Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 273: Years in Revue: 1980/1990

Episode Date: January 20, 2020

The Retronauts East crew (Jeremy Parish, Benj Edwards, Ben Elgin, Chris Sims) attempts to explore the highlights and disasters of gaming history in 1980/1990/2000/2010 in our annual by-the-decade recap... but only make it to 1990. It was a big year, OK?

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network, a collective of creator-owned and fully independent podcasts focused on pop culture and video gaming. To learn more and to catch up on all the other network shows, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. This weekend, Retronauts, the Tens, they're so bad. Hi, everyone, and welcome to this episode of Retronauts. If I had thought I would have looked to see which number episode this is, but I didn't. And that is the Jeremy Parrish difference. That's right.

It's me, Jeremy Parrish, here hosting an episode of Retronauts and being unprepared as usual. We did not create 20 pages of not. notes, absolutely not. No, we're flying by the seat of our pants. And here with me, streaking through the air by the seat of their pants, not the kind of streaking that was popular in the 70s, but the other kind of streaking, like blue streak, I don't know. Anyway, let's just go in, what does that counterclockwise order? Counterlogical? Yes. Counterproductive order. I'm Ben Elgin, and I'm just going to leave out the whole streaking part. I think I'm just going to kind of amble in here.

They call him the streak. Look at that. Look at that. Fastest thing on two feet. Weird. Hi, I'm Benj Edwards, and you might know me from TV's Retronauts. And Sasquod. And I'm Chris Sims. It's probably worth noting Benj was the only one who had alcohol at lunch. I don't know.

No, no. Oh, you had some. Okay. That's why he was singing earlier. Yeah, probably. Oh, I see. He doesn't sing without a beer. The lively part of your personality that never comes out on Mike.

You're always so reserved and sensible on the podcast, but now everyone knows the truth. You actually sing. Occasionally. Chris, I have nothing to say about you. I'm sorry. That's fine. You're being very productive over there. I am.

I've got notes up. I'm ready to get you. Oh, I thought you're not. These are notes. Okay, okay. These are, this is the bad Google Docs out. I've got my iPad here and I'm just playing video games, not looking at notes. Did you know?

Video games? Video games from 1970? No, there were none. All right. Yes, this is once again the Retronauts Annual Tradition, wherein we look back at the, well, we look ahead to the coming year by looking back at years that came before. This sounds a lot better in my brain. So if you've been listening to Retronauts for any amount of time, including like a decade or more, then you're familiar with this annual tradition. Basically, we used to look back every five years, but now there's so many years of history that we can't do that anymore.

That's how long Retronauts has been around. Now we're looking back 10 years at a time. So as we venture into 2020, the year of amazing vision, we will be looking back at the 10s, the 1970, 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000. I would say 2010, but we're not going to make it. So we'll do that as a separate episode, much like our widely reviled 2009 episode that I thought was amazing and everyone hated. So we're going to do another one of those.

But maybe this time we'll get to it before. November. I doubt it. Well, we'll see. That's not going to happen. All right. So, yeah, last year we did the, we started at 1969, and there was a lot of video game stuff that happened in 1969. That is not the case for 1970. 1970 was a year where video games apparently did not exist. I scoured the internet looking for any evidence of any video game created and conceived in 1970, and I could find nothing. Nothing.

Yeah. Benj, why is it? that tell us why no one was making video games in 1970 i bet you know yes we were in a weird place between the space war dominated mainframe era that started in like 61 or so and uh then in between you know the the pivotal innovations of television video games by ralph bayer and also nolan bushnell and ted dabney they also they thought of ways to use um you know non-computer logic to play games on a CRT display. And also then shortly after that, the price of computers fell dramatically,

even though they were still extremely expensive, which allowed more people to get computer time to develop computer games in the early 70s, which like Hunt the Wumpus, Star Trek, all that stuff. There are a lot of things in 71, if you'll look. Next year is going to be packed. We've got so much stuff to talk about. Oh, man, I can't wait.

But that is a year from now. But right now, yes, there's just, there's really not much to say about the year 1970s. So rather than belabor the point, let's talk about the two things that were kind of touched on already, actually. Benji kind of spoiled the, you're doing this out of sequence. But yes, 1970, the only video game innovations I could find. Did you write this technologist article? Yes, I did. So actually, you know, I'm just going to have Benj to tell us about it.

Well, I mean, there's two points here. Magnivox licenses Ralph Bear's TV game from Sanders Association. and Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, who would found key games and then Atari, or something like that, Sizigi and then Atari and then Key Games, begin their attempt to create an arcade version of space who are calling it computer space without the exclamation point. Bushnell then joins Nutting Associates. So what's up with this? Why is this important? Well, I'd say the interesting thing is that Chris is having problems with, I believe, nutting associates. I was trying not. I've been laughing at it all day. We just got to get it out of the way. It was a different time. Yeah. It was a time before internet memes and rap memes and whatever else. Okay.

It wasn't just a bunch of guys nutting together. See, you took it too far, binge. We could have just left it at that. All right. They were just throwing their nuts for the winner. Okay, well, 1970, you know, if route. God, guys. How can I be a serious story?

You've got to hold the line for us, binge. Save us from ourselves. Yeah, sure. I'm being so quiet right now. The hilarity on your face speaks volumes, though. It fills the room. Okay, so let's see. 1968, Ralph Baer and co developed the brown box. They had finished their prototype and started shopping it around to places like RCA and Magnavox and other places, other TV manufacturers. And I guess... Do you want to talk about what the brown boxes?

I don't know that we've ever actually really discussed it on Retronauts before. It was a project box that Ralph developed with Bill Harrison and Bill Rush. It was a metal box with a bunch of switches on the front. And the reason they call it the brown box is because he put a sort of plastic brown wood grain laminate all over it to make it look better than just sheet metal. And so the reason for the switches is to turn on and off different modules inside the console that would activate and deactivate different, you know, you know, balls and lines.

So, yeah. Sprite objects, basically. Yeah, they weren't sprites, but they were, you know, TV projections. Anyway, so, yeah, so that was the prototype, and that, you know, turned into the Odyssey in 1972. Magnovox's engineers got a hold of it, and they invented a method to, instead of having a bunch of switches, you had to toggle to change the game. You would put a sort of cartridge jumper, switch jumper thing, thing.

to the console, which would turn on and off those different modules. But just there's, you know, there's two player paddles and a ball and a line and a, you know, at the time that it had a color background, Ralph's prototype. I played Ralph. I went to his house, Ralph Bayer's house in 2011 or 12, and he had a rebuilt prototype of the brown box that he had built a replica of it. And we played pong against each other, this TV ping pong. And it was cool because it had the original color.

It has a green background. But Magnivox took out the color circuitry to save money. And also because color televisions were not exactly that common at the time. And Star Trek had launched in 1966. It was like, let's make everything super garish because, wow, people have color TVs if they're very, very wealthy. It was a new thing. Batman was the same way. Like, it was originally billed as Batman in color in January of 66.

Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, even up until the 80s, I was just writing about the Atari. 800, Atari's arcade games, even in 1978, were all black and white screens in the arcade. They had some, they had done a few in color before that, but they were still releasing black and white CRT games with color gel overlays to save money, you know? Space Invaders in 78 was black and white. Yeah, color overlap. 79 was kind of like the color revolution in arcades.

