Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 425: Years in Review Revue - 1972 & ’82

Episode Date: December 27, 2021

Jeremy Parish, Ben Elgin, Jared Petty, and Benj Edwards greet 2022 by looking back to the major events of gaming 40 and 50 years ago. (Naturally, this episode only covers about half the planned content as we dive deep into the medium's pivotal events.) Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This week in Retronauts, twos for the show. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. Yes, I gave it away by. introducing us as this week in Retronauts. I'm Jeremy Parrish, and once again, you are listening to a podcast that we have put together to edify and enlighten you. And as always, it's the end of the year, the beginning of a new year, and that means we are talking about years gone by. It's a long-time Retronauts tradition to begin a new year by talking about the significant events that happened 10 years past, 20 years past, 30 years past. It used to be a lot of

5, 10, 15. But now we've been doing this so long that there's too much history. It used to be easier in the early days of retronauts when there wasn't that much history to talk about. It was like a little baby industry. But now more than 15 years later, it's a full grown industry. It can drive a car. It can drink. It's probably married. I don't know. I haven't really looked too closely into his life. Anyway, I'm Jeremy Parrish. And with me to celebrate times passage and our mortality. It's a Retronauts East Jam featuring a new, a new face in the Retronauts East Jam. Who is this new face? This new face is Jared Petty. You can't see my face, but you can hear it. That's true. Yeah. That sounds good. That's a pretty, yeah, it's a nice sounding

face. I like it. Thank you very much. Yeah, Chris Sims has moved far away and he'll be calling in from time to time. But for this episode, because Chris does not really jam that much with 1972 and 1982 video games we called in Jared who is much more into the old

stuff the really old stuff I really do love the really old stuff right and that's what we need what that's what we need in our time of podcast crisis talking about games 50 years gone by

so also here to help with talking about extremely old things we have another enthusiast of the decrepit and the dusty and Jedwards that's glad you do that

I was talking about you. Yep. When I said decrepit and dusty, you were like, that's me. You also pointed at me when you said it. Yes, but people can't see the nonverbal cues. That's true. So who is to say that I really did that? Yeah, that's true.

Mysterious. Who knows what transpires in the Retronauts non-studio. And finally, bringing some sanity to this rabble. No promises there, but Ben Elgin. Yes. So with this episode, Retronauts East is now two people with the, initials B.E. And two people with the initials J.P. For maximum confusion, please enjoy. Anyway, it's the year 2022 as of the time you are maybe listening to this. Not as the time that we are

recording, but you know, we do this stuff in advance. So we're just kind of bracing up for the inevitable. Time passes. We die. But in the meantime, in the meantime, we look back through the decades to talk about old video games. And 50 years ago, this year, that was 1972. And that was in a lot of ways where the video games industry really kind of began and became something resembling an industry as opposed to some dudes who put out an arcade machine that people didn't really like or get because they were too drunk to appreciate the subtle controls and physics of computer space. But now, now we move on to the people pleaser, the rabble-rous, crowd-favor, games like Pong.

1972 was a pretty momentous year in video game history. And now, 50 years later, we are peering back like Kilroy, back into the past, putting our little nose in our hands over the edge of history and staring into its maw. I don't know. What am I talking about? I had some socke at lunch. I just love to use more. Any opportunity to use more is a good day. It's a good time.

So we are looking into the mall of history, looking at its tremendous teeth, and it's extremely, like there's some stuff back there. I don't even know. It's like the Sarlac Pit. So anyway, there are three key points that I want to identify for 1972. These are the significant things that happened. First, Atari came into existence, 1972. Also, the first proper commercially released video game console. The Odyssey came into existence.

And the first arcade video game hit. Pong came into existence. Interestingly enough, and I did not realize this until looking at whoever very politely put in times and dates into the notes, Pong actually came along. The arcade industry started after the console industry. My God, Benj, you put that there,

so explain yourself, young man. Oh, gosh, well, it's true. The Odyssey was released around September, 1972, and Pong, November in 1972. So, and Atari was established June 1972, so all that is, there's so much history there. It's all woven together in a really interesting way.

And I don't know if you, we would probably, should probably start with the Odyssey first because that sort of sets the stage for Pong. Go for it. So. You've talked to the creators of the Odyssey. Yes. So you seem like the perfect choice to elucidate.

I, to enlighten us. That's what you're here for. I have even played the proto. type of the Odyssey in the basement of the creator of the Odyssey technology. Ralph Bayer in his basement in 2012. Is that just like, is that where he kept it or was it was so like a punishment sort of thing? Yeah. Go to your basement. Yeah. He, you know, Ralph, in 2012, I went to his house. I flew there for and stayed the night there one time because we were going to talk about video games.

He's going to show me some of his paperwork and records and stuff. And he just, he liked good company, he's an old guy, his wife had died, and he was kind of lonely, and he was a grandfather-type figure to a lot of people, and he was just a wonderful human being, a very thoughtful and caring person, and we had become friends over years talking about video game history. So in his basement, he had this wall of all of the inventions, toy inventions he had ever created, like talking G.I. Joe guys and the Simon and all these other things. like talking greeting cards and stuff. And then another little room in the basement,

he had recreations of his early video game prototypes. He created at Sanders in the 1960s with Bill Rush and Bill Harrison. And Sanders was a defense contractor who usually did, you know, big defense contract deals with the government. They even did some contracting on the Apollo missions. Like I know Ralph told me, I think he'd like started, he developed a handle on. one of the video cameras for the Apollo missions or something like that.

That was like one of his contracts at Sanders, you know. And so on the side, he had this idea to make games played through the TV set. So he assigned a few of his engineers to sort of work on that on the side secretly. And it was not a secret to his bosses, but to the rest of the company it was. He had him in a little closet off the side, and they had a key to this door where him and And Ralph would come check in on Bill Harrison and Bill Rush, who would be working on these things. And one of the games Bill Rush invented was a ping-pong game in 1967 that had two paddles and a ball bounce between. And, you know, if you miss the ball, you, the other side scores your goal.

And a point. And that was the ultimate genesis of Pong, basically in 1967. He even, there's a document somewhere in one of my articles that. Ralph has, it's dated like June something, 1967, and it has a diagram. He drew a sketch of this ping pong table like, or might even have two players on it with rackets. I can't even remember what he did, but they implemented that game, and, you know, they made all these video games with spots and things, and they rolled all those into a device that Ralph called the Brown Box, which could play a variety of different games if you flip these little switches on the front of it. it to turn on and off different spots on the screen and like a center line could go on and off

like at the center of a court, like a racquetball court or ping pong table. And so then they shopped that around to a lot of companies. And one of the companies, well, the company that was interested was Magnavox. So they bought the rights from Sanders, you know, to this technology that Ralph created. And they, along with several, you know, with engineers at Magnavox, turned it into a commercial product. And along the way, one of the interesting transitions they did was they took that bank of switches. It was two banks of switches and turned it into a jumper card that you could just plug in to switch on and off those things quickly. So the Odyssey has these little cards that aren't proper cartridges, as we would probably consider them now.

They didn't have ROM code stored on them or anything. They were on and off switches. So they did technically program the console to work in a certain way. But this console only had, you know, basically analog circuitry in it that would generate spots on the screen. So these cartridges are literally just a bunch of jumper cables, basically. It's just connecting one wire to another in the connector. They have little traces under the plastic piece where they're connecting the different contacts in this connector together.

You could open off a Magnovox and like wire one pin to another and turn on different games. Yes, it's true. And they constructed the Magnovox in an interesting way too because there were these redundant spot generators. They made it in a modular way. So if you take off the lid of the Odyssey, which is this white console,

it looks sort of like an air's rock or something, some kind of monumental mountain or pyramid or volcano sort of thing going on. and it has all these little modules in it in these slots so that they did it that way so that they could manufacture a bunch of those modules and just stick them in and they generate spots or lines or whatever and so that's what the cards turn on off that thing those spots and the way they created different games was by using accoutrement the accessories that came with the odyssey they figured out how to, first they developed overlays that you'd tape over the screen that showed a picture of a haunted house or a roulette wheel or like a tennis court or a hockey court to give some kind of color and flare to these spots that are just moving around. And basically there's only two controllable spots, player controlled spots and a ball and a center line. I think

that's basically all it can do. And you can turn those on and off and, um, So if you turn off the ball and turn off the center line, you've got two spots. You can control the X and Y coordinates with these knobs on the side of the Odyssey controller. And you basically like to play roulette. You close your eyes. One person randomly spins the knobs, you know, on the thing. And you open them and see where it lands in that wheel on the overlay. So a lot of the games involve you keeping track of the rules of the game.

And even the ping pong wasn't very solid, you know. The football game requires you to like flip over the card, right? And you basically have to kind of keep track, like keep score. Yeah, you have to keep score yourself. It's really, most of the game is like, in a lot of those games is like a board game pieces. It came with poker chips. It came with cards. It came with like score tables and things, all this stuff.

