. That was all the thing. That was all the rage. Everyone was doing that thing. Not a space invaders game, but kind of was Hayankyo Alien. Deadly towers. Can I just say, I have been on several episodes of this podcast,

and I know you've explained it to me two or three times. I still don't know what Hayanko Alien is. So it's like Space Invaders, except instead of being a ship at the bottom of the screen and aliens descending at you, instead it's a top-down game where you're a policeman in Heon era of Japan. And you are, you have a shovel, and there's aliens walking around, like running around in a maze, and you dig holes in the maze and try to trap the aliens in there. If they fall in, then you have a few seconds to cover up the hole and trap them in the hole that you've dug. So it's nothing at all like Space Invaders, actually, I completely lied.

Is it? It's very similar to Pac-Man. It's like Lod Runner, but top-down. Yeah, it's what inspired Lod Runner. Is it like Dig-Dug? No. Again, I know we've had this conversation. Okay, so think Pac-Man.

Think Pac-Man, okay? So there are no dots in the maze, and the four ghosts are little alien creatures kind of running around haphazardly. They don't really follow you around. They're kind of hard to, it's hard to know how they're going to move. It's pretty random. And then you're a guy,

and you have the ability to dig a header behind you or like any side of you in the maze, and you create a hole. You can't go in the hole, but if an alien falls in the hole, then you can cover up the hole and you'll trap the alien for a minute right and you can bury them

but if you don't bury them then they get get out and come after you see actually I think of it more like if you're playing like Zelda 1 only all you have is a shovel and so you want the mobblins to fall into holes so it's like a link to the past it's exactly like

all you have is the shovel it's a Metroidvania only the shovel and you really like this game Jeremy I think it's a very well made game for its time and I think it's been profoundly influential. It was a massive

success and a massive influence on games like Space Panic on as before mentioned Load Runner on Pac-Man. It's kind of this super influential game that kind of gets overlooked because it has

a strange name. Yeah. It did come to America 10 years later on Game Boy. What was the original platform for Hayankyo Alien? I want to say it was like a PDP or something. I thought it was one of those weird Japanese like an NEC I don't

computer I can't remember what they maybe it was like 6601 originally as a personal computer game

in 79 okay was that it was on the 661 and then arcade in 80 because I

think the 8801 and 901 were later the X1 so it would have been I don't know

it was a Japanese computer and then and then they did get 801 801 801

the PC801 in 79 okay so yeah it's like the predecessor to the

8801 okay so there you go and it was it was converted to the arcades and it was a pretty big came on in arcades just a year later it was a pretty big hit there were like strategy guides for it and uh you know magazines would cover it and so on and so forth and they're still creating sequels and remakes to it um there was one released just last year it's like hayankio alien 2184 or something and it's kind of got that uh pacman uh champion edition neon vibe to it it's fast-paced and exciting. It's very cool.

What platform was the remake on, or the new one? It's on Steam. Yeah, you can get it on Steam. I remember you talking about it, but I don't know. Okay, well, let's us be the definitive statement until I cover it again. Let's see. Also that year, Temple of Upshye. And finally, we'll wrap for 1979, which we've talked a lot, we've talked about a lot more than I expected with Scott Adams and Adventure International's text adventures, including Adventureland, Pirate Land, Pyramid of Doom.

I think most people know Scott Adams. Not because of Dilbert. He's not that guy. Different guy. It's because of his Marvel superhero text adventures. Quest Probe. That's right. Those came later, but these were kind of the early ones. I know I'm from the Adventure Land thing.

Yeah, well, you're an exception to the... Not a weirdo. Just like you approach things from a different direction than the rest of us. Those ads didn't run an Iron Man, I don't think. Isn't that true of everything? The cool thing about Sky Adams is a few years ago on Twitter. I was playing one of his games on Apple 2, and I was posting pictures of it on Twitter and stuff. And then suddenly, Scott Adams followed me

on Twitter. And he's like, yeah, I remember that. That was great. It was really cool. But one of his games has this neat anti-piracy intro that says, hi, I'm Scott Adams. That shows this guy with a big Afro. I take a long time to make these games. You know, you should go down to the store and buy them. You know, don't copy them for free. Please don't copy that flop. But he was a, you know, a text adventure pioneer, especially in terms of the graphical element where there were these still images of the scenes you would see,

which I think Sierra probably did first at one point with like, what's that game called, mystery house or something? But it was, he was a pioneering adventure guy. And the parser was very simple. I think it's like a word and a verb, noun in a verb commands. So there's only so many words it recognizes. Yeah, I would say if you would like to learn more about Adventurelands games,

go to Jimmy Mayer's Digital Antiquarian, which anytime like historic PC stuff like game design commentary comes up, I feel like he's probably your definitive source because he's really gone back to the past and dug up the history behind these games and also talks about how they work as games. And in the case of the Adventure Land games, Adventure International games, maybe not so well. They're much more primitive than, you know, Sierra games or Infocom games, though they do predate the commercial release of Zork and anything by Sierra. So, you know, so he doesn't have that going for him.

Not anything by Sierra. I mean, they did Mystery House before then. In 79? Oh, yeah. I thought Mystery House was 81. I thought, I thought Mystery House was later. Okay, well, maybe I'm wrong. Mystery House was the graphical game, so that came along.