And, you know, arcade games were cutting edge technology. That was like where, you know, it's always been kind of like the leading edge of video game technology. And they were just getting into color in the late 70s. So, yeah. Also, I wanted to hit on the other thing you said about these graphics. I said they're not sprites because this was before you had like addressable pixel displays. Right. So was this, was this box basically just directly manipulating kind of the cathode ray mechanism in the TV? Like, like, I know people were doing things with oscilloscopes too, like directly manipulating. Yeah, there's something a lot of people don't know and that Ralph de-emphasized about his history of video game development is that

They started with a, at Sanders, with HeathKit color signal generators that would generate a spot on the screen for test purposes. And you could move the spot around, make it wider, or have a color pattern or something. And he said, wow, look at this, the spot circuitry. I mean, we could turn this and control the spots and turn it into a game. So it was an analog circuitry that would control the TV signal to generate a spot that you could control with a two potentialometers for vertical and horrible. horizontal x y axis you know and um if you put a a stick in that then it becomes a joystick because then you can control it and anyway am i going too far no i mean um you know we said we weren't going to say too much about 1970 we're 10 minutes into the episode now so i think we've switched

a bit yeah switch to the uh the nolan bushnell stuff which is um you know they nolan quit Amex in like 69 or 70, joined Notting Associates, had a plan to create an arcade version of Space War because he thought it would be fun. It would get a lot of quarters or nickels at the time. They didn't even charge quarters for arcades. And so that became impractical, and he had a epiphany or Ted had the epiphany. I can't even remember. And they decided, no, it was Nolan. He had the first idea. He said, so, you know, when you control the vertical knob and the horizontal knob, what are you doing? You know, how can you control this image on the screen? And he asked Ted, which is an engineer at Ampex with him. And Ted said, well, yeah, we could do that. We could

control anything you want. So they turn it into a game called computer space. So we should talk about that next year because they didn't really set till 71. That's true. All right. So that's it for 1970. Yeah. People didn't have mainframes in their homes for some weird reason. And there just weren't many opportunities for video games to exist in the public space. So we jump ahead a decade, and wow, everything's changed. 1980, in my opinion, was the first year that video games were really video games. Mainstream. I mean, yeah, you can talk like Pong, Space Invaders, that kind of stuff, came along, the Atari VCS, Fairchild, Channel F.

Like, these things happened in the 70s, but 1980 was when they really went mainstream. And it's kind of on the back of a few notable. arcade games, but also just, you know, the Atari 2,600, it kind of reached saturation in the market, computer platforms like the Atari, the Apple 2, Atari's PCs, the like the Commodore Pet was also... And the VIC-20 was already, well, did it come out in 80? It might have. Yeah.

The TRS 80 came out. The VIC-20 did not, because it's not on my list of things that... But the Simpler, the X-Avials. Yeah, it was a color computer. that came out in 80, the TRS-80 color computer. And also the TI994A had come out, or the 4, TI994 had come out in 79, and I think the 4A was 81. I can't remember.

Right, but it was in development. But basically, yeah, video games and computers, just as a whole were hitting critical mass. Yep. I'd say, I mean, 80 was probably the Atari 2,600's, I don't know, 801.80 and 81 were huge, huge years for Atari with their VCS platform. so yeah and um that's what it says here is the first item on the list the heyday of the Atari VCS did you guys I wrote it you did I did not put that there um did you guys own a VCS at the time

were even alive at the time I was born in 81 so I was so I was four in 80 so I did not have a lot of consciousness of this but it's a given point where a lot of these things that that were releasing in 80 were still around by the time I started actually noticing um likewise yeah and like we never we didn't have an Atari but like I knew some people who did And, yeah, some of the things that came out here are definitely things that I got into later. Battlezone was a big one that came out that year. That's the sort of vector graphics tank game. That's a cool one.

And we had Rally X in there. It's kind of one of the prototypical, like, maze race games, sort of a much less tight version of Pac-Man. Yeah, I mean, that was kind of seen as like, oh, this is going to be the big game from Namcoe and Midway. But then it wasn't because it wasn't as fun. or is concise or accessible or character-driven as Pac-Man. Yeah, although it's one of those ones that even, I mean, it's obviously not anywhere near as well-known as Pac-Man, but it's still like the brand hangs on for some reason.

Like, there's like a rally-act track. Yeah. Fondness for it. Yeah. I'd say Activision was, it's a big year for Activision. It was the first third party. Like that's a big part of video games becoming a sustainable business, I think, something more than a trend,

is the move of third parties to publish. on consoles instead of just consoles being completely closed and, you know, only first-party games showing up. Yeah, so in 79, Al Miller, David Crane, Bob Whitehead, Al Kaplan, I can't remember his first name, and several other people left Atari because they were mad at Atari. Well, the fact is they were making... They're mad at Warner, really.

Yeah, they were mad at Warner. They're mad that their games they're developing were making 200, million dollars a year and they made $20,000 a year and they got no credit and no bonuses basically. I mean, they did get a bonus to 79 according to what I just learned about. But they felt like they weren't being compensated fairly, credited fairly. So Activision started up and they began developing games for the VCS. And of course, up to that point, all games published on the VCS had been published by Atari. And they knew exactly how to program it because it was Atari's top programming staff, you know, all, they didn't all, but it was a big core group

they left the company, and they made great games. So that first year was they were first published, I can't remember, I was just looking this up the other day. It was like mid to late 1980, boxing bridge, checkers, dragster, fishing derby. Boxing was really cool. It was based on a prototype game that, a prototype arcade game that one of the guys had made that they Never, Atari never finished. And it's really fun. Have you played boxing, Activision? No, I'm not really an early VCS fan.

It's neat. And you see two guys from an overhead point of view. You see them like top, completely top down. They're two boxing glove arms in their head. And you can, you alternate. When you push the button, it alternates which thing you, which arm you swing. Yeah. So you have to.

And I feel like there's a way you can push both of them out to block people. I can't remember. Benj is doing these great visuals here that you're not getting. It's really challenging to manipulate something with two arms when you have a single stick and a single button. Yep. But it's a great game. You're trying to hit the other guy on the nose, basically,

and block his attacks. And then Bridge, I've never played. The checkers. Yeah. Checkers is good. It's a good implementation of checkers. Dragster, you're racing a clock, which became a staple in.

in their design, game design. There are so many games where you had to get through obstacles. Dragster has become a point of contention in recent years over scoring. I can't remember exactly what the story there was. I should have looked it up in advance. But basically, like,

there was someone who supposedly had some kind of crazy world record, like nine seconds or something on Dragster. And there was a lot of debate over whether that was a real score or not. Yeah, I actually wrote about this last year. Because I was at my day job, they needed someone to write about Billy Mitchell. And I was the only one who had watched the King of Kong like three times.

So, yeah, I wouldn't research that. I can't remember what the exact thing was. But, yeah, it's this very, very simple game that had this weird thing where you could, like, cheat the clock entirely. And people didn't know about it until relatively recently. And so all the scores at Twin Galaxies got knocked down. And a fishing derby, I don't remember what that's like. You probably catch as many fish as you can. It's a hat that you wear when you go fishing.

Okay, good. So we've got some other really influential stuff in this year. Yeah, I want to call out specifically one that probably is not going to show up on most people's radar. And that's the Acorn Adam. That was the first proper home computer from Acorn, which was a British computing company. And they didn't really do much throughout the 80s. like they made computers and they kind of existed, but none of them really took off. But it was in the 90s when they created the Archimedes.

And in the process, created the arm architecture, which is basically in every embedded system, phones, consoles, you know, handheld game systems, any kind of embedded device these days probably has an arm in it. This was like the basis of one of the most important and pervasive computing platforms in the the milling machine at my day job has an arm in it so there you go yeah that was the first arm CPU in the acorn atom did it have an arm cp u i thought arm was later i thought arm was based on their risk architecture and started in the 90s well okay i read very briefly about this that had the arm yes the archimedes yeah that was in the 90s risk wasn't really a thing yeah yeah that was later they had to come up with instruction sets before they could reduce them but yeah like um just

you know the fact that acorn entered the home computing space in 1980 and would then kind of percolate in the background for about 10 years, 15 years before coming up with the platform that would make them just everywhere. Acorn's not really around anymore, but like the standards and references and everything that they came up with, that's what's important. I'm sorry, I got confused. The Archimedes were released in 87.

That's the first one with the first arm process. Oh, I didn't realize it was that early. Cool. That's why I got confused. But yeah, 80 would have been way too early for that. You're right. I like Berserk as one of my favorite ports of games. I never played the arcade version, but Berserk is really fun where you face robots that talk to you.