One thing to remember about this when Benj says spots is the, you know, at this period of time, you didn't have a display that was like addressable with pixels. You didn't even have sprites. You literally just had like four blobs of light that could be circles or lines and you could control the positions of. So they had to do all kinds of things to sort of figure out how to make four spots of light

into different games. And the solution of the overlays, it's just so wonderfully lucid. It reminds me of what you got a few years later when you started getting a lot of commercial box art for something like the 2600. You have these big vivid paintings to help you understand what the pixelated blob

on your VCS are doing, this is, this is that stuck to the screen. They're just like, you know what, we're going to help your imagination out here right there on your TV. And I think that's great. Like what a, it, it seems so awkward now, but it was a really elegant and thoughtful solution, I think. So the overlays came in two sizes. What sizes of television worth those four? I assume like 12 and 17 inch maybe. Yeah, I don't know the exact numbers, but I have them and they're like, one of them's like, probably like a 20, 24-inch sort of thing. Really, that's a huge TV for a 1972. Yeah, like the family TV.

And then slightly smaller is probably like a 15-17-inch kind of thing. I don't know exactly that number. So, okay, so it's bigger than I would have expected. I guess if you were investing in a game console when they didn't exist yet, you probably had a good TV. If you could afford a $99 video game console. I love the controllers for The Odyssey 2. They look exactly like a recipe card holder my grandmother had.

Which I'm sure she bought around the same time that The Odyssey was invented. But there are these kind of just like boxes. They're tall and kind of thin. And they sort of taper toward the top. And then they have this rotary knob on the side. I thought they looked kind of like K-9. Yeah, you can definitely like flip like Rolodeck style between the recipes with that knob on the side. Yeah.

I mean, that's such an engineer way of approaching controls. It's that we've got two axes. So let's have very precise wisdom of it. Nothing approaching that single, simple paddle that you'd have for Pong, nothing like a joystick, just, you know what? We move vertically, move horizontally. And we're thinking in terms of that on televisions because we engineer televisions. And that's what we got.

And it's, again, it seems so awkward now, but there's a tremendously thoughtfulness and logic behind it. I mean, they were figuring out how people, are going to interact with electronic components. So, you know, honestly, considering this is one of the first attempts out of the gate, I think they did a pretty good job with it. It's not, you know, it's like I've seen definitely some much worse controllers and much less usable interface paradigms.

So, you know, this would be refined over time, but they came out pretty well. I mean, compared to like the control interface for computer space, which came out the year before, This seems much more intuitive and just easy to deal with. Yeah, the funny thing about this control scheme is that Ralph literally took a Heathkit spot generator device that was already made in the 60s that generated spots on your screen for testing purposes and modified it to make the first game console prototypes in like 1966, 67.

And so what he's doing with the knobs is it's literally an XI, and Y control of this spot on the screen. And so you're just moving it up or down or left and right. And so there's nothing more sophisticated than that. He did make probably the first video game joystick by combining them into one lever at

some point in the prototype stage that didn't come out for the Odyssey. But it's very simple and matter of fact. Matter of fact. I mean, this is basically like an etch-a-sketch, essentially. That's the same kind of control paradigm, just combined into a

single, like, dual-level knob. And it doesn't leave a trace on the screen, but it's the same kind of thing. It's a good way to visualize it. If we're going to talk about Odyssey controllers, we really should talk about the shooting gallery gun for a second because, wow, that thing. Let's build a really, really realistic looking rifle. That was a thing for a while. Like, the Nintendo Famicom gun, the Japanese equivalent to the Zapper, is a six-shooter.

It looks very realistic. I had to transport one back to Steve Lynn in San Francisco by playing. Wayne. I was like, I am checking this in my luggage. I don't care if the TSA steals it. I am not carrying this on board with me. And I have the super cassette vision gun, which is a very realistic mouser. Yep. So not only is it a gun, it's like a Nazi gun. It's like, man, double trouble. Like this, like, I mean, it's, it's very convincing and I'm sure I haven't used it yet, but I'm sure it, you know, feels good in the hand. But like, you know, holding this thing, I feel like Indiana Jones is going to shoot me. I just love

that the things two controllers are a Rolodex and a hunting rifle. I think that's a marvelously 70s-tastic combination. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've got the hunting rifle for the man, the recipe holder for the woman. It's the nuclear family right there, you know? Very American. That is not okay.

Well, the light gun, I'll change the subject back to video games. The light gun was, Ralph Bayer was really proud of inventing the light gun. Bill Harrison was in charge of building it. And when I interviewed him, which I still think is probably the only interview with him ever because he has Alzheimer's, if he's even still alive right now.

But he said Ralph told him to go to the toy store and buy a toy rifle. And then he modified that into a gun that would, I think it has a photo receptor that detects the spot on the screen or when the screen flashes or something. I don't, I've never actually used the Odyssey rifle. I don't have it in my collection. But I know it was one of his pride and joys because anytime anyone made a light gun after that he got to go after him with the patent. Nice. Does it use the same basic technology as Nintendo's where the screen basically blanks out

to solid black except for the square that the target is on? Yeah, I think so. Okay. Basically the same. And Ralph had this really weird contraption in his basement. That was funny where he modified a zapper. He made his own like sensor thing. He had this TV set with duck humble.

hunt on it with an NES and he had these like sensors that could tell where you threw a ball at the screen so he could play duck hunt by throwing the ball at the screen if you hit the duck with the ball it would go blast that is like awesome so I played that with him it's something he tried to sell to somebody at some point that sounds like the best game for little kids ever yeah like that's amazing that was cool so yeah I mean I'm just thinking about all the people who threw a Wii controller through their television screen and thinking you know maybe maybe Maybe that didn't sell to anyone for a reason. Yeah.

That's what happened to my first HDTV. That was a victim of a Wii remote. Really? Yeah. Wow, I don't know if I met someone before. You were the reason for those warnings. Yeah. Well, not me, but the youth group we invited over to our house that day.

Wow. First person I met who actually lost a TV to that. Yeah, that's... Anyway, so The Odyssey had what, like 12 games, 11 games? I wrote it down. About 12 games. They were extras, like, expansion sets that had more games in it, like little boxes with more overlays and different cards.

But that was the thing. When you bought it, you got that whole set of the first 12 games. along with like all their feelys, all the overlays, board game accessories. It had a whole lot of stuff in it. So the first, the funny thing is the first ever game console was like a quasi board game product. You know, like it was half the game is in you playing it and making and following the rules on paper. And, you know, that kind of thing. It wasn't just all on the video screen because it was too limited for that technology.

And one thing I wanted to, it's one thing I've, never told anybody is that regarding the appearance of the Odyssey console, I actually interviewed the industrial designer of the Odyssey console five, six, seven, eight years ago. I don't remember because I was going to work on a big article about the Odyssey. I never did. And he said it was based on a TV set that Magnavox designed. And I found the model of TV set and it matches it. The TV set had a base that looks like this white base of the console that goes out and it flares out at the bottom it's got this white column and and it's got like the trim the wood trim and everything so if you want the premiere experience you got to track down one of those magnet rocks TVs too from like

19701 72 do those take uh gb escart you could modify it probably yeah it's i don't know if it was solid state yet they might have been vacuum tubes there probably was a solid state here Ralph had a lot of not to say about that kind of stuff boy TV technology but so that was the Odyssey and that you know

in May of 1972 they Magnavoc showed it off they went on like a like I think it was a product tour around the country they had a few different places where they invited press to come try it out and stuff

and I think somewhere in California I don't remember for this Burling game California or somewhere it's in my one of my articles somewhere Nolan Bushnell came and saw it he came in May we have the exact date I wrote it in the notes but I can't find it because I heard way too many notes

yeah he signed his name in like the register at the event yeah so it's like wow you created a paper trail for your concept theft yeah so well done yeah well that's the whole thing teasing out the like the lineage of Pong was something I focused on the first five years

of my career, like talking to Ralph, talking to Nolan, talking to Al and everybody. So he saw it, you know, and probably thought, oh, hey, this is really cool. And the funny thing is, I think the first time Nolan ever admitted that he actually saw it was in my interview on Vintage Computing in 2007, where he, you know, he said, yes, I saw it, and it's no big deal, or whatever, it's a Tempest in a teapot, he said. No, Tempest was like 1981. Yeah. This is like Yars Revenge and a teapun.

Sorry, I couldn't think of another game. Anyway. What you want to think of any other game? Yeah, that's a great. We're going to talk about it later in 82. So, Nolan saw this. And so we're going to go back to Atari real quick, where, you know, in 1971, Nolan, Bushnell and Ted Dabney created computer space. As you can learn about it in last year's podcast

Yeah, last year's podcast Published by or manufactured by nutting associates But the company they were working at at the time was Sizzagy Yeah, that was their They made a little consulting company basically That owned the rights to computer space Licensed it to nutting while they were employed by nutting

Which is the best deal of all time And used all of their work time To develop this thing that they owned the rights to And but you know, So, Nolan wanted to do a follow-up driving game or something like that, and he got into disagreements with Nutting's management and resigned and took Ted with him. And they founded Atari, or just do the quick version. And so they, Nolan went to Bali, got a contract to develop a couple games in a pinball machine for $4,000 a month, something like that.

