Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 347: Years In Review Revue | 1971 & ’81

Episode Date: December 28, 2020

Because you demanded it! The Retronauts East team reconvenes (virtually) after a long time apart for the New Year's tradition of looking back across the decades. Despite our best-laid plans, we only get halfway through. In short, a classic episode. Cover art by Shaan Khan.

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 week in Retronauts, the Ones are the loneliest number. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronaut's episode. Oh, I've got this, uh, 347 baby. That's right. This one is locked in time. I am Jeremy Parrish, your chronologist here at Retronauts. And so. You know, 2020 has been a, shall we say, shitty year, and we're leaving it behind, hopefully, for a better year, although, you know, life doesn't really work according to calendars.

So we'll see. But now that we are at the end of the year, one thing that is consistent and constant is that we are recording an episode, kind of getting ready for the new year by looking back 10, 20, 30, 40 years in history to talk about the events of video gaming. Actually, we're looking back 50, 40, and 30 years, Bob has Bogarted the look back at 20 and 10 years. So we will not be discussing those years here. Instead, as we move into the year 2021, we will be talking about 1971, 1981, and 1991 in video gaming. And I've adopted a new format for this year's discussion because the last few episodes, the last few times we've done this, it's gotten a little unruly.

So I'm going to try to rule it back up again. And here to help keep things tidy, hopefully, it's a Retronauts East episode, the first we've done in like half a year. It's been a long time. So guys, everyone's probably forgotten who you are because it's been so long since we have done one of these Retronauts East episodes that people probably don't even remember. Like it's been several years since last month and even longer, like decades since last year. So yes, who was that?

forgetful person who just spoke up. That was me. I have no idea who I am anymore. I haven't had to, like, you know, leave the house and use my name all summer. Okay, you wrote it down on your hand in a marker. What does it say? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so I'm Ben Elgin. Right. All right. Ben, good to have you back on the show. Who else is there with a very similar but not exactly the same name? That's me, Benj Edwards. All right. Reporting to you live from a hellscape of 2020.

That's where we all are. Live, but fortunately alive, as opposed to the alternative. And finally, oh, hi. It's me. It's me, Chris. Chris Sims. Way to go. All right. Okay. So we all remember who we are. That's very exciting. Now let's try to see if we can remember history video games. So once again, this is going in, you know, prefacing the year 2021, looking back in time, as is the Retronaut's tradition, looking back decades, to discuss what video games were like at key points in video game history. There was no video game history in 1961, so we will be beginning with 1971, where there was barely any video game history and probably Benj is the best person to, like the person best suited to talk about this. I agree. So why don't you, why don't you fill us in

on what things were like back in 71, back when you were, you know, in high school or whatever it was? Yeah, I was negative 10 years old at the time. Fantastic. So share us your prehistory memories there. Yeah, so 71 was the genesis of the commercial video game industry. It saw the first ever commercial video game product ever sold, which was Nutting's computer space, arcade game, developed by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. And I don't know how deep you want me to get into that history because I wrote a really long article about it back. Yeah, I mean, we talked about, you know, kind of the history of computer space and

And Atari and, of course, nutting associates, which Chris loves, his favorite video game company name ever. We talked about that a bit last time, so I don't think you have to get too deeply into it. But the 1971 was when those efforts finally came to fruition, and we finally did have a commercial video game that failed abysmally, actually. I have, well, I don't know. The conclusion I reached in my article is that it was surprisingly successful for the time. And it did only sell about 1,000 units.

But the kind of units they sold back then in arcade games where around 2000 was like a really successful game and electromechanical games. And so compared to Pong, which sold 19,000 units, which like insanely blockbuster success for that time. I mean, like, there are games like Gauntlet later, you know, only sold like 7 or 8,000 units anyway. So Pong was such a monumental success

that made computer space look really like a failure. So I think, relatively speaking, computer space was a success. Okay. I guess that's fair. You know, kind of adjusting for expectations. Like, Sega's very first console, the SG-1000, sold like a million units or something, and it came out the same day as Nintendo's family computer, which sold, you know, 50 million or something worldwide.

But Sega still considered the SG-1,000, a great success because it was much, it did much better, than they expected. So I guess, you know, you kind of calibrate according to what you hope for and see what comes out. The fun thing about history is you can you can change the criteria at any time. Right. It's the winners rewriting everything. Yeah. Sorry, Ben. The thing to keep in mind here, like we're talking about this in the context of video games, but as Bench was just saying, the things that was competing with was like electromechanical devices and even computer space itself didn't actually have a computer in it, right? It was just, it was

fussing with the ray tube on the screen to create sprites directly through like circuits. Like none of this stuff had programmed computers in it. That was kind of before that. And so this was sort of a whole other level of mechanical things that people were building to put in game spaces back then.

It's fascinating. It's a, it was a piece of wizardry computer space. I have some bullet points I put together here if I could run through them real quick. You might as well. We're all You're on the line. Computer Space was published by noting Associates in 1971. We already said it had sold 1,000 units.

It had a one-piece fiberglass body, which was, I think, I can't remember who sculpted it. Maybe Nolan sculpted it in clay, and then Ted took it to this guy who made boat hulls and fiberglass. Yeah, hot cells and things like that. Cool looking swirly thing. Didn't it end up in a movie? It's sparkly. Yeah, it was in Westworld, I believe. And Soylent Green.

Okay. It's in Soylent Green, I think. Okay. With Charles and Heston. And there's a funny story about that in my article. It is a beautiful machine if you've ever seen it in person. I've, you know, they'll show up occasionally at conventions. And it's got that kind of like, you know, like bowling balls that, you know, they made back in the 80s and 70s.

They just had that kind of embedded sparkly quality that like that fiberglass quality. Like it's just beautiful. And it's seamless and. curved, like nothing else that, you know, you would expect a scene in an arcade. I think it's mica dust that they just embed in a resin covering over the fiberglass. Makes sense? Right. So the Soilent green thing is funny is that Ted Dabney told me this story.

See, I interviewed these guys for the article. So Ted Dabney is now deceased, unfortunately, but he was a really cool guy. And he told me, he went to see Soiland Green when it came out in 73, and he was amazed at computer space was in the film. and so he went and told Nolan Bushnell that he'd seen the movie but didn't he asked him like hey did you see the movie and Nolan said yeah but it wasn't a very good film that's all I said and he said didn't you see computer space in it and Bushnell said no I came in late that's what I read I see anyway so but you know it's possible he never actually saw the film just was making it up anyway what are you saying about Nolan Bushnell sir nothing nothing at all It was inspired by Space War, the mainframe, you know, game that originated on the PDP1. And I guess we would be talking about that next year, right? That was 62. Yeah, and 62, yeah.

All right. And Bushnell saw it and wanted to put a coin slot on it. He thought, man, this would make a great arcade game because he had worked at an arcade midway at his summer job while he was in college. And once he moved to out west to work at Ampeck. after he graduated, a data general Nova mini-computer came out, which was the cheapest mini-computer at the time. I think it was like $10,000 or something.

I can't remember, which was a lot of money back then. And he thought, this is my chance. I could program space for a clone on this and put it in an arcade, maybe power two cabinets with one computer. But then they did some calculations and said, oh, it's not powerful enough. And then they just sort of let it sit for a while.

And then at some point, Ted Dabney told me about Nolan's epiphany he had, and this is a direct quote, Dabney told me. He said, Nolan came to me one time and he said, on a TV set, when you turn the vertical hold on the TV,

the picture will go up. And if you turn it the other way, the picture goes down. Why does it do that? And he said, I explained it to him. It was the difference between the sink and the picture timing. And he said,

could we do that with some control? I said, yeah, we probably can, but we'd have to do it digitally because analog would not be linear. And so the whole point is that he just had an idea, like, let's just directly control the video signal on the screen. You know, we don't need a computer. Let's just mess with the timing and the, you know, the sink and everything.

