Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 91: Retronauts East - SEGA's golden arcade era, pt. 1

Episode Date: March 20, 2017

Ben Elgin and Benj Edwards reconvene with Jeremy to explore the first half of SEGA's arcade output. Like the games we're discussing, the episode starts off a bit shaky, but everything is awesome by 1985. Pengo! Zaxxon! Space Harrier! Hang On! And more!

This week in Retronauts, Sega. Wow, that sounded just like the real thing, just like the real thing, just like the arcades. It's just like the really poorly sample SIGA Master System version of that. Anyway, hi, everyone. Welcome to the delightful second episode of Retronauts East. I am your host, Jeremy Parrish, and with me this week, as last time, we have... Ben Jedwards. Who is what?

A person who writes about video game history. That's so specific. Thank you. Thank you for that. Benjedwards.com. And also... Ben Elgin. an old guy who played video games and has a master's in computer science.

That's exciting. Okay. So we are here this week to talk about, yes, old video games. And I said, you know, Retronauts East was going to be a chance to explore things that are new for the show and also new for us. So this week we're looking at the vintage days, the golden age of Sega in the arcade, which is basically everything from 1980 through 1987 or so. I think all of us have played some of these games, but I don't think any of us has played all of them. Some of them are pretty obscure. But we're going to look at Sega kind of where they started from. Of course, Sega, you know, was founded in the 1950s by an American working in Japan by the name of David Rosen as service games. And they started out, you know, making arcade amusements, not video games, because no one made video games in the 1950s. That's just crazy talk. but they did I know someone who did did you yeah do you

who was that that's for my book oh I'm gonna spoil it here someone some time traveler yeah traveled back in time

and was like I'm gonna make a moba here in 1950 there's a lot people don't know about early video game history I see on an oscilloscope

yeah before oscilloscopes just playing on our radar screen I guess I wasn't a silo never mind World War II was like a great big

video game watching those little blips fly and sending up the fighters to scramble that's the way they thought of it was toys the life same with the Cold War was exciting with the missile defense they're playing missile command exactly so yeah anyway that's that's kind of the basics of Sega we all know this story but over the course of the

70s like many amusement companies they worked their way into the arcades the arcade video games naturally transitioning from things like shooting gallery toys and pinball games. I don't know if they actually made that many pinball games, but I don't know. Whatever the stuff they made in the mechanical electromechanical era was. And then sort of bringing in the video games.

And they did their obligatory pawn clones and Grand Track 15 clones and Space Invaders clones. And there's not really that much exciting about Sega in the 1970s. There are some interesting little novelties they created. They made

a game called Duck Hunt. Did you know that? It was before Nintendo's. But really, we want to look ahead to 1980, where things really start to consolidate. By 1980, you know, you had the space invader boom in Japan, and that sort of culminated in the development of Galaxian by Namco, which was the first color arcade hardware, full-color arcade hardware. And that's really when things started to take off. So we're going to look ahead to 1980. We're going to look at things like trends in game design at Sega,

the influences that we can see in Sega's games, the influences that Sega exerted upon others and innovative ideas that kind of predate big breakthrough hits. There's a lot of sort of revolutionary games that Sega created, but that didn't necessarily catch on or that didn't quite come together the way they should have. I don't think the company really hit its stride as an arcade maker until around 1985 or six.

And that's when, like, those are the games that everyone really remembers. Before that, there's a lot of really interesting stuff, but nothing that is a huge breakout on the level of a Pac-Man or a Galaga or a Dragon's Lair or whatever. Although they certainly try their hand in a lot of those things. So without further ado, let's look at 1980 with a game that you guys may have heard of, which was Pro Monaco GP. Are you familiar with this game at all?

Are you asking me? Or everybody? Anyone. I've heard. I haven't had a chance to actually actually. play it. But yeah, from looking at the sort of layout of it has the thing that a lot of, I think, the really old arcade stuff has where it has these external and analog elements sort of like a pinball game where you have different readouts and different inputs. It's not just, you know,

one screen and one set of controls. Yeah, this game is, it's kind of a weird, like you said, sort of vestige of that, you know, electro-mechanical era where, you know, pinball machines and that sort of thing would have, like, actual readouts outside of the game play space, sort of built into the arcade hardware. And you see that here with, what is there? God, there's a ton of stuff on the side. There's a separate LED readout.

Yeah, there's like for rankings and score. Is it an analog speedometer, too? Really? Yeah, there's like crazy, just all kinds of crazy stuff. That's amazing. I want to play this game now. I've never played it. It does look cool.

I've never actually been in the presence of a cabinet for it. Yeah, this is, I've never seen the real cabinet for this. And now I really want to after researching this episode because the actual physicality of the arcade cabinet, I think. That was something Sega really invested in pretty heavily was making their games, their arcade games. their arcade games awesome. Like After Burner. We'll get to that. Yeah, we'll get them.

Even that 3D subgame. Yeah. Yeah, like they really thought about, you know, this is a, this is an experience, this is a cabinet, this is a device that we can use to present our video games. They weren't constrained by consoles, which are all basically the same thing. But instead. Well, it goes to show how much is lost now when people can't experience those games in their original format. an arcade cabinet that had all those different controls and displays and the layout because we tend to think of everything on one screen with one controller like you're just saying

in a home console but you know many many arcade games experimented with different alternative control schemes and displays and stuff yeah universal emulation is not going to get you your your full cockpit or whatever a little VR yeah it'll be interesting to see with more and more people have you are whether people start trying to replicate more of the experience of some of these you know putting in the things that we're We're not just on the screen and trying to emulate the other parts of these games. That'll be really interesting. Yeah, so you were talking about the Universal Arcade Experience.

Yeah. So we need virtual reality so we could sit in a... What's the Grand Monaco GPS sit-down cabinet or stand-up? It's a stand-up cabinet. But with a steering wheel. Yeah, with a steering wheel. Could I have a pedal? I don't know, actually.

As Atari's earlier games had pedals. Yeah, you know, like Spy Hunter had a pedal. They definitely wore some, yeah. Grand Track 10 or something had a pedal and sprint. I think of Grand Track is a little. a sit-down experience, though. They may have had two different versions. Did they have, like, the big tabletop version where it had, like, eight steering wheels all around it?

I've never seen that one in person. I've only seen a couple of them. They made a whole bunch of racing games back-to-back, like Sprint, Super. I don't know, Super Sprintz one. Grand Track, Grand Track, Grand Track, 10. We're talking about Atari now, but. Yeah, that's fine. We can stray.

Yeah, another thing about Pro Monaco GP that kind of sets it as an element of a different era is the fact that you used discrete logic boards instead of a standard chip. Ben, maybe, or Benj or someone, maybe you guys could sort of explain what that is. I could fumble my way around it, but I think you have the technical expertise to do that. Yeah, so presumably just not a standard integrated circuit chip that you'd program whatever onto it had custom hardware that was designed to the game, I imagine, is where that's going. Yeah, ROM-based games had a computer. Well, some of them, actually, a few of them didn't.

The, like, Tank, I think, used a ROM for character, sprites, but it didn't have a computer. But most of them had a computer where it read software code from a ROM chip, you know, later. But discrete games were they laid out the logic of the game, the rules, just through hardware design, through logic gates and TTL chips and stuff. It's hard to fathom how it works. I've talked to the designers of these games, and since I've never done it myself, it's just, it's hard to wrap your head around. in the software era. Yeah, you're programming straight to the hardware, basically, so you come up with what it's doing,

and then you fabricate this chip, which leads to a really long debug cycle. It doesn't work, build it again. Well, that was the software revolution and making development much easier. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the discrete logic era had really come to an end at the end of the 70s,

and the 1980s saw a move into more standardized approaches, which ultimately gave us things like the JAMA standard, and Neo Geo and that sort of thing. I'm surprised. I'm surprised in 1980 they would make a discrete logic game. That's just very surprising. This was a sequel to a 1979 racing game called Monaco GP. This was pro-monico GP, which, you know, in the way of all sequels back then,

was basically just the same game with some tweaked elements. So they probably just took the original logic boards for that and shuffled them around a little bit to give them some tweaks. Had its color to it or something? On a CEP Prime Turbo, XX. So rather than reworking it, you know, for the newfangled logic boards, ROM chips, they just worked with what they had already. It was a tweet. I think you're missing out.

Some of the 70s games are interesting, like head-on, the Sega game head-on. What was that? There's an Atari 2,600 version of that that was called something else. Remember you go around in a maze and you try to avoid each other's cars? It was like a clone of head-on, I think. What's that called? Kind of an early version of light cycles, but... It's like you're in concentric rings of a maze in the...

And you can switch lanes so you don't run into each other, or you know, I remember the Atari game now. You have to collect. Dodge them. That's what I called dodging. There's also the version called Head-on-in, which is head-on, but distributed by Nintendo or Sega. I thought you're joking. Nope.

It's head-on letter N, not head-on. And I think one thing that's other thing about the 70s that we should maybe mention is there's a game called Heavyweight Champ, which is an early boxing game where you actually physically moved your hands in these boxing glow type things. Nice. And I did an article many years ago where I was trying to find the first black video game character, and I thought it was probably in Atari's basketball for the Atari 800. but heavyweight champ has a depiction of an African-American guy on the cabinet and he's you know he looks kind of darker on the screen than the other guy so that may be the first after all 76 appearance of a black guy in a video game makes sense I mean you had a lot of African-American boxing champs back then so you know all that American culture filters over to Japan and they see stuff on TV and they're like okay let's let's base our you know our impressions of of Western culture on what we see. That reminds me that the Japanese guys who made Tecmo Bowl had never watched football before.

Really? Yeah. I didn't know that. Is that why it's so good? Yeah, probably. They didn't feel constrained by the rules. Yeah, they turn it into a game instead of like a simulation. Simulation, yeah.

That's interesting. Tangent. Well, unfortunately, back then, there were a few enough pixels per character that you didn't end up with caricatures that are completely embarrassing now. Yeah. Yeah. That was a little bit of a problem. But I don't really think, I can't think of anything that Sega did that straight into that.