And Ted, Dabney, I still remember telling me something like, This is funny he got this because he had, you know, there's no way no one could do this by himself. You know, like we, he, Nolan is a wonderful, brilliant salesman, very charismatic. He's a genius at ideas and, you know, and he has this amazing charisma. But Ted said, you know, he wasn't the world's best engineer. And he, and Nolan knew that, you know. Yeah, it was kind of a jobs Wozniak relationship. Yeah.

So there's a lot of people who, to don't give Nolan enough credit. Because they think he's not a brilliant engineer, but I think they're missing the point that he was an idea guy and he was a visionary person who drove these ideas forward. And he attracted people to him who could execute them, like Ted Dabney and Alan Elkhorn. And so Alan Alcorn was their first hire. They hired in, I think, June of 72 with that money from Bali. And as an exercise, supposedly to test Al's. Alan Elkhorn told me that Nolan told me

he had this contract with GE to make a home video game console or something and you know he's just bullshitting Alan you know so why don't you make a game like this and he described what became Paul like the two paddles and the ball

you know and Al had never seen the Odyssey or anything like that you know but Nolan had and so he suggested building that game and Al took this and built a brilliant game. So Pong was a great improvement over the ping pong game on Odyssey because it had on-screen scoring. It had sound effects, which is the original Odyssey had no sound. And it had angle of incidence and reflection calculations. He divided the paddle into eight segments.

So depending on which part of the paddle you hit, it bounces off in a certain angle. and the top and bottom walls of the screen are walls. I mean, the borders so it can bounce off. And the Odyssey, you can just lose the ball. It just flies off the court. And to Ralph, that was okay. Because he's like, we're playing tennis. It's just like tennis.

It goes off the court. You pick it back up. You put it there. And, you know, but Al thought it's no fun. So let's keep it on the court and it bounces off and it has this angle. So it's more like High-Eye or something as opposed to proper tennis. Yeah, something like that. And so.

A racquetball Yeah, so one of the final cool things about us that the ball speeds up over time as you rally it back and forth and so it makes it more challenging and whenever a score is a point is scored it resets the speed and so it has these really gamified elements

that were missing and they're moderated by the machine and the circuitry instead of the players you know having some nobility to not misuse the English knob on the Odyssey thing, which can, which literally control the vertical orientation of the ball. You can just like go whoop and like I can go past someone. And you keep track of the score on the Odyssey by yourself, you know. And so there's no on screen scoring. And critically,

you're sitting here on this one axis now and you've got that famous direction, avoid missing ball for high score. And that strikes me a lot because most action video games, I think, kind of now boiled down to two things. The school of thought that Pong's started, get hit. I mean, ultimately, Pong is about making sure you collide with the ball. Or the predominant school that's followed sense don't get hit. That's really the two things that happen in action video games, by and large. Pac-Man doesn't want to get hit, except when he eats a power pellet, then he wants to get hit.

And those principles start there in Pong. It's just so darn accessible. You can get your mind to write it instantly because of the real world metaphor. But even if you'd never played ping pong, you know, you very quickly understand in that game, after a couple of points, what you're supposed to do. Even if you're drunk in a bar. Exactly. And it's just so, getting rid of the English knob, keeping it at one axis, adding the ricochet like you talked about. The sound effects, and Alcorn told him in one interview about how Bushnell wanted the roar of a crowd.

And he's like, well, if you want it, Nolan, you program it. And he made the beep, you know. And that's become, that beat, boot has become part of our... That's supposed to be the roar of the crowd? Well, that's... Wow. No, that was Alcorn's fuck you to Nolan Bushnell about asking for the roar of the crowd. He just like, no, I'm making this.

If you don't like it, Nolan, get rid of it. Got it. Yep, exactly. And so the funny And so the funny thing is that they're like, that's great a great. Now go build the driving game. And Alan's like, wait a minute, wait a minute, this is a great. Like, this is a really great game.

And so according to my interviews, I'm going by my old article, but I interviewed Ted Dabney and Al Korn about this in 2012. And they said they went behind Nolan's back, basically, and built this into a machine, their first Pong unit, that Ted Dattany made the cabinet for. It was just a basic simple wooden cabinet, and they stuck a TV set in there and the circuitry. And they convinced Nolan that, yes, this is a really great product by itself.

And this, in fact, should be our product because it's so amazing. And they stuck it in Andy Capp's Tavern in, gosh, was it, Sunnyvale. Probably Sunnyvale. Yeah, California. Someone out there will know. So, you know, there's a famous story. Everyone's heard probably a million times is that Al got a call that the Pong Machine is malfunctioning. And he goes in there and opens it up to trigger a free game for someone.

And the coins, the quarter just spill out, spill out all over the place. And it turned out it was just jammed up from so many quarters. And then they knew like, holy crap, we have something really big on our hands. They could do so much laundry. So much laundry. A quarter was a lot more money back then. A quarter was big. In fact, the fact that they could get a quarter for a game instead of like a dime,

which most arcade games used dimes up to that point, was a big thing. So they were rolling in the dough. They were making like $6,000 a week on these machines. They built out 10 more Pong prototypes and put them around. and they were rolling in the dough. And then they're like, wait a minute, Bally paid us to develop this. Technically, they own it.

And so they had to go back to Bally and asked them to be released from the contract. And they're really worried. Like, they wanted to either, they're worried because they knew they'd have to go into manufacturing themselves. And that was a really big thing. But they also knew it could be a big opportunity.

So I think Ted wrote a letter to Bally and convinced them to release them from the contract. And so the funny thing about that, that I have a little story about that, the prototype Pong Arcade Machine is currently in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. And when I last went there in 2017,

I called Alcorn and said, would you like to meet me at the museum? Because that was like, I was up in San Francisco and he lives down there, you know, closer to Mountain View. So I said, you want to meet up. And so he met me there. And the first thing he does when he comes in the door, I was standing with Dag Spicer,

curator. And he's like, hey, Dag, I found the key to that Pong machine, like the key to the coin box. Do you want it? It's in my garage. Like this machine. And Dag's like, yeah, yeah, I'll take it, you know. I'm like, of course. So I thought that was funny because this hugely historic item, he just has that key sitting in his garage and he found the coin box key. Anyway, that makes me so happy. Yeah. So, so happy. So, so happy. So, Al gave me a tour of the museum and he showed me off all the stuff and showed me his palm machine and I got some pictures that are on my blog and that was a great day so pong when it was released they were you know they sold I think something like in my article I said Nolan came back and was flabbergasted

they sold 300 sight unseen to somebody and they're like well we got to build these now and they had to you know ramp up real quick find space to store it hire people to build things They got a cabinet maker to build the wooden enclosures for the pong machines. And they've sold them as much as they possibly could capacity to manufacture. And so it was such a wild hit that people started to clone it really quickly. You know, like other manufacturers would clone the board. They'd either clone it completely or build derivatives. And Al told me that he started getting these returns like for repairs.

they would send in a board to repair and they weren't their boards. There are other people's boards that had cloned them. But he realized that, like, it actually did them a favor somewhat, the cloning, because they were at capacity manufacturing. Those people were just taking the rest of the business and, you know, and expanding the market, basically, and spreading this phenomenon around the world. So the cloning is what built the video game industry, basically.

It's really crazy. Yeah, the fact that they went in a matter of weeks from running an arcade route, picking up quarters to try to have a full manufacturing operation. I've seen interviews where they've talked about this before, but it just shouldn't have worked. They should not have been able to pull it off. And I still wonder sometimes just what it was like, how fly-by-night that whole thing was and how miraculous it is we still have any Atari legacy after that first year. Yeah, it's incredible.

There's a lot of pathos involved with Ted and Nolan that I still haven't really gotten into because there's, you know, there were some bitter feelings. Their partnership broke up basically in 1973. And for a while, Ted was Nolan's implementer of ideas, kind of, like did a lot of things for them to make them real. you know nolan did a lot of design work on computer space himself and i credit him for that and and so you know there's issues of whether ted got enough credit for this and that and you know but they together somehow like pulled this together and i think the reason why they were just so successful is they hit upon a wildly popular product that was just so phenomenal they could not

stop it, the money coming in. Super accessible, too. Like, anyone could play it. Exactly. It was so lucrative. Everybody's like, I want to get in this. If your machine is breaking thousands of dollars every week, like, that's a lot of money in

1972. So, like, everybody wants to get into that to make money. And it was just a wild freight train that was unstoppable. So you either ride the bull or you get thrown up, as my mom would say. Jeremy, you mentioned accessibility. I think another thing is Pong is still fun.

yeah that that's one of the shocking things about it i a pong and it's it's various home iterations even modern versions of pong like windjammers which are delightful but you go back and play classic pong it's still a lot of fun if you've got two people there yeah two people is the thing no one likes to talk about the social aspects of pong because he he loves the fact that it's a it was a social game and there was rare to have anything any like most arcade games up to that point where had a single player mode, at least one, I'm talking electro-mechanical

machines and things like that. And this was two-player only. There was no computer controlled second paddle at all. So two people had to stand next to each other, and they were usually in a bar, and they could play together this experience, and it was the first social

video gaming experience. Grow apple trees and honeybees and snow white turtle dust So those were two momentous creations for In perfect harmony And I'd like to hold it in my arms So those were two momentous creations For 1972, The Odyssey and Pong But, you know, people were still making games on computers.