Yep, they insult you. actually let's go through some of the computing platforms that debuted and systems that debuted in that year because there's actually quite a few and it was a really big sort of breakout year. We go through this extremely cool alphabet. list that I put together. The first thing we have on here is Deco from Data East. Are you guys familiar with this? No, I'm not. It's something that I was not aware of until a few years ago when I was working on Game Boy

works and started kind of researching Data East and the origins of lock and chase. And it turns out that Deco is basically kind of a precursor to Nintendo's Versus system and to the NeoGeoMVS platform. It was a modular, game system, an arcade system, it was just like a standard platform, and the games came on tape cassettes. The Deco meant Data East cassette something. I can't remember exactly. Anyway, so like you would buy a game, you know, is an arcade operator and stick the tape cassette into the deco machine and change out the labels on the side, like the side art, and you

would have a new game. And I think actually S&K had a similar system that came a little bit before that, but these both kind of happened around the same time. But it was a, you know, kind of an early precursor to an idea that would become a lot more common in arcades throughout the 80s. Hopefully they just loaded it into RAM the first

time you turn it on, so you don't have to know it. I believe so I'm pretty sure, yeah, I'm pretty sure it loaded into Lamb, so RAM, Lamb. So the first time you turned on a Deco game or, you know, when you plugged it in for the first time for the day, it would take a few minutes to load up, but then it was just in RAM, yeah. That's cool.

there's also the Nintendo Game and Watch I feel like I'm actually surprised I don't think we've had an episode on Game and Watch Have we not? We should do that But Chris is over there mimicking Mr. Game and Watch So clearly you have some opinions No I had

I'm not bored You can catch me in Y2K That's when I'll be back Wasn't the first game ball Ball It's just called Ball I don't know if that was the first one But yeah probably

It's just a guy Kind of juggling balls or something Yeah, I didn't have any of the really early ones and the ones that the, you know, Smash Game and Watch guy comes out of. I had some of the ones where they attempted to do a Mario thing on there with the LCD. So the, you know,

your little walls and pipes made out of little LCD number sections. And it kind of worked. I mean, it was kind of fun to play. I had that one, too. The Super Mario Bros. Yeah, the Super Mario Bros. Game and Watch. It was actually impressive that it had like, you know, four differently themed levels.

That was like 1988, 89. It was much later. Yeah. Way later. It was way later. It was, it was. definitely way later. It's not one of the early ones at all.

But, but yes. And that was the Genesis. It was Nintendo, it was not the Genesis. No, the Genesis of the game. Oh, okay. Was it a breakout year with the Genesis of several games? Okay. Okay, the cross, the cross-shaped controller pad, the D-Ped originated on, in like 83 on the Game and Watch.

I believe Donkey Kong, yeah. Like, maybe 83. I think it was 82. 82, 83, one of those. Actually, it might have been 81. I don't know. I don't think it was 81. It might have been.

Oh, God. Yeah, so Game and Watch a big deal. Get out. One thing we haven't really talked about on Retronauts ever is the Mattelan television, which was... Thank God. A powerful system compared to the Atari 2,600,

and also introduced, I guess, kind of, maybe not so much introduced as perpetuated the bad controllers on video game systems. It was kind of a thing before things got standardized. It's absolutely remarkable that the Intellivision, the Kalika Vision, the 5200 all launched with such horrible controllers.

Just absolute ergonomic disasters. I mean, they are, how can you put that many man hours into engineering and testing and stuff and actually base the future of your company on such a terrible design? And I just don't get it. Of course, the Intellivision fans are going to crucify us over this because they know better than to listen to. Retronauts. Okay, good. I mean, there are people who love the... Intellivision is, I'd say, the best of all the three of those, just because...

It's a great platform in and of itself, but the controller, like, that's all I take away from it. It's just so... It's so not fun to play because of that. Yeah. It's, it has 32 directions, I think. I can't remember instead of... Yeah, it's a disc. Yeah.

So, and it has a numeric keypad on it, and you can slide an overlay over it for games. And that's an interesting idea, because there were some... more complicated games released for it, like Utopio is one of the first sort of real-time strategy type games, simulation games. And I've played a few fun games with there. There's a voice module for the television

that does speech synthesis. And this is the same company. No, okay, yeah. Skip that part. So there's a game called B-17 bomber. That's really fun. When you started up, it says,

Hotel Electronics Presents B-17 Bomber And it even has like an accent to it, which is really neat. And you play as a fighter pilot shooting down, approaching enemy aircraft, and you pick the view like it says, fighter is 9 o'clock,

and you push the direction on the keypad to face that way and then shoot them down with the controller. So there's some interesting complexity going on there on that system that is generally underappreciated. but yeah coming from the Atari side of things with the joystick where you could easily manipulate it and the buttons that are easy to press instead of the two buttons on the side which had like Apple 2 had such a great little joystick yeah I don't like Apple the analog joystick on Apple that much but you know the Intellivision has two buttons on each side they're duplicates of each other and they're hard to push too but I mean there's neat things about the Intellivision Chris what do you love about the Intellivision? Chris what do you love about the Intellivision the most. I do believe, if memory serves, the Intellivision was the source of the first comic

book ads for video games that would be running around this time. Specifically, like, games made by Parker Brothers for the Intellivision. I can see that. Another thing that I wrote fairly recently, like within the past year, so I did a history of comic book ads in, or history of video game ads in comics. mix for Polygon. And I went back and basically had every issue of Amazing Spider-Man from, like, the mid-70s on because I figured if it was going to be in anything, it's going to be in those.

And I think the first couple, before there were NES ads, certainly were for like in television. I think it was Parker Brothers on both in television and Atari. And Atari, yeah. And one of the big early, like, cross-platform ones would have been. like the one that had it showed you like pitfall on like the 12 different competing systems that were about to all go away in 1983 yeah but yeah like that's that's where i'm at with 1980 those uh yeah there were there was a series of atari soft ads that had those all the

different screens yeah and those were around like 83 84 or 80 somewhere they were a little bit don't worry i'll be talking more about uh video game ads and comics a little bit later yeah Also in 1980, we had the TRS 80 Coco, the color computer, the color computer. which apparently has a huge fan base. Benj, do you want to talk about this? I don't know if you are a fan. I am a fan. Yeah.

I mean, there's a couple things I like about it. I got one. When I first started collecting computers and... Why don't we actually describe what it is first? It has a unique sales model. It was tied to a retailer, which was very unusual. Yeah, called Radio Shack. Yeah.

Okay, so... I guess most people don't know what that is anymore. Well... It was a shack. Radio Shack was a chain of electronic stores in America that was... huge and it was very influential and they made their own brand devices. They had their own labels, in-house labels for things. And one of them was their computer line was called TRS 80, the Tandy Radio Shack 80 because Tandy was their Tandy Corporation is the parent company

of Radio Shack. And in 1977, the TRS 80 Model 1 came out and it was a black and white computer with 4K of RAM and a Z80 processor, I think. And that was the 80 part of the TIRS 80. And so they released a couple iterations of that up until, and 1980 was their first color computer. And it was, I think it's a 6809 in it. It's a CPU. And it's sort of primitive by, like compared to the graphics on the Atari 800

or something weren't that great. But you could play cartridges on it. It's an all-on-one machine that was gray with a keyboard built into the base. And so, and you could buy a disk drive-fold. and load cassettes, and it came with basic built in so you could program. And the best thing about it is that it had really good basic manuals. So when I first got one in 92, three, four, somewhere around there when I was collecting computers, I just sat down with that manual.

And I already knew basic from Apple II, but I just sat down and followed that manual through, and it was just really fun to learn how to program it because it was so brilliantly written with little cartoons and stuff. And I still think that Radio Shack made the best computer manuals of all those vendors. Yeah, I mean, they were designed for the Everyman. That was Radio Shack's entire thing. It was like if you needed a part for an electronic device, then you would go to Radio Shack and dig around in that weird space in the back where they just had racks and racks of, like,

what are these things? If you didn't know electronics, you were just like, this is mysterious. But they had everything you needed. Yeah. And that was kind of their thing. It was like DIY. So it makes sense that they would make DIY accessible for people. And their line of computers was very successful.

I think they were, in the early 80s, they were number two behind Apple in terms of home computer sales, which is, you know, the low-cost computer type things. So one of the games, the funny thing is I'm thinking, like, what's the most notable games for the color computer? Because I have probably literally 100 color computer cartridges. and they are also unmemorable that I don't, you know, I never go play them because they're very primitive and blocky. I remember there's one called Downland. It's really weird. It's sort of a platformer kind of Donkey Kong clone, I think.