And so Ted Dabney went off and designed a board that could do that, that could move a spot around on the screen with switches. And then he handed it off to Nolan. And Nolan just went off and went to nutting and said, hey, I want to do this game and everything and made this deal. and started designing the logic of computer space. And so the actual game itself was sort of like asteroids later in terms, or like Space War, where you control a ship, you had one button to shoot, two buttons to turn the ship left and right, and you had the momentum of space.

So if you go forward, you drift for a while until you, unless you retro rocket, you know, you turn around and fire the other way your rockets. And then they were UFOs that was zigzag on the screen, and you had to shoot those, and they would shoot at you every once in a while. And the outline of the UFOs and the ship were all individual dots, and it was amazing how the ship could rotate. And it's really smooth and incredible game. And it made its debut in Chicago, Illinois, on October 15th, 1971, at the Music Operators of America Show, Trade Show. and that's all I wrote down. I mean, the rest, you got to look at my article on technologizer.com.

It's called Computer Space and the dawn of the arcade video game. All right. So that is a pretty succinct summary of, yeah, basically the first commercial video game ever. Amazing. There's another one on here that I had never really heard of before, but you made a note, I think, Ben. Is it a Galaxy game? No, PDP 10 baseball. I assume you put that there, Venge. I did not. I don't know. I think you did. Oh, maybe I did, and it's been, you know, several years since I put these notes together last month that I don't remember. Yeah. That PDP 10 baseball, I have never, you know, I know Don Daglo who designed it, maybe mentioned it once or twice in an interview with somebody, but we have no real record of what it was like or pictures of it or anything, so it's very vague. Right.

Okay. Well, yeah, the PDP 10 was a mainframe computer. I think it's the same computer that computers or not, that Space War was originally created on it. Was that a PDP 1? It was a PDP 1, originally. But it's part of the same sort of series, yeah. Right, right. Well, yeah, clearly it's also by, yeah, digital equipment corporation using the same

technology, but a later generation, blah, blah, blah. In any case, that's not a commercial game, but it was one of those sort of formative, early efforts to create a game that, you know, would eventually kind of trickle out into the mainstream. But I think a more notable, and actually the final. thing we want to talk about in 1971, there's an instance of a game being created, and you can argue over whether it's a video game or not, because it didn't have a video screen, but it did eventually make its way into the mainstream, and it is a game that you can still go to the store

and purchase 50 years later, and that is the Oregon Trail. And have you guys ever played the original version of Oregon Trail? Which one? That's a teletype version? Yes, the original version. the one we're talking about here in 1971. No, but I have like some printout pictures of it. Okay. Like surely someone has emulated this. Oh, yeah, probably. I mean, they preserved the code.

Or actually, they recreated the code of it once it was deleted. But basically, the story is that some educators, some high school teachers, I believe, made use of local computing time on a shared system and had a teletype interface for it. in their classroom, and they put together a simulation of pioneers making the journey from, what, like Missouri or Mississippi all the way to Oregon. Yeah. And it was put together by a trio of teachers, Don Roach, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger. And basically, it was just a thing they put together. They programmed, and it was kind of like magic.

They gave it to their, like they let their class, their kids. and their class use it and they would, you know, say, give simple commands to the computer, type those in, and the computer would send back, you know, a printout on paper that outlaid what happened as a result of their efforts. And it was very simplistic. They could go hunting. They had to worry about, you know, their stocks of food. They had to worry about crossing a river at the Ford or whatever, but it was still a very innovative, very revolutionary way to teach. And this game, you know, like I said, was originally created for a single classroom on a teletype system. And at the end of the semester, all that data was purged.

But the creators, the programmers went back and recreated what they had done and preserved it and continued to iterate on it. And eventually from that, they founded the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, or MEC, which we've done an episode on quite a while back. and they began to license out the Oregon Trail, not even just license, but to share it, to spread it across other computers, to use as education simulations, and then to be, they began to sell the game commercially to bring in money for mech. And yeah, it's just a very groundbreaking, innovative approach to using computers very early on to make learning more interactive and more exciting for students. It's hard to imagine kids these days getting excited about inputting a command and watching a typewriter, slowly output what happened. But, you know, in 71, it was a simpler time. We were simpler people. We didn't have supercomputers in our pockets.

That's true. Yeah, I got to, I saw Rauch's post-mortem at GDC 2017, and I got to meet him and I shook his hand. I was really proud. Nice. We played Oregon Trail on the Apple 2, which came out in 1982. that version and I thought it was 85 for the really yeah too written down maybe I'm wrong uh no it was it was 81 82 uh I know this because uh now I get to plug myself last year I put together a um an audio book for audible on the history I wrote and recorded a history of video gaming

and there's a whole section on the Oregon trail so I'm just I pulled that up and I'm looking at it here but yeah the Apple 2 version did come out in the early 80s and I believe that was distributed for free to schools, but they did begin to create graphically upgraded versions, more elaborate versions, sell those. I believe it was purchased by like the learning company or something. Yeah, it was the graphical version that came out in 85. There was the text Apple II version was earlier, yeah.

Oh, okay. Well, without the graphical version, we'd never have pepperoni and cheese. Yeah. Before we skip out a 71, we have, to mention Galaxy game briefly because somebody will be mad. All right. Who is somebody? In 1971, Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck bought a $14,000 deck, PDP 1112 mini-computer.

I'm reading this. And a $3,000 vector display with money gathered from their family and friends. They created a version of Space War. Installed it in the Tresciter Memorial Union at Stanford. And they sold games $0.10 a game or a quarter for three games. This is in mid-1971. And the funny thing is, Nolan Bushnell knew about this, and he heard about it, and he went to go to him and talked to him. They both visited each other.

In fact, Bill Pitts and Hutt were essential witnesses of Nolan actually working on computer space in the lab, which is neat. But Bushnell said they were kind of funny guys that were technical, but not real focused on world domination. So he didn't find him a threat, and it never really went past Stanford, but that was something that happened in 71. Yeah, world domination was much more Bushnells kind of thing. Mm-hmm. Hey you. Yeah, you like podcast. Aren't you into anime?

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Come on down to superhero stuff you should know. All right, so come on down to, wait, why did I say come on down? To superhero stuff you should know. Part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. All right. So that is 1971. 50 years ago, video games were a thing. It's very exciting. They weren't much of a thing, but they were a thing. And in the following years, the next three or four years, the medium would explode. And there would be so many video games. It leads us to where we are now, where everything is bad. But things were still good back in 19. The next year we're going to talk about, and 81, you know, 80, 81 to me is really when video games became a thing, like not just a little amusement, not just kind of like a quirky object you saw sometimes at the laundromat or whatever, but like a pervasive cultural

force. And that has a lot to do with the specific games that were released in 1981. And I'm going to go down a very thoughtfully organized alphabetical list of what I have isolated as the major games from 1981. This is not all-inclusive because we do not have that much time. But we're going to go down this list really fast. And then we're going to go back and everyone's going to talk about

a couple of things that they find personally significant. And that way we're allowed to kind of provide an overview here of what 1981 was like in 1991 after that and go into depth on a few things, but also kind of keep it on track and organized. so we don't get to, you know, like an hour and a half into the podcast, and we're still in 1981. I'm like, oh, my God, we're going to have to do this another one.

It took us so long to get this episode together to find a way for everyone's schedules the lineup here in pandemic times. I just can't count on that again. So we're going to make it happen, guys, brace yourselves. Here we go. All right, 1981, major games include Astrosmash for Intellivision, Castle Wolfenstein, for Apple 2. Defender for arcades. Donkey Kong. The Dungeons and Dragons computer fantasy game, which is a standalone handheld in the game and watch vein. Frogger, Gallagher, Gallagher, both for arcades. Ghorf, which was Atari 2,600. Did that have an arcade predecessor?