Williams' first game. Somebody looked that up. Yeah, that came along later, I'm pretty sure. Like, Scott Adams was definitely a pioneer, at least in the commercial space. But, you know, people were doing much more sophisticated games in the, you know, the mainframe space at that point. But, you know, for someone doing stuff on, what, TSR-80? Yeah, with that 8K RAM kind of computers. Mystery House is 1980.

Okay, 1980. Yeah, so. It's all around the same time. time here. You know, it's all kind of right there in the same time, same time frame. But considering the limitations he was working with, I think, you know, you can, you can admire what he did. Yeah, I would, I know I grew up saying, my brother was a huge Infocom fan. And so he looked down on the Adventureland games because they were so simple and primitive. And the parser was not that complicated compared to Infocom games. But I look at it and see, yeah, like, if you're

thinking about like an 8K, TRS 80 or whatever, something incredibly primitive RAM memory wise, he did some neat things. I like the graphics of like pirate adventure. I mean, I played that on a TI-99 a lot. Did you have that, Ben? I don't think I had that one. I don't think I had that one. No, I didn't have that on cartridge. All right.

Well, we need to speed things along because, holy crap, we are really dwelling on 1979 here. It's a good year. I guess so. I didn't realize that was such a fine vintage, but here we are. Anyway, yeah, let's jump ahead to get all the way through 89 in this episode. We've got like 20 minutes more before we got to wrap and move on. belong to the next.

You won't talk about a good year. This was good year. I think we should save the Nintendo stuff for the second part of this episode. Let's talk about the other stuff because not that the other stuff isn't great. Holy crap, there's some really great stuff on here. But the Nintendo, I think, you know, all of us had Nintendo systems growing up. So we have a lot of memories there. So I want to give some breathing room to some other stuff.

And we were, you know, actually old enough to buy games in 1989. Yeah, that's right. I was alive. I mowed lawns to buy McDonald, too. I saved up my allowance for some of these. So, 1989, for one thing, I think maybe the most important revolution in 1989 is that the Sega Genesis came to the U.S. And that was a huge change, you know, it was like a huge sea change for video games, especially here in the U.S., because up until that point, you know, Atari had run roughshod over everyone, then they died. then Nintendo ran rough shot over everyone and they didn't die but Genesis you know was the first time in you know four years since the system the Nintendo NES's launch that someone posed a real challenge to Nintendo and said hey we can do what you're doing but in a cooler better more impressive way we can do what Nintendo that's right that's exactly right and NEC also said that they came out with the turbographics that year and their advertisement can't

campaign was entirely based around the fact that Nintendo is sad and stupid and bad. So, like, compare- ads are nuts. Yeah. Compare, you know, Super Mario Brothers from four years ago to China Warrior. Wow. Wow. Wow.

Vigilante. These games look way better. And then you play them in, oh, they're not actually better. I did a piece for Polygon where I went back and sort of chronicled the history of video game ads in comics. And the shift that you get. get in 89 when Sega and the turbographics are suddenly around? Like, the thermographics absolutely like,

rip your eyes out. It's bonkers. And man, 13-year-old was just, 13-year-old me was buying none of this because I had just saved up all my money and bought myself in NES like a year or two before this. And, man, I was invested. And, you know, this was the days of the original console wars. And so Sega was the enemy at that point.

So I missed out on a lot of good stuff because of that. No, I'm right there with you. So are these three... Which one are we talking about first? The Genesis and the cover graphics, because I have both... Actually, you know what? I think we should talk about Atari first because their story in here in 1989 is not that impressive. We've been following them.

Yeah, we've been following them. And this is kind of where they've fizzled out. Like, you know, Atari had it rough in the mid to late 80s. And this was their attempt to kind of rally their troops and really go for it. And they released a system called The Links. it was a handheld system it was way more impressive than the microvision it had uh let's see i think it was 140 by 102 resolution as opposed to 16 by 16 it had basically like 16 bit color it had an infinite number of sprites available to it like from my understanding it had a sprite

blitter that could basically give you as many sprites as you wanted and it would cause like it would just draw more power and cause the system to become hotter so you know you could have a A game that was like thousands of sprites and your battery would last for three minutes. You could cool it with... From my understanding. Set your house on fire with Dynasty Warriors. Cool it with liquid nitrogen. Right.

As you know, I mean, everyone kept one of those in their station wagon. Yeah. Yeah, well, Lynx was developed by engineers at Epix, the company that developed, you know, Jumpman and those other... And the Amiga. Temple of Apshii and... The hardware was designed by Amiga's designers. Was it?

Yeah. Not Amiga. Amiga was a different company. It wasn't... Right, but it was... It was the same people, some of the same people who left the company. Yeah, I can't remember the name right off the top of my head, but I think J. Minor might have been one of them. But it was like the spec of the links, some of the tech, is very similar to the Amiga because it was, you know, it was common technology.