They weren't selling them because no one in the public owned a computer, to speak of. It was all still academic and military. But, you know, people were still killing time, creating stuff on computers. So before we leave 1972 behind, I do want to talk about two notable releases, or not releases, but creations for the mainframe computer. The first being Hunt the Wumpus, which is, um, It's a game that I think, you know, kind of like Pong still has appeal to it because it's so much about kind of, you know, it's almost like an action-oriented mine sweeper. I feel like it's half minesweeper, half like dungeon del. Yeah, like you basically move through a, you know, the original version was text-based.

There was a version that I played for the first time on T-I-99-4-A. It's a good version. As a cartridge, yeah. They had a physical representation, but it works the same either way. You're moving through a series of caves that are represented as nodes, you know, numbered. And each node you go into it, says it connects to these other nodes and gives you the numbers. And so you can create a crude map of how the caves are laid out. It's randomized every time.

And somewhere out there, there's a creature called the Wumpus that if you end up in the same node is it, it will kill you, but you have an arrow that you can fire at the wampus from afar, and, you know, if you know where the wampus is, you can kill it. At the same time, you also have bats that I believe will pick you up and drop you in another random node

if you happen to come across the same cave number as them. So, you're trying to kind of avoid the bats and, you know, trying to adapt to the sort of wild card they play if they manage to catch hold of you while hunting, you know, the

the titular wampus and trying to shoot it. There's also pits and other things that will just kill you if you go into the wrong cave. And it gives you warnings, which is where the minesweeper thing comes in. If you know if one of the things next to your space is a danger zone, it'll tell you. Right. Like if you feel a draft, that means there's probably going to be what a cave or a pit. There's going to be a pit in one of the things connected to you. But if you haven't mapped out some of them yet, you don't necessarily know which one.

So there's a chance element there. And that wonderful blind man's bluff. kind of, hey, okay, I'm stumbling in the dark. I'm gradually building a clear picture where I am. But then sometimes the Wampus is close. You know it. You're not ready to kill it. And so you're being pursued by this random creature through the dungeon.

It turns into a chase. Then the hunter becomes the hunted and it's guesswork and you feel great when you get it right. And it's a really solid game design. I think it came to just about everything. Yeah. And it's so simple. It's when you have the text version, you know, it's literally just printing out you're in room X. you can go to Room YZ.

Maybe there's a warning for something. And so, like, you can program this thing in, like, a fairly short basic program, which people did and would come out in magazines. And so I played something very akin to this just in text on my... I didn't have the graphical version for Ti-99, but I had it in one of the magazines came out with the TI Basic version that you could just type in and save this program and then you can play it. Yeah, I remember playing it on a Trash 80.

but my favorite version of it was a graphical handheld He-Man Masters of the Universe that I had as a kid and it was Hunt the Wampus it was Skeletor was in the other room and you were moving through a 3D maze and He-Man would throw his sword

one screen over but it was on the Wampus just with a little button interface I don't want to play then was an LCD game It was an LCD game Yeah I had it when I was a kid You could probably buy it now for like $5,000

Those LSI and LCD games, they're so expensive now. Wow. The other game is one that I'm not familiar with, Empire by Peter Langston. There is a note from Jared and a note from binge. So I'm going to let you guys take it away. Jared seems familiar with it. I wrote about it in my teletype games article for PCMag, and that's what's written there. Oh, I want to be clear, I'm not familiar with the 72 version in any detail.

The reason I put a note in is because it turns out there are two very similar computer games from the 1970s named Empire. And according to everything I've been able to find out in my very limited skimming around the Internet, which I pretend to call research, these were developed independently. They just happened to be people that built board games in the early 70s around college. And these folks came together and were like, you know, this really complex slow board game could be sped up if we used a computer to do it. Different people and different systems create a different version. The 72 version is the earlier of the two. But the one that I think maybe more people are familiar with today is the latter of the two, made in the later 70s and then ported to everything under the sun, which is still available for download free, and which I still play. You can play.

And the server is online. It is very sieve. Like, it is very, very sift. But, yeah, I put that note there not to confuse, but to try to break some confusion that I've long had that these were the same game. Apparently, even though they play extremely similarly, they are not. They are independent creations with the same name and the same theme. And I thought that was interesting, but that's about all I got.

It's a 4x game. It's a very simple approach to that. You have cities, and from those cities you build units. you use those units to explore, and there's enemies out there. It's all the militaristic elements of SIV without the technology development elements. In fact, when I did a big history of civilization, Sid Meyer's civilization in 2007, I interviewed Sid Meyer and asked him his inspirations, and he said Empire was one of them, this mainframe game.

So it was definitely a direct inspiration on civilization. Apparently, the first version was created by Peter Langford. on an HP 2000 at Evergreen State College in Washington. And I don't know who did the second one, but I do remember there are variations. It's just one of those longest running kind of games. I remember even in the early 90s when I first got into Muds and stuff, there were Empire servers you could get on and start playing these games. And it was just impenetrable to me because it was so complicated.

But some people love that kind of thing. All right. Well, that wraps up for 1972, which actually, And we, and specifically you, had a lot more to say about than I expected. So we're going to take a quick music break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about 1982. And I don't have to ask because I know it's going, because I know it's going last. eternally

the land will tell you wrong with God understanding we're never handing any alibi Oh, and we're back. Oh, we're back. Wasn't that great music. It's your music. was. All right, so we jump forward in time a decade, and so much had happened in that decade. Video games actually began to exist beyond just like a novelty and a curiosity.

So by 1982, not only did we have an industry built around video games, but it was starting to implode like we had gotten that far into video game history. So looking at 1982, there are a few key points that I think we should talk about. First, probably most notably, 1982 was the final wave of new systems released in America for its golden age, the pre-Atari crash era. At the same time, you had Japan and the UK really kind of coming to their own with computer system releases

that were all their own, and these new devices that were launching kind of specific to those regions allowed those countries to have a video games industry that thrived and expanded as America's was contracting and shrinking and dying. At the same time, in the arcades, you had just an absolutely extraordinary showing for some of the big players. Namco especially had an amazing year in 1982. Like any company would be proud to have released Namco's 1982 slate. across their entire lifetime. That was one year for Namco,

but the downside is that you really kind of understand why people were maybe getting sick of video games and there was fatigue and things were starting to implode when you look at how many games were released bearing the name Pac-Man. So, you know, Namco was kind of out there doing great stuff, but also was kind of partly responsible for, running things into the ground. And then finally, as kind of the unrelated side note is media licenses became fully a thing in gaming

in 1982. Like we'd had some media tie-ins going all the way back to what, death race? But 1982 was where it really, like you saw adaptations for basically properties from all different forms of media hit video games. So, Ben, you were going to say. Oh, I was just like speaking of the tendency to run things into the ground in this air, another thing I noticed looking at the games from this year is you would have a game that would be a hit and then you'd have everyone else making their own clones of that game like in the same year, even like, you know, six months later you would have clones and spinoffs of a hit game come out. And so like anything that was popular suddenly like it'd be saturated. Yeah, the instant something looked like it was going to be even a hint of success. You know, even if before, it hit the market. They saw it at the

AMOA. Is that what it was called? The trade show then. Yeah, you had like a Nichi Bitsu or someone out there like let's rip that the hell off and do our own just shameless clone. So yeah, it was you know, that was kind of the, as Benj said earlier, that was kind of the foundation of video games but also bit video games right in the ass. On the other hand, if you walked into an arcade in December of this year.

These games were waiting, the last couple of years worth of incredible games were waiting, and for the first time ever, Thriller was playing through the speakers nonstop above you. It's true. Creating the final, the final, just exclamation point on the end of the perfect 80s arcade experience. I mean, you were playing these video games while wearing roller skates and wearing a red leather jacket with zippers. Yeah, like that was, that was the dream. All right. So instead of having the kind of extended in-depth discussions that we did for 1972 here, what I'd like to do is kind of a rapid fire run-through of things that I've kind of isolated as major releases and events here in 1982. We've broken it up into arcades, consoles, and computers, which I organized these notes. And then I looked at Wikipedia's entry for 1982 in video games.

and this is exactly how they had organized it. So now people are going to be like, oh, they're just reading the Wikipedia article. But no, Wikipedia ripped me off retroactively. Those pastures. Anyway, this just seems like a logical way to do it. Arcades were still, you know, that was the big cheese. Primacy, yeah.

Yeah. So we're going to start with arcades, and I'm going to run through the list. Someone can, like, say one sentence about these games. Maybe it's a run-on, but keep it to one sentence. But then we have a few titles that people have, called out to be something that they want

to talk about in greater depth. So we'll give a couple of minutes to those titles. But anyway, Baby Pac-Man. Does anyone love it? Okay, no one loves it. This was one of the Pac-Man fatigue games developed by Midway, not Namco. This was the one where

it was a bad like Galaxian hardware video game version of Pac-Man integrated into a bad pinball game. It's not very fun in either modes and the combination of two modes do not make it any better. It's just frustrating

and annoying and you know, novelty factor was high I played it quite a few times as a kid but went back and played it as an adult and said wow, both parts of this suck. Black Widow. Just re-released in a really neat new version by the game of the Ding Dong XL

and a beautiful, fun game that I don't think enough folks have tried maybe. Black Widow is really good. Is this a vector game? It was a vector game. Yeah, it's a vector game. By Atari, I believe. It's not as intuitive as a lot of Atari's other games, but it's really fun when you learn the rules. Bubbles.