And there are wild catting and, you know, there's a pinball thing. Yeah, it's like drilling for oil. That's not where I thought that was going to go. Okay. Yeah. It's not as exciting as nutting associates. and uh catting associates would be a great great brand so uh yeah i'd have to look it up the funny thing i got a whole shelf full of cartridges but like the weirdest thing on that platform is there

was a licensed poltergeist game that just seems so weird in our place did you like have to touch your screen to play but that would be fun here yep anyway it's a great thing the color computer two and three came out later and iterated on that the Color Computer 3 being the most advanced around 1986 or something with much better graphics. And there were diehards who kept with that platform, even though the IBMPC stuff, you know, took over the market. Anyway, there you go.

All right. So let's wrap up 1980 talking about just a few quick, important things. You mentioned Berserk, which was like a maze shooter, Rogue, launched. Rogue is the most important game on this list. I don't know about that, but it's definitely a big one. There's a lot of important games on me. Pac-Man is on this list, you know. We should probably mention that.

Pac-Man, you've heard of it. I know you've heard of it. That was that and Missile Command, I think, were the games that really broke video games into the mainstream. Those were pervasive. Like, everyone knew what they were. Interestingly enough, I do think that there is something to what Ben just saying. But I feel like we are currently in the era of rogue likes. The era of Pac-likes lasted like 10 years.

No, no. Rogue was an extremely important game, but it kind of bubbled beneath the surface for like 20 years. It's very relevant now. But I would still say it had much less impact on the overall shape of the games industry. Probably so. Without Pac-Man.

Without Pac-Man and Missile Command, I feel like, well, no, I mean, I feel like those were essential in helping push video games into the mainstream and making, you know, the average person aware of them. And without those games to really, you know, kind of serve as like ambassadors to the idea of video gaming, I don't think video gaming would be where it is now. And there's Zork on YouTube.

I don't want to pass over to Zork here, either, because that, that, you know, really got the text adventure off of, like, mainframes into consumer stuff. And that was actually, like, the things that came from Zork, all the infocom stuff was, was one of the biggest things I was playing in the later 80s. And, like, that's what we were talking about, like, okay, it's because we were giant nerds, but that's what we were talking about on the playground in the late 80s was how to get past the puzzles in the infocom games. Yeah, 80 was a huge year. If you think about Zorke, Rogue, and Pac-Man, and all this Activision starting and Sierra Online and all these computer platforms, yeah, it was a big year. I found what I wrote about Rogue in 2009 for PC World because I, do you want me to read it? Might as well. Yes, it's actually better for you to read stuff instead of just saying, oh, there's an article you should link to it.

So let's hear it. Okay, so Rogue, the Adventure Game, was number six on my 10 greatest PC games of all time list that I made in 2009 for PC World. This says it was originally released commercially for computers and stuff in 84, but originally developed in 1980 for Unix mainframe systems. Rogue eventually found its way to personal computers, including in 1984, the IBM PC. The image shown here, well, he can't see that, is from that version of the game. An asky character cell classic, Rogue not only spawned a genre known as Rogue likes, but also mothered the action role-playing game, which is slightly ironic since Rogue is turn-based.

that's sort of debatable. It is totally turn-based. It's universal turns. Yeah, well, not the term-based thing, the action-rpg thing, but this is the next paragraph. Yeah, I mean, Diablo is what most people consider the action RPG's origin,

and that was directly inspired by reality. Yeah, that's the next paragraph. Nearly every dungeon hack and slash, for example, gauntlet and Diablo, and every overhead dungeon crawl RPG, such as Baldur's Gate, ultimately derives from rogue. And with its randomly generated dungeons,

the original is still as much fun to play as it was in 1980. And so I should elaborate on the Asky Character Cell Classic, which is that, you know, it was just, it had no bitmap graphics. It was a probably originally a console game on a video terminal for a mainframe where the characters of the, you know,

punctuation and letters served as the graphics of the game. And you're a little at symbol walking around, you know, a dungeon that's drawn with these Asky graphics what would later be called Aski graphics on the IBM PC. And there were some graphical versions of Rogue for the Atari ST and I think the Amiga later, which are really, really cool. And it was insanely influential. So there you go.

And you can still download all of these variations. You can download the Aski version. You can get some graphical versions of Rogue and NetHack and all those things for pretty much any platform you like at this point. Yep. And it even made it outside of the U.S. There was a commercial version released. In Japan, and I think I've mentioned before that I found a strategy guide for it, and I really regret not picking that up.

I don't think a Japanese language strategy guide for an ASC-based game would do me much good, but the novelty of owning it would have been nice. That's really cool. Yeah. And so, I don't know, we talk about... I think that's it. That's 2018. We've had many Pac-Man episodes. I think we're good to move on to...

We didn't talk about Mystery House, the first graphical adventure game. I mentioned it. Sierra Online sounded. Yeah. Okay. I think we got to keep moving. We've got 1990 to deal with it. We got a lot of roots of adventure games there.

We've got 1990. It's a big deal. Hey, folks, it's Awesome Kahn, CEO editor-in-chief, over there at shacknews.com. Give a listen to the Shackcast, the official Shack News podcast of Shack News, over there on the Greenlit Podcast Network. Hi, I'm Ray, and this is my friend Alex. Hi. And we do a show called No More Whoppers. Some call it corn, we call it therapy.

We're adults with the virility of men. Want to hear us read snack food copy and talk about Japanese chips? Too bad. Join us every month or so on the Greenlit Podcast Network. Hey folks, it's Asif Khan, CEO and editor-in-chief over at shacknews.com. Give a listen to our 9-5 Elon podcast about Tesla and electric vehicles and all sorts of cool stuff over there on the Greenlit Podcast Network. So, yeah, So, yeah, 1990, you know, if 1980 was, you know, if 1980 was

a huge leap over 1970 in terms of what was happening in games. 1990, you saw, you know, video games having gone through quite a bit of growing pains in the 80s and re-emerging on the other side to grow even more prominent and powerful. And if 1980 was the peak of the VCS's power, the 2600's power, the 1990s, I would say it was the peak of the NES' power. And Nintendo was really at the kind of the pinnacle of their dominance in a moment. America and basically throughout the world, maybe not so much sure, but Japan. Tell me about Color Dreams, because that's the only thing on this list that I don't know at least a little bit about.

All right. So Color Dreams was a publisher that made NES games without a license. Okay. And they made not great games, but they made them and, you know, didn't go through Nintendo's approvals process. They're British company. Were they? I don't think so.

I'm pretty sure. I'm almost 100% sure. I think they were based in California because they became wisdom tree. Really? They decided to rebrand themselves as a Christian company and they reissued some of their games such as Sunday Fun day or such as Minis Beach. Wow. I am so completely wrong. The first line in Wikipedia for Color Dreams is Color Dreams is Color Dreams is an American company.

Yeah, I think they were based in California. Yeah, I'm confusing him with somebody. Because the graphics in Minus Beach were made by Nina. That's a very American kind of name. I don't know if that's true. Anyway, so yeah, they rebranded themselves as Wisdom Tree thinking, I guess, the prevailing theory is that they said, you know, if we wrap ourselves in the Bible, Nintendo is not going to come after us. Because the optics of a Japanese company coming after a group of Americans dedicated to Jesus. In 1990.

In 1990 was not good. It was not something Nintendo wanted to get messed up with. They did get away with it. They released Super Noah's Ark for the Super Ennis. The only unlicensed Super Annius game. The whole reason that we started Apocryphiles. If you listen to it, we're just trashing Nintendo all the time. Nintendo specifically?

Yeah, it's a cross-promotional joke. I get it. I get it. No, I want to hear how... How terrible... How Nintendo factors into the Book of Revelations. We will... Are they the great whore?

We do not use that term. Autofagraphals. We will eventually be doing a Wisdom Tree episode, I think, because Benito definitely had those growing up. But yeah, that's... They're still around. They're owned by different people now.

Yeah. They are still around. They are still around. I have a device called The Ark, which is like an NES controller that has games built into it, and there's an HDMI port, and you can play...

A Wisdom Chiless. You know, Moses. What is the game with Baby Moses? Moses? I can't remember. No, Bible Adventures. You can play that. And Sunday Fun Day and a few others.

on your modern television. So it turns out that I did actually know about color dreams. I just didn't know it under that name. Interesting. And they are very unique because their cartridges were this horrible baby blue color. Yeah. So did Nintendo just end up dropping the lawsuit when they changed their name? I don't know that they ever got sued.