It was just a 2600 game, right? It was an arcade game. Oh, okay. Never saw that one. I've played golf, but not Wharf. There was Kaboom for Atari 2600 lock and chase for arcades Quicks

not kicks quicks that's right that's what the Katakana says quix Kuikasu Quid tested

mother approved that's right that is yes that was an arcade game scramble well we'll come back and talk about it

Scramble another arcade game. Skyskipper, another arcade game. Soft porn adventure, which was not an arcades. Maybe the arcades in the back of like an adult novelty shop with the, you know, the beaded curtain and everything. I don't know. Stargate and Tempest, both for arcades. Tombstone City, 21st Century for Ti. That's the TI 99-4A folks. Turbo for arcades. Ultima for personal computers. Vanguard for arcades. Wizardry, also for personal computers. And Zork 2. for personal computers. All right.

So that is an overview of the games of the year. Oh, wait, there's also hardware and other things that happened. This is also conveniently alphabetized. There's analog magazine. Was that the very first video games magazine? Oh, wait.

There's like three magazines here. There's also computer and video games and electronic games, all jockeying for the right to be first. Analog was the one that had programs in the back, right? Where you were like, wow, I'm going to type in my own programs and you must type one character and it doesn't work

and you're like, what did I just waste my hour on? All right, so there was the BBC micro computer, the IBM personal computer, the PC 8801 personal computer, the TI994A personal computer, the VIC-20 and the ZDX 81. All right, so 1981, that's it. Now we're going to go back through this list

of seminal, monumental, momentous events, I noticed Chris, you didn't mark anything down here. Chris was but a wee, babe. So, Chris, explain yourself. You have not signed up to discuss anything on 1981. Yeah, I don't know anything about any of these. What?

I mean, I feel like... Defender, Frogger, Kaboom? Like, these are... I mean, like, I played Defender a couple times. And I understand, like, the legacy of Defender. Same with Frogger, but, like, the ones that I would be most familiar with were, unfortunately, snapped up by Ben Jenwards. I see.

Benjohn. Who want to talk about Donkey Kong. That's the only one that I have any real connection to. Well, you could talk about you can both talk about it. But you should talk a little bit about Defender. So let's do that. Let's go alphabetically here. Chris, you are being put on the spot to talk about Defender.

So defend your opinion about Defender or your lack thereof. Well, I feel like my opinion about Defender requires no defense because my opinion is pretty good, actually. it's really interesting to me that Defender and Gallagher came out in the same year. I mean, like, this was kind of the beginning of a big boom period, as you said, Jeremy, so it's not that surprising. But, like, those are kind of the two games that really defined the space shooter forever. I played Defender on the Atari 5200, which we had, I was a kid that we got at a yard sale for, I think, $12.

And it was really the only game out of everything that we had for it. And we ended up having like 10 games that came with it. It was the only one that I think held up because this would have been like 1990 that I was playing with. And Defender, which, you know, you're a spaceship, side scrolling. You shoot stuff. You know Defender. Yeah. If you're listening to Retronauts, you know Defender.

You got to rescue the people. My thought on Defender for 5200 is that that game must have been really frustrating because 5200 had this, you know, the infamous controller that was analog and did not automatically re-center. Whereas Defender is designed in the arcades, it did not have a control stick. You had digital, you know, like a left-right button and you could accelerate and, you know, rise and stuff. But, or actually, no, it had up and down buttons and then it had accelerate. So it was like a very complex kind of control scheme to keep your head around, much less intuitive than a control stick. But they were still finalizing, like, standardizing controls at that point, control schemes. So it just seems like, you know, having that kind of muddy control interface for a defender would be really challenging, but you still feel it held up pretty well.

Yes, it was quite bad, the Atari 5200, just in general. It was. It was a mistake. But yeah, like, of everything, it was the most fun to play because even though it had the frustrating controls and even though it was, again, well past its sell by date, it's still, you get it, right? Like, its beauty is in the simplicity and how well it's done, like in most forms. So, yeah, like the problem is I never really gravitated towards the defender legacy. like I was never super into the why do we call them schmups and not just say shoot them ups we don't need that much that's a British thing we don't have to do that yeah

just call them shooters the bullet hacks I never really gravitated to those because I'm just not good at them so I enjoyed playing defender it didn't hook me and I do wonder if I would have been exposed to like the arcade version or like a different version of it if I would have come away as a bigger fan. But I still have fun memories. I was never even good at Defender. Although I was playing it, I think, Macintosh port much later, obviously.

So on a keyboard, which is also maybe not ideal. But my memories of it is that it's just really hectic. There's a lot going on at once. And I was never any good at it. Yeah, it's interesting, Chris, that you describe Defender as simple because I feel like when you sit Defender and Gallagher

next to one another, you really get a kind of a great sort of case and point example of the difference between sort of American Western game design at the time and Japanese game design at the time because Gallagher is very simple but there's so much that emerges from its very simple sort of

graspable systems. Whereas Defender you have a bunch of buttons, you have a bunch of things flying around on the screen, you've got a mini map on a scrolling screen, you have different kinds of aliens, you have like you know a smart bomb you have the ability to warp you have to manage attacking enemies while also preventing them from absorbing or killing humans and you have to avoid killing humans and it's really fast paced and a game lasts like 60 seconds if you're you know even decently uh capable of playing the

game it is it was a game designed to be really hard really complex for the time uh and very very challenging to keep your quarters flowing. My former boss, Jazz Rignal, used to be like a world record holder for this game, you know, the kind of person who could play it for a day straight or something, like hours on end. But it is a game about flying around shooting things. It is, but there's so much you have to deal with and learn. I mean, if you want to, if you want to, you know, simplify it, you can say Minecraft is a game about hitting walls, but, you know, there's a lot more to it.

I wouldn't know. By the way, Defender, I think, was the first or supposed. Supposedly the first arcade game or video game that had an off-screen world going on, you could pull through. And, you know, that's the mini-map was a big innovation in that game. Yeah, all the enemies and humans are still moving and existing off the screen on the whole Taurus that you're on. Yeah, there's probably some example of like a, you know, a Plato game or something that had a world happening off-screen. But, yeah, in terms of commercial releases, like mainstream hits, Defender was. definitely the first to say, hey, there's more to life than what you see on the screen. And,

you know, at the same time, you had the game Donkey Kong come out, which was four individual screens that kind of typified the concept of like, what you see is what you get. This is your entire world. But before we talk about Donkey Kong, I would like to contrast Defender to Gallagher to Gallagher. Ben, you had kind of put your name down next to Gallagher. So tell us about it. What's, what's so great about that game? That was just one of the ones that stood out. out to me. It always struck me as the game that took, you know, the basic template that was started way back by Space Invaders and just made something a lot more enjoyable out of it. Not that Space Invaders isn't fun, but it's kind of one note. You know, you got your, you're shooting at the

things. They're coming down. That's basically all that happens, although you've got the UFOs too. And then Gallagher takes that and just, you know, you've got lots more interesting enemy patterns. and then there's the whole mechanic where it can capture your ship and you can get it back to so your power up your power up system is rescuing your own previous lives which is just a pretty cool concept yeah there's a real risk reward to that because you know to strengthen yourself you have to give up a life and that was you know you only had three lives so you're diminishing your playtime in order to get a power up and once you do get the power up you you are in much greater risk of taking damage and losing that extra life because you have such a wide profile to your docked fighters. And yeah, it just takes the basic template and just does a lot with it. It's also got these, uh, the intermission levels where you're just trying to shoot as much as you can before they go off the screen, but they've got all kinds of patterns and just the like, the like variety of patterns that the enemy ships fly in seem like, I don't know, just a lot more complexity than you saw in most games of that era in terms of enemy behaviors. Yeah. And the first, you know,