Never heard of it. I played Bubbles. It's okay. Yeah, that sounds like a good description of it. Bump and Jump. I thought it was fun on the NES port. Yeah. Yeah, it's a racing game and a platformer that's top down.

Yeah, yeah. Uh, burger time. Everyone loves this one. Yeah. Until you scream at it. It's a, um, maybe you still love it. Food sanitation inspector's nightmare because you're stomping all over the burger. You're walking on, you're walking on extremely large burgers to cause them to fall through a platform somehow and create an enormous burger while you're being chased by, I don't know what the logic is behind the creatures here.

There's like pickles and eggs and also a hot dog. It's like the enemies of hamburgers But you put pickles on a hamburger And eggs sometimes And eggs, yeah There's the moon viewing burger The Sugimei Burger from McDonald's in Japan Those are great

It's one that you're kind of surprised Like I guess you said like licensing Was just starting to be a thing But if this had come out later It would have been a license for some fast food restaurant Right? But it's not. It's just burgers Burger King time

Burger time is fun We always had this at the Pizza Hut for some reason It was one of the games To remind you of the food you're not eating You chose pizza. Your parents brai here, but wouldn't you rather have a burger kids? It's hard as all, and I love it. It really is one of the hardest games from this period, but it's so well designed.

You throw pepper at the monster guys. Yeah, it makes them sneeze and they die, I guess. No, they just get stunned. But then you can crush them by dropping a hamburger bun on them. Just crush beneath my buns. There's a fetish side about that. Um, so next next on the list is dig dog and I see Ben has called that out as a deep dive. So give us, give us the deep dive.

I don't know how deep, but, but I think dig dug is, is interesting just in that it was one of the things that was actually seemed like it was putting a new twist on the ubiquitous maze janez genre. So, you know, there's all kinds of single three maze arcade games that, you know, you have some layer, you're going around it, you're driving, you're eating, or whatever. Dig dug like gives you like the beginnings of the, of the maze. makes you create the rest of it, which is really interesting. It was a really fun, fun variation. And then you have these enemies that you can pump up until they explode, which is a kind of gruesome. Unlike a lot of Mace Chase games, you're not helpless.

You're not helpless. You have an offensive capability, but it's very easy to get overwhelmed because you can't just immediately kill an enemy. You have to hit them, you know, like five times to cause them to explode. And they have movement options that you don't have. They can move diagonally through the undug dirt and then pop up somewhere else in your tunnels. But you also have other options. You can also, like giant hamburger buns, you can crush them by digging under a rock and making it fall on them. You get bonuses for like chaining them. So there's

a lot of options in how you approach it, which is pretty cool. And it's just a nice looking and sounding game, too. This was one of the ones that, um, some people may have seen, uh, Mr. Hiroshi Ono, uh, who was also known as Mr. Dotman. Um, is in Japan and it was what we call pixel graphics. they called Dot Graphics. He just died earlier this year, so there were some tributes put out to him. But he did all the player and enemy graphics for this game. Yeah, there's a funny anecdote that's a, I'm spoiling this maybe. It's, there was an interview that Riki, that a game developed,

the Doge and game developer conducted with Mr. Dotman and is included in the limited run games release of Kira Kira Star Knight Deluxe, I believe, because he helped design some of the pixel graphics for that. but he talked about how in the original DigDug, uh, digdug's eyes like his goggles are blue, but in DigDug 2, their flesh color.

And he was like, you know, the thing that I came up with in my head is that in DigDug, you're underground. So he's like suffocating, but he's a club ground in DigDug 2. So that's why he's not blue. Oh God.

So he put a lot of like really random thought into the art he created. But yeah, DigDug is a game that anytime I see it in an arcade, I have to put in a quarter and play it. and I'm really happy that quarter arcades from Numskull created a dig-dug game that's like a great recreation of the arcade machine, very fun. One of my favorites. You actually played, I played original Dig-Dug not that long ago because it was showed up in,

God, I think one of the times they've, there's people who put together a little arcade for DragonCon. I think it was in there. And actually, I think it's in one of the arcades in Durham also, has a Dig-Dug cabinet. There was a clone of Dig-Dug for the Atari 800 called Anteater. that was programmed by a guy I just talked to yesterday, Ed Freeze, formerly of Microsoft. I was talking to him about the Xbox. And I was just like, finally I got to talk to you about Anteater.

So great. Anyway, it got a lot of guys started, you know, writing clones for the software. Like Sid Meier made a Space Invaders clone on the Atari 800. Yeah, and this is one of the ones I was talking about that was like it was a big success and it was immediately cloned everywhere. Like there was another game called ZigZag that also came out. in 1982. There was Anteter. Mr. Doe was a big expansion for it, like an expansion upon the ideas. That also came out in 1982. And so, you know, it was very quickly everywhere. Digdug is one of my favorite arcade games, but something it does that I've seen. And almost nothing else

is that dig Doug's music is dependent on your movement. I love that. It's musical walking. The music, yeah. If you're moving, the music starts playing. And when you stop, the music stops. And when you move, it picks up where it left. And I don't know why that works so well, but it does. It helps it just like this fun, like kind of bluegrass thing. Deter, da-da-da-d-d-d-d-d-d-ding. Yeah. I actually heard something about that.

So evidently the composer for the game was Yureko Cano, and she was told to make some sound effect for the character moving, and she couldn't come up with a, like, walking sound that she was happy with, and so she went with the melody instead. I want more games where music plays when I walk around That's cool It's like Philipp's Here Comes a Special Boy Shoes Okay, so moving on We're we don't have a lot of time

So I'm going to even edit this list down a little bit Donkey Kong Jr, the inferior sequel to Donkey Kong Frontline, notable because it's basically the template for games like Commando, top-down shooters, Ikari Warriors, that sort of thing. Kind of primitive from Taito, but it was a good idea. Journey Escape, anyone has actually played this? I have. One of the license games of this year, this is, you know, a new medium rock band.

Yeah. And another place where Ralph Baer had a patent for the digitized faces in Journey Escape. Yeah. Yeah. I have the 2,600 version of this game. I feel like it probably loses something in translation. Yeah, it does. Although the single loop of,

the single journey loop in the 2600 is impressive for its limited sound capabilities. For some reason, I have five copies of it. No idea of one. If anybody wants one, just write me a letter. One for each band member. There you go. Next up is Joust,

which Benj has highlighted to talk about. So, Benj, take it away. You're a look. I don't have to go deep dive. I just wanted to say how much I love Joust, because it's a fun game. It's made by Williams, I think, and... Yeah, designed by John Newcomer. Yeah, John Newcomer, and it's really neat

because it has unique mechanics for the time, I feel like, you know, you're on the back of an ostrich, I think, the first player, and you have to keep flapping the button, pushing the button to flap your wings, or you just fall like a rock to the ground. There's a big inertia element in the play control, which I feel like is inherent from,

maybe from some of the early, you know, space combat stuff, But it adds like a gravitational constant inertia, but also gravity, yeah. Yeah, so there's a lot of left-right inertia and the gravity pulling you. So you're fighting against that the whole time. But once you really master it, you can sort of like soar and time the beats of your wings to really fall at the right time to hit the other guys on the head and knock them off their mounts that are flying around. And then you gather their eggs so they don't hatch again and turn into another. But then you've got the lava troll who will grab your ostrich's legs and pull you into the lava unless you, pump away and get away. It's terrifying. And then that vicious

pterodactyl that you can stab in the throat. It has a one pixel, one pixel, uh, vulnerable point. Um, but then also, you know, the, the landscape changes as you play. You know, initially the bottom of the screen is safe ground. But after a few rounds, the lava burns away the bridges that connect everything. So there's just like limited spaces where you can land. And, you know, that's when the lava troll comes out. So, you know, it gets harder the longer you play. But it also gets, gives you those bonus opportunities, the rounds where it's just like the egg wave, and you can go break all the eggs before the enemy knights show up.

So it kind of has that, like, flow the same as Gallego, which we'll talk about. It's also got that thing going on, that Super Mario, or pardon me, that Mario Brothers does, where you're sort of cooperating, but really, you're not. Right. With the other player. And you play two players, yep. I like the two-player simultaneous thing. I as a kid I got you know the 7800 version of Atari 7800 version of Jouse is really good port done by general computer and it's I played it for hours and hours with one of my brother's friends and we just had a blast so I love the yeah that like frenemies co-op competition thing going on if you the way you just described it with the stage is changing the pieces dropping away some of the platforms disappearing it's a really beautiful pure

piece of game design and such a limited, like, with such limited technology at the time, they really did an amazing job with them. And it taught us to call our schoolyard chum's buzzard brain. Hmm. Let's see. Jungle Hunt, a game that did not license media content and got in trouble for imitating the Tarzan y'all. Kang, maybe the best Donkey Kong ripoff?

I'm going to go with Burger Time for that for Best Donkey Kong ripoff. There's no platforming. Burger time. You're not jumping. You're not jumping, but you're going up and going up. I feel like that's an essential part of Donkey Kong. That defines Mario. He is jump man.