And so in effect, you had like a little baby Amiga that could play games. That should have been a runaway hit. But it was not because a month before, two months before the links came out, Nintendo line. launched Game Boy in America. And it had Tetris and Mario and a Castlevania game. And a 20-hour battery life or something. And it cost half as much. It used half as many batteries. It ran twice or I guess like 10 times as long on those batteries. And yeah, it was a really good value proposition. It was kind of hard to look and say, well, I've got an NES and, you know,

little Timmy has an NES, but he also wants a handheld system. I don't have a ton of money because I'm just a normal middle class parent, so which one should I get them? I'll get them the one that has Mario. I know that guy, and also it costs half as much. It costs half as much. And it goes. It matches. It does. It's the same shade of gray. I think people today also forget like how much batteries were a thing back then. It's like now you just worry about how long you have to go before you charge because everything's on a rechargeable battery. Then you had to go out and buy a lot of batteries. Not if you are an Xbox one owner. Yeah, well. Well, yeah, I think battery life and Tetris are the two big things and the cost

the cost yeah it was way less than a color screen yeah but I mean in terms of technology the links just slaughtered Gameboy it was so impressive and Gameboy was 10 year old hardware it was basically you know like Atari gave us the XE game system and

Nintendo gave us the Game Boy which was running on a like a Z80 yeah it was like three kilohertz or megahertz or whatever and yeah kilohertz megahertz and it was it was very slow and it was just a simple 8-bit system it was it was a modified variant of the C80s so it was like you know ancient technology from the 70s on this the screen that had so much flicker and and blur that you were like what the hell is happening but for

tetris it was great oh yeah tetris was amazing the ad for this one said um the it was mostly mostly mostly a white background with a picture of the Lynx. And then in bold type, it says, lynx eats boys lunch, which I think somebody at the advertising company thought was like a really good sick burn. But it takes so long to figure out what they're trying to say. And also, I think they kind of miscalculated their audience.

They're like, ha, ha, school yard bullies are cool. But no, the kids you were selling to are the ones being bullied. like you're you're totally missing the audience here that's that's why i never played super dodgeball for years because it was like i don't want to i don't want some like neanderthal dude beaning me in the head with the the the medicine ball because that's what happened when i played dodge ball in gym so i was like why would i want to you know have a pay money to to do that on a computer when i have to deal with it in gym class every day i was good at dodgeball in school that's why i like the links i'm too i'm too listen to me talk i'm too slow i just

I take my time. Then I, you know, I play for five minutes and I fall asleep in bed. It's terrible. Were the games any good? For the links? Yeah. I mean, there's a game called... Bringing one in with the Batman or Territers one?

Oh, yeah. There's a game called Electro Cop. I mean, come on. Well, the reason I ask is like... There are good games on it. Yeah. It's not a bad platform. Alan Murray, the officer Alan Murray was turned into Electroca.

I don't know if that's his name. But, like, you know, Super Mario Land is still pretty fun to play. Yeah, it looks terrible, but it's, still holds up. The physics are a little weird, but it plays well. The lynx is a competent platform. There's a lot of pretty good games on it. It plays them fairly well. And it's just big and bulky and expensive and power a lot of batteries. I think it took like six AA batteries. Game Boy took four. Yep. And the Game Boy, they'd last at least 10 hours. The links will probably last a couple hours or something, you know, if you're playing it nonstop.

I mean, the first model. They did a revision later. the links too which is much nicer slightly more compact it's considerably more compact yeah i mean you can you can use the original links as a skateboard if you were really pressed but you wouldn't do that with the links too it's like game gear sized yeah so yeah it's a little bigger than a little it's like game gear sized i mean the switch that's what the like is there yeah so it's thinner though the links had switch is so much lighter than the game gear yeah yeah yeah i mean the the links was actually pretty light too because it was mostly empty air. It's like

there was a focus test that said well kids really want big systems so let's take this hardware design and make it bigger and just fill it with empty air. So that's what you have. It also has more buttons like not more buttons that switch but yeah it had like a reversible design. Yeah so you could flip it over and

play it left handed or you could do it a vertical orientation and stuff. I guess you could. There was like one I think Gauntlet 3 did that. I wish that was some way to have vertical orientation on the Switch. Yeah, it's a shame. Someone should make a thing where you can stick it into some place.

All right, guys. Enough clowning around. So, yeah, there weren't that many great games at launch on Switch, or on Links. We've done an episode that hasn't been released to the public yet about Links, but that'll be out sometime next year. There's a good port of RIGAR on the Links, the arcade game. Yeah, except it's the arcade game. Yeah, but still, it's a good version of the Arcade game. Yeah, but compared to the NES game, it's really.

is garbage. It's not garbage. But I do love the NES game very dearly. Blue Lightning was a very cool launch game. That was the like the demo system kind of game. It's like, you know, kind of an after burner sort of game. And it takes advantage of the Lynx's sprite pushing and scaling capabilities. So, you know, it had some, it definitely caught the eye. It was just a hard sell compared to Game Boy. And I really feel like if it had launched, I've said this before, if it had launched a couple of years earlier and maybe had been a little less expensive. Smaller. Yeah. Smaller would have helped. But I think it could have done well. But there was a lot of politics that got in the way of links. You know, it was created by epics and the first run of

software was created by epics. And then Atari kind of strong-armed epics out of the business. They like choked them to death. They nickel and dined them with milestones and expectations and contracts. And epics eventually went out of business. and had to sell the links to Atari. So, you know, pretty much everything that came out from four links after that, most of it was made by Atari. They didn't have a big catalog of third-party developers. Yeah, they didn't.

There's some, some of them went on to do Jaguar games and things. But I was going to say that California games was, I think, the original pack-in for the links, which is an epics game. Anyway. Yeah, I mean, you know, in 2019, my video work series is going through Virtual Boy, but links is something I'd like to tackle sometime down the road because it's only like 70 games.