10 stages or so seem kind of repetitive after a while. You're like, okay, I'm getting the hang of this and then you keep hitting these milestones where all of a sudden new things are introduced like enemies start to attack in different patterns they start to weave around more you start to see like ships mutate into other ships it gets it gets pretty wild you know the further you can make it so it's a it's a really good challenging game it's pretty tough to get past like the 10th stager so but people who are really into galaga can can get really far and it's a great score chasing game but it's much much less frantic than defender and much less complex you have a control stick and you have a fire button, and that's it. The control stick lets you go left and

right. So compared to Defender, you know, there's a lot less to manage. There's no smart bomb. There's no, there's no mutants or anything like that, aside from the ships that morph into one another. It's just a much more elegant game. It's the exact same rules as, you know, Space Invaders and Galaxian just with more going on to interact with. Yes. So that was, that was very much kind of the ultimate iteration of Japan's Invader Boom. kind of the peak of taking that Space Invaders concept that you mentioned and turning it into something with a lot of depth and a lot of just sort of immediacy. It's really great. A good, fast-paced, entertaining game. And one of the most successful arcade games of all the time. Yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, you can still buy it in many forms. Numskull put together a really great quarter-scale cabinet for it last year that is very nicely made, very authentic to the arcade cabinet. It looks great, plays really well. So, yeah, a timeless classic. But also, that same year, we have a timeless classic in the form of Donkey Kong, which represents a totally new school of Japanese game design emerging. Donkey Kong was not the first game of its type,

but it definitely was the point at like the inflection point at which this kind of element like this concept of platforms and ladders and stuff that was sort of bubbling to the surface really took form and binge you've got your name next to this one so i'll let you and chris hash it out oh okay cool well yeah donkey kong was a great game it began as a conversion of radar scope which was an unsuccessful space shooter game but your name is quoted in wikipedia Jeremy, talking about Radar Scope. Do you want to briefly talk about that or anything? I'm sure I said everything that I have to say on Wikipedia. No, Radar Scope was another one of those invader-style games. And it was, you know, a decent success in Japan. It was like added kind of a three-dimensional perspective to the action, if I'm remembering, right? But it was, you know, still just basically Space Invaders Galaxian.

And they said, oh, this is going to be our big game. Nintendo said, this is going to be our big game in the U.S. it's going to be a huge hit. Let's manufacture 2,000 of them and put them in the U.S. And American arcade retailers or arcade distributors were like, nah, we're not really interested in this. And then, you know, the games took months to come over from Japan via a very slow boat.

You know, they were being shipped by freight. So by the time they arrived, no one wanted them. And Nintendo was stuck with this warehouse full of cabinets that they couldn't sell. And basically, that was the end of Minoro Arakawa, Inouye's president. That was the end of his life. His father-in-law, Hiroshi Yamauchi, the indomitable president of Nintendo Corporation Limited in Japan, was like, yeah, you got to make this work out. So they put together a conversion for it, and a plucky young artist named Shigira Miyamoto

said, what if we made this a Popeye game? And they said, that's a great idea. And then King's Features Limited said, no, you can't make this Popeye game. So they said, what if we made this a King Kong game and didn't call it King Kong? And Nintendo was like, you know what, go for it. So Miyamoto sat down with, let's see, Gunpeyokoi worked on it. And I believe Hirokazu Tanaka did the audio for it. And they planned out this game and worked with some programmers at an electronics company.

called Ikegami Sushinki, and they put together this arcade game that was a huge hit both in Japan and the U.S. and in Europe. Everyone loved it. And why not? Because it was, wait a minute, you're supposed to be talking about this, not me.

Why do people love Donkey Kong? You just work through all the bullet points of the notes I put together. You told me to. You told me to. You told me, like, what's up with the radar scope? And I told you what's up with the radar scope. Yeah, but you also told me

what's up with Donkey Kong, but that's good, because you said it way better than I would have. I was going to talk about Pope briefly. And Ikegami Sushinky, all those things. The cool thing about Donkey Kong is that it made a really human protagonist front and center, I think, almost for the first time, like a notable character. Instead of just like a little stick man on the screen, you know, Mario had some detail

to him, and he became, he was called Jump Man at first, right? I mean, he didn't really formally have a name. Yeah. If I'm not mistaken, they didn't actually technically call him jump man. That wasn't like an official designation. He was just like, the guy. But then they quickly named him Mario. So first appearance in Mario, by the way.

Yeah, I have two quick thoughts. One, I think it's weird that when they wanted to like file the serial numbers off of King Kong, they kept the name Kong and not just like King something else. King Donkey. King Donkey. what an odd world it would be if it was the KD crew. Yeah, well, you know, copyright and trademark things were a bit looser

40 years ago, and in Japan, things were way looser. Not in the sense of like where you have, like you create something interesting and then three days later, there's like a Chinese factory stamping them out. But it was just like the idea of property rights and copyright is just handled different.

in Japan and, you know, especially when you're dealing with foreign properties, like, they probably didn't even know necessarily who to talk to about King Kong or they didn't really care to talk to them. In any case, King Kong was in the public domain by that point, so it didn't matter, but that would take lawsuits to determine. But yeah, it was just a case of people playing kind of fast and loose with trademarks and licenses and that sort of thing. And you saw a lot of that throughout the 80s in video games. And then corporations took over the world and that kind of cool, fun stuff went away forever. The second thing is Donkey Kong is one of the most important video games of all time.

Is it the most important? I do not like that definitive article, sir. I avoid it altogether. I mean that's take a stand Jeremy it's Nintendo's most important video game probably although they love they love Super Mario Brothers more yeah but they would have never had any of that without Donkey Kong that's true starting that whole train rolling you know especially with Mario I have this book over on the shelf called the anatomy of Super Mario Brothers and it starts with Donkey Kong actually oh yeah it's yeah I don't know who decided that that's pretty

wild it's it's weird to think that this game is the foundation of so much else. You know, like, we don't get to Pokemon without this game. You know, we don't get to, we don't get to Luigi's Mansion 3 in a very direct way without this game. But we don't get to Donkey Kong without space invaders.

So. Yeah. Yeah. That's, listen, that's true. A platformer and the mascot game would have arisen at some point, but this is what was there. Yeah, but imagine a world where all we have was Sonic. there would have been no Sonic without Mario so it all it's all it just like dominoes toppling it's all connected it's just it's all connected man and see like not only how foundational it is

but how how different it is from other games and how different it is from what would come later but also like the similarities like jumping being such a thing like you don't even think about it because it's it's the most natural thing in the world for video games that progressed from like Donkey Kong to Super Mario Brothers to platformers to on through to, I don't know, hollow night or whatever. But like the importance of jumping and the importance of mobility being something that was established so early on here, not to mention like, you know, genre tropes of like kind of this, this hero on which you could project yourself, but also who had a little bit of personality of his own. Like there's design there. And then, you know, having the, the object

be the lady you have to save. There's so much that is rooted in this that is such a big step from a space invaders, from a Pac-Man, from all that. It's really interesting. Again, I don't know if the most important of all time is a good descriptor, but I do think it's an interesting one for Donkey Kong.

I could say, Chris Sims thinks this is the most important video game at all time. I'd agree with that statement. I actually don't. like that. It's definitely so on a direction. Like, you know, I don't, it's not necessarily a foregone conclusion that, you know, jump is one of the primary verbs of this kind of game. You know, you can have a game where you progress over obstacles by, like, climbing over

them, but, but, yeah. And that was, that was exactly the case with the, this game's predecessor, uh, space panic. Was that, what was called? Yeah, by, uh, universal where you were like a dude climbing ladders and digging holes so that, that enemies could fall into. It was like a proto load runner. like the mix of the midpoint between that's right heyanko alien set outside of the claxons and load runner and that was you know a 2D platformer very similar in kind of its

overall viewpoint donkey Kong but without the jump verb yeah yeah so jumping jumping was important Mario invented jumping I imagine Chris Chris is obviously onto something and it was so incredibly influential the fluidity of movement the jump jumping and all that. I mean, we wouldn't have Metroidvanias without Donkey Kong. That's true. That's why I covered Donkey Kong and Metroidvania works. Is Donkey Kong a Metroidvania?