So, unfortunately, we won't have to brush up against any of that. But one other thing to note about Pro Monaco GP, just that the Monaco games, there are a few of them, have been kind of deeply beloved by Nintendo, by Sega. And it's one of those things that they keep dredging up, even though the game is extremely dated. We haven't really talked about it so far. but it's just a top-down racer where you drive up the screen, the screen scrolls past, and you're just avoiding cars. It's extremely simplistic.

But, you know, it does have the analog steering wheel, so it does give you that kind of precision that you wouldn't get from just a joystick. So I guess I can see a little bit of the thrill. But they've remade that game and re-released it. There was a back in the early days before M2 took over the series, there was a Sega 3D Ages for PlayStation 2, that import line of a budget software and remakes.

And they made a very, very ugly, very poorly playing 3D recreation of Monaco GP for PlayStation 2. Yeah, we were spared to those. The early 3D ages were not something you'd want to mess with. Good to know. You should do a stream of that, though, like a live stream. I guess. I don't know if I hate viewers that much. So anyway, that's Monaco GP.

pro-monico GP worth mentioning one other game from 1980 which really does kind of I think drive home the fact

that the 1980 was still the 1970s at heart and that's the other sort of big game Sega released in the arcades

that year was called Space Trek which was nicely timed for the recently released Star Trek

the motion picture I guess but despite the name it's not it doesn't have anything to do with Star Trek

it is a space invaders clone because people were still making space invaders clones. 1980 saw Nintendo, of course, making several Space Invaders clones that all bombed, and they had to scramble to redo their business.

Yeah. Sega was still part of that, too. Everyone had to have at least one or two. Yeah. Have you guys ever played Space Trek? I even made a Space Invaders clone. That's how popular it was to do it. Yeah, I can't say out. Space Trek, no, I haven't. Yeah, I had never actually heard of this game. Wasn't there an arcade game named, like, Star Trek or something?

It had nothing to do with Star Trek? I don't think so, but But Sega did release a Star Trek arcade game that we'll talk about in a little bit. But that was a couple of years later. This game is just kind of your generic things descend from above, and you shoot them. And that's about it. It's for the Vic Dual Hardware, which I guess is similar to the VIC-20. Is that right?

Wow. That would be strange. It is the first Sega hardware to use the Xilog Z-80 processor. So I guess it's not VIC-20, because that was. The C-MOS, right? That was a Commodore thing. Yeah. So it's just a coincidence.

It was called Vick. Yeah, Xilog Z-80 was in it. Very important computer. 64 colors. Space trick is boring. Let's go to the next thing. Let's go to 19881, because that's when things get cool. We start in 1981 with a game called Turbo,

which is not the same as Turbo Time from Recit Ralph, but maybe it was an inspiration. Turbo was the first arcade racer with a behind-of-the-car 3D perspective, which you would see, you know, the next year in pole position, which is the game that really broke that out and made it big. But this is the game that started at all. Have you guys played this one? I think so, yeah.

You think so? I think it hasn't it been on compilations and stuff? I mean, it seems to be one of those standout games in the Sega's early catalog that is celebrated by the company. They do a lot of celebration of their early stuff, yes. I think it must have been some sort of hit Compared to others Relatively speaking

I don't think it was anywhere near as big as pole position Certainly never had a Saturday cartoon based on it TurboTene was not based on this video game I don't think TurboTine was a completely original property Unless you had seen Auto Man In which case it was the same thing Oh yeah I think there's a port of Turbo on the Calico vision That I have may have played that

There's a little steering wheel thing It's probably I wonder if the CalicoVision version is basically the same as the SG-1000 version because I'm sure they released an SG-1000 version and those things have the same hardware. Wow, they do. Yeah.

Oh, yeah, it's like a super popular conversion process. Interesting. I do not know that. The Colico Vision didn't get a lot of Japanese games so people really like to take SG-1000 releases and do some minor tweaks to them to bring them over to the Colico Vision. Wow, that's neat.

That's a fun trend. Yeah, so anyway, the designer of this game was a guy named Steve Hanawa, and I don't know anything about him, but that was the guy who made this game, and he kind of revolutionized racing games. Before this, everything was either top-down or occasionally you get like a side view, like Dragster for, which came out around the same time. Was it Dragster? Yeah, for Atari 2,600. Yeah, that was probably an arcade game, too, Dragster. Was it? I bet it was.

I know, it was an actor-vision game, so it was... There's just some really early Atari games that nobody remembers. Not even I remember them all. I mean, you know, like from 72 to 76 or five. It's certainly outside-scrolling vehicle games like Moon Patrol that we had last time. Yeah, but that came later. That's true. That was the last.

That was like 83, I think. Yeah, I think so. So this is 1981. Again, like, it's pretty significant. If you look at this game, you can see the way the background scales forward coming, coming toward you, it really sort of predates and prefigures Sega's revolutionary super-scaler technology that would be all the rage in the mid-80s. But they didn't have that kind of technology. This was an 8-bit system

so it didn't have the cool sprite-scaling effect, but they were working on it. And I think the reason pull position did better than this game, and it was more memorable, is because the car in pole position looked a lot more impressive. This has just like tiny little spites. that almost could have come out of their last racing game, Monaco, GP, like they're dinky and unimpressive.

And then pole position gave you much larger cars. Big enough, big enough sprite to look like a car that was a cool car. Good art. Yeah, it's kind of more 3D-looking car to me. That was an impressive game. We've got to have to do that poll position podcast, too. Can we talk for an hour and a half about pole position? Maybe, yeah.

If we bring one in and play it while we're doing it. So the other notable game, I think, from 1981 was called Borderline, which is a game that's actually gotten a few ports through the years for Sega Systems. It was on the SG-1000, which I think the first time I ever heard of it was reading about it on Sega Does, which was a chronology of every Sega S-G-1000 game and had a lot of really bad games in there. But Borderline was kind of, it was like Konami's Jazz. Many years early. I don't know if you guys are familiar with that.

Yeah, I am. Okay, so. Yeah, it's the same sort of thing. It's a vehicular shoot-em-up where you're sort of driving up the screen, although you're not just driving up the screen on, like, in Jackal. You're kind of driving around, yeah. It looks like has maze game elements to it. Yeah, I mean, you kind of see, like, some Rally X in there, but it's also a shooter.

Can you break through the dirt? Are you just driving on the room? I don't believe so. I think those are boundaries. We're looking at a picture of it right now. I've never, never heard of it. but it looks awesome. Yeah, I mean, you're driving a Jeep,

and there's this really tortured sense of perspective on it. It's like top-down, but you've got a little bit of a side view. Also, every sprite is a single color, which says something about the hardware. Yeah, that's the SG-1000 for you. It kind of has a spectrum look to it almost. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Yeah, like there's some screens of it that almost look like it's edging towards like

Spy Hunter, but then you get these like maze-like screens also. So the SG-1000 hardware is similar to their arcade hardware or something? Well, to this very old arcade hardware. I think this game might have been made on, like, the arcade version of their SG-1000 hardware. That was pretty common. There were a few games that we'll talk about, especially the boxing game, that were made on basically an arcade board that was, like, an S-G-1000. Stuck in an arcade machine, yeah. There were definitely several of those.

But, yeah, still kind of struggling a little bit to find something interesting to say about Sega's 1988-1 games. But 1982, that's where it all comes to a head. Let's go backward and start at the end of the alphabet and talk about, well, I guess the end of the alphabet would be Zoom 909. So let's talk about Zoom 909. Surely you guys have played this. If not in its Zoom 909 incarnation, then is Buck Rogers Planet of Zoom. Yeah, I think there's a Klico Vision port of that, too.

There's a Clico Adam port. It was very nice. Calico Adam, yeah, that's it. It's probably on Flico Vision also, but I had the Adam version. Okay, yeah. I think I have it. That was there. Actually, that was the Adam.

At least the version of the hardware I got, that was the Adams pack-in software. Yeah, you're right, actually. I think you're right. That's a tape. I don't remember what it's like, though. I'm sure I've played it, though. So you tell me. Okay, so it's called Zoom 909 in Japan,

but in America, for whatever reason, they licensed Buck Rogers. I guess that's because there was a TV series. at the time, the Buck Rogers in the 25th century. Was that still going in 1982? Yeah, that actually started in the late 70s. And it was running into like 1982 or 81 or so because I had a lunchbox. I remember in like first grade that was Buck Rogers and I would watch that at night. Was it a really futuristic lunchbox?

It was metal. It was made a metal. That's actually not futuristic. That's the opposite of futuristic. That's the past. Because after a while, they phased out the metal lunchboxes in favor of crappy plastic lunchboxes. Those were terrible because they soaked up smells of food. Yeah.

All the good ones are fiberglass. No, metal ones were great. I love the metal ones. Because they, you know, they were embossed. They were like hammered. I had Dukes of Hazard, Pac-Man, E-Man, metal. The cool kids of school had Dukes of Hazard. I had Book Rogers.

The Duke's a Hazard was a hammering down for me. It's my brother. So it was really beat up. But, man, it was cool. Take your Confederate flag to school. Yeah, so we didn't care back then, nobody cared. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this has got a different kind of pseudo 3D going on.

Yeah, I feel like, I feel like quite out of Zoom or Zoom 909, I don't know if it was a reaction to the Star Wars arcade game, because that was, what, 1982? But it was definitely working along the same lines. Yeah. It may be one of those sort of convergent evolution things where you had people sort of come up with the same idea at the same time. Yeah, although the perspective also reminds me even of,

of like first-person dungeon crawlers. You've got this same kind of linear force perspective. Yeah, a little bit. So this one, the reason I compare it to the Star Wars arcade game is because it has three different views. It has sort of three different settings. You have, it starts out with a trench. So it's like the, it's like Star Wars backward.

Yeah, it's like the Death Star Trench run. There's no, there's no like scenery or topography in the trench. It's just, you know, like a box in the screen that you're flying through. enemies fly down into it and you have to avoid the edges. So basically it's the same as the space mode, but with constraints on how far you can move to the side. And there is a outer space mode where there's nothing like in the background. You're just shooting enemies without reference points. And then there's a surface mode where you're flying across the surface of a planet and you have to avoid outposts and rocks and things like that. Wow. Yeah, I remember this. So it's like a third person

behind the ship. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So unlike Star Wars, it is not a first person perspective. It is third person. That's cool.