Yeah, there's this neat mod too, like a McWill mod or something. Yeah, it's like a VGA out and you can record directly to a television screen and upscale it to high definition for capture. Yeah. It's amazing. It's great.

I've got one. You do? Yeah. But I was just, because there are some really great games on the links that I'd love to play if I had a better screen. You know, there's a lot of ghosting and stuff on the original.

And the angle of view is not very good. Jeremy, is there anything left that you can't capture in high-deaf now? I'm getting close. Pretty soon I'll have an X-68,000, and that'll be something. So also, also from Atari that she'd always be there. But don't put it in what you believe in. That's getting you nowhere. So also, also from Atari that year, 1989, not on home systems, but in arcades, was hard driving, which is, dare I say it, the first fully 3D polygonal racing game.

It's more like a driving game. but it is fully 3D. It's not all that fun, but for the time, it was very impressive. At some point, Tingen tried to convert it to NES, which, God bless them. I don't know what they were thinking, but they tried. Yeah, that's Atari Games versus Atari Cork. That's the arcade company instead of the home game company. Yeah, so I'm looking at the clock here, and I think we should tackle the console wars in the second part of this episode.

I can't believe we're going to make this a two-parter, but here we are. Should we talk about the turbographics? Well, no, that's part of the console wars. I think we should talk about the arcades now, because that's nice and easy. So I put down just a few notable arcade titles. If you guys can think of any others that came out that year, feel free. But there's some kind of cool stuff that came out. Relevant to right now is a game called Toki, which after 10 years of development, a remake finally came out for that a couple of weeks ago on

Switch. That was announced for like Xbox 360 seriously like 2008-2009 and it went through these weird ups and downs. It changed studios. There was a Kickstarter. Did you guys ever play Toki? Go an ape spit? Yeah, I played the original one, right? Isn't it a

Famicom game? No, it's an arcade game. I mean, it might have come out on No, there's a PC engine port. I think I've played that. Yeah, that probably is correct. Yeah, it's a monkey guy running around spitting. Is that what it is? Yeah, it's got a really weird art style, you're like, you've got a head that's probably twice the size of its body. Yeah. I played it on the whatever PC engine version. I don't know if I played the arcade one. That was one of those that was at the pizza place that my family would go to, you know, every other Sunday or so after church. And, you know, that's where I found the G.I.J.

arcade game, which was amazing. And the Goonies on PlayChoose 10, which I love. And Robocop by Day to East. And they had toky there? And they had toky for a while. Wow. That's one hell of the pizza place. Yeah, I mean, it didn't, it didn't have like a huge arcade area, but there was like a wall with about five cabinets. And then up on the kind of raised dining area, there were two cocktail, like space for two cocktail cabinets. So Toki was one of them that was there in cocktail form for a while.

And I played that a few times. And every time I was just like, what the hell is this? This game is so weird. You are, yeah, you're like this weirdly misshapen monkey guy. walking around and you like spit seeds at things in the jungle and that's kind of it yep i don't know why people were so determined not just play it i mean playing it out of curiosity sure but like why why did someone remake this game for for switch in the year 2018 it's so bizarre i don't know but that's cool and they charge thirty dollars for it i would not pay thirty dollars well i did

because I have a sickness and I'm like, I probably need to write about this at some point. But if I were a normal person, I would not pay $30 for kind of an ugly remake of this extraordinarily weird game. You're hurting someone's feelings right now out there. I know they listen to this podcast. I paid them $30 so they can deal with it. So one of the things I'm surprised you didn't already have on here, but although we'll talk more about the franchise and the consoles is the Teen HMit Ninja Turtles arcade game. Oh, no, that's next episode. TMNT Turtle Mania, yeah.

Okay. But I guess that was 1989. But there was an arcade game 40. Yeah. It was really great. I played it a lot back then. It was in the gauntlet vein and Final Fight vein. Yeah, you could be four people at once. Yeah, but it's a beat-em-up. Yeah, but you were four people at once. Yeah, I love that.

I love co-op games. You know me. I mean... And it was one of the first big cartoony beat-em-ups to just like call your eye arcade. It was by Konami at the height of their powers. Yeah. And thus do we end where we began? with talk of the turtles. Well, we're not quite done yet.

It would have been so, I know, but it would have been so poetic. Sorry. Well, no, they had to press the issue. Just blame those guys over there. So much for poetry, Philistines. Let's see, do you guys ever play Stun Runner? I was always a big fan of Stun Runner. It was a, it was a polygonal, like, shooter.

It was kind of a tunnel-based shooter, and you were a little ship with kind of like a rocket ship, rocket sled with a little not quite wings. It was like pylons sticking out, pontoons, and you could shoot stuff. There was something about it that always reminded me of

road blasters. It had that same sort of vibe to it, even though the games didn't really have that much in common, aside from like you were shooting stuff. Yeah, I remember. I think I'm looking at a picture of it. I remember playing this in the arcade one time. And you can kind of go up the... I don't know how to explain it, but it looks great. It gives me a little bit of a wipeout vibe kind of.

A little bit, but yeah, it's like You know, there's almost like an element of tempest to it. It's like a tempest were a racing game. Sometimes you're on flat tracks, but sometimes you're in these tubes and you can kind of bank up the sides. Yeah, I remember going up and around the top of the tubes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like a vehicular shooter where you're flying forward, but it's 3D polygonal, polygonal. And that's about it. It's like hard driving, but with... But fast and fun and shooting.