That is what I would like to discuss for us four hours. So we're going to move along from Donkey Kong now because the conversation has degenerated to a few other little, definitely lesser games from 1981, but still worth talking about. There's quicks or kicks if you prefer, you're wrong, but it's quix. So, Ben, you want to talk a little bit about that? I'm going to debate you on this Quicks thing. So apparently, as seen in the North American promotional flyer, it was pronounced Kix. And this was actually developed by Taito America. So I think they take precedence.

I have to say you can't trust marketers. You have to go by what's written on the box. And if you look at the Japanese box copy, the title is Quix. And Taito was a Japanese company. They didn't know what their American people were doing, but their American people were definitely wrong because they were not in Japan. Anyway, so tell us about what is, what is kicks or quicks? Kicks or quicks.

It's this weird little puzzle game. And it's just, one of the reasons I picked is it's just kind of unique. You know, it's not, it's not a falling stuff puzzle. It's not a pushing blocks puzzle. It's a, you have this square field and there's this line that is sort of rotating and bouncing around inside the field. And that line is the enemy. If you touch it, you die.

It's the quix. Yeah. And you are this little dot that goes around the edge. And what you try to do is venture into the middle of the field without getting hit by the line and then make your way back to the edge and you enclose an area with the trail behind you. And then you've claimed that area. And so you try to keep doing this while avoiding getting hit by the line. And then sometimes there's other enemies like a little sparks that will also follow you around the lines. And then at some point you've enclosed a certain amount of the area. It depends which version of the game you're playing. And you win the level. And then it goes on and it gets. it's harder. And so it's a pretty simple concept, but this like spinning line is this weird, weird concept, conceptual enemy character that looks really cool. You know, it just looks like a trippy screen saver kind of. And then, and then, yeah, it's just kind of addictive. You keep trying to find different ways to close off areas. You can do clever things like get two protrusions from the edge close together and then, you know, zip through and close them off. And sometimes you can even trap the enemy in a tiny space and you get bonus.

points. It was originally on some vector systems, wasn't it? Because that would make sense. But then it's ported, ported basically everywhere and had all kinds of spinoffs, including weird like soft porn spinoffs. So the like gal's panic genre comes from this because someone realized that as you're closing off space, you could reveal something behind like a picture. And oh, hey, it can be a picture of, you know, titillating women back there. And then we can sell more because people will buy soft porn, anything. Yep. Yeah. So Quicks to me or Kix is kind of an alternate take on the basic concept of Pac-Man. Like I've come to realize Pac-Man is less about navigating a maze and more about dominating space, like taking possession of space. And you look at games like Crush Roller,

city connection, lock and chase, all these games that kind of were sort of Pac-Man-esque in a way where you're, like, moving around a space and trying to change the state of the maze or the corridors or the passages, even Kubert, where you're jumping around trying to flip colors of cubes. All of these games are about kind of taking over space. Quicks is about, you know,

drawing, like, simple lines and partitioning off space in large chunks, as big a chunk as you can possibly manage without getting, you know, taking damage. It's a different take on the, concept but but definitely very addictive pretty simple to understand you know it was a big game for game boy a big release nintendo actually developed it in-house um and they stuck mario in the endings so yeah i had that version yeah it was very popular but but yes it also um became like the basis of an entire pornographic games industry which was kind of given a solicitous okay

by tito under the table like not formally but they were they were okay with it. I think they kind of were involved in some of the early ones like Gal's Panic, which weren't quite as super pornographic as the later ones. Panic was actually Kaneko. Okay. He was the publisher on. But yeah, I think they did have an agreement with

Tato. Hey, and speaking of pornographic. Yes, it's an amazing segue, Benj, go for it. Yeah, so 1981 year I was born, also happened to be the first time anyone published an adult video game that I know of computer text adventure game I guess not a video game and it's called soft porn adventure by Sierra

they were called online systems at the time but the funny thing about soft porn adventure well okay I'll just describe this is developed by Chuck Benton and it has a simple object verb parser and your goal is basically to sleep with three women through the game and it's all text

based you type it in so it was a on computers like, you know, the Atari 800, Apple 2, later, IBMPC, things like that. And when I was a kid, we had a copy of this for our Atari 800. It was like a bootleg copy that my dad got at work. And for some reason, he's like, okay, kids, just go play with this. You know, it was in this big pile of stuff, pile of games, you know. And my brother could play it. But it was so insanely tame, honestly, by today's standards.

And we didn't understand most of what was going on in it anyway. because, like, you have to buy a rubber at one point. It was like, I had no idea what a rubber was, you know. Like a Super Bowl. Right, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's a happy fun ball. Your, your lubed, ribbed rubber ball.

Yeah. So, okay. You have to describe it. I mean, that's the way that the game described it. And so you play through your, I can't remember what your guy is. You go through a bar. You go through like a casino or something. And you, you're sort of a.

a hotel and it's just basically leisure suit Larry if you've ever played that this is like a text surely this has to be inspiration for that yeah so the funny thing about that is that when we my brother and i also played leisure suit Larry when we were kids for some reason this is great great parenting i know but it was the era before hover uh you know helicopter parenting yeah before hover parenting and uh we had like a bootleg copy that from some one of my brother's friends because he's five years older than me. So we played that and we're like, holy crap, this is soft porn adventure, exactly.

And it turns out it is. What's the guy I named? My brain. I got COVID brain. What's the name? You know, the famous designer who designed Lee or Shoot Larry. What's his name? Al Lowe.

Yeah, I've talked to, sorry, Al. I've emailed him many times. Alow went to Ken Williams and said, can we remake SoftPorn Adventure as the graphical game? they said yes and so leisure to larry is basically like a a note for note remake of soft porn adventure with graphics okay so way more inspiration it's really a graphical port up basically yeah it's incredible if you play soft porn adventure and then you go see it it's like the same story and everything and the kind of like if it as far as like lewdness and stuff i mean the kind of thing you type is

like screw hooker that's the kind of like sex involved and one at one point if you don't if you're not wearing a rubber when you screw the hooker. It says, you have atomic clap. And that's all it says. It doesn't describe like what you do or anything like that. Now I'm really curious what like six year old you thought atomic clap was. God, I had no idea. I mean, this was this was the Cold War. So it was probably something you had to duck under your desk to avoid. Yeah. I think, you know, my brother was older than me. So he may have understood some of like what a rubber was and stuff and tried to describe it to me but it didn't feel too naughty like it was just such a weird ridiculous game like i'm actually i've just loaded it up on my Atari 800 behind me and here's the

description this is the first scene it says i'm in a sleazy bar behind the bar sits a bartender a sign hanging over him says beer one hundred dollars whiskey one hundred dollars the place isn't furnished too well a curtain hangs on one wall next to the curtain is a button a fan whirls slowly overhead moving the stagnant air around. What shall I do? That's a very expensive beer. Yeah, it's really weird. And it's also notable because on the cover of the box art of the game is Roberta Williams, the famous game designer of Kings Quest and other Sierra games, is in a hot tub nude with several women. You know, you can't see anything because she's underwater and there's a butler in his clothes standing

there. So it's just an interesting piece of trivia. And they said that it sold around 50,000 copies, which was insanely huge at the time for a game like this. And Lane Nooney wrote a cool article about this on the Atlantic, the odd history of the first erotic computer game. At the time,