Yeah, I remember that game. And it, I think it was the, it was one of those games to use proper joystick yoking where you press up to go down and down to bank upward. I don't quote me on that,

but I seem to remember that. There, yeah. The whole room just sighed at the same. same time. Yeah. We have a dad in the room. Yeah. So I played a lot of this game and got really good at it on KlicoVision.

I think there's like a final boss or something at the end of each run, but I could be mistaken. But, you know, it was pretty impressive for the time. And it was another one of those cabinets that had sort of the discrete displays on the side, the separate LEDs. I've seen the Buck Rogers planet of Zoom Arcade cabinet. And it's, you know, a big sit-down cabinet with an enclosure, and it's got LED readouts next to the screen. A lot more fancy than the game probably deserves if you look back at it. That sounds awesome, though. Yeah, it's very enjoyable.

Whenever I see it, which is not often, but sometimes at retro game conventions, I take the time to sit down and play it. Through the magic of technology, I've been handed a picture of the book, Rogers' cabinet. It's pretty amazing. Just visualize yourself. You just call up anything we want. Yeah, it's amazing. What technology is living? Why were you playing that game so much?

Did you grow up with an atom? Yeah, that was our first computer. It was a Klico Adam. Well, man, we got to do a show on that. We do. Super obscure, but awesome at the same time. Yeah, we didn't actually own that many games for it, but it did ship with Buck Rogers Planet of Zoom.

So we had that one. And it was worth the tape cassette time, low times. We didn't get the Desquette version. We got the tape cassette version. So whenever I think of Buck Rogers' Find out of Zoom, I think of about a minute of tape loading. Yeah. It's worth it.

It was cool. was a 3D space shooter before such things really existed. Another Sega game that starts with a Z that I had on my Colico was probably by, I would say by far the most impressive game that they released in 1982 and still is one that I just love to look at and play, although, man, it's really hard and I suck out at it these days. That is well-remembered now. Zaxon.

So, Binge, I know you have a lot of fondness for this one. You've talked about it before. I think we mentioned it maybe even in the last podcast for some reason. I just have a memory of going to a... Every year we'd go to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and it was a spring break as a kid, and they had a lot of arcades there. And the first time I saw...

This was in the late 80s, maybe. The first time I saw Zach Signs just blew me away because it seemed like it was a three-dimensional game. Like, I don't know. Like now it wouldn't fool me, but as a kid, it's just that element of going up, down, left, right, and you're going flying forward at the same time. And I just thought the graphics were amazing.

So I think it had a magical quality to it, which probably has a lot to do with its success. I agree. I think one of the interesting things about this era is, you know, we were a long, long time before the ability of the hardware to actually render 3D things. We have all these completely different approaches

to trying to convey the sense of 3D with what they could do. So we had, you know, the very rudimentary, different sized sprites. So the first game we talked about of the motto. And then we had the, in the Buck Rogers one, you have just like corridors drawn with very simple shapes. And then in this one,

you have the trick of is isometric perspective, which is a way to do 3D with static sprites, really. And that's all we know about it, but it's awesome. Yeah, that was one. I've probably told this story on a retronauts episode long ago, but

this was one that I encountered my grandparents were supervisors at a men's dormitory when I was a kid and there were always arcade cabinets in the lobby because it was the golden age of arcades and arcade games were cool

so there were like half a dozen arcade games at any time in the lobby and they would get switched out and Zaxon was there and that game was just like amazing looking and on holidays the vendor would put the games on free play because no one was at the dorms except me and, you know, my family. So, um, nice. Zaxon was the one that...

This is a strange childhood you're describing you need to go into more detail. It's, is it that strange? Was this at the YMCA by any chance? No. Okay. Just checking. Um, anyway, so... Yeah, so...

So cool, though, but Zaxon was one that they would not put on free play. So I only got to play that occasionally, and it drove me to tears because I, it was the first time I'd ever played a game that had the full. light stick approach to controls and I didn't get that you had to push up to to go downward and vice versa so I couldn't get over the very first wall like you shoot ships in space and the game wasn't doing what I wanted to but I still shot a few and then you scroll in ahead and there's this wall that you have to fly you have to go to the wall yeah I remember that's like the test and I just didn't get it like it didn't make any sense to me and I thought the game was

broken so I never really got to play it but I would watch the college kids play sometimes and be like man that game looks amazing what year was this when you were doing those games in the dorm i probably would have been about 1983 or 84 so the game was still relatively fresh what other games were there do you remember oh let's see keystone capers and joust and galaga and defender and uh tempest miss pacman wow tons of stuff yeah that's awesome so you had a free arcade as a kid i mean it was free for like two weeks out of the year. Well, that's a lot of time.

Yeah, I mean, we would always go over to my grandparents for, like, Christmas or Thanksgiving because they had the most space. Obviously, they had this entire dormitory to host dinner in. So, yeah, so my holidays for a few years were basically me zoning out in front of video games as much as I could stomach. So just eating pie and turkey and playing video games. Well, now we know the origin of Jeremy Parrish, ladies and gentlemen. It's how I started.

It's like a little roly-poly kid. Yeah, but yeah, I think like Sega hit a real sweet spot with this one because you had, I mean, there was a time when you still had things like your Space Invaders clones that were just very flat on there. And then you had things like Tempest or Star Wars, which are 3D, but all just drawn in lines. But then you have Zaxon, which gives the sense of 3D space, but it's still like super colorful with all these different objects. And so it's really, you know, it looked like nothing else that was around at the time, which is probably why it's the one thing from this year that everyone remembers and knows about. Yep. And we've, I've talked a little bit about the origin story of Zaxon and the creators behind it. I see someone made the note in here that it was programmed by a Japanese firm Ikigami Sushinki. Yeah, that was me.

Programmed Donkey Kong. So since I've told this story, why don't, why don't you tell it instead, Ben? I'm not that good at this part of history. You tell it. What? All I know is, you know, is hanging like that. I don't, I don't know much of the details. I just know that they were developed by the same company. Okay. And some of the, you know, the Nintendo contracting that company to program Donkey Kong and whatever, maybe some other game before it. Was it Radar Scope or something? They did some, Ikegami Sushinky is believed to have done several games.

They did Radar Scope, which is why they did Donkey Kong because it was based on the same hardware. And they did a few other games. I think Popeye, maybe Skyskipper, if you've ever seen that one. Yeah. So. Well, when I first learned about them doing Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong, I mean, that blew my mind. I never thought of Miyamoto in the same way again. Well, he's tarnished. I guess. It was, it was pretty common for people to use contractors

back then. I'm just kidding, but yeah, I mean, I mean, an entire sort of business developed in Japan of sort of companies you could outsource to. That's where Tose is from. They founded in their approach. Because if you think about putting a creative genius like Miyamoto with a programmer, that's like, you know, modern game development. So, like, someone with the ideas and someone with the technical knowledge, it didn't have to be the same person. So, yeah. Maybe that's an innovation.

I guess. But a lot of Japanese companies did that sort of thing back then. Yeah, I mean, you had the one guy who did all the code for Final Fantasy. Maybe it's not an innovation. I think it was born in necessity. So that is the mother of invention. Yeah. There you go.

But, yeah, anyway, there was definitely a falling out with Nintendo, or between Nintendo and Ikeama Sushinki at this point. So that's, uh, probably how they got involved in Zaxon, but they made a really, really impressive game. And I guess that shouldn't be a surprise because, I mean, Doggy Kong was a very impressive game. Like, they

really, they had some real technical expertise going for them. Uh, so let's see, some other games from 1982, all the way at the other end of the alphabet, Ali Baba and the, and 40 thieves. Not the 40 thieves, just 40 thieves. Forty thieves. It's not, it's not exclusive. They're not special thieves, yeah.

There's no definitive article there. There's probably some other thieves. We pulled 40 random thieves off the street and made them. So, yeah, this is one that I had never played, but now that I go back and look at it, oh, Ben, do you have? No? You have not played it either? Yeah, I played it, but I barely remember it.

I played too many games. Show me a picture. Clearly. I mean, it looks like a high-man layout to it. I'm thinking more lock and chase, actually. Yeah, yeah. Wow. That one's fresh in my mind because I get down to the Game Boy World.

Jackman is a good, was the father of all maze games. Of course, of course. Unless you count Hayankyo Alien. Yeah. Let's not go there. Let's not go back into Heyanko alien. I'm going to make it a point, make it a point to mention that every episode. Yeah.

Yeah. So, it's kind of a weird game because unlike in other maze games, you're not running from every enemy. You can actually destroy most enemies by bumping into them. There's one thief captain who's chasing you around. And if he catches you, then you die. But otherwise, you're just trying to, like, squish the other thieves. It's kind of weird.

There's like a chamber of treasures at the top of the screen, and the thieves are taking stuff up to there, but occasionally it unlocks, and you can go up there and steal back the treasure. So it's one of those games that I think they looked at Pac-Band and we're like, well, we can't make exactly that game, so we need to add some complexity to it. And it came up with something that's maybe a little too complicated

to understand at a glance the way you can. Well, look at that mini map at the top there. It looks like, reminds you have a Zelda or something. Yeah, like, different regions you can go through. It looks like connected together. Yeah. And Alibaba. Is that the arcade version or the home version?

Because I don't think the arcade version looks quite that. That may have been the first arcade mini map in a game or something. What about Defender? That was 1981. Okay, fine. But that's like just like a miniature version of the world. Yeah, but it's there. Yeah.

True. That's the challenge of saying anything's the first because then you're like, oh, wait, no, there was some other thing that came before that, damn it. Yep. Is this the one? That's the one. Okay. Yeah.

So the simpler. the earlier version. Oh, okay. Yeah, I probably got an overhaul when it was remade for home. Yeah, there was a... I didn't really look into the lineage of this game. Alibaba and the 41 thieves.