He is Jeremy's side. LaserDisc games made their debut with something called Quarter Horse. That's unfortunate. It's a big horse that you put quarters in. That's right. Yep, it's like the little things outside the supermarket. Locomotion,

which was also known as Gatangatang. Yes. And it's kind of... What's that? Was it a Sega game? I believe so, yes. And it's kind of the basis of like those, you know, pipe dream and that's that sort of game. Millipede, the fancier sequel to Cinepeed, but not as good.

Yep. All right. Moon Patrol is one that I wanted to call out because as a game, it's not that amazing. It's kind of an early take on the Inless Runner where you're forward scrolling. You're in a little moon buggy on the surface of the moon. The moon surface is uneven. You have to jump over pits. At the same time, there are flying saucers.

there's a fly overhead and you can fire forward and up and destroy them. But it's notable because its designer, Takashi Nishiyama, a.k.k.a. Pistin Takashi would go on to basically create fighting games. His next game of note was Kung Fu, and after that he created Trojan, and after that he created Street Fighter, and after that he created King of Fighters. So I feel like even though Moon Patrol is very different stylistically and thematically from those fighting games, there are some very important concepts that, you know, you really kind of see trickle into his later games. Like Kung Fu is a game about forward motion. Here in Moon Patrol, it's forced forward motion. In Kung Fu, you have to move forward while also shaking off enemies from behind you.

but really the idea of attacking, dealing with enemies and threats at two different levels is really essential to Kung Fu, and that, you know, gave us the street fighter design where you have standing punches and kicks and crouching punches and kicks. Here, you know, you have like forward shots and threats on the ground, and then you have aerial shots. So even though you're shooting at like 90 degree angles, there's still this kind of concept of managing two tiers of threats and then you know you turn that into something that a human's managing a human character has to deal with and that becomes high and low attacks and so you know like these are

it's a very tenuous connection but you really do look at this and and you kind of look at how his games evolved his catalog and you're like you know i kind of get it i kind of see how he would kind of distill some of these elements from Moon Patrol into a brawler, like a belt scroller, and then how that would become a fighting game. No, I can't agree with you enough. I played a lot of this as a kid. There was a Moon Patrol in our local bowling alley, and it was my go-to. And, yeah, you deal with threats either by jumping, shooting forward, or shooting up,

and those threats quickly mixed. I think you have absolutely nailed it. That philosophy runs through all those games, and I would not have thought of that in a million years still you brought it up. Very clever, my friend. I also play the heck out of Moon Patrol on the Apple IIs at school. It was just an addictive game. Like, it's fairly simple, but it does the ramp up expertly.

That was a good version, too. I remember Apple 2 in Patrol. And Jungle Hunt, we played on Apple 2's for some reason, poor of that. All right. Next up, Ms. Pac-Man, which binge has again earmarked. Yeah. So about 2012, I was going to do like a big 30th anniversary article

about Ms. Pac-Man. So I interviewed everybody who created it. None of whom were at Namco. Yeah, they're all Americans. General Computer Corporation in I think Cambridge, Massachusetts, or thereabouts. And they started by

making arcade game hacks for missile command and got in trouble with Atari and then got, you know, worked out a deal with them. And then they made a hack for Pac-Man called Crazy Auto at first, and that turned into Miss Pac-Man. And so Miss Pac-Man has some differences like the, I think the Ghost AI is a little different.

Yeah, it's not all pattern-based. It's more dynamic. Yeah, it's more dynamic. And the mazes change, unlike Pac-Man, which was the really big thing. So, you know, the whole story about how that came to be, I put together in a giant oral history that's a fast company. It's something like how the MIT dropouts created. uh miss pacman and so it's a fascinating story because it's this weird it's a like a story of of like gumption and renegadeness i don't know what's the right word like it's it's these young

college age american kids who are so damn smart and so clever that they could um deal with these giant companies relatively speaking and and convince them to let them license it was it was a fan hack yeah that got picked up and became an official game but they were so careful about how they did it. They learned a lesson with missile command. So they really went out of their way to create a legally justifiable hack by making it a board add-on, something that you didn't, you know, it wasn't meant to replace Ms. Pac-Man or break. It wasn't meant to be pirated. It was designed to be sold and then legitimately attached without any kind of legal ramification. And I think that was really smart of them because it allowed them to

work with Namco once, once things did eventually come together on that. And yeah, I got to talk with Steve Goulson too once, and it was just so impressive. You could still see that youthful enthusiasm there behind it. He was just so proud of that work, humble, but really, really proud of what they pulled off as a bunch of college kids. Yeah, Steve Goulson is a really great guy. I recommend he did some talk at some point after I interviewed him, too, about how they made Ms. Pac-Man. It's really good. And one thing that you said about that, which is interesting, is according to the creators of Ms. Pac-Man,

they told me that there is a Pac-Man board in every Miss Pac-Man. And in fact, it has the original Pac-Man ROMs because it just piggybacks on it. So if you take off the Miss Pac-Man in any official Miss Pac-Man machine that was created in the original run, it could also be a Pac-Man game. Interesting. Yep. Also, in 1982, we had Pac-Man Plus, which wasn't as good as Miss Pac-Man. We had Pingo, which is an interesting take on the maze chase in which you could weaponize the maze against your enemies, kicking pieces of the maze at the things that are trying to attack you, which is awesome. Pole position, kind of an expansion on Sega's turbo

with a behind the car perspective, very impressive graphics, very challenging gameplay. Good stuff. Popeye, anyone want to talk about this one? Not the new one on Switch, which is poop, but the original arcade version. It was gorgeous, played a lot of it, hard as all. Didn't look like anything else in the arcade at the time.

They used a really unique high-resolution mode for the character sprites, that looked like actual cartoons and the backgrounds are like abstract blocks. It's really kind of weird, but between the detail of the sprites and the kind of visceral effects of like punching things and getting hit and make, like, it makes the screen shake.

It just feels so physical. It's a really impressive piece of work. It's not as good a game as like Papa or Donkey Kong, but it's still very cool and very impressive looking. It's beautiful. It was one. one of the first, like, what you would call a high-resolution arcade game at the time, like compared to what was out there.

I don't remember the exact resolution. I wrote about it in one of my resolution articles, whatever it was. Yeah, it was probably like 448 by 512 pixels, but from the background graphics were super low-res. Man, we're running low in time, even rushing through all this stuff. God dang it. But we can't skip Cuber. We can't skip Cuber. Cuber's fun.

3D game. Yeah, it's like, I mean, like in concept, it's like the maze chase games and that you're trying to cover all the ground while avoiding the enemies. So like you describe it that way, it's the same as Pac-Man. But turning it into this like stack of isometric blocks just kind of makes it a very different mental challenge in terms of mapping out where you're going on. Especially when you start encountering enemies that jump on like the other faces of the blocks, which is really mind-bending. And when you lose your little character curses with a little abstract cartoon cloud of obscenities. Yeah, it's a great character.

Best part is the cursing. It's such a great area of control. game, the secret prequel to Splatoon, I think. You know, covering areas in color and I love it. All right. Robotwan, Robotron 2084, Jared. Video game, colon, the video game.

I think this is the perfect arcade game. It took nearly, actually, it took more than 20 years for people to realize, oh, twin stick shooters, what a great idea. You wouldn't get that until the free bonus with Project Gotham Racing for the Xbox 360 launch in 2005.

Followed closely by, I made a game with zombies in it. Followed closely by everything. Yeah, exactly. And what was that? Geometry Wars. Geometry Wars. I feel like that really revived that kind of. Yeah.

But yeah, that's what Robotron is. Not the first twin stick. That was probably, you know, maybe space dungeon. But just such a beautiful game, you pop in. Everything tries to kill you except a few people you try to rescue. If you're going to get a high score, you've got to rescue them. So you can't just shoot. You're chasing things while you shoot. The second you kill everything, the screen resets and something more deadly gets thrown at you. And it's gorgeous and perfect.

There's nothing I changed about this game. I got to go to the GDC Post Mort on this. And it really is one of those games where they just started with an idea and they kept iterating to it was fine. It was Eugene Jarvis. It was basically one guy. Yeah. And who also created Defender. Like, that guy was on fire. He's okay. He's okay that. Eugene Garvers. And I've made some really cool joysticks to play Robitron with twin sticks on Atari's and stuff. Oh, yeah, yeah, I need one of those, the 7800 controller. Because the 7800 version is really good, but trying to use those 7800 controllers is really bad. It is so good. It's called the BX-85. That's the moment.

I got to play the original cabinet of Robitron on a cruise boat of all things, but I got on the high score list because there weren't that many people on there. All right. All right. Ben, why did you call it the 85? Because the 7800 was supposed to launch in 84 and actually shipped in 86. So, like, that's either side. You landed right in the middle. Well, the BX80 was my first Atari joystick because the CX 40 was the Atari original Atari joystick. And I think, okay, BX instead of CX, because it's binge, 80 instead of 40, because it's twice as good. And so 85 was just the next model I made with twin sticks. I see. That's the second one. Interesting. All right. Super Pac-Man, proof that even Namco could make a bad Pac-Man game. Tron. Ben?