No, I definitely. You shoot, and you can go around in tubes and you're in a spaceship. Yep. Also, that year was Camelry. Do you guys know Camelry? It's also sometimes called On the Ball. Never heard of it. I've heard of it, and I just remember that today.

It's kind of like, you know. In fact, I think you just made that up right now. I did not. The theme, the slogan for Camel Tree was, why not try? So maybe it's supposed to be Camel Try. Okay, Camel Try. But, okay, so Camel Tree, Camel Try on the ball, whatever you want to call it, is a game where it's like a sort of a physics puzzle game where you have a ball that's, you know, falling through

a maze and you control the maze around it. You're like spinning the maze. So it's kind of like one of those labyrinth, like the steel ball labyrinths. Yeah, except instead of tilting, you're spinning. And this game was converted to super NES. Can you believe that? Because Mode 7 was made for this. And it's also been like there was a game for PlayStation.

I can't even remember what it was called. It was the same thing, but instead of, like, trying to guide a ball to the exit, you had this little girl who was, like, trying to deliver mail. So, yeah, there's... Yeah, this is one of the few games that I've never heard of in my entire life. I'm just looking at pictures. There was a... Somebody just made this up.

Yeah, no, I've definitely seen it. But I haven't flight it. Yeah, it looks crazy. Was it released in America at all? Yeah, it's on the ball. Really? On the ball. Okay.

Did you see who was made by? Was it Mitchell? The guy named Mitchell. Just working in his space. Taito. Taito. Oh, okay. Taito.

So, yeah, that would explain it. And then speaking of things that came out with different names, we also had U.N. Squadron, which was the side-scrolling shooter, which is secretly an anime, which is why, you know, all the character portraits are, you know, these cartoon guys. Fluffy hair. It's 80s on a bay, yeah. healthy hair and why you have some very weird dialogue and stuff. Because it's actually Area 88. Right. Do you want to talk about that a little?

I've done a super NES works episode on it for video if people want to check that out. Yeah, I mean, I don't know a whole lot about it. I've played it a little bit. Here we go. I haven't actually watched the show. But yeah, I mean, it's your side-scrolling, side-scrolling airplane shooter where you've got your plane and you're going against a bunch of enemy planes and tanks and stuff. It is a horizontal shooter.

You can play as one of three pilots, each of whom has a different specialty. Like Greg, the heavyset guy with the beard, he has the best endurance, and his ship recovers from damage the most quickly. So you're the least vulnerable, but he tends to fly more slowly. You know, it's the usual cliches. One of them is really great at using special weapons. And one of them is just like a, I think he powers up really quickly. So it is kind of a, you know, it's a shooter, but it also has that Capcom arcade. economy built into it that they were doing with games like

sidearms and Black Tiger and Willow and a bunch of other games like that where you earn money as you play and you know between levels between missions you can buy special weapons you can buy better planes. This is especially true on the Super NES version where you can really just like grind for cash and get super crazy planes. And I think that ties into the source manga where these characters are like buying themselves out of indentured sort ofitude. So the idea is basically like it's a foreign legion kind of thing where people who are,

you know, commit war crimes or else are somehow imprisoned or tricked, join this mercenary force called Area 88 or based out of Area 88. And they fly pilots in these constant mercenary land wars. And they have to pay for their own plane. So, yeah, by going on missions and completing tasks, they eventually pay off their plane. It's very Tom Nook. And, you know, so one of the big dramatic moments in the series is when the main character, Shin, loses his plane and it's a huge setback for him because he has to go into death, debt to buy better planes.

So it's Animal Crossing. Yeah, that's what I said. Not in space in the desert. In the desert, but yeah, this is a... I'm sorry, did you say you play this game as a war criminal? Well, no, some people are war criminals. The main character, Shin, is tricked. He thinks he's going to enlist to join a noble cause

And he signs a contract where he becomes enslaved For basically three years or a million dollars Do you know the backstory of UN Squadron like this? Because I did a super NES episode on it Super NES episode Is this something to ever play this again? It's not, but it's based on a, like I said, It's based on a manga, it was released in the U.S.

Yeah, I've seen it. Yeah, I've never watched it, I've seen it in like around the anime was done here too, yeah so this is like this is all turned into a video game pretty effectively like the economy makes sense in this shooter and you can buy better planes and power ups and stuff and it's pretty challenging but it's got that great konami or capcom looked to it it's got great sound the super nes version has a lot of slowdown which is unfortunate but yeah if you ever have a chance to play you in squadron definitely do because i feel like it's a really strong shooter from that year either in arcades or you know two years later on super nes there was a sequel called carrier air wing that now I never came to the U.S. and has never been ported to any system, and I would love to play it someday, but I've never seen it in my life. So I've never had the opportunity. But anyway, I do love me some Capcom. Also that year from Capcom, one of my personal favorite games, you know, I was ridiculous and bought one of these arcade one-up machines. They are coming out with one that has strider on it. And I'm going to even, I know it's a stupid idea. It's a waste of money. But I've always wanted a strider arcade cabinet. So that's going to be. the closest I will ever come. $300 versus, you know, $2,000 is probably the way to go. So Strider, I love Strider.

Have we done an episode on Strider? I'm trying to remember. I don't know. I actually don't think we have and we should. Do you guys love Strider? Tell me why you love Strider. Nobody does. Nobody loves Strider.