And 41 thieves. And 41. Yeah, sorry. The articles. Let's see. Some other games of interest from 1982 Sub Rock 3D, Benj, you have quite a little write-up here for it.

Tell us about this one. It's one of those games that, like I was saying, you know, Sega, keep wanting to say Nintendo Sega really put a lot of thought into the applications of custom hardware and this is a crazy example of that

Yeah, so I guess in 2011 I did a slideshow for PC World about the history of stereoscopic video games and I determined at that time I don't know if it still holds up but that SubRock 3D was the first stereoscopic commercial

video game in 1982 and I wrote The Aquatic Warfare Game integrated a unique binocular viewport that mimicked a submarine's perspective. The machine created a stereoscopic 3D effect via two half-clear, half-opaque spinning disks. Man, who writes like that?

The disc spun in synchronization with images on the monitor so that as an image for the left eye showed on the screen, the right-eyes view was blocked by the opaque portion of a disc and vice versa. It sounds like a patent description, I'm sorry. It's basically like anastrophic 3-D, like the shutters that they use.

Shutters. Just mechanical shutter spinning. So this is yet another solution to how to do a 3D display without actually having hardware that can generate that stuff. And this is, I mean, this is actually like what VR does today, presenting a different view to each eye. So you get the same view you would have if you were viewing things at different distances.

Right. But apparently this one only used a single screen instead of two separate screens for each eye. So just on each half of the screen. I think the shutter would have been synced to the refresh rate of the screen. So the free refreshing, 20 frames per second.

So you're giving up frame rate. So, yeah, like every other frame, it's like left eye, right eye, left, the right eye. Alternating. Yeah, right. And then that's thing to the block. You know, the Vectrix had a 3D imager thing that was like this with a spinning disc. And it could actually do color, like had different colors. That's filters.

I don't know Vectrix could do color. I've only ever seen. Well, it's just the filter. Like the way, the spinning filter has three colors in it and like a blocked out portion. So somehow they could time it so you see certain things, different colors. I almost bought one of those 3D images for really cheap in the late 90s, but I feel bad. I kicked myself. I didn't do it because they're pretty rare.

Are they expensive now? Yeah, I think so. Of course they are. Of course. Spectrexes are pretty expensive now. Yeah, I shouldn't have sold my second one for like $10 a yard sale. Yeah. Well, video game regrets.

What can you do? I sold a copy of Earthbound for a whole lot less than it sells today. I did. I sold my Earthbound too. I just needed some money. Yeah. Whoa, Earthbound's worth $100? I'm going to sell it.

I didn't get that much for it. This was back in like 1996. I was like, well, that game was okay, but I'm going to sell my entire box and the manual. Yeah, I had the box, but I didn't have the manual because I got it from Blockbuster

as one of their previously viewed things. I bought mine brand new, so it was shiny and mint. That's awesome. You're a head of the game. Anyway, so Sub Rock 3D was a submarine warfare game. So it made sense that they could have this like view scope that you would use

because, of course, there had already been submarine video games that used, like, a physical periscope. If I'm not mistaken, one of Sega's more prominent mechanical games was a submarine game, but I don't know what it was called. I can't remember something like that. Periscope. Sea shark. Seashark, yeah.

Let's see. Also, in 1982, one of my personal favorites, Pengo, which was another take on the maze game, but this one was different because you could actually use the maze to attack enemies. It was great. Did you guys ever play this one? Yes. I played Pango, but only once.

Only once? Yeah. But yeah. I said never again. This game's horrible. It lets you screw up the maze, which is pretty nice. I think it lets you screw up the maze. It lets you reshape it.

Like many of these early Sega games, I suspect this was ported to the Kaliko vision as well. It seems to be like that's my exposure to these. some of these. Well, if you only played the Calico version, maybe that's why it was horrible. But the arcade version was a lot of fun of game. Yeah, there was actually a stand-up of this in the arcade they had set up at an amazement

a couple years ago here in Raleigh. So, yeah, so that was fun. Last surprise. Oh, sorry. Oh, I was just for anyone who hasn't played this, yeah, so you imagine, you know, a maze grid like Pac-Man, only the maze is made out of blocks,

and you can shove the blocks around. So, you know, you've got a monster on the other side of the wall from you, you can crush it with the wall. So, Kickle Cubicle was a gigantic rip-off of Kingo. I like Kekle Cubicle, so I should like Pengo. The arcade version is more like Kickle-Cubicle than the Kaleiko Vision version of the game, I think. Yeah, probably. Okay.

It's very fast, and it's got really nice graphics. It's got one of the video gaming's first penguin protagonists, which is great. And that's kind of the premise, you know, why you can kick around the maze because... You're a penguin. I mean, that's what they do. You're an maze made of ice blocks, so you can grab an ice block and then kick it if there's nothing blocking it, and that'll go sailing across the earth, skidding across. Isn't there a story about the famous South Pole explorer who first landed on Antarctica and a penguin came up and kicked him in the shin? I don't know that one.

I'm just kidding. Okay. And then he was crushed by an ice block. That's what penguins do. It's not easy, though, yeah, because it's all ice physics and it's so fast. But it's fun. really liked it. It was a very memorable, very colorful game. And that's another one of those mascots that Sega likes to kind of bring. Actually, I think that was their first mascot that they

like to dredge up. Pingo. This is his name Pingo? Yeah, the name is Pengo. He was Pengo the Penguin, which, you know, they used up the easy one. Then they had to be like Pentaro for Paredias. So on and so forth. So another one that I had never seen or heard of, but it's kind of amazing. 1982 super locomotive you guys ever played this one have you ever seen it it's crazy no but i'm about to see it okay so i'm prepared so this is okay first of all this game has a split screen perspective it's um you're controlling a train and the top screen is a top down view uh or the top half of the screen is a top down view of the train yard and there's like all these criss-crossing tracks and you have to drive around and basically direct yourself uh in other directions to switch tracks

like a multi-lane racer like some of those really old ones. But yeah, but then the bottom track, the bottom half of the screen is a side view of the train and you can actually see like the senior you're going through and you can also see there are certain threats that you see in the upper screen and you can't tell like where

that is physically in relationship to your train. But on the upper screen you can see like things that are flying over you and dropping bombs at you. Yeah, this is wild. There's a lot going on there but then on top of that the music that plays is just like straight up

Rideen by a Yellow Magic Orchestra Like they didn't license it They just took Yellow Magic Orchestra music And you know It makes sense Like Yellow Magic Orchestra Was making games

Or music that sounded like video games So why not have a video game That just rips off Yellow Magic Orchestra Didn't other games did that Like Mighty Bomb Jack has Lady Madonna Oh yeah there's a whole ton of games Yeah a ton of games did that People just made a mini version of something

This is maybe the first like just straight up. This is a contemporary song, and there is no ambiguity. Like, this is do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do de, do de, do de, de, de, de, de, de. Like, you, you hear it in you're like, oh, that's yellow magic orchestra. We should I try to sing on more of these podcasts? Is that a top 40 hit in 1982? I don't think it was a top 40 hit, but it was definitely, Yellow Magic Orchestra was pretty big in Japan at the time.

Yeah. I actually mentioned this on the episode that just went up right before we recorded this. The sampling one. Yeah, they had samples of Space Invaders and Circus Charlie and a bunch of other games that they turned into like a rhythm. Then are you sure they didn't have? have some sort of missing the word. I read that it was not

a license. And if you listen to computer game or whatever, it's theme from the invader that has all the samples in it, I don't recognize any Sega samples in there. So I don't think it was a like a mutual, you steal from us will steal from you thing. I think it was just

like a rip-off. What the hell? Yeah, everyone in Japan loves them. I mean, it's all over like Final Fantasy soundtracks and whatever. Yeah, I mean, WIMO is no longer together, but they're individual the artists who comprise the band still are pretty big they're all over the place

uh reuhei Sakamoto i think is one of them like he's he's kind of the big one and he's still composing still active so sometimes he does video game stuff you can believe that all right yeah this looks really cool like the I can't help the thing that comes to mind when I look at the overhead maps of these train tracks is if you've ever seen someone did a parody comic about

a parody of initial D with trains they were doing multi-track drifting. Uh-uh, I didn't see that. It really looks like you should be able to do that on these maps. I don't think you actually can, but... That would be disturbing to see a real train do that. The rails aren't really meant to do that. No, but it looks like a really cool setup.

It breaks reality. Interestingly, that was not the only train game Sega produced in 1982. They had another game called Gatong or Locomotion in the U.S. totally not super locomotive at all this one is a like a how would you even call it like a sliding block puzzle where you have all these different rail tracks

that are kind of disjointed and you have to slide them around and the train can make it to the end so it's like the tile puzzle where you just have 16 slots and 15 tiles and stuff to slide and squares back and forth and so you get everything in order inspired pipe dream

and also there was another game boy game that I played that was really terrible. I can't even remember what it was called. On this basic puzzle type. Yeah. But this inspired like a Colico Vision game, weirdly enough, that was released sort of after the market had crashed. And I can't remember the name of that one either.

Damn, what's wrong with me? Anyway, so... That's okay. Thanks. It's not that important. But it also reminds me of the board game, Rivers Roads and Rails, where you're doing the same thing, connecting loops and paths.

Yeah, yeah. tiles. Yeah, I think PipeDream was definitely the big, the biggest game. But I do like the name Gatang Gatang. It's pretty game now. I guess that's supposed to be like Anamonopoeia on like the sound of a train. Yeah, Japanese. When I just read it, I was like, is that some sort of weird German word?

But now that I say it out loud, I'm like, oh, it's like the train. It's automataia. Doki doki, dokey of the train. That's exactly what it is. Dokey, Dinky Dinchy. Anyway, or Dinsha. sorry. Two other games in 1982.

First is 005, which is almost like a predecessor to Metal Gear Solid. It's a top-down spy game and you have to avoid the line of sight of enemies. The discount cousin of James Bond. Yeah. It's two less than James Bond. It looks not very good, but I do feel like

it's probably one of those games that's like I think people probably played this and said I could do this better. Or maybe it was just a dead end in history and other people had the same idea and made the fascinating point. Yeah, it's got you a very rudimentary hiding from spotlights

kind of deal going on. Who knows who saw it and played it and was influenced by it? And then there were a lot of really terrible stealth segments much, much later. It's like if you wanted to make elevator action but make it top-down. And it turns out elevator action is fun because it's a side-scrolling platformer.