I mean, it says here Nintendo sues color dreams. Oh. I thought you wrote that. We'll put that there. Not me. You did. It wasn't me. Maybe I was in a few.

State. I was possessed by the devil, actually. And that's why we need color dreams. Well, sorry, wisdom tree. Spiritual warfare is one of the games. That's one of, that's cool. All right. Which was the Zolda clone.

Yeah, kind of. Actually, Chris, it seems like there's a lot of stuff you're not really familiar with like Super Mario Brothers 3. You haven't heard of that one. Yeah, is that good? No. Oh, okay. I'll skip it.

Yeah, I wouldn't mess with it. It was delayed like a year and a half to come to the U.S. And by that point? Yeah, did that actually come out in 90? Or was it? It came out here in 90? Okay, yeah, that's right, it had already been out in Japan when we got delayed. Yeah, no one cared.

Everyone was like, no, Mario. You know, somebody's going to take you seriously? Can I, like, go back and listen to any episodes of Retronauts where that's mentioned? I don't, I don't think we've covered that one. It's just such a non-event in video games. People are going to think you're serious. It was actually, anybody who thinks we're serious about not knowing about Super Mario Brothers Three.

There are people who deserves to not think we're serious. But, yeah, it was actually a couple years old in Japan at this point, right? Because there was there were these chip shortages. for Nintendo cartridges going on that we're delaying. I think it was more a timing issue. Super Mario Brothers 2 came out here in 88. It came out within a month of Super Mario Bros. 3's release in Japan.

They were just like, hey, let's let this sell for a while, and then we can bring up to... Then they had to introduce it in a movie, so... That's right. I had to get Fred Savage out there, pumping everyone up. All right. So let's talk... There were a bunch of game systems that came out this year. Let's talk about those first.

Game Gear, launched in Japan. I think it came out in the U.S. the next year. That was Sega's answer to Game Boy. Actually, it was more like an answer to Links. It was more, technically, it was more capable than Game Boy. So it was more on the lines of Links, but it was the answer to Game Boy because no one cared about links. Yeah, it was more capable than the Game Boy for about half an hour. Until the batteries right now.

Yeah. It was IP to all the AA batteries in the world when the game game came out. Everyone wanted Nintendo to make a portable NES and they gave us Game Boy instead, but everyone, actually no one cared about having a portable master system, but that's what Sega gave us anyway. That is what the Game Gear is. And they were trying to beat Atari. I mean, they were trying to beat Nintendo with the Game Boy

because I remember reading an article about them saying, developers saying, you know, they wanted to have color specifically over the Game Boy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, they probably were aware of the links, but didn't care about it. But, yeah, Game Boy's lack of color was a big sticking point for a lot of people.

It was, you know, So the system's advantage in a lot of ways. Yeah, I mean, this was already a point where, like, the specs of the Game Boy were, like, ridiculously low in all kinds of ways. And everyone was looking at this and saying, oh, well, we can build something more capable of that. And lots of people did, but they all failed for other reasons, like not having any battery life or just having hard to see screens. You can't drop them off a balcony and then go play it afterwards. Game Gear did surprisingly well for itself, you know, despite the added expense and the extremely high. high voracious battery consumption.

Lots of people owned it. It sold millions and millions of units and actually stuck around until the late 90s, actually. It ended up getting a port of Gunstar Heroes. It got a port, well, not a port, but an adaptation of Panzer Dragoon called Panzer Dragoon mini. I mentioned that to one of the creators of Panzer Dragoon earlier this year at GDC. And I was like, so did you have any involvement with that? He was like, no, we were surprised.

but they really put their hearts into it. It was kind of like those poor sad fools kind of response. You know, I did a Game Gear thing this year, wow, August. That recently. Yeah. Wow. Do you remember doing this? Kind of.

I mean. Were you also in a fugue state? Well, yes. I'm usually, usually am. So I wrote that the Game Gear came into the World of the Curse called the Game Boy Yardstick. That was my flowery way of saying. that everything they did was compared to the success of Nintendo's Game Boy. Even here in this podcast, that's what we've been doing.

Yeah, so it sold 11 million units, which would be a stunning success for anything, but Nintendo sold about 60 million units during the same period. So relatively speaking, it's considered a, quote, market failure. And it held on for so long and got a lot of great games for it. As with everything, 8-bit Sega, it was very popular in Brazil and did pretty well Europe, too. It's also the subject of one of my favorite moments of video games. Don't work like that in movies, which is in Rumble in the Bronx, my favorite Jackie Chan movie, where Jackie Chan hands a child, a game gear that clearly has no game in it, and the child

immediately starts playing. And they dub in some little beep boops. Beeproop. Pac-Man songs. Yeah. All right. Over on the other side for Sega, much more promising was the Mega Drive. The Mega Drive did not. do much in Japan, but when it came to Europe as Mega Drive and came to America as Sega Genesis, it did gangbusters. No, was that released in America in No, it was launched in Japan in... No, wait. 88. No, no, no, no, no. No, this is the European launch. Yeah, European would be 90. Japan was

88. Yeah. US was 89. Europe was. I just wrote Mega Drive. I did not put Mega Drive in Europe. You were in a fugue state, man. I was. I was. That's my excuse for everything now. It was the European launch of the Mega Drive, and it was huge over there. The first console that really took off in the UK and in Europe, like, people owned consoles before that, but they kind of preferred PCs collectively. But when Mega Drive hit Europe, everyone was like, hell yes, give us the football games and give us the shooters.

And Americans were confused because their idea of football is totally different than ours. That's weird, isn't it? But yeah, so Sega was really kind of geared. gearing up to go big, even though the game gear was only kind of big-ish, Mega Drive and Genesis, like I said, sold gangbusters. S&K, on the other hand, was aiming for obscurity and boutique appeal with the AES, which was the home adaptation of the MVS, the NeoGeo system. But it was interesting because, you know, I mentioned the Deco earlier from Data East, and this was like the Deco, but what if you could use the Deco at home? It was a console that

ran the same cartridges as their arcade machines. And the system sold for like $700. Cartridges were like $2 to $300 each. Crazy expensive. But if you were, you know, if you were one of those people who had the, God, like a 30-inch television and the home speaker system, like, this was the game system you wanted to have because it would just like show all the neighbors. It would rattle your walls. But yeah, this is two or $300 cartridges in 1990s. So it's dropping a grand on a game.

Yeah, and their thing they advertised was that you could have a memory card between the arcade and the home that would transfer between the two. You could take your save game from the arcade and play it at home. So it was kind of a big deal, but because of the expense, it was very much, like I said, a boutique item. But there's still a vibrant collector scene for it. We really haven't covered NeoGeo on Retronauts as much as we should, mainly because I had not nearly enough money to buy. Neo Geo? And none of us did at the time either. It looked very nice from afar back in the 90s. Certainly we don't have the money to pay NeoGeo prices now. Terry Bogard's a Nintendo now.

Yes. That's true. Yep. So it's the most important game system ever. Let's see. What else was there? That is not a system. Are we still on systems? Turbo Express. That was actually NEC's answer, or Hudson's answer to the Game Boy, which was, hey, what if we made our, portable system, or our console system

portable, kind of like with master system, but a better, more powerful system. There were many versions of the Turbo Express released through the years, including the highly coveted PC engine LT, named LT as in laptop, because it actually had like a clamshell design

and could hook up to their CD player and, like, you could attach TV connections to it. It's an amazing little system, and it sells for thousands of dollars now. Yeah, and the GT is what it was called in Japan. The Turbo Express. Yep.

And the cool thing is the cartridges, you could use the same cartridge because they were tiny. They were who cards. Who cards? And finally, on the hardware front, a system called the Super Famicom from Nintendo. No, what is that?

That would grow up to become a little boy named the Super NES. Not familiar, not Ring-I-Bell. It would not play Super Mario Brothers 3, but it did play the sequel. Doesn't that mean Super Mario World came out of this? It did.

Super Mario World. World and F0 and Pilot Wings and all the other launch games. But I feel like Super Mario Bros. 3 in America was bigger than Super Mario World in Japan, honestly. Really? Yeah, Super Mario Bros. 3 was a cultural phenomenon over here. Mario 3 is, I think, aside from the pack-in games, the best-selling Mario game. Actually, maybe Mario New Sporei Brothers has outsold at this point.