Nobody has ever loved this level. I could build you a Strider game for $150. Yes. I'm just kidding. Keep talking. That's not true. There's a like a raspberry pie thing. Have I talked to you about that?

It can play Strider on it. It costs 30 bucks. Come on. So let's talk about Strider, not about piracy. Do you guys love Strider? If you don't justify your existence, Philistines. Strider is gorgeous. I played the NES version, which is not like the arcade when I was a kid.

That is correct. I think I briefly played the arcade version. It was obviously a long time ago, and I don't think I got very far at all. Well, the NES and the arcade versions were released pretty much simultaneously. they were meant to be a media tie-in along with a manga but Capcom just bollocks the whole thing because the manga and the video game share a storyline in characters

the manga was never released in the US and the NES game was never released in Japan so no one ever got the complimentary material here but the arcade game was released in all territories and it's definitely the best thing to come out of this venture so it's just a really cool action game I don't say something is cool casually. It is a cool game.

You play it and you're like, this guy is cool and I feel cool for playing this. And look how cool this action is. It's like an extremely awesome action anime that you play through. And every screen scenario is like a self-contained challenge and almost like a little story into itself. And it's just so fun and so dynamic and so beautifully rendered. Like, cool.

It's very cool. At one point, you fight a machine that alters gravity. It's like this, this like gravity reactor sitting in the center of this huge kind of like chamber and you're spinning around. You have very little control over yourself. You're like fighting against anti-gravity while trying to use your extremely cool sword to slash up the gravity control generator. So is it a sword you're using? Yes, it's called cipher. It is a plasma sword.

Okay, I remember it being looking like a sort of... It's like a crescent. Yeah, because you're a cyber ninja and you swing your plasma sword so fast that it's just a crescent. It's like a destructive crescent of death. I just remember hitting things of the crescent. That's what I remember about this. But not a croissant.

That's different. That's the French localization. That's right. He's got this cool scarves. Lest idea. Yeah, so it's just a extremely rad game. By the end, you're fighting robot dinosaurs. Midway, like in the second stage, it begins with a robot gorilla.

Robot Carilla and Robot Dancero. And then when you blow it up, the room bursts into flames and you have to avoid the flames. And then you climb up and run along a, like a power station in Siberia at night. And there's like flashes of energy coming from the power, like the, you know, the power station that lights up the, the area. It's just, and then you end up like fighting Chinese acrobats on a flying battle platform in the sky. and then you go and then you fight a crazy guy who causes piranhas to materialize out of the air

on a moon base. David Copperfield? No. Like a real magician. He's called the Grandmaster. Are you kidding? He made the statue of liberty disappear. And that's why she said Superman to go for him. Help me, Superman. David Copperfield is a criminal. Is that before or after the Ghostbusters commandeered it to fight Vigo? I don't know, but Ghostbusters are the only ones who commented on her

underwear. But yeah, it's all these It's all these big, ridiculous set pieces with gorgeous graphics, and it kind of, it kind of feels like what Treasure was chasing with their later console games, like to just have these, like, constant set pieces and had something cool new to do. Strider did it so well. Yeah, it was created by a guy named Koizzi Yotsui, who now works with Square Inix, actually. Does he? And he's done some stuff with them, including a few spiritual successors. He created for Mitchell, a game called Cannon Dancer. Yes.

Or Osmond. Osmond. Yeah, which very much looks like a striven. It's extremely strider, but like with martial arts. And then there was also, I want to say, moon dancer, or moon, I don't know if I got the name right, it's moon something. Not moon walker. That's different. That's like my, that's like my tree in the yard tilting forward. Yeah. But that's the other part of this episode. Yeah. I was going to say, didn't we see a strider on, didn't you play it on the X68,000? I did. And it was

really a good port or something. Well, the thing about the X68,000, and this is totally a sidebar, But games like Strider and Final Fight, which we're about to talk about in this episode, were actually developed on X-68,000 hardware. So then they were taken to the arcades. But then Capcom took that code, basically, and released arcade-perfect conversions of their arcade hits for the X-68,000. And they are extraordinary. They are amazing. Yeah, and they come on floppy disk, don't they?

I think so. Anyway, so finally, to wrap this episode, fittingly, final fight, which was a double dragon clone that I would say exceeded double dragon in every way. For one thing, you have three characters instead of two. You can only play two at once,

but it was still three characters, including one who was basically what's the guy's name, Jesse the body of Ventura as the mayor. Mike Hagar. There was a ninja in sneakers. And then there was the boring guy and the wife beater. Jab,

jab, cross, body blow, uppercut. Yep. No, that's punch out. No, that's, that's Cody's combo. Oh, is it? Yeah. Well, there you go. Tell us about Final Fight, Chris.

You seem animated all this. Yeah, I love Final Fight. Did I ever tell you about how I almost wrote a Final Fight comic? Maybe not on the show. Yeah. I, back when I was reviewing, this was way back, this is when I was reviewing comics on my blog. So like 2009, 2010. So it's retro now.