Who do? Yeah, I like that game. Is that Data East game? No, it's Taito. Oh, Taito. And finally, we'll talk one last game in 1982 and take a break. And this last game is what we mentioned before, Star Trek. That was it. I was thinking about. The game that was kind of like was called Star Trek and didn't have anything to do with Star Trek.

Yes, as a matter of fact, it did. It was licensed. Vector. And it's a, yeah, vector game. It also has a split screen view. There's like a map on top. And then the action view on the bottom. And I don't know if you guys ever played the 1970s text version of Star Trek.

have. I heard of it. It's a very famous mainframe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it kind of... Actually, I think I have played it. It's a little bit before our time. Yeah. Because it was really like for, you know, dumb terminals and that sort of thing. But my uncle, when I was a kid, had this computer. It was a portable computer. So it was very low-powered and very large and heavy. But it had like a three-line 28-character LCD display, which was just enough to get that Star Trek. game on there. So I would play Star Trek on there. Yeah. I mean, it's the net hack of space combat sims and that it's just you know you have a little asky math and you're doing commands. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, this game really feels like they took that mainframe

Star Trek game and said, let's put some visuals on it. So you're doing basically the same thing, which is warping from sector to sector, docking with star bases, to refill your weapons and your shields. And then you would encounter Klingons. You'd have to destroy

them. And that's actually the, it's kind of the big difference between this and the text game, because in the text game, it's pretty much just like, there's a Klingon in this sector. Do you attack? Do you use Shias? What do we do? Yeah. It's a command to shoot. Yeah. It's very, very, very basic. But this, you actually can move in. What's that? Action-based shooting? Like, as action-y as you can get with a Star Trek, Starship Enterprise. Is it a first-person view? Yeah, it's like, it's like Star Wars looking for a first-person view. So you're kind of action as you. So you're kind of, as action-y- kind of rotating through 360 degrees.

It sounds a lot like Star Raiders for the Atari 800. Yeah, yeah, actually. Where you work sector to sector, you take on... What year was Star Raiders? That's 79, somewhere around there. Okay, so this was like the killer app of the Atari 800, people said. It came out in 79. An interesting thing about this is, you know, I hadn't seen it before,

and if I just saw it, I would not have pegged it as a Sega game just because they didn't do a lot of these, like, vector-based lines. So it doesn't look like, you know, any other other stuff, really. Yeah, Sega is great because, they dabbled in a little bit of everything. Like if there was, if there was a trend in the arcade in the 80s, they at least gave it a shot. They may not have done it well, and they may have decided this is a bad idea. Let's never go back there again.

But they at least thought about it. They at least put some consideration into it. And that's cool. Yeah, it looks pretty darn cool. If you're a Star Trek fan, I could imagine being amazed by this game. Yeah, I mean, it's not exactly faithful to Star Trek because Captain Kirk would, you know, try to talk to the Klingons first. but maybe it's like Star Trek

the cartoon series where everything was kind of dumb but yeah like it makes a good counterpart to Atari Star Wars and it does kind of get to the difference between the two franchises because Star Wars was very much just a

fly through the trenches blow stuff up there's crap flying in your face from all over whereas this is much more about like think about your resources go explore space watch out for the Klingons and the combat is very methodical and slow-paced. So in that sense, it is, I would say, faithful to the franchise.

Yeah. Star Trek. So there are ports. I think there are ports of that to the home. Yeah. Arcade Atari, 2,600, Commodore 64, Calico Vision. Yeah, I have it for the Kalika Vision again, Star Trek. And I'm honestly not that big of a Kalikovision fan,

but for some reason, they're just a whole bunch of Sega ports on that platform. Yeah, so it's obviously not a vector, but it looks similar to the arcade. They just redid it with raster lines. Yeah, with raster lines. Yeah, yeah. All right, so that is 1982, and I think with that, we're going to take a break, and we'll be back after a word from our sponsors. And caller number nine for $1 million.

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taking you out of your comfort zone. This was supposed to be a chance for you guys to speak to your expertise, but maybe early 80s Sega is not necessarily your speciality. But hopefully as we move into the mid-80s, you'll start to see games that you recognize more often. Yes, maybe? Working on that. Probably.

Yes. All right. Well, let's go with the easy one. Let's talk about Congo Bongo. You guys have got to have played this. Yes. I've definitely played this because I wrote it up for GameSight back in the day. Yes, GameSplay.

What a great publication that one. Yeah, I've heard that's pretty good. Such talented and handsome people. So, Ben, tell us about Congo Bongo, why don't you? So, Congo, Bongo, it's pretty cool. It's, as we actually mentioned before, it was programmed by those same guys who did do Donkey Kong. Hegama Sushinky.

He got me Sushinky. And it has certain similarities in that it stars an angry ape. Very, very obvious similarities. Yeah, I mean, you see the arcade cabinet and you're like, is this a Donkey Kong cabinet? No, it's not. Because the guy who's fighting the ape is wearing a Piff hat and not a plumber's hat. But that's about the only difference on the cabinet. But it looks very different because it's actually an isometric platformer.

So it's got the same perspective as Xon. It's built on the Xxon hardware, I believe. I think so. It's got a lot of the same look going on. But it's also got kind of some of the same structure in that you've got a series of distinct stages, each of which is kind of different from the previous one. But even more so than Donkey Kong. It's practically like each stage is a different mini game. Like I was playing it almost feel like I'm playing a really early warrior wear in that I'm completely changing up what I'm doing on every stage.

Okay, so I've only ever actually played the first level. How are the later level? Okay, so, yeah, so the first level, so the first level is... I'm not good at this game. Like, I can't wrap my head around the isometric perspective. Actually, yeah, I actually, I surprised myself by how well I did it. I was playing it around an emulator, but I actually managed to do it without cheating much. So, yes, tell us about what's beyond the difficult screen.

You start out in a level that reminds you a whole lot of Donkey Kong in that the big apes on the top and he's throwing things down to mountain and you have to get up to him. Although it has like a lot of little cool things in it, like there's a bridge you have to cross at one point that falls down after you and there's like some little monkeys that if all them get a hold of you, they throw you back off the mountain. So there's just a lot of little things going on. But then you get to the next level and it's, um, there's a big lake. And there's a bunch of islands and bridges that you're going across, get across this lake. And there's snakes that are basically the same as the roper's from Zelda that like charge at you. And so you have to kind of like

bait them out and retreat, um, in order to get past them. And it's like, it's, yeah, you're doing something completely different. And then the next level, what was it? There's one with rhinoceros kind of things charging at you, and you can try to dodge them, but they're really fast. But there's also like pitfalls, and you can bait them into the pits, and then they get stuck and you can go around them.

And you play this game a lot. I play three several times. It's hard. It's really hard for me. And then there's like a level that's basically Frogger. Yeah, I see the Frogger thing. I just looked at. There's a Frogger level.

Like a river? Is it the River one? Yeah, I think. There's a river where you have to cross with little... Yeah, and you have to ride on lily pads and, like, alligators. And it's pretty much frogger for that level. And then that's it, because there's so much interesting stuff in each level that then they run out of space in the hardware, so there's just four levels.

And that's the end. And then you wrap around and make it harder because it's an arcade game. It's a congo-bongo cake. A cake. Pretty good. Of the first symmetric cake. Congo Bongo, I love that guy. That's the cake box.

But yes, they threw a whole bunch of really cool ideas into this game and, like, made these packed four different levels of just packed full of stuff. So that's a little bit reminiscent of Donkey Kong, and the Donkey Kong was kind of a big deal because it had four different levels, each packed with different things, but totally different things than this. Yeah, yeah, this is much farther afield. I thought this game was just like you trying to climb up that mountain over and over again. Just level one. Wow. Yeah, I guess we both never got past level one, Jeremy. I suck at this game.

Yeah, it's hard. It's not one that I've ever really had the chance to play in the arcade, though. I've only played, like... Port. Yeah, ports. I remember seeing it at a computer shop in, I don't know, 1983 or 84, back when it was new and it was like, this is the hot new game on an Atari computer or something,

and seeing it, it'd be really fascinated by the way it looked, but never had the chance to play. Actually, I don't know how much of it made it into the port. so there may not have been I see a picture that looks like something horrible like it's a flat Oh yeah yeah so there's a flash G1000 version Right so this is Sega Master System

I remember seeing that version Yeah so it completely does Aecovision version is like that too Yeah so it completely does a way with the isometric perspective and basically collapses this mountain into a flat 2D screen Which makes it even more like Donkey Kong Yeah

But it's sort of yeah it's sort of at that point It's like a cut rate kind of ugly donkey conning instead of being this much more interesting thing Yeah there is a flat There's just an angry excoriation of that game on Sega does.com. Yeah, no, that version is just bad. Like, it tries to preserve a few of the things like the bridge across the waterfall and stuff, but it just, yeah, it ends up being bad.

Yeah, it loses the essence of what Congo Bongo was. Yeah. Maybe the SG-1,000 just couldn't do the isometric visuals. I mean, it was isometric and there's just, there's a lot of stuff going on at each screen. If you look at the background of the SG-1000 version here, all the background tiles are not tiles. They're just blocks, like blocks of color. I don't know if it could actually depict... I think they just didn't have enough...

Yeah, right angles. Yeah, blocking something else at an angle. Yeah. Yeah, like, you saw that sometimes. There was someone who just commented on my YouTube video about Popeye when I, you know, mentioned the fact that, like, the backgrounds in the arcade game are really blocky, whereas the sprites are high resolution. And the sprites in the backgrounds are actually at a different resolution.

So there was a lot of, like, the backgrounds were, like, 64 by something, whereas the sprites were, like, 512. So they're much denser and more detail-packed in the backgrounds. So, yeah, that was definitely an issue back then. And you started to see more isometric games around this time. Crystal Castles came out here. Yeah, Crystal Castles really comes to mind. Yeah. Very similar kind of concept.