But it's, it's, I think, okay, Mario Brothers, Smaller Wethers 3 is the best-selling non-pack-in NES game. I think is correct. It needs to be like a relative to the population of the time, a sales thing, like in fashion. Back when the world was only 6 billion people, it's not nearly as impressive to sell well as now that we're 8 billion. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, there's a lot of truth to that there. The market has grown, the population has grown, sales have grown. But yeah, Mario 3 was a big deal. It was. Yes. And we have talked about it. It was. We have talked about it.

We have. We have not talked about really Bonk's adventure, which I feel like we should. We ought to talk about Bons Adventure. I like this game. Do you know how mad I was when I found out that that game's name is a pun only in Japanese? I was so mad. Is it a PC Gengengin.

PC Gengen as a PC engine. Yeah, it's the PC Engine. PC Gengen is what like, it's like caveman, right? Yeah. And then Arizonk was called PC Dengen, which means PC Electric Man. That's very good. Yeah. Bonk means nothing

In the UK it means Have Sex Well yes So that series has very different connotations over there It's a good adventure His head gets big and yeah Jeremy Parrish I'm telling you that's what happens with the game

It does He erupts Boom All right That is a noting associate's title Why don't we head on to Castle of Illusion Which is the far opposite end of the spectrum

From the blue language We've been using here It's a game about Mickey Mouse Do you guys have fond memories of Castle Evolution? I don't have memories of it. I've played it a lot in the last 10 years, but it's a good game. It's a good platformer. What makes it stand out among, because it has a huge fan base.

People really love it. They kind of remade it recently. Yeah, I like the remake. Yeah, it was 10 years ago. Oh, God. I love the remake. Let's do a retronauts on the remake sometime soon. The remake is great.

I played through it twice with my kids. But the original one was good, I would say, because it was a very good licensed Disney title. there were others like duck tails and stuff obviously but um there weren't a lot of great licensed games outside of the disney universe at that time and uh it plays well it's uh got good graphics and it's very inventive in that you go to these different bansiful stages there's a forest there's like a stage of a bunch of cards and magic stuff and you know um it's just a good game I mean, I could be better, but it's, for the time, it was a great platformer that was a non-Mario, non-Sonic platformer, which Sonic didn't come out until 91. Yeah, so, yeah, so it was probably one of the best platformers on the Genesis.

It was better than Alex Kidd. Yeah. Alex Kitt sucks. I mean, we talked about that. Okay, well, you're going to make some people angry. It's okay. They weren't angry the last time I said that. I went off on Alex Kier.

You're just, you're playing with fire. It's okay. All right. I want to talk about the next thing. Clash at Demonhead. Clash of Demonhead was great. And I don't even know how I ended up with this game, because it wasn't like a high profile game at the time at all.

But somehow I ended up with it. And it's just this kind of sprawling action adventure game that takes place over a bunch of levels that are strewn over this mountain side. But it's also got these kind of proto-metroidsvania elements in it, dare I say, where you're collecting these different powers and different things, and then you can go back to places and take alternate routes and fight your way through a bunch of bosses.

and it's got a very weird story. The whole thing is very anime in ways we didn't really have the context to recognize at the time, but there's a lot of just like animary action stereotypes going on in here and just a lot of weirdness. Yeah, for the longest time,

I thought this was based on an actual, like, media property. It was called PC, or no, sorry, it was called Dengecki Big Bang. Bang, yeah. The main character's name is Bang. Right. And I thought, like, what is this?

Is this like a manga and anime? And I looked and I looked and I've never been able to find any information on a tie-in property, I think they were just like, hey, what if we just made something that is very much in the style of this sort of like 70s Shonen anime? And it's great. It's like the enemies are weird. And everything and it's over the top. And it's like in a way that like, you know, we get a lot of that stuff now, just just like weird indie things. And yeah, like your your buddy dies in the field. And if you go back later in the game and revisit him,

It's like his corpse is more and more skeletal. Like eventually he just becomes a skeleton. It just, yeah. Like some of this stuff is like this, you know, in this serious action game vibe. But then you've got things like one of the bosses is like a panda and there's like skeleton on a motorcycle. It's very undertale.

I never played this. This sounds extremely good. It's pretty awesome. It's got some janky physics. Yeah. It's very floaty. The control is not the best. It is definitely not the best controlling platform or in a year where we have,

you know, and all that, but, but just the whole atmosphere and the stuff that goes on, it's a fun, it's a fun ride. It's wacky. All right. Commander Keen. Yeah, Commander Keen. All right, go for it.

Well, I was going to look up what I wrote about it. No, no, this time you have to go off your memories. Okay, well, tell us, binge. Commander Kean, put your phone down. Put your computer down. Drop the phone. Get down. You have five seconds to comply.

So, Commander Keen was a breakthrough shareware game released by, published by Apogee, published by Apogee, developed by ID software. The guys who did Doom did this first and Wolfstein 3D, you know, John Carmack and John Romero and Tom Hall. So the whole genesis of Commander Keene, if I recall correctly,

is that John Carmack was a genius, and he still is, and he found out some neat routines with the EGA card on a PC that allowed a smooth scrolling technique. at a time when there was no hardware enhanced scrolling like on other like on game consoles you had to do all those tricks in

software but there is a way to like feed the graphics to the memory of the card and stuff to make a smooth scrolling thing only on EGA cards on IBM PCs and so they made a Super Mario Brothers demo called Super Mario Brothers

and her what was it Commander Keene and copyright infringement I can't remember what they called it that that was like a Super Mario Brothers 3 port demo for the PC and they tried to sell it to Nintendo and they Nintendo declined and then they decided hey we should turn this into our own game and they did and it's called Commander Keen so it's a in Keen dreams yeah it's goodbye galaxy is the first

oh my bad yeah Keen dreams later but it's a about a kid named Commander Keen I can't remember doesn't he have another name like Billy I probably anyway so This guy with a football helmet, he builds a spaceship, he lands on Mars, and it's a kid, and he runs, and you can jump on enemy's heads and get a pogo stick and a blaster and collect things. And it's just a neat platformer. At the time, it was very smooth and great. You know, in retrospect, it's a little, you know, I don't know, it's just at the time, it was great. That's what I'm going to say.

I mean, it stood out because it was a console-style action game on PC in 1990, which you just didn't get. There you go. He just summed up everything I want to say within a sentence. Well, there you go. Chris, now it's your turn to talk about why old people love Dr. Mario. Old people love Dr. Mario. No, no. Why?

Why? I don't know. What? They really do, though. We talked about last time. Yeah, we talked about me playing the guy, the guy from my dad's company that in Dr. Mario and went to the... Yeah, and he schooled you.

Yeah. Yeah. But he played it from like 40 feet away. Yeah, I think if people want to hear us talking about Dr. We did that fairly recently. All right. Do you want to talk about Fire Emblem? No, okay.

Ultima 6. There was a fire emblem game that came out that year. You could see the look I just gave Jeremy. I like, no. I mean, you love Smash Brothers. So that's like, that's mostly Fire Emblem characters, sword bros. By volume, yeah. Like if you centrifuge it out, it's just like, here's your massive sword bros.

Yeah. So which part was this actually like the first? This was the second one I think. The second Fire, it's the one that actually came out over here. I looked at them for a long time. I looked it up and I didn't look too. deeply into it because I don't really care that much. It was one of the really early ones.

It was, the series either debuted in 89 or 90s, so this was either the first or second one. In any case, it's been remade at some point and released from the U.S., whereas the original wasn't. Ben, you wanted to talk about Ultimus 6. Yeah, one of my favorite PC games at all time.

I got this in 1990 when it was new, and VGA was new. I mean, it wasn't new. VGA started in 87 with the PS2, IBM PS2, but it was commonly available on PCs, finally, around 1990. So Origin developed Ultima 6 with that target of 256 color graphics, and as usual, it up the game of the graphics and gameplay from Ultima 5. There's a world that operates without, you know, you being present. There's a clock, a day, a night cycle.

I think there's some weather-type things, but it's not very extensive. And all the NPCs go to sleep at a certain time, wake up at a certain time, and you can buy and steal anything and attack anything. But the main plot is that you are the avatar who has come into Britannia and... And that's not the same as the James Cameron Avatar. Yeah. In order to the same as the Airbender.