I talked to her, some of our conclusions about how, like, salacious it was. I don't necessarily agree with because, just because at the time, even when I played it as a kid, it didn't seem like that crazy, but I was also a kid and I didn't know anything. But it's still a cool article about the

history of it. So there you go. That's soft form. All right. Yeah, kind of a weird little side note, but interesting. So I guess the rest is me, huh? Well, I would have Tempest if you hadn't, so I can talk about that. Then I'm going to let you jump in a little bit and talk about Tempest. A game published by Atari, designed by Dave Thurr, and made for vector systems. Go for it. Yeah, Tempice is another one that's just a cool twist on the space shooter. So it sort of flips things around. I mean probably almost everyone has seen Tempest at this

point, but the setup is so it's this vector graphics. You're kind of at the top of a well. So like a polygonal well, think a big like octagon receding into the distance or something. And your ship is on the top of it and you can rotate around the outside and then the enemies are working their way up from the

bottom towards you along the various corners of this well. So it's sort of taking a flat shooter like space invaders and sort of warping it into this 3D extreme perspective. And then it does interesting things like having the enemies jump between the various lines. And I don't know, it seems like I describe it like it seems really simple, but then it gets very hectic in just managing this space. And then a lot of my experience with it is actually the later Tempest 2000,

which is one of Jeff Mintner's remakes, and is just basically trying to be the, trippiest thing it can be and is basically the best thing to play in a dorm lounge at like 3 a.m. Regardless of what substances you may or may not be on. You don't really need any because it provides the trippiness for you. And that was just a fantastic time. So what were you going to say about Tempeth, Jeremy? Just that.

No, Tempest is interesting because it was inspired by a nightmare, supposedly. Dave Thuror, the developer, was kind of inspired by a dream he had of these things crawling out of a well. So that's kind of the concept here is that you are moving along the near perimeter, the near end of a basically a space well. And there are things emerging from the opposite end. They're very tiny, but because it's vector-based, they all kind of read clearly. And they all have different behaviors. Like there are things that basically create spikes. They're like sparks that move up and they create a spike that you.

you have to be careful of because once you clear a stage, then you move forward to the next stage by passing through the well. And if you encounter a spike, it remains as a passive hazard. There are other enemies that kind of move erratically as they emerge from the well, growing larger. And when they hit the edge of the well, they split in two and become these things like bow ties flipping around the edge of the perimeter of the well. And you have to avoid them. So you're like shooting these things, trying to kind of manage, you know, which enemies you're taking aim at and what is a more, like, which threat is a greater priority to deal with. It's a very fast-paced, energetic game. It uses a spinner to control. So you don't have to

worry about, like, which button is moving me right. You know, when I'm in this part of the, the sphere or the circle, like, it's very intuitive that if you're going to spin the spinner clockwise, you'll rotate that way on screen. And then the further you go, the more the shape of the levels changes. I think you can choose any one of nine or ten stages at the outset

and they start, you know, like with a simple circle, but then they become like a cross and then later ones are like just a one-sided stair step or a letter V, so it's not a fully connected circle around the edge. So, yeah,

like the further you start into the game, the more the point bonus you get for starting that far in, but the more difficult it is, the more likely your quarter is to vanish within 30 seconds. So it's just a really well-designed game, very addictive and intuitive. And yeah, Jeff Minter, really huge fan of it, has created many different versions of it sometimes with llamas. He's kind of a strange guy, but he knows how to make him a Tempest. And Tempest, I think 2000 was the only game worth playing on Jaguar, supposedly? Yeah. Other than Doom and Wolfenstein, pretty much. Right, but you could play those on many other systems. The spikes you mentioned, this is like one of the very few games where beating the level

can kill you. Yes. The transition from one level to the next is itself a hazard. Yeah, and you can shoot down the spikes. Like if you blast them, they'll shorten. But when you're moving forward through the maze, you actually can't fire fast enough to avoid being impaled on a spike if it's more than a certain length out. So you really have to be careful. color vector style, but very challenging, one that I played a lot as a kid. The one other game I want to mention this episode for 1981 is Wizardry, which was, I've done an entire episode on it as an interview with one of the co-creators, Robert Woodhead, who actually lives here in North Carolina. But, you know, a formative RPG inspired by early RPGs seen on the

Plato computer system, which was not a public or commercial computer system. It was like an academic system that he had access to. But really kind of the definitive computer role-playing experience, that and Ultima both, were just really huge. And wizardry actually ended up being bigger in Japan for whatever reason, like Japanese developers who would go on to create RPGs, played a lot of wizardry and really loved it. And so the wizardry series, even though it's no longer in the hands of its original creators, is still a thing over there. It's still being developed.

There are wizardry-like games being made. It's just kind of a thing. It's a whole thing. Its DNA is in like everything RPG that comes out of Japan, basically. You can trace some part of it back to wizardry, it seems like. Yeah, it was kind of innovative. Well, it was innovative for the time in giving you a party of characters to control as opposed to a single character to control. And it was basically trying to replicate the

dynamic of a tabletop RPG where you had like six people sitting around playing. But instead you were all six people at once. And you had to deal with different classes with, you know, the way enemies work, learn different spells. The armor system is basically, you know, Thaco. Like you have armor class as opposed to hit points or defense points. So, yeah, it's very, very formative and help directly inspire games like Dragon Quest. So kind of a big deal. I have to imagine there's a ton of it

in things today like Etri and Odyssey. And speaking of big deals, what about the IBMPC, huh? Yeah, so moving over to the hardware section. And, wow, even though I organize this, it may still be a two-part episode because I'm looking at 1991 and saying there's no way we're going to get through all of this by the time Chris and I have to bounce out. So I can make this brief.

No, it's okay. Like I don't want to truncate 1991. If we go back and revisit this episode, I don't think anyone's going to complain if we talk about how great the games of 1991 were because there's so many games that people have nostalgia for in 91. So take your time. Tell us about the IBM PC. Okay. Well, I was going to read something I wrote about the IBM PC just succinctly for, I don't know, PC mag at one point.

You know, it was IBM's entry into the personal computer space, you know, after making many mainframes and other sort of small computers that were not personal, not the price of a personal computer. and IBM intended its PC originally to compete with everything from upper end of the home market where Apple 2 was ruling at the time to the small business PC realm, which is like expensive personal computers. And to that end, it allowed maximum flexibility. Its base model contained only 16K of RAM, sorry, 16K, which is barely anything, and no disk drives. but people could run Basic from ROM. It had Basic built in and saved to a cassette drive.

It actually had a cassette port, which many people don't remember. And maxed out, though, you could use 640K of RAM, two double-sided double-density disk drives for 360K storage each. That's kilobytes. And color CGA graphics, which is like four colors at a time out of a palette of 16, I guess. that configuration though would cost as much as a new car like if you adjusted today it's probably like $11,000 the price is unadjusted for the base model $1,565 the low end to $4,500 maxed out in 1981 so but it became the forefather of all the x86 PCs today which we still use and up until recently even this same architecture and and, you know, descendants of it powered max.

You know, they're still the X-86 Max because of the chips in them. Yep, they're about to go away, though. Yep. But that'll be the end of an era. And also, you know, the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox 1 and all these X-86 things, they all gain their power from the chips that came from PCs, PC clones. Right. Though, you know, IBM didn't really have, I don't know,

How involved was IBM with the development of the 8086 architecture? That was, I mean, that was Intel, but how deeply were they embedded in the process? Like, I know the PowerPC Consortium was Apple, IBM, and Motorola. Was that right? So they were all kind of, you know, heavily involved, like the computer manufacturers were heavily involved in the road mapping and, you know, giving feedback to the chip manufacturer. but I don't know how much that was the case with the IBM PC originally. Yeah, that's actually a great question.

Originally, I mean, the 8086 was developed before, you know, that came out in 79. That was before the IBM PC came out. And so I think they didn't have much say into Intel's creation of the X86 architecture. By the time the 286 came around, they may have had some input or something, you know, because the PC was chugging along. But what I mean to say is that the success of the X-86 platform was tied directly to the success of the IBM PC clone market, you know, and how it exploded and everything.