Do you think it was a rip-off of Congo-Bongo? I don't know. What year was Crystal Castles? I have no idea, but it was an Atari game, right? Atari. It was. Maybe it came later. 83 or so, yeah.

And then Marble Madness was 85. So, yeah, things in Congo like Marvel Madness is reminiscent of that, just building interesting structures in these isometric perspective. Yeah, isometric was kind of Ikegami Sushinki's thing. There was one other games they put together on Zaxon hardware that

we'll talk about in a little bit, but definitely all of them were crazy hard. And I don't know if it was deliberate or just sort of a result of the unconventional perspective. But man, like, Zachson I could beat on Klico Vision.

because I played it at home a lot but when I go back to the arcade I'm like, uh, what? I'm dying so much. This game, I've just never made it anywhere. So Sega hardcore. It would help if the joystick was tilted like if you did the controls instead.

Yeah, I mean, I was doing this on Maine so, you know, I just had four keys for the directions and maybe that may have actually helped over a joystick. I'm not sure. Yeah. So sometime around here, Sega started up a series called Champion. Excuse me. Champion.

like champion sports champion boxing champion baseball both of those came out in 83 there were quite a few other champion games as well that I didn't write down I kind of felt like these two were probably the most important champion baseball

that's kind of a big deal if you look at it it was really sort of a landmark I didn't write about this in the context of NES baseball for good intentions but I really should have because this is kind of the first game to do that top-down multi-view version of baseball that you saw in NAS Baseball, which came out

at the end of 1983, so a few months after a champion baseball, and it would become sort of the standard for Japanese baseball games with the Family Stadium series by Namco. Famista was pretty much the default baseball game for 10 years. Definitely has that look to it, where you've got kind of this diagram view of the whole outfield and you can see everyone moving around. But interestingly, champion baseball was not developed by Sega. It was developed by ADK, who is better known, more frequently associated with S&K. Like, ADK basically became an S&K second party once the NeoGeo came out.

But up until that point, ADK did a bunch of stuff for a bunch of different developers. I've even covered some of their stuff on Game Boy World. I can't reproach game. It was CatTrap or something. But in any case, it was like, oh, huh, interesting. I feel like that was probably a lot more common before sort of everyone coalesced into their different console silos. When you still had people doing custom hardware for arcade games all over the place, you would have these development teams just kind of jumping around.

Yeah, and I don't know that ADK ever self-published. I feel like everything they've ever developed was developed and published by someone else. I could be mistaken about that, but that's definitely the impression I got. Anyway, so this was a really sort of revolution. A evolutionary baseball game, but I don't really like sports games that much. So I'm finding it really difficult in my heart of hearts to care. Yeah, I know what you mean. Okay.

I'm kind of the same way. I'm glad I'm not alone here. There's only a few sports video games that I really enjoy, like Blades of Steel. TechMobile is fun. You know, punch out. Yeah, just punch out. It counts. Foxing is a sport.

There's probably some other games that are like that, yeah. Yeah. But, uh... And there's one I want to talk about coming up in a few years. My brother was huge in the sports game, so I had to watch him and play them and stuff. Yeah, mine too, but he didn't really want to play video games that much. Home run on the Atari 2,600, he'd just laugh at me, because you can make the ball curve around the player, his batting.

It looks like it's coming straight at you, and then at the last minute you can curve it around. Oh, man. Like a Mario Tennis trick shot or something. Yeah. Anyway. The other champion game from 1983, champion boxing, it's kind of a weird one.

It's another one of those games that began life as an. SG-1000 title and it made it to arcades on one of those boards I mentioned that was based on the SG-1000 hardware which in 1983 was pretty meager I mean the SG-1-000 was uh that looked pretty darn good for an SG-1-000 game it looks it looks good for an arcade game yeah not so great it's really kind of flat colors and very limited yeah there not very many uh kind of looks like Atari Sprites. It looks like a Kalinkovition game. The boxing combat, it's a side view boxing game.

And I just did a video on Urban Champion where I was talking about how that was kind of, like, an idea that was developing in 1983 Nintendo made boxing for Game and Watch. And it has like the high, low kind of block and attack style. This does that too in 1983. So you kind of have, again, like lots of different people sort of coming to the same conclusions about how to make their fighting and future. team that made Zelda, too, played those games. High strike, low, low, lock. I mean, probably urban champion, yes,

since I was at Nintendo. But the more interesting thing about this game is that both Rako Kodama and Yu Suzuki worked on it. Apparently this was Yu Suzuki's debut game. Oh, wow. And he would go on to be like the guy at Sega,

like the arcade guy. Kind of responsible for all the amazing racing games and fighting games. Like, if it was a revolutionary Sega arcade game, you, Suzuki probably worked on it. And then Rako Kodama would go on to be an RPG specialist, you know, artist and scenario writer and director for Fantasy Star, Fantasy Star Online, Seventh Dragon, so on and so forth.

So boxing is a weird place for her to start, but I guess you take the job you get. I would not have known that from looking at the art for it, but all right. Well, I mean, the character's, do have a very sort of a, despite the simplicity of the hardware and the minimalist design, the characters do have like a very charming, cartoonish look. Yeah. And I know Kodama started out more as a graphic designer. So I'm going to assume that, you know, what you like about this game is probably her fault.

Good. Or her responsibility. Her invention has that. Yeah. One other 1983 game, a weirdly named game called Starjacker. It sounds hardcore. It sounds really hardcore. I jacks stars.

Yeah, Jack's an entire star. Grand Theft Star. Dyson sphere. But it's a top-down shooter. So this is, actually, we kind of skipped over a few of these, but Sega made a bunch of Zettius clones. Zedias was a 1982 Namco game. Very, very innovative. Basically, it took the Gallica concept, you know, which Gallagia was Space and Maters a step further.

It took that concept and put it on a scrolling star, or background, I guess not a star field, but basically gave you like a low-in flight approach over the ground, and you could shoot ahead, and you could also drop bombs. Yep, yep, exactly, things on the ground. I never get that on my head. So that was a hugely influential game in the early 80s, and basically started like the vertical shooter. So Sega made a bunch of these.

This is probably the most interesting because you start with three lives, like so many shooting games except you get all the lives at once it's kind of like they looked at the capture element of Gallagher and were like what if that were the whole game what if that weren't optional but you started out with three ships flying

all behind you and when you ran out of ships you've got a squad basically pretty much squad based shooter what's that squad based shooter squad base squad goals it's like Tom Clancy

so it's kind of a weird a weird game in a sense in that you become less powerful as you play like as you lose your ships you lose firepower you have a smaller target to hit instead of three ships you just have you know two and then one but you also lose a 30 for firepower yeah it's really the opposite of how these games usually yeah so it's more turrets or whatever yeah so you're like being dismantled as you play so i don't know you can get more too because i'm seeing screenshots with like four ships in here yeah i don't know how fun that would be but maybe fun

I don't know anyway that wraps it up for 1984 or 83 83 and one of Sega's most

I guess iconic games the games that they love the most I don't know that I've never met anyone who's really a big fan of the game Flicky but Sega really loves it they've remade it

they've referenced it they've turned Flicky into like you know a character alongside Pengo that just always shows up like what's the deal with Flickie guys what's up with that? It's very Japanese I think

in what sense they must love it because it's named Flicky It's a cute little mascot character. Okay, but there were lots of cute mascot characters in videos back there. So why is it the Sega looks Flicky so much? Maybe whoever's in charge of the company develop Flicky. And they really think it's important.

So they, you know, talk about it a lot. I have no idea. So you guys, you guys actually have played Flicky right? No, I've never played Flicky. No. I don't think I've even heard. You're not a proper Sega fan. No, no.

You haven't been doing your duty. I think I'll make them briefly. This is how I love it. It reminds me of Mapyland. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just looking at a picture of it, still picture. Well, Mapyland was a side-scrolling platformer. This is more just the original Mapy or city connection.

Okay. There was a version of it for the Genesis, apparently. Yep. So they do love it. They do. I mean, that came out of ten years after the arcade version. It's something culturally we cannot know because it's just Japanese. Japanese or something.

I guess. We just can't fathom it. I mean, it also kind of reminds me of a couple of the games in the Nintendo Retro Collection, the Retro Game Challenge collection. Oh, yeah? Like the old, the oldest version of the Ninja Game. Yeah, the Ninja Game. That was really based on like Ninja Taro.

It was. Was it just called Ninja? I don't know. Just like the single screen with a whole lot of stacked platforms jumping and doing, like that kind of action. Yeah, you've got Mappi. Ja-ja-Marcoon. That's like a whole sort of self-chameral of these things.

That's sort of single-screen-ish platforming action game. Yeah. Yeah, but for whatever reason, Sega's really, really fond of this one. So Flicky, basically, you control a bird, a little bluebird, maybe the bluebird of happiness. I don't know. And you're going through this multi, like a, not really a maze, but it's an area with multiple platforms of different levels. It's not quite a single screen, but it basically scrolls for like two screens and then it loops.

So it's kind of like an infinite, a little bit like fantasy zone, if you're familiar with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like a small, infinitely scrolling area. And within that space, there are little yellow chicks

that have been, like, kidnapped or abandoned or something. And your goal is to collect those chicks and then lead them back to the exit. And basically, you can take one at a time or you can,

keep going around and grabbing as many as possible and they'll all trail behind Flicky, a little bit like Starjacker almost. And as in Star Jacker... This is Chick Jacker. Yes, exactly. So, you know, as in Star Jacker, there is a risk element that comes with having

this trail of chickies behind you. And that is, there are little cats roaming around trying to catch you. And if they catch you, they use a life. But if they just bump into a chick, then they'll catch the chick, and that chick will be knocked out of your out of your little troop of chicks.

So the more chicks you can take to the exit door at once, the more points you get. Like there's a score multiplier, and basically you get like 100, 200, 400, 800,000, 1,000, 2,000, 5,000. So if you get all the chicks at once, then you get a huge score bonus, and that's kind of the challenge of the, because it's an arcade game,

you're going for the highest score. But if you do that, you have to be really careful because there are cats on the prowl. So you have to kind of question, Is it worth just getting on to the next level, or do I want to try to get as many points as possible? A classic risk reward system. It's a little bit like choplifter, and that you're trying to rescue a lot of things, and you can go for a bunch at once, but it puts them at risk. And Siga did, I think I put it on here.