Yeah. Not the same. But you are the Lord British style, Richard Garriot avatar. And I thought at this point, Lord British was like the ruler Britannia And the avatar was like a subject of him. The player is always the avatar in the ultimate series.

Because it's a, it's like a, the avatar as the concept is that there's this Hindu concept of a God projecting themselves onto Earth as a sort of human form. Kind of like maybe Jesus is sort of a, like as God's physical incarnation on Earth. We should ask color dreams about that. Yeah, they would know, you know. So the player is the avatar projecting themselves into the, this world. And that's actually sort of part of the game mythos, which is that you're a visitor from Earth into this world. And, you know, Lord British is the king. And he was once a visitor too and things like that. So the premise, the thing that makes this one unique is that, um,

gargoyles. Yeah, you're basically, it's a prequel to Disney's gargoyles. But, but the premise I know is that you're basically like there to fight the gargoyles. And then kind of like there's a big plot twist where you realize, oh, actually these, these guys aren't so bad after all. But, but the, Spoiler alert. Yeah. Maybe we shouldn't go around indiscriminately murdering sentient creatures. It's a game about racism. It's really amazing because you assume, obviously, that the gargals are bad.

They're conducting raids and stuff. And then you find out, of course, the people, the humans have been doing bad things to them, and they're just trying to survive in their own world. And it's a great game. It's so good. To me, it's aged very well. The interface is so user-friendly. It's got a mouse-based interface, and you can use a keyboard.

and it's still really playable today. But not in the first-person shooter mouse and keyboard style. No, not like that. But, yeah, it is a great, a game with a great reputation. I think a lot of people consider it the pinnacle of the Ultima series, even if it wasn't as big a milestone in game concept design as Ultima 4. Yeah, I would say there's a lot of people that's evenly split between 6 and 7 is the favorite. Six is my favorite by far.

It's just great. Also, speaking of classics, there's Pit Fighter. You guys love that one, right? I remember seeing it in the arcade. Atari Games did it, right? Yeah, I think so. Was it? I think so.

Yeah, I think so. Published it. Digitized graphics, bad sort of pre-Street Fighter 2 fighting game. And this is before Mortal Kombat. This was the first time I saw it. Well, I know, but this is before, like, the digitized graphics was a big hallmark of Mortal Kombat. And I remember seeing Pitt Fartter. Pit Fartre.

Good, good, yes. Forrety and Slip. Spirter. Oh, Lord. Pit farter. I remember seeing it in the arcade with the digitized graphics and being impressed. I'll say that. Chris, did you want to talk about the Secret of Monkey Island?

Yeah, that's the first Monkey Island game, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I do not care for adventure games. But I think unsurprisingly, like, I did really like the Monkey Island games. I came to them much later. Like, I went back and played a secret and whatever the second one is after I played. No, no, no. Yeah, curse is the phone.

Sorry. It's just, yeah, it's just a Monkey Island, too, Let Chuck's Revenge. Yeah, I played... Sorry, I was just on an episode about that. Yeah, you just did that one. Yeah, I played Curse of Monkey Island first, and then went back and played the other two. And in retrospect, like, having checked out a lot of other, like, adventure games, I really appreciate what that and kind of the other Scum system games did. Actually, I just recently watched a really interesting video on the history of adventure games and how the genre kind of dies out, circa Curse of Monkey Island and

then comes back with, like, the telltale games, but... You should listen to some great podcast recorded by one, Bob Mackey, about the Scum games. I would love to listen to that. You should. I have not revisited it since, like, 2002, so I don't know if the comedy holds up as much. They're still pretty funny. But I do really like the core idea of, I mean, the thing that sums it up, you never actually find out what the secret of Monkey Island is.

It's still a secret. Yeah, it's a secret. Why would they tell you? Yeah, it's not a secret if you tell people. Yeah. I think that's a, like, that game, if you're talking about influence, like we've talked about the influence of rogue coming back today, I think you get a real generation of writers and developers working in games

across all genres who kind of come from that and from Curse of Monkey Island. Because I remember... And Maniac Mansion did the tentacle. Manette Mansion also being a big one. But, you know, we're going to get Curse of Mike Island in 2000. And the, you know, that game had voices. So, spoilers. We're not getting to that this episode.

That's where I have a lot to say, though. Hold it up. I sat very quietly through 1970 and 1980. But no, I think, I think there is a huge influence on what would become kind of the standards of the sort of humor that you see for like a general. generation in video games, like what is funny in games, comes from... It's like rye irony. Yeah, because it comes from like subverting the expectations of what the player wants to do versus what the game can do.

And I think that's a thing that video games can do that nothing else can because of the interactivity. And so I think that influence is huge and really can never be overstated on the way game writing went. That's a good point of... In the California, in the U.S. Yes. Did we talk about it on the 89? 99.

We did. Okay. So one thing I wanted to be sure to hit on while we're still in 1990, though, is not... This episode lives and dies with 1990. All right. Well, we're going to be in 1990 for a while. Let's wind it down. But I want to bring it something that's not a game or a console, which is the game genie.

Yes. Because that was a huge thing. That was one of the things at the time in 1990. So you'd had, you know, if you have the whole different world of games on, like, computers where they can be, like, hacked. changed and stuff. And you couldn't do this on consoles until the game change. Suddenly, this thing comes out that's just basically, it's literally just injecting code. You're just injecting lines onto registers with this thing. And suddenly you can make console games do

weird, weird, weird things. And this was a huge deal. Like, like, the ability to like just take your your console games, which are this one thing that's just, you know, off the shelf and never changes. And suddenly you can break it. Yeah. It gave you a sense of power over the games that was really um intoxicating yeah it's really amazing like when I started my blog in 2005 I had found our game genie code book my brother and I would develop

our own game genie codes for Mario brothers like small and firepower and weird icy sliding stuff we should describe a little bit about how this works so so you have this so so it's a lock on technology it slots in between the cartridge and the console and they had this for multiple platforms I don't know if they all first you have to make friends with somebody who has one

at school. Yeah. Find a richer kid. Absolutely. But so there was, you know, there was an NES one. There was a Genesis one at some point.

I don't know when they all came out. But, but, and then so it would come, you would boot up into this like game genie mode and you would be able to put in your codes, which are just these, like, it was hexadecimal, right?

Yes. Because it was going straight into the registers on the machine. Well, it's kind of, yeah. Sure. There's a P is in there. Yeah, there's not quite X decimal. It was, it was, it was, yeah, okay, so you were like X and, yeah.

Okay. I don't know what. they represent. But it's an alpha numeric code. It's like seven. And you can put in like eight of them, or depending on the game team model and the system. And it would ship with these code books where they would give you pregenerated codes that they had determined would, you know, access the register that gives you the number of lives in this game so you could set your lives to 99 or whatever. And so you'd have these books of all the codes that were, you know, known to work for various games. But it was really just putting arbitrary code into arbitrary

registers. And so you could do whatever you want. And that means you could experiment and like sometimes you would just hit things that did something interesting. A lot of the times it would do nothing and a lot of the times it would just make the game crash. But there was a lot of scope. It's a way to consider it a way of cheating at games, giving you invincibility or infinite lives. And it, you know, I remember there being some ethical debate among friends, maybe among the press or something that whether it was okay to actually use a game genie to play these games when you are not having the, you know, the skill. to actually beat them without it. You cheated yourself.

I mean, it was also unlicensed, right? Like, this was totally unlicensed. Yeah, yeah. Nintendo tried to shut it down. It sued. Yeah. Go ahead. Well, one of my favorite things is I rented this, the game genie five times from Blockbuster,

and then we finally, my mom finally bought me one. So we kept renting it over and over again. But there was a neat code where you could, in Super Mario Brothers One, you could just do a moonwalking float, like where you keep jumping. and keep going higher and higher and then you float down and stuff. And it was just so mind-blowing. If you're a kid who doesn't understand how this stuff is programmed, it's like the Matrix.

It's the same thing as like warping space and reality and getting, you know, being able to change physics of the universe around you. It was just so fun and exciting. I could never beat Mega Man 2. Another big game from 1990. Could never beat it. Or no, Mega Man 3, actually, was the one that I used it on. because you had those

disappearing block things and I'm terrible at those. I'm still not good at them. You know, you could get the rush modules, the rush adapters to fly past them and stuff.