I like Super Pac-Man. I love it. Okay. Super Pac-Man's boring. I think it's underrated and misunderstood. I understand it. It's not very good. But you get to turn gigantic.

You don't. You just fly above the maze. Yeah, I didn't understand that. Yeah, it's very, it's, it just doesn't quite land the concepts. I still love it. Okay, that's fine. That's fair. I mean, I like some really bad video games too, so.

Yeah. You do. I do. I just kidding. That's right. especially Zavius, but we'll get to that. Tron. So Tron is kind of a weird one.

In some ways, I feel like it's a missed opportunity. So this is from Valley Midway. And apparently when they were making this, this of course was one of the media tie ends, because obviously Tron the movie. And they had apparently two teams pitching ideas, and one team was pitching a vector graphics game, which could have been super awesome.

but Bally was worried that basically they wouldn't be able to get it out in time because you have to tie into the movie. So they went with the other team, which basically did a bunch of minigames, which is what we got. So I see her kind of wishing we got the like Vector Star Wars version of Tron because that would be super, super cool. But what we got is interesting too.

It's this collection of four mini games. And some of them are pretty clunky. But you do have like twin sticks up on something. that you can both move and aim with this weird little sprite of Tron that looks pretty goofy as he, like, moves his arm around in the direction you're aiming your disc. So there's one where you, like, fight gridbugs and try to get in a portal. There's one where you shoot the shield surrounding the MCP and try to get into the MCP. Then there's a tank game, which is basically just a maze game tank.

Yeah, it's combat. And then what's the other one? Light cycles? Light cycles, of course. The big one. The big one. The big one. The most important.

But, yeah. So they just threw all these together. And one interesting thing is you start out. You have to go one of four directions to pick one of these games. And you don't know which is which. It's actually randomized until you, like, play a game. And if you die in it, then you know which direction is. You can try it again.

And you try to get through all of them to advance through the levels. But it's got a lot of ideas in it. It's a little clunky all put together. It's got nice tron music. And the control stick, like the whole cabinet is so cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It comes in this big cabinet. It has like a light up stick.

Yeah, it glows. And the fact that you have a stick with a trigger and then a spinner. Like, those your controls. How many other games do that? It's really, really a weird, rare control scheme. Yeah, yeah. Is it an analog joystick in the arcade or is it just an eight-way? I think it's just a way.

I think it's eight-way. I have a, like, they've made home versions of that tron stick that are blue for Atari, you know, just to be, to tie in with it. Yeah, and there was actually, apparently there was originally supposed to be a fifth mini-gang, which is disks. which became a sequel game, its own separate sequel game, Dissootron, which evidently did not do very well by itself. The Disso Tron environmental cabinet is one of those beautiful things ever. Yeah, the stand-up environmental is an unreal. Is that the one you go inside of a thing?

Because I went in one in an arcade, a Tron machine where you were like in it or something. Yeah, that's the full-sized disc of Tron. Which is amazing. Before we go past Tron, I got to ask, I don't know this, but was the light cycle thing invented in the movie? And then it became the video game. Like, because they play, they have light cycles and they're cutting each other off in the film, you know? And did they invent that game for the film?

Or was there any precedent to that that you know of? I mean, Snake already existed. Yeah, Snake existed. So they probably just kind of looked at that concept and were like, and they probably were inspired by Pac-Man also, the idea of like a maze. But you're creating the maze. Yeah, I think snake concepts going back to 1976. So, yeah, the Atari had surround well before then. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right, next up is Zevius. And, you know, with the video, and, you know, with the videos that And, you know, with the videos that I've been producing over the years and retinauts here, it seems like there are just kind of these memetic games where it, for whatever reason, like, they just keep coming up as reference points, as inspirations, you know, it was Hey, Ankyo Alien for a while. And I haven't really come across anything in a while that's super, you know, owes a lot to Heyonchio Alien. But then it was Tower of Duraga. And I kind of feel like, you know, the work that I've been doing, I haven't come across anything in a while that owes a lot to Tower of Duraga. But I've been doing a lot of videos on consoles in Japan, 1983, 84, 85. And I feel like half the games that we're looking at were just straight up inspired by Zebius. And one thing that's, I find really fascinating is that when you look at developer interviews with people who are making games in this time, all of them cite Zebius. I mean, I, you know, just recently put together a video on the game Life Force for NES.

And the inspiration for Life Force and Grades before that was that Konami's designers looked at Zevius and said, we need to create a game that surpasses this. So they created Gradius. You know, one of those Riki interviews that we translated and put in the limited run collector's editions of the NES trilogy that he produced, One of those interviews is with Yuzo Koshiro, the very respected and still active composer. And one of the anecdotes he shared was that he became a huge game fanatic early on, you know, adopted the Famicom right from the start and was deeply in love with Zevius. And when he heard that Zevius was coming to Famicom, like he still remembers where he was.

how he felt that day. Decades and decades later. Another example was Fujio Mitsugi, the creator of Bubble Bobble, who joined Taito in the mid-80s and felt that Taito's games were very stale. And he looked specifically at Zevius

and said, we need to create something, you know, great like this. Like he became a game addict because of Zevius, and that was kind of his touch. Stone, and somehow that turned into bubble-bobble. It's just over and over Japanese game devs from that era will come back and talk about how much they loved Zevius.

And over here, that game may as well not even exist. Like when you talk about it, either people are indifferent or they're like, oh, that game sucks. You know, when they released it, Arrika put together the 3D classics version for 3DS, which apparently was very difficult to do because the game, you know, was not to be. designed for that 3D visualization, but it's perfect. It's a perfect choice because it's a top down shooter where you fight enemies in the air and you also have a bomb that can hit ground-based enemies. So it's like this really cool dual layer, dual threat system where you have enemies

that can attack you from two different layers and, you know, they each act differently. They have different kinds of behavior. Like that was perfect for 3D. And in Japan, it made perfect sense. But here people were like, why would they waste a slot of 3D classics for this when we could have gotten like Super Mario or something. And, you know, people I think mostly know Zevius from the NES version, which was good, but it was originally released in Japan in 1984 and came out here four years later where we had stuff like Life Force and Legendary Wings. You know, Gratis had been out for a couple of years.

Like, it just wasn't that impressive looking by that standard. And so it's this huge, like one of the biggest cultural disconnects of this game that is absolutely enormous in Japan, so influential, so foundational. And here is just like a little tiny blip on the radar that no one cares about. And that's weird to me, because when I saw it in the arcades in 1982 or so, I was like, oh my God, this game is so cool. And I loved it, but I only saw it once or twice. So it just stuck with me. And I remember, like, you know, every once in a while, I would encounter it in arcades and I would just be like, I have to play this. It was really just a masterpiece of game design by Namco, and specifically by Masanobu Indo,

who would then go on to create Tarragha and other games. It's this great synthesis of shooting action, sound design, music. The visuals are really unique. They look almost pre-rendered with great shadowing effects on the enemies. Really cool landscapes that are scrolling beneath you. There's dynamic difficulty. The longer you survive, the stronger and more powerful and deadlier the enemies become. When you die, they kind of reset and go back away.

There's bosses with the Andor Genesis motherships that you can, you know, they look like they're aerial enemies, but you can only defeat them by bombing their core. It's just got all these great ideas and it's full of secrets and it's just really, really distinct and it looked like nothing else in arcades at the time. And yeah, it was, it was huge, huge, huge in Japanese arcades. You know, I've been watching a lot of vintage Japanese anime from the 80s and you'll kind constantly see characters playing what is very clearly zevious, like Kima Gray Orange Road, Megazone 23, like I just keep seeing it come up over and over. It's such an important game and

it just like no one here cares about it. And that's just really, really fascinating to me. Anyway, I've just stream of consciousness about this for five minutes and I apologize for that. But this game is really good and I love it and it's super important. And I wish more Americans understood like just the significance of this game. No, I'm dying of joy here. I lived in Washington, D.C. during this time, and the arcade scene there wasn't what you were going to find in a place like New York, but there were still plenty of great arcades. And I had a local Zavius and loved shoot-em-ups as a kid. I thought they were just, those were the kind. I was playing Phoenix, and I was playing Gallagher. And then there was this one that was, unlike everything else, which was that stark black arcade look. Instead, it's animated,

and there's music, and things are literally like the cartooned. flipping at you, and there's that two-playing combat where you're dropping bombs and you've got the guy. And it was just, I played so much Zevius as a kid. And so this is, I'm really delighting in hearing this, this wonderful exposition from me here. I agree with you. There was a disconnect. I didn't, as a child, have any clue that this was a cultural phenomenon in Japan, and I wouldn't know that for much longer in my life. But as a kid, if I had a choice to play any shooter, Zevius, was generally what I gravitated toward because it looked and sounded so much more sophisticated than anything else that was around at the time. And it was that way for many

years, really until the 1940, really until about 1943 came out. I think that's the first one that reminded me of Zevius where I was like, oh, okay, maybe Tiger Heli. I played a lot of that too. Tiger Heli is straight up Zevius clone. Yeah, totally. And absolutely loved that. The other Zevius anecdote that I always think of when I think of that game is the wonderful Game Center CX series of segments where they leave Zevius running on a Famicom for months with the turbo button taped down and the ship in a safe position where you can't be hit. And just every few days, they have a camera on it all the time. They will come in and check to see how much more glitchy the game is because it's gone on without stopping. And they just do that all season long. It's a beautiful, beautiful gentleman.