Yeah, they created the arcade version of choplifter. So maybe they were really inspired by choplifter. And that may be part of why it caught on, at least with some people, is that it's kind of, thing that you get really good at it, you can get a much better score because you're much better at, you know, getting these multipliers. You can get through the game, even if you're not so good. But it's the sort of thing you could put effort into and actually

see a reward for it. Yeah, I think maybe this was one of those games that was probably like really popular in the arcades at the time. And those of us who didn't see it back then look back and are like, eh. Yeah. Yeah. I had a doubt this was popular in America. I seriously. I don't think so. It had to be Japanese

because I've never heard of it. I mean, likewise, Mappi seems to be a really big sort of iconic game for Namco, but I don't know that I know of any American fans of Mappi. So I guess, you know, like this style of game or this cutiness of game is just like more popular in Japan than it is here. So it goes. But yeah, like Benj said, there was a Genesis remake of the game and it's a pretty

straight remake. You know, coming out nearly a decade later, that's, I think asking a lot of Genesis owners like please buy this game that is you know basically like a prettier version of a 1984 arcade game and also there's weird references and other things like an entire level of Gunstar superheroes for Game Boy Advance did you ever play that I didn't own it but I think I played it once so there is a level where it is like I didn't get it when I reviewed the game I was like

why am I like leading chicks around but yeah I don't think I made it to that level It's a section of It must have been a huge hit in Japan or something. I guess. Either that or this is proof that Sega's insane. Someone has something on Sega. Okay. Anyway, so Flicky, I guess to understand Sega, you have to understand Flicky.

You must grok it. Yep. I don't. At least played it once, which is not the case, in my case. Let's see. Something else weird from 1984, a game called Apu. I don't even know how to pronounce that, but it's a Russi. wrestling game.

Apubo. Yeah, kind of visually reminds me of champion wrestling, but a little more defined and definitely not afraid to just rip off the likenesses of American wrestlers. Yeah. There is a guy with a yellow, like a yellow mullet and a balding hairline. And his name is Hogan, H.O.G.E. N. Hogan. H.O.G.E. N. Hogan. Yeah, we've got our H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. H. Oh, A, Giants, yeah. A, the giant.

Yep. And A and, okay, they're even living off Japanese wrestlers, too. So I have to assume they changed these names when they came to America. A pooh. I think this came out as champion wrestling. But, you know, for the sort of clumsy visual style it has, like, the graphics, the character designs are really weird. Like, when Hogan attacks, he, like, he loses his torso. It's really strange.

He loses his torso. He loses his torso. So he throws his arms out and just becomes like arms and legs, doing a flying kick. Like Rayman or something? No, not quite like that. Does he have limbs? It's the opposite of Rayman, where he's only limbs. He's only limbs.

Wait. Rayman is only limbs. No, he has no limbs. He has no limbs. He has no limbs. So it's pretty shameless. But then again, you know, years later, we still had Capcom putting in M. Bison. So you can get away with that stuff.

Well, at least they changed two. M. Bison was. Yeah, they switch it around. Well, for America. Oh, yeah, no matter. Okay. But in the Japanese version. A Poo is an

Automonopoea Japanese thing. Like, I don't know. Close line. A pooh. I wouldn't be surprised. It must be something.

Maybe it's like a month. It's got to be something. You know, they wouldn't name a game APP-P-O-O-O-H for no reason. I'm sure it's a sound effect, yeah. But it's like a Poo, like the character from the sentence. A-P-U.

I mean, if you look at the logo, it's even got this little, like, cartoon impact at the end. Yeah, it's like a punch. It's like a punch. It's like a punch. sounded yeah that makes sense but i will say that for all its goofiness the game does have tried to take a pretty sophisticated take on wrestling for 1984 it has grappling it has throws it has flying kicks

you can toss guys out of the ring and the perspective changes and there's a countdown as they try to get back into the ring so they tried to do a lot that's good i guess sounds like fun yeah yeah so what's up with spatter i don't know do we want to talk about spatter? It looks, I don't know. I just looked it up and it looks colorful and delightful. It's really colorful. It's like an eyesore colorful. It's one of those really garish mid-80s arcade games where they were like, look at all the stuff we can do before realizing, oh, hey, we don't have to do all that stuff at once. It's kind of like Rally X and you're running around. I see a resemblance. Yeah, and you're going through these mazes. And it does have some impressive visual techniques.

there's um like the the foreground the areas you're running around and have sort of holes that you can see through to the background so it's got that like dual layer parallax shift yet another different version of 3d simulation i think this is cool i there's so many neat obscure Sega games it's fun not knowing because you get to learn all this for the first time there's so much that you i mean jeremy we know so much about video games right about all kinds of things i i've I feel like I know a good amount about it. Yeah. So to find a niche that's unexplored is just exciting to me. Yeah. So it's a road rally in the sky, basically, is what it looks like. Sort of. The layouts are actually not that dissimilar from like the really old, you know, drive around in a square. Well, in this one, you're trying to avoid enemy cars.

Right. Like, enemy cars are trying to smash into you, and you're trying to collect flags. That's why I gave it the RallyX. Right, right. So RallyX kind of stuff. So you've got this like several screen wide maze. But then the graphics. or such that it looks like it's, you know,

floating half a mile up in the sky above these other backgrounds, which just yeah, gives it a real, like, visual interest. It's different from all those other games. It even throws in a little bit of the block pushing that you get in Pengo. Like, if you watch videos of it, you can, like, bump into things

little objects on the racetrack, and if they slide into an enemy racer, you'll take the enemy racer out of commission. Nice. So it seems like they were trying to do a lot with this one, and it seems kind of like a visual mess. But maybe if you play it, you don't mind so much. It's just very garish looking and there's a lot happening. Wow. Now, of all the obscure Sega games from this year, the one that I really want to play is Future Spy, because that was the final game on Zaxon hardware. And it's

an isometric shooter, but instead of being set in outer space, it's set over the ocean with sort of a modern military theme. You fly an F-15, and you're taking on enemy ships, an enemy jetcraft. It sort of looks like 1942 isometric. Yeah, a little bit, except instead of fighting, you know, a 19 World War II plane, whatever those are called Mustang, you're flying an F-15, so it's more contemporary. But it's future spy, so I guess it's not contemporary, it's actually set of the future. But as far as I can tell, the only future thing about it is that every once in a while, you'll encounter this giant storm cloud on the ocean, and there's no way to avoid it. and you'll fly into it and then it takes you to

like the Star Trek the next generation a hollow deck it's just this grid this grid space and you're still isometric like the perspective doesn't change it

but the ocean is replaced by like a grid it's the VR missions version of the other levels yeah and then there's just like bolts of energy that fly around

it's really bizarre and abstract future spy maybe you're spying on the future I guess maybe that could be you're flying into the future and traveling

back in time to say, don't let Trump get elected. Oh, my God, guys. The future is entirely grid-based, by the way. Always. I believe it. I saw Tron. Yeah. They call it the game grid, damn it.

The game grid. Anyway, one other sort of obscure and interesting game for 1984, which is GP World. Wow. And this is one of Sigism's very few forays into laser disks, yes. They really did do a little bit of everything back here. I feel like I saw this in the arcade back then. I remember a real road video like this. Yeah, so video background.

So the sprites are overlaid onto some sort of pre-filmed video background on the laser disc rate, apparently. Yeah, so it's an early version of some of those streaming FMB games you saw on the Sega CD, like Sewer Shark or Silfeed. But this one is, yeah, it's got the sort of behind-the-camera view that you saw in, was it Turbo? the graphics are a little nicer like the car graphics are bigger and more detailed it looks kind of like pole position yeah I mean the the cars are closer to that yeah closer in size

and scale and detail to pole position's cars so definitely more of a 1984 game but it was an attempt to jump on the laser disc trend that Dragon's Lair started by taking a different approach to it which I think is interesting but basically they probably had you Suzuki You know, he's a big racing nerd.

They probably just had him, like, drive down the road really fast to the camera. And film, like, driving down a European road. And so your race basically plays off the laser disc, and there's no change in the course. It's always the same. You can't really change speed. So you're just kind of moving left and force. But that's, you know, racing games, you are pretty much just going fast. So it almost kind of makes sense.

Yeah. It makes sense also in the context of arcade games. as spectacle and amusement and attracting players just to get a quarter, you know? Something different. They don't necessarily have to have longevity as long as they attract people to spend money on it because, man, this is cool and new, you know. Yeah, and it's yet another way to get 3D perspective graphics that the hardware couldn't handle.

In this case, just replace the whole dang thing with video, overlay sprites on top of it, and you get all these visuals that there's no other way you could make on this kind of. The problem is that you have a real-world road, and then you have these sort of cartoonish race cars, yeah, they're like four colors, very blocky. They scale awkwardly. So it doesn't quite work. I think they probably would have had better luck if they had, you know, had like maybe someone draw, you know, get like a studio Gynax or someone to draw on a back.

Like overlay cells. Although this question could the hardware handle that to the compositing if it wasn't just sprites? I don't know. Well, no, I mean, if it were a laser disc, if it were spilling, hand-drawn animation, Like Dragon's Lair was animated So, you know, come up with Sort of a color and style

That is more uniform and consistent with the race cars Yeah I think that would have worked better But this is To me it reminds me of those little mechanical toys That you might have seen as a kid Where yeah, it's like a plastic car on a stick And there's a scrolling

A belt in the background And you're basically just really Steering back and forth Trying to avoid little bumps on the belt I always took the part And broke Nice I always play this for like 30 seconds and said, okay, I want to be playing a video game.

Yeah. But, you know. This is in 1970? What am I doing? This was a good attempt to do something different with technology. It didn't really work, but certainly this wouldn't be the only time people would take an approach like this. So kind of innovative. And Sega did have a hand in, I want to say Pioneer's Laser Disc concert.