And so Intel kept churning out new improvement to that for that market, even if IBM wasn't directly involved in the design. And it all started with the IBM PC in 81. Yeah, people, I don't think IBM has a huge presence in commercial. computing anymore, but back in the 80s, they were really the Cadillac of computer makers. Like if you, you could buy a PC clone, like this spec was quickly and widely imitated by people who made much less expensive clones. But if you bought the IBM model, you knew you were getting, you know, the best possible version of it. Like a great system made well, just a reliable system that would be a performance monster for a long time to come?

They're built like tanks. They're like my original IBM PC, the 50, 50, 5150, sorry. The original model I have is like, it's so solid. It's like it has a steel case. It has this huge chunky power supply. The keyboard still works like crazy. It's got buckling springs, like my Model M keyboard clicks. And yeah, it still works.

I mean, 40 years later, it's still chugging along. A lot of old computers I have have crapped out by now. They had substandard parts, but IBM built, used all the best parts at the time. Is there any relationship between the IBM 5150 and Van Halen's 5150? Not that I know of. Okay. What year did your 5150 come out in the album? I think it was like 84, wasn't it?

Yeah, so there's your answer. It has no connection to it. I feel like another measure of the success of that platform, though, was the other thing that happened in 84 was the McIntosh coming out. And like the ad campaign for that was right. It was this big brother pastiche, but it was setting up the McIntosh as a reaction against the ubiquity of the IBMPC and all of its clones. And that was just, you know, three years after this.

So that platform had been so successful that by 1984, IBMPC and PC clones were like, were the standard to react against. That's kind of remarkable. The clone explosion was huge and immediate. I think the first clones came out in 82, Compact and all that, and then they were more in 83 and 84, and they just kept coming and coming in them. It was just, but one thing that's neat about the IBMPC is for the,

I don't know, the 30th anniversary of it, I went to my parents' house and sequestered myself in a room. They had a spare room, and I hooked up a 51st. 50 PC and tried to use it for work for like a week. And it was a weird experiment that I wrote about for PC World. It's called Can You Do Real Work with a 30-year-old IBM PC? And it's a neat article. How did it go?

It was surreal and strange, but it went pretty well. I think my conclusion was of any of the older computers that I had to actually try to work on, as in, like, write an actual article on or, you know, even use the Internet on to do email or some kind of thing like that. I would pick that over other machines because of its versatility and its, you know, reliability and the nice keyboard, things like that. So, all right. It was neat. So, yeah, the IBM PC not really meant for gaming necessarily, but essential to the evolution of video games. And, you know, speaking of clones, if we turn our attention to the Japanese side of things, you have NEC's PC 8801, which was not a clone of IBM's PC. But it was powered by an NAC Mu series chip, which was an 80-80 clone, which is kind of what the 80-86 was derived from.

So, you know, this was kind of Japanese, the Japanese take on the personal computer standard. I don't know that NEC's model was necessarily cloned, but it was very widespread. That and the 16-bit follow-up, the 9801. they were just huge and made massive inroads into the Japanese market. It's kind of important to note that back in the early 80s, especially, the computer market, when you looked internationally, it was very, you had kind of this Galapagos effect, where every country, every region, every territory sort of gravitated toward its own local systems for its own purposes, you know, its own individual reasons, you know, things like Commodore 64,

and the ZDX Spectrum were huge in Europe and in England. You had Commodore 64 was huge in the U.S., but also the IBM PC and the Apple 2. And then in Japan, you had basically the Sharp series X1 and NEC's PC801. And these were more successful in Japan, understandably, because they had a very wide column graphical support, which was essential to being able to type out text in Japanese kanji, like the very

dense pictographic ideograms that they use for, you know, most written content. You can write in the phonetic alphabets in Japanese, but it's very in elegant and difficult to read. It's just kind of an eyesore and a headache. So having these systems that had, you know, like, they used to make. measure computer resolution by text columns. And Japanese resolutions were just much denser than the standard American resolutions. I think, you know, IBMPC introduced what EGA, CGA? What did it start with? CGA and MDA. Yeah, CGA was like garbage. It was almost like, it was terrible. Very

low resolution, no color support. The Japanese systems like, some color support. Some, but but nothing to be, yeah, that's That's no color support. It didn't get decent until VGA in the mid-80s. But Japanese PCs, because they had to support kanji text, text in kanji, they had high-resolution graphics right from the outset from the early 80s. And so these very quickly were snapped up to become gaming machines. Like people saw the potential like, wow, you have so much resolution there. And it might just be, you know, eight colors.

but at that degree of resolution, you can do all kinds of dithering and interlacing effects and create the illusion of a greater color depth for your computers. So they became very popular for video games, adventure games, especially at the time it started to really take off in Japan, role-playing games, like these games that were kind of slow-paced based around static imagery

that the PC-801 was really, really well-suited to. And so it was really kind of, I would consider the PC8801 the basis of Japanese personal computers, PC gaming. And that's something you don't really hear about a lot these days. Like you look at Japan and you don't see a whole lot of games being developed for PC. The ones that are mostly developed for PC now are kind of in the vein of soft porn adventure, except a lot racier and or pornographic. but so many games that we know from consoles, yes, hard porn.

So many games that we know from consoles got their start on PC 8801, things like, you know, Hyde lied or all the Falcom games, that sort of thing. That's where they got their start. Even Dragon Quest kind of derives from the Portopia Serial Murderer case, which was a PC801 game, if I'm not mistaken. And Dragon Quest is like the next iteration of that turning it into an RPG. So really just a massively important platform that is not very well known here in the US just because, you know, foreign computers that require the ability to navigate a text

parser in another language, kind of rough to work with if you don't speak that language. But there's just all kinds of stuff that is really not that well documented, especially in the West and is really kind of, to me, represents. a huge frontier of video game archivism and exploration, you know, stuff that needs to be covered much more deeply. You know, I used to have these huge collection of magazines from the early 80s, computer magazines from the 70s and 80s. And if you read through them the early 80s, whenever NEC or somebody are Sharp or something

tried to sell a computer here, the magazines would be like have one little column in one paragraph and a picture of it. And like, this is another weird Japanese computer, you know, it doesn't run anything you want or you know. And it's just, they sort of dismiss it. And it wasn't, they had so much trouble getting an inroads in the market here for some reason. Probably just because of the, you know, we had this rah-rah American Apple, IBM, you know, stuff going on in the industry in America. Yeah, but even more than that, it was just, you know, the logistics of import tariffs and, you know, the shipping issues. it was a much bigger world back then.

The world is much smaller now. Like, I can order something on eBay from Japan and because they won't ship by postal service anymore from Japan to the U.S. So everything is either like sea freight, which takes three months, or it's DHL. So you place an order for something and two days later, DHL is right there at your doorstep.

Like, here you go. Here's the thing you bought. Which just, like, that's, that was inconceivable 40 years ago. So, yeah. like the there were there were a lot of logistical pricing distribution issues with taking computers into their markets and you know that that was also the case for consoles like that's why the family computer the famicom was huge in japan and the Atari was huge here and it took a long time for nintendo to kind of break through that yeah and you know it there were a lot of changes that happened politically and with shipping and distribution and economics and so on and so forth that we do not have time to get into but that was a big important evolution in the in business and international markets in the 80s. Yeah, like I remember my like my first contact with that line of like knowledge of that line of computers was like it's where, you know, Japan's indie game scene ended up too for a long time. And so like when I was into like shareware and stuff on Macintosh over here in the 90s and I was also getting into anime.

I was like, oh, there's all these cool like indie anime style games, but they're all on the Japanese PC88 lines. and I'm like, well, there's no way I can get my hands on those. By the way, do you know what the very first IBMPC game was? I happened to know. Okay, tell us. It was a port of the colossal cave adventure published by Microsoft. It's called Microsoft Adventure, 1981. And so it was a Texas adventure game, you know, and you explore a cave.