Yeah. Uh, I, uh, Udon had the street fighter license and they did a final fight backup story and they were like, uh, if you want to see more final fight stuff, uh, write in, let us know. And when I reviewed it, I, I was like, I would like to see more final fight stuff. And in fact, I will write that stuff for you for $1 because I love Final Fight. What do you think? You're Steve Jobs. Yeah. One dollar salary. The Steve Jobs of not writing video game tie in comics. The CEO of Final Fight. Yes. I think that's Mike Hagger. So they, like, Udong actually got in touch with me, and they hired me to, well, they asked me to pitch, and they hired me to write a final fight comic. And I asked them if they wanted me to pitch a straight-up adaptation of the first game, or if they wanted me to just do, like, go wild with it.

And they told me to do both. And so the one that was wild was basically sleeper, but with Cody and the. Mike Hagar where Cody goes to prison, but it's all a plan so that he can infiltrate Maggear and bring him down from the inside. But then somebody car bombs Mike Hagar so nobody knows that Cody's actually in there undercover because it was a top secret mission. And then Phoenix Wright was going to show up and be his defense attorney. It was going to be pretty good. But instead they just told me they wanted a straight adaptation. So I pitched a breakdown for what four issues that would look like. And they hired me. And I started writing. And I started writing.

But right before I was set to sign the contract on it, the deal fell through. Like Capcom put a hold on their licenses. And that's when I take a lot of comfort in knowing that it wasn't just me because like the Street Fighter comics stopped for a little while. So yeah, I love Funnel Fight. Wow. So you must know more about the backstory than any of us. Well, it's a very easy backstory.

There's a girl named Jessica. She gets kidnapped. And then the mayor of a city. takes his shirt off and starts punching people in the street. The mayor is the girl's dad. That's important. Family counts. Well, there's, the mayor's her dad.

Mike Hagar's her dad. Jessica Hagar. Cody's her boyfriend. Guy's just a dude they know, but he is a ninja. He's the guy you call, I guess. Guy. Isn't he like kind of Cody's,

not his big brother, but he's like, Cody's kind of a dumb oaf and gets into a lot of trouble, and I'm going to be here to make sure he doesn't get himself in over his head. That might be. Cody actually has a younger brother. Oh, yeah?

Yeah, in Final Fight Streetwise for the Xbox. That doesn't count. I was going to bring it in. Okay. Were you going to bring in Final Fight revenge also? I wasn't going to bring in revenge, but I was going to give Cody like a little brother who was constantly swearing. How does Mighty Final Fight for the NES fit into all of this?

It's the chubby short version. Isn't there a name for that in Japanese? Chibi. Chibi. Yeah, Chibi. So there's a game, there's a final fight guy, a special version for the Super NES. Yeah, because there wasn't a novel blockbuster. Yeah, I bought a copy of it.

It's heck and expensive now. Yeah, I sold it last year. But I got for like 10 bucks. Yeah, I retired. It's a podcasting. Yeah, but yeah, the Super Nias port is another thing. But, I mean, this game was very much in the double dragon vein, but the characters were bigger. It had a really good art style, you know, Capcom, peak of their powers again.

And music. yeah, great music. And it did a good job of kind of leading you through a place. Like you were fighting through Metro City. And so there was a map on screen and you got to see which area you were moving to. And the enemies all had names. Everyone had a little energy bar that would appear at the top of the screen. Like when you punch someone, you would see their name and how much energy they had left. And so you were constantly like cycling through. So you could be like, okay, this guy is Eddie E. And this lady that I just punched in the face is poison. And then there's Damned and there's 2P who's a 2P and J 2P and J 2P is based on the second

player character in uh i want to say forgotten worlds forgotten something about axel and slash yep there's all there's all these references in there's a guy i can't uh yeah andre there's a whole bunch of andreys and they're really hard and i hate them there's a guy with a bandana who like throws dynamite at you uh and everyone does that like bursting into flames thing where they're replaced with a generic sprite, like in Street Fighter, whenever Dalseem blast them with fire. And in fact,

this game was meant to be a sequel to Street Fighter. It was originally pitched as Street Fighter 89. And there's actually official art out there. It's like, you know, Street Fight or Final Fight artwork that you would recognize from seeing promotional artwork at Final Fight, but it says Street Fighter 89 at the time. And I think they said, let's walk that back

and create a Street Fighter 2 instead. And that was good. But eventually these universes did merge. And so now it's kind of like a, you know, thanks to the Street Fighter Alpha games, you just kind of get crossover between all the Final Fight games and characters and Street Fighter characters. I think Maki from Street Fighter or from Final Fight 3, which was a super Nias exclusive, showed up on one of the Game Boy Advance ports as a fighting character. So it's just, it's all over the place. There isn't even poison in Street Fighter now. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. There's a weird little shared universe that's, uh,

Saturday Night Slam Masters. Because Mike Cagger is a wrestler. That's what he did before he became mayor. Then Final Fight, Street Fighter, rival schools. Oh, yeah. And there's, I don't want to say there's one more, too. Oh, yeah, the Marvel universe. Right.

And that connects to Smash Brothers, which means also Castlevania and Mega Man and Zelda and Bayonetta. They're all connected. Final Fantasy 7. You love the Mr. Driller universe. And now we've got the smash universe. It's the Ryu, the Ryu-Hoshino universe. You guys are freaking me up now.

Yep. You haven't even had a Jen yet. Yeah. Come beating on your door But actually, I think it's time for some Jen So, you know, we've gone on Actually, like, we get gin You guys survived the episode, now you get a treat.