Yeah. And then you run out of rush energy. Yeah, you run out of rush energy. What do you do that? Does that trigger you, Chris? Yes. Am I messing you up?

I'm still not good at them. Like, whenever they show up, because I play obviously like a lot of, you know, retro games. and people love to bring those back because I guess someone likes them but I remember that would be the one code I would put in

for Mega Man 3 when I was over at my friends and I'm making quotes because this was a very this is a very usual relationship but I would put in the moon jump code for Mega Man 3 so that you could jump over all the barriers and then also jump out of the pits. No, there was a moon jump code that you didn't need to activate the Game Genie for if you held

I want to say up on controller That's right. That's what we did. That's why there had to be two of us. That's what it was so true. Okay. No, that was actually built into the game. You could just stick the second controller under your toe and like, hold. I didn't know that. But yeah, that was basically a debug mode. God gave us so many limbs. Just ask, just ask wisdom tree. But I definitely, like, I thought that was a game genius. I have vivid memories of the screen where you put in the code, though. I mean, I'll bet you could activate the same mode. Yeah, probably make it permanent. But you can do it with the second controller too. Yeah. Also, the game genius is the source of, um, my favorite thing. If anybody wants to say, and these to me on Twitter is lies that children tell about video games in school. Which I don't know if they do that as much now that the internet exists and you can just go look.

It's a lot harder. Boy, in 1990. Oh, God, yeah. I remember there was this kid who kept insisting that his dad could make game genies in his garage out of wood. And we would be like, really?

He's like, yeah, I was using it last night. I was in this really hard part in Super Mario 3 and that the genie showed up and just started throwing fireballs everywhere. And I was like, who's not what a game genius is? I love children lying about video. This is my favorite thing in the world.

You know, I never used a game genie back in the day, but nowadays, when I'm recording these NES works videos, and some of these games are just, like, punishingly difficult. And I just, I'm too old and I don't have the patience for it.

I'm like, yeah, invincible or, you know, extra lives cheat. I'm there for it. Yeah. That's how I made the Deadly Towers video. That's right. Without me. Without you. Nope.

Don't even, don't even start, Benj. I'm looking. I'm looking. I see him. Out the window. All right. Let's wrap up this episode and wrap up 1990. Yes, Mega Man 2, we have talked about that. It's quite good. Mega Man 2 was good. I like three better, though.

I like them both. That's fair. They're both good. The 2 was 1990. 1990, Metal Gear got a sequel in the form of Snake's Revenge, which did not have any involvement from Hideo Kojima. And he saw that and was like, actually, I'm going to make my own sequel with hookers and Blackjack. In fact, forget the blackjack and the hookers.

Let's just make Metal Gear 2. And he did. And it was very good. And it was the basis for basically every Metal Gear that came along afterwards. Metal Gear Solid was a remake of Metal Gear Solid or Metal Gear 2. And Metal Gear Solid 2 is a remake of Metal Gear. That's great. Just the same game over and over again.

And it's all because of a weird US-only sequel to Metal Gear called Snake's Revenge. Now, are these games about sticks? Are they about strands? They are about snakes and ladders. Okay. Thank you. Actually, Metal Gear Solid 3 is the only snakes and ladders. Is that a Kojima board game? That is correct.

You climb the ladder and it keeps going and you get bored. I would love an episode of this podcast where you just explain Metal Gear to me because I've never played it. Oh, we just had a Middle Gear Solid episode come out. You should listen to it. I want the whole timeline explained to me in a very concise and understandable way. Thank you. All right. Finally, wrapping up Railroad Tycoon, the first of the Tycoon games, which is still going strong, although now it's about roller coasters as opposed to railroads, I guess they had to

kind of downscale. That was the, yeah, okay. That was the first one. Yes, that's correct. Smash TV, a Twin Stick shooter, right? Is that correct? Yes. Yeah.

That's a great game. In the vibe of Robotron, it was the precursor to every shooter on Xbox 360. I love it. I'll tell you something cool. I've got a smash TV story if you want to hear it. Go for it. It's not that great. But it's just the fact that I...

No, you got us all hyped up. Well, I mean, I built joysticks for about a year. And one of the coolest things you can do when you're building a joystick is build a custom two twin stick joystick. So at first, I made my first twin stick joystick was for RoboTron, Robotron, 284 on the Atari 800. And it worked for other, you know, you can use Player 1 and Player 2 controllers to control them. each

one is you know the direction you move one is the direction you shoot so smash TV has that

same scheme and I made one for the super NES for Smash TV that was really cool and I've only made like three of them

but it's the greatest thing I've ever built if you ever you know what you don't even need two two joysticks cables like you do

on the other one because the super NES port of smash TV has the right the right stick is the cardinal directions of the buttons up, down, left, and right. So I just mapped those buttons to the right stick, and you can use it that way. And you can also play Mario that way.

Yeah, I did that. It seems really impractable. It was fun, actually. Can you do a run and jump, though? Yeah. Is it like a fireball motion? There's a video of me on Twitter playing Super Mario World with this twin stick thing. Like, the only thing I actually remember about Smash TV, like I didn't actually have the game at the time,

but it felt to me like sort of the early version of the very, like, like in-your-face style that was going to be the 90s. Like, because it was just, it was loud and kind of gross. Like, yeah, and pretty graphic. And like, like, it seemed like kind of the precursor to all the like. Wasn't it, is it Eugene Jarvis who did? I think so. I think he did this game too.

And then NARC. So there's continuity here. Yeah. All right. I think that wraps it up for 1890. We've actually gone on longer than we have time for because the guy at lunch wanted to, instead of serving his food, talk about video games. Show his drawer his mess.

How dare? He took his clothes off and showed us his tattoos of video games. It was a little weird. I thought it was fun. But he made Jeremy sign up too. It was so awkward. No, actually, that was the receipt of the bill that I signed. Sorry, not an autograph.

Anyway, so thanks guys for continuing this fine retronauts tradition. I think we've done the tens before back in like 2010, but this was different. We talked about different stuff. and the history of computing back in 1970 was especially great, the kind of difference, the kind of content you can't get from old episodes of Retronauts. That's something. Anyway, yeah, we'll have to do 2010 some other time.

But we did talk about 1970, 1980, and 1990 to prepare ourselves through the year 2020. Good Lord. So for Retronauts, I'm Jeremy Parrish. This has been Jeremy Parrish for Retronauts. Guys, where can we find you on the internet? Who the hell are you even? I'm still Ben Elgin, and you can still find me on the hell site, I mean Twitter, at Kieran, K-I-R-I-N-N. That's where I'm hanging out.

And I'm Ben Edwards. I am currently looking for a job if anyone wants to hire a writer, editor, podcaster, image editor, or composer, composer, you know, for any sort of tech publication or marketing, just let me know. Bengeedwards.com and Chris? I'm Chris Sims and you can find all of my stuff at T-H-E-I-S-B.com. That's the dash-ISB. That's my website. It has links to everything that I do, things that I write online and podcasts that I do and comic books that you can buy. I'm very excited to come back and talk about 2000, which is the year that John Romero made us all his B words.

Wow. We're also going to talk about Team Ente at some point. Yeah. That was 1990, but we didn't have time for it. Yeah. I have a lot to say about Tianan. We just wanted to shut you about this episode, Chris. about that. It's fine. I'm not mad, actually. I think it's funny.

I think I got a lot of things to say for 2002, because that's like Square Summer Adventure. 2000. 2000. Oh, 2000. 2000 also. 2000 as well. That doesn't end of the 10. All right. Anyway, I'm Jeremy Parrish. You can find me on Twitter as GameSpite, which is not my real personality, but whatever. You can also find Retronauts at Retronauts.com on podcast aggregators like iTunes. And you can support us through Patreon to make more raucous conversations like this happen, patreon.com slash retronauts. Every episode you'll get for $3 a month. That's like six or seven episodes. You'll get it a week early at a higher bit rate quality than on iTunes. And also

no commercials, no promo spots. So you know you love that. In the meantime, let's venture on into 2020. And at some point, the remainder of this podcast conversation. Thank you. I don't know.