That's awesome. Wasn't it the first shooter with a scrolling background, basically? Well, I mean, Gallagher had a scrolling background, but it was just an abstract starfield, whereas this was, this was like a landscape. Yeah. So I believe so. The first one you could interact with for sure. Yeah, definitely that. But I mean, there's like, there's detail in the landscape.

You go through, you know, past roads and then past lakes, and then there's NASCAR lines and then like a desert. and then you finally reach Andor Genesis and it all starts over again. Yeah, I think it's, it's Riverades contemporaneous. That's a home game, of course, but that also has distinctive environments like that. But it's certainly one of the earliest. All right, two more arcade games. And then actually, we got to put a, put a, a bow on this one and carry forward the

consoles and computers of 82 into the 92 episode. It's just all falling apart. I did my best, I did my best, but I didn't expect so much great information about 1972 stuff. I thought that would be like a 10 minute conversation. Haven't you learned by now? Binge had to bring it. We tried to tell you.

You're usually so quiet. You're usually like, you say a sentence or two and then you're like, yeah, I'm done. But this time, you were like, it's my moment to shine and you waxed eloquent in ways that I did not expect. I'm gratified. but also we're not going to get to consoles and computers. Oh, well.

The TimeX-Sinclair 1,000 weeps. The Adventure Vision. I want to talk about alpiner. So we'll have to talk about it next time. I did want to say Xaxon, kind of the shooter equivalent of Cubert, I guess. Those isometric graphics really created a convincing illusion of 3D. I touched on this in one of the videos I produced earlier this year,

but Zavius and Zaxon are like two different faces of the same coin. How do you depict the third dimension in a 2D video game space? With Zavius, it's here is a strict top-down, like two-dimensional perspective, but there is depth underneath your ship. Like you are passing over the ground, and the ground is an interactive component that you interact with separately than aerial enemies. But Zaxon is like, no, actually, you're looking at everything from kind of a skewed perspective and you have to

worry about your lateral movement but also your altitude and enemies are attacking you from the front and from below and you have to navigate you know barriers and walls and things like that so it's a beautiful game too it blew me away when I saw it at an arcade in

where was it in Galenburg yes it was in Galenburg is that where you wasted a quarter running into the wall the same the same wall every time because you didn't get the stick was reversed yeah I hate I hate that darn wall. I thought the game was broken the first time I played it. I was like, you know, six or seven years old, and I was so sad because my quarter, I wasted it.

Yeah. But it blew me away anyway, just the fact that you could go up and down and left and right, and it's like, oh, my God. I don't know if it's because I played a lot of computer games from very young, and there were flight games, but the inverse controls on Zaxon made sense to my brain pretty early on. And so I really got to, that's another one I played a lot of it in terms of impressive shooters. and really, really enjoyed it. But I'm not sure I really ever understood how truly novel it was with that depth approach

until, as a kid, I bought the Zaxon board game. I was so into it. And the little pieces on the Zaxon board game of your plane, of your jet, have a built-in elevation function. And the game was all about being at different elevations to go over the little physical walls that came with it. And then I was just like, wow, I get it.

That's why this game is special. but it took the board game to help me and understand that. That's neat. I had the Pac-Man board game. That's as close as I got. I like that. With the marbles. Yeah, with the marbles and little like the, yeah, it was kind of like hungry, hungry hippies or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, shout out to the Centipede and the Zaxon board games, which were both really high quality. They were great. It's neat. All right. And finally, there's Zoom 909, which is an interesting game also from Sega, like Zaxon, that is not nearly as impressive. but it is interesting because it had these varied incarnations. In the arcades, there was the standard shooter version,

and then there was like a laser disc version that had streaming backgrounds that you would fly over. And then also it came out on some platforms as Buck Rogers Planet of Zoom. That's how both Zaxon and Buck Rogers Planet of Zoom I experienced on Colico Vision, Calico Adam, and played a lot of those. I just recently, as a matter of fact,

as of this recording, this past week I published two days ago, no yesterday, actually, a Sega retrospective on the SG-1000 version of Zoom 909, which is not as good as the Kligo-Vision version, even though they are the same hardware. Well, it's because it wasn't a super game, Jeremy. It wasn't the Buck Rogers Planet of Zoom super game, which did take advantage of the Kligo-Vision's extra 64K of RAM, which is why I think that. There you go. I will say, to Zoom 909's credit, it doesn't have any loading times from tape.

But the real problem with Zoom 909 on SG-1000 is they added an extra level to it, which is nothing like any other level. It's a top-down level where you're surrounded. It's got inertia like asteroids and you're surrounded by hazards. And basically, it's impossible not to die, which really sucks the fun out of it. But otherwise, it's a pretty cool game, very inspired by Star Wars, you know, the Death Star Run, the Trench Run, that kind of thing. Um, not, not as good. But still, you know, they tied it to Buck Rogers. So I guess it's fair that Star Wars ripped off Buck Rogers and then the Buck

Rogers game ripped off Star Wars. Bitty, baby, baby. Yep, exactly. Yeah. Just the circle of life. Exactly. The circle of game development and clones. That's how it all began.

That's how it will all end with another Fortnite clone. Um, so I think that wraps it up. We've all got things to do, places to go, stuff to see, et cetera, et cetera. So we didn't make it through all of 82 like I thought we would. And I'm honestly surprised. Like, I swore at lunch that we would get through this. And yet, here we are. I don't know how it happened.

But every year we just get more passionate and informed and intelligent. We're just so cool and sexy that we can't help. But I don't know. Anyway, it just happens. Yeah. Well, you got, I mean, it's nice to have a place where I can finally talk about that 10 years of research. No, absolutely. I mean, the 72 section is, like, that's one of the best and most informative segments we've ever recorded.

So thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Yes. So, actually, Ben, where can we find you on the Internet? Oh, boy. Right now, I am an associate editor at How To Geek.

I write history articles every Friday. My next one is going to be about the Xbox 20th anniversary, which by the time you read this will be, you know, several months ago. And, I mean, you hear this, not read it. And I am also on Twitter at Benj Edwards, and I run Vintagecomputing.com, and that's me. The other JP, where can we find you on my mind? I host the Top 100 Games Podcast, which you can find on pretty much any place you'll listen to podcasts, and just look for Top 100 Games podcast. Every week we have a different guest come on, and we're counting down from 100 to 1,

the 100 best games of all time. What criterion is that entirely up to the guest? They pick, and then we just talk about it. It's really just an excuse to gush about video games we love in a structureless and pointless way. Also, when not doing that, I'm making books at Limited Run Games and working for Jeremy. Aren't you making a podcast there, too? I do make a podcast there at Limited Run Games. Run Time, the Limited Run Games podcast, which you could find on Apple Podcasts on our blog at Limiturgames.com.

And now, for the first time, on Stitcher, available on that, as well as some other nice spots. See, there we go. Synergy. All right. Ben, how about you? Ben Elgin, you can find me on Twitter at K-I-R-I-N, where you can see what beer I checked in recently, maybe something else occasionally. I like that you say you're Kieran, not a beer, and yet. And yet.

Well, I am not currently running any podcasts. I don't know. I don't know what's wrong with me, but I don't know. You have one of those balanced lives, huh? If you need any desktop CNC milling done, check out my day job at Bantam Tools. I do. You do. That's true.

I tell you that every time. You know where to find them. Yeah. Yeah, I know. And finally, oh, sorry. I was just going to say, it's just that they cost like a lot of money. But they're nice machines. They are.

Finally, hi, I'm Jeremy Parrish. You can find Retronauts's podcast that I'm hosting right now at Retronauts.com on various podcast services, excluding Spotify because yuck you can find us publishing every Monday and then every other Friday we also publish a bonus episode exclusively for our patrons at patreon.com slash retronauts

this is how we support this addiction the addiction of you listening to us talk about video game history you fund this podcast and we make episodes go to patreon.com slash retronauts and subscribe for three bucks a month you'll get every episode early

with no advertisements and at a higher bit rate quality for five bucks a month you also get the bonus Friday episodes every other week and every weekend you get a column and mini podcast by Diamond Fight

you get Discord access it's a fine fine deal and I highly recommend it you can also find me personally Jeremy Parrish at GameSpite on Twitter and on YouTube as Jeremy Parrish and at limited rungames.com

doing stuff with Jared. So anyway, that was it for this first look back at the years ending in two. And there will be more of these to come because we've got to do 92 and also the rest of 82. I'm sure Bob will do 2002. And who knows about 2012? I don't know if I'm ready to deal with that being retro yet. So we might skip that one. These are getting harder to do as we get older than time advances. It's getting painful. It's painful, yeah. We've got to bring up a young retro blood. I really don't want to know what came out in 2012 right now. So please

continue to enjoy the discussions of older things. Thank you Benj, Ben, and Jared, and thank you listeners for making this possible. I hope your ears have been satisfied. Good night. I'm going to be able to be.