No, we, my God, we didn't even make it like halfway through the notes. I can't believe this. We have to reconvene some other time and record an episode. Like the second, maybe third part. of this episode. I feel like once upon a time, like in the past, we used to be able to go through decades of history, just like that. And now we didn't even make it through three years of history. We are some wordy bastards. Are we just that much wiser and more erudite? Maybe you shouldn't have invited over people who know that much about Lunar Lander. But I mean, it's important. It's video game

history. All right. So Chris is voting binge off the island. See you later, guys. Sound effects are great. He just left. He left around. That's the sound effect there. All right. So we got some narration

happening. Anyway, yeah, we're getting a little silly. So I think it's time to stop. But thank you, everyone, for listening to this episode. The traditional Retronauts year in review,

part one, apparently. So sometime here in 2019, we are going to do the rest of this. We've got so much to talk about with 1989, the NES, Sega, NEC rivalry. Oh my God, that's huge. Think about 1999 with the Dreamcast and PlayStation

and its prime. Think about 2009, which is, yeah, it's retro now. So there's a lot of us, a lot of things for us to cover still, but it's not going to be right now because this episode is over and everyone has lives that they have to get back to. So we are also going to let you have a life. But thanks for listening. I'm Jeremy Parrish. This is Retronauts. Retronauts, of course, is a podcast that you can find on iTunes and wherever you like to download podcasts for free. But if you like to subscribe to podcast and get cool stuff, you can also go to patreon.com slash retronauts.

And for $3 a month, you can subscribe to Retronauts or more if you want. There's like tears and stuff where you get rewards. It's pretty neat. Tears and the rain. No, no, these things will not vanish in time. This is an ongoing concern. We are going to keep putting up podcasts, and if you give us $3 a month as a subscription, you will get your podcasts a week early with higher bit rate quality and no advertisements.

It's a pretty sweet deal, so check that out at patreon.com slash retronauts. Benj, don't you also have a Patreon? I do, but nobody gives me money on there anymore. Well, that's because you don't pimp yourself hard enough. Instead of that, why don't you buy a joystick for me? Okay, that works too. On Twitter at Benj Edwards, I'm creating a custom joysticks for the NES, Genesis, Atari, Commodore, and Super NES.

And now I have a new Atari 7800 stick that supports two buttons. The company is called BX Foundry, and it exists only in my head at the moment. But, you know, I don't have a website for that. It's cheap to incorporate. It's not a big deal. Yeah, yeah. It's just a couple lawyers of five grand or so. It's a lot of things.

No, do an LLC, man. Get a pass through. It's fine. Yeah, okay, cool. Well, anyway, you know, I run vintagecomputing.com, and I'm on Twitter and everything. And Ben? Hey, I'm Ben. I don't really have anything to plug right now.

You can find me on Twitter at Kieran. That's K-I-R-I-N. I had a retro blog that I used to plug here, but Tumblr evidently just shot itself in the face. So I may have to re-host that somewhere else. We'll see what happens. I'll let you know. I don't know how much you know about social media, but Tumblr just shot itself in the foot. Yeah, yeah, pretty much.

So that's a giant trash fire. We'll work it out. I'm going to take everybody else's plug time, I think. My name's Chris Sims. I have a bunch of other podcasts. Where were you born, Chris? I was born in Ohio. But I do consider myself a South Carolinian.

We moved there when I was young. So I consider myself Southern by the grace of God. Cool. How's that tie into final fight? Everybody was going to have a thick accent. No, I do a bunch of podcasts. I do one about comics called War Rocket Ajax, which you can find at warracket ajax.com.

I do a movie podcast called Movie Fighters, where my War RactaJax co-host, Matt Wilson and I, we watch bad movies. That also incorporates a podcast called Snack Situation where we eat snacks and rank them on a list. I do a podcast about Sailor Moon called Sailor Business, which you can find at Sailor Business.com.

I do a podcast called Zeno Warrior Business. It's a spin-off of that where we watch Zeno Warrior Princess. I do a... I'm trying to talk Chris into starting a G.I. Joe podcast with me. Yeah, there's... I want to. Believe me, the desire is going to happen. It's going to be called G.I. Don't.

It means you shouldn't do it. That's just my way of saying that. And I have another podcast that is called Apocrapels. And it is where my friend Benito and I are reading through the Bible and all of the apocrypha, presumably, until we are dead. How do you have time for some of a podcast? I think the secret is that he doesn't. Yeah, I really don't. That's why this G.I. Joe thing is kind of a, it's been a, it's been a, it's been, a, there's been some pushback.

Yeah, I, look, I want to do. So, my wife says, why does it take five to six hours to record a podcast? This is why, because I'm slowing things down. Also, I write comic books, go to your local comic bookshop and buy Infinity War's Sleepwalker. She knows you're doing, she knows you're doing two episodes at once, right? I told her, but I don't

know if she understands. She doesn't listen to podcasts. The Mary X-Men holiday special buy that one, too. Right, that's it. So lots of comics that you can buy. Anyway, this has been part one of the 2019 years in review from Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish. Oh, and you can find me on Twitter as GameSpite. But I'm not really that spiteful. I'm jolly. I like talking about good video games. So come and follow me and everyone else. And we'll be back in a week with another episode. And who knows, we'll follow this one up sometime when we can all get together again. Look forward to it. Think about direction, wonder why you have it now. Stand in the place where you were now face west.

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The Mueller report. I'm Edonohue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine, Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral.

It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect. the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.