Oh, yeah, I think that was highlighted in an episode of Halt and Catch Fire where everyone at the studio got really addicted to that game. that's neat yeah I still haven't actually seen that show even though I think you'd enjoy it even though you'd be pulling your hair out over some minor inconsistencies and inaccuracies but it is a pretty pretty well-researched love letter to that era of computing they they asked me twice for stuff for that show like um yeah yeah but then they pull it back and like whoops Like, I started, I was trying to find a bunch of Commodore monitors for him once, and I was getting, and then, like, some other, like, PC stuff for them. And then they'd be like, nope, we don't need any more, sorry. And so I don't watch that show. Ah, okay. Well, I don't have a grudge, so I enjoyed it.

Anyway, one last thing to discuss for 1981, Ben, this is all you, the T-I-99-4-A. Actually, Benj and Chris, you can also chime in. So the T-I, we actually did a whole episode on this, so, you know, that info is all out there. But this is the one, this is the one I had when I was a kid. It was a neat little computer. So it was, it was one of those in this hybrid space that, kind of existed back then between personal computers and gaming systems. So it had, it was an all-in-one unit with a keyboard, and like, you know, you can program

basic on this thing, but it also had a cartridge slot, and it had cartridge games like an Atari. And so it had like clones of all the usual stuff. There was a Pac-Man clone called Munchman. There was a Space Invaders clone called T.I. Invaders, I think. But it also had some fun other things that were kind of its own thing. It had that Tombstone City thing that we briefly mentioned before, which is kind of like if you take Pac-Man, but you own the whole maze and then you zoom out and the monsters are coming in from outside the maze and you're trying to shoot at them and you turn them into, they turn into obstacles when they die, sort of like centipede. And then it had things like alpiner, which is this thing with big graphics of you being a mountain climber climbing up the mountain and there's like huge bears that swat at you. and a lot of things that you just didn't see on too many other platforms ended up on there.

It was a weird little system. It's like system-wise, it was, let's see, the introductory price was $500 in 1991, so it was cheaper than some of the other own PCs. And I think actually they ended up getting into a price war with Commodore later, which destroyed the company. Yeah. And the entire industry. Yay.

Well, guess what? Remember when I was telling you about researching, you know, Atari 8-bit computers. Like, that price wore tanked Atari. It tanked the video game industry because it drove down the price of computers so low that everybody was saying, let's buy a computer instead of a game console. So they all started buying those, and there was no profit in it because it's just insane. So it's all commoner's fault.

I digress bastards. Yep. What was I saying? It also had 16K of RAM. It was technically a 16-bit computer. It had a 16-bit processor, but it was a little bit hobbled because, like, the memory bust to most of its memory was actually 8-bit. So it had some weird design decisions that kind of held it back. And then another weird thing about it is it has all kinds of weird peripherals you can get for it.

One I actually had so you could get a cassette tape deck expansion, and you could save out your programs and data to audio cassette and read them back, kind of using a cassette as if it were a real-to-reel hard drive. there was like a voice expansion box like a speech synthesizer crazy for the time all kinds of weird stuff you could get for it yeah and I know I've mentioned this before but because I grew up in Lubbock, Texas where TI had one of its manufacturing plants those things were everywhere when I was growing up so definitely a very pervasive system just hard to get away from but you know pretty capable. Yeah, I recommend listening to that episode we did about TI then mentioned. It's really cool. Yeah, that was, gosh, was that a couple years ago now? I don't even know. We were so awesome. It's like four years ago, three years ago. Yes, three years ago was several decades at this point.

So anyway, yes, that is 1971 and 1981, and we went a full hour and a half on this, even though I swear to God we would not. So the only thing we can do now is get back together sometime soon and, uh, give an hour and a half to 1991, and this time Chris will be allowed to talk. Woo. Chris will have things to talk about. Also, Bob Fetterdang, I'll talk about all my favorite things in 2001 since he stole that from us. You should email him, send him a sternly worded message and say, put me on your show. Retronauts incursion.

That's right. Anyway, yeah, so as always, there was much more to talk about than I expected, even though I tried to trim down what we could actually talk about. man podcasts are so weird and confusing yeah anyway it was good talking to you guys it's been a long time since we've done

a Retronauts East but hopefully it won't be quite so long before the next yeah it's been like a year almost I don't know other than the time we did something at that the Pax East no there was there was one we oh you weren't able to join him for that one that's the problem oh yeah

yeah I did one back back in the before times when we could go to people's houses. Yes. So anyway, I'm glad we're all still alive. Yes, that's very good. Hopefully people enjoyed this jolt of memory of nostalgia for recording approaches back

in the day. I don't know what I'm saying. Anyway, clearly I'm out of practice with podcasting. I'm totally losing my train of thought here. But that was it, 1971, 1981. As we move into 2021, we will circle back around and visit 1991, which was a momentous year. but that is it for this episode and as always

we can do the usual chatter here for instance I can say that Retronauts is a podcast you can find on the internet and that the Greenlit podcast network you can help support the show through Patreon if you enjoyed what you just heard and you should have because it was so good you can go to patreon.com slash Retronauts

for I'm trying to remember I think three bucks a month yes you can subscribe to get each episode a week early. For five bucks a month, you get bonus content every month. Every other Friday, there is another podcast in addition to the Monday shows and also weekly columns every Saturday or Sunday by Diamond Fight. And we're always talking about throwing some more stuff in there. Sometimes it happens. Sometimes it doesn't. But it's kind of a crap shoot and it's good stuff for a pretty modest subscription fee, less than the cost of a hamburger unless it's a very bad burger.

Delicious. Chris, you've been quiet. Tell us where we can find you so people can get a handle on what you're actually like. Well, I am the host of several other podcasts here on the Greenlit Podcast Network and elsewhere. You can find links to all those

at t-h-e-isb.com. That's my old website, or Greenlitpodcast.com will take you to shows like Warrockin Ajax or Apocopal's or Movie Fighters or Snack Situation, the podcast. I haven't heard of that. one where I eat things. It's on the movie Fighters feed.

It's very good. It's a sub podcast. Got it. It's clear. Chris has a podcast addiction or something. Yeah, there's there's a lot of them. And in fact, I did just launch a new one that I do with my wife.

It is a, it is a backer exclusive podcast at the Warwick and Ajax Patreon. It's called Every Pinet Ever. It's my wife and I being extremely married and also reviewing every pint of ice cream that we eat. It's very fun. I'll hear I was hoping for beer. All right.

So that was Chris, Ben. Where can we find you on the internet? Me. I am on the Twitters. K-I-R-I-N-N is where you can find my Twitter feed, which I occasionally still use. I'm not on any other podcasts at the moment. I'm just weird like that.

It's just this one. Okay. And finally, Benj. Hey, guys. This is Benjid. I am not on any other podcast either other than this one and it's been a crazy year but I'm working at how-to geek right now as a staff writer

and you can find me on Twitter at Benj Edwards you can follow my shenanigans there where I hook up weird Atari's to my tiny CRTs on my desk and things like that. It's fun. All right. And I did research this time. It's the first time. Thank you. That was amazing. Yeah. Yeah.

Patreon. All right. So that's everyone, except me. You can find me on Twitter as GameSpite. And you can check out my YouTube channel, which is called Jeremy Parrish, because that's also my name. It's an amazing, amazing coincidence. But it's very convenient also. That's my name, too.

I don't know about that one. But anyway, that's it for this episode of Retronauts. Thanks, everyone for listening. And we'll be back sometime, hopefully soon, to tell you what was up with 1991. I got to do that before Bob records 2001. So got to get in there. otherwise it's going to be asynchronous and everyone's going to be confused like what if we skip the story what's the plot here what's happened with video games who killed jr

We're.