Was it the laser active? Yeah. Yeah. Laser. They're somehow involved there, and I didn't look that up in advance. But I know, again, the site Sega does, has been posting laser active reviews because of the Sega connection. Yeah, that module. They had a Genesis module.

That's what it was. They plug-ins. That's cool. I don't have a laser active. I almost bought one for really cheap in the 90s. One of those stories. They're a lot cheaper back in. You got a whole series of those things you didn't quite buy.

The ship of regrets. I remember seeing them in the store that were like a Circuit City when they were new, and I thought that was crazy. Just couldn't believe it. We didn't have Circuit City back then. We had Federated. Well, Circus City wasn't that much better. At least it survived longer. Yeah.

Okay, so... 85? 85 is got good stuff. This might be the last year we do, because we're kind of running long. We're almost in an hour and a half now. I've got so much stuff I want to talk about in like 85 and 86. So maybe we should just hit the highlights. I think we need to do like, no, let's do 85 thoroughly.

Let's give it... There's a lot of an 85 to talk about. Well, are we going to do a part two? I think we need to do a part two, 86 through 1990 or something. Sega has a lengthy arcade history. Yeah. And this time I'll put the notes together further. in advance so you guys can

actually learn about what they are. It's not just me monologuing at you. It's okay. I feel like Mr. Parrish, the teacher. I looked into a lot of this 85 stuff, so we got some good stuff. Yeah, 1989 is a good-ass year for Sega games. Like heavy metal. This is the year that Sega really, really came into its own.

I mean, just look at, I mean, the games. Hang-on, Space Harrier, Sega Ninja, Fantasy Zone. Like, even those three or four games right there, those are great. there's tons of other stuff that they released that were good or notable or else kind of became memorable because of their connection to the master system. So yeah, like this is, this is Sega really shifting into high gear. Yep. So maybe we should start with the big ones. Should we start with the super scale? I think hang on. Yeah. Yeah. So hang on in space harrier, the first superscaler games. So, so this was you Suzuki's M2 team. Um, and him again,

as this has kind of been a theme, really wanting to do 3D before 3D graphics existed. So they came up with this super-scaler technology, which was a new set of hardware. So it was a really early 16-bit hardware. It was a really early 16-bit system. So it had a Motorola 68,000 in it. But then it also had... Which is also important because that's what the Sega Genesis would use. Right.

So there was kind of a natural evolution from arcade to home. So that's pretty important. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. No, that's fine. So they got the 16-bit hardware, so there was a lot more hardware to start out with. And then they also had this super-scaler chip set, which was a whole bunch of custom chips that I don't really know too much about, but that were basically designed to scale sprites, as the name on the box says.

So, you know, they'd already done this kind of pseudo-3 thing with 3D thing with sprites where you have a tiny sprite and replace it with a bigger one and a bigger one as it gets closer to the screen. but before this you couldn't really just take a sprite and smoothly scale it in hardware, which is actually the same sort of technology that's still used to this day for 3D graphics for manipulating textures. You know, you have these 2D textures and you manipulate them using a bunch of math to be at some 3D perspective angle on the screen. So this was really sort of an early version of that, where you're just taking sprites and stretching them and maybe rotating them to put them at, to make them appear to be a different. distances and doing a whole lot

of it at once is really the breakthrough here. So like I'm looking at this high frame rate you know, yeah, super high frame rate. I'm looking at the specs and you have 128 sprites on screen per frame thousands of scaled sprites a second you can have... Bear in mind what

were the size of the sprites were they like 8 by 8 pixel because it's not necessarily like 128 independent objects it's sprites, you know, objects made of multiple sprites. I'm not sure what individual sprites But not to take away from what they accomplished here, because it is amazing. You can have 100 sprites on a single scan line on this without slowing down the hardware.

And, you know, this is 1985. So you had like the NES, you know, you get, what, half a dozen sprites before you start getting flickers? Eight sprites. Eight sprites before you start getting flicker. And this is sticking 100 on the same line. So it's impressive. Yeah. And it really lets you do things that they, you know, they'd sort of been trying to do before,

but hadn't really been able to realize. It's another game that blew me away in the arcade, just seeing it. Yeah. Just the visuals and the high-detailed graphics and the speed. And, of course, the motorcycle you can sit on and lean back. Yeah, so hang on, had a cabinet with an actual motorcycle that sit on and you steer the motorcycle by actually leaning this physical cycle from side to side. And then you have these pseudo-3D graphics streaming at you super fast.

And like Suzuki has actually said that he thought about making these. He was thinking about them in 3D. He wasn't thinking about, you know, taking 2D planes. manipulate them, he was actually calculating where these objects would be in 3D and then feeding it into this hardware and having it do the right thing to the sprites. That's awesome. So he was really doing 3D graphics. It was just being implemented in this way that used the sprites, but the playfield really was conceived in 3D. Well, yeah, that's kind of the big thing. You had sort of the forward into the camera view

of turbo and then pull position and things like mock writer on the NES. And those were all sort of impressive for the time, but they were very limited in how they rendered the screen, whereas the Super Scalar games gave you these, like, really detailed, chunky backgrounds that could twist and turn. I think Hang-On was pretty much just like straight, you know, flat horses, but, you know, by the time you get to 1986, what is the game in 1986? Oh, yeah, you had, um, uh, Enduro Racer. Dendro Racer.

Yeah, where all of a sudden you get ups and downs. You get hills and peaks. Right. You can do jumps off of things. Yeah, I mean, and this continued on through, you know, all the way to, we'll get to these later, but all the way to, like, Galaxy Force in 1988, where you had, like, the entire environment being made out of these scales, right? So you could really do anything you wanted with them. I mean, that was, that was a couple board revisions, and at that point, they were putting multiple 68,000 processors together to do this.

You're making them want to play these really bad. They're really cool. Well, the nice thing about Hang-on, at least super hang-on, is that you can get it on 3DS as part of the M2 developed 3D ages. and the really awesome thing is that there's a mode where you can get like pixel perfect scaling so instead of being stretched

to the whole screen it's a windowed and it will have the arcade cabinet around it and you can turn on the accelerator or the gyroscope inside the 3DS and you can play it

like you're on the cabinet and the screen will actually rotate wow that's like within the screen to reflect what you're doing it is an amazing it's an $8 dollar game.

I should buy it. And they put so much love into it. People are like, $8 game, $8 for an old arcade game. I'm like, you don't understand what they did. You don't know what they did here. I need to pick that up just to check that. There's so many different ways to play that. And it's in two.

So the emulation is just perfect. It looks amazing. Yeah, like absolutely. Anyone who has a 3DS needs to get the 3D agents. Yeah, and a whole bunch of these games have been ported to those 3D classics. Yeah. But I don't think they did Space Harrier, did they? I don't know.

So that might have a Space Harrier. I remember that. Yeah, so 85 we have hang on in Space Harrier. Space Harrier doesn't have the gyro element, which is what makes the hangout court so crazy. Yeah, Space Harrier is kind of the weird one. So originally this was someone on the team wanted to do a jet simulator. But basically the hardware wasn't quite there. Or maybe the budget wasn't quite there for that.

They decided that actually having a jet as your main character would require to, many different sprites for all the angles it could go at. And so they changed it to this thing where it was a dude with a jetpack in this very weird fantasy world. So you're just a guy. And so it doesn't require as much animation because it's just a dude from the back running constantly. But you can fly around the screen with this jetpack and you're shooting at everything coming

out of you in the background. And it's a very trippy game. So I had this quote that I wrote down that Yus Suzuki's had the inspirations on this one were the 1984 film The Never Ending Story, the 1982 animated series Space Cobra, which is the guy with a gun on his arm, and the work of artist Roger Dean, which you can definitely see. See, Prog Rock Strikes again. Yeah, so it's just this super surreal fantasy setting where you end up fighting like one-eyed

mammoths and weird robots. I don't actually think Space Harrier is that fun because it's going so fast and it's really hard to judge locations of things in green space. look at these things. Well, there's a port on the Sega Master System that used the 3D glasses. I have it. And Hang-On was one of the pack-in games, Hang-on Safari Hunt.

Mainly that was to like to show off the light phaser. But the space area had to use those 3D shutter glasses, the LCD shutters that came with some packings. I did not know that. Some version

of this. Oh, yeah. I think it had to buy them separately. Yeah. But it is a little hard to play. They had a set where they were packed in there. That's what I was talking about. But, yeah, you could buy them separately. Most people did. Yeah, those are something I need to pick up eventually. I have them.

Do you have the Famicom 3D glasses? Those are cool. It's pretty much the same thing. Yeah, same thing. Yeah, but, you know, the NT Mini now has a core in it that plays Master System games. And the guy who's been developing the core has been talking about creating custom adapters for hardware and cartridges. So you can plug it a Master System cartridge. and then plug in a master system controller.

So once he gets the master system, it's like half a dozen systems in addition to NES now, there's more coming. But once he gets the master system stuff in place, it would be really cool to, you know, get the adapter for the glasses, the anastrophic glasses, and be able to play space harry or 3D

or Zaxon 3D on an HD TV. How crazy would that be? That would be crazy. Technology, man. Red and Blue are tuned the same way they are on a CRT. Yeah. I would assume. I probably work out.

Yeah, I think it would work out. As long as it's, you know, going at 60 frames a second, that's probably all you know. It has to synchronize perfectly soon. Yeah. But, yeah, it's a little hard to play just because it's got this sort of twin stick feel going on where you have to keep track of where your character is in the full plane to dodge things. And you're also trying to shoot at things. Yeah, it means are shooting bullets at you.

And the bullets are also scalar objects and they get huge on screen. So that really gets a lot of these games get a little close. get a little cluttered. It's mostly makes sense in motion, except it, but it's all moving so fast. It's a little hard to take it all in. I remember seeing Space Area in the arcade. There's another one of those in Gatlinburg, and it was hard, but it was impressive looking. Yeah, I

like the idea of it. It's just really hard to play, which I guess, you know, that's kind of the Sega thing, like, I can't take your quarter in a minute or less. But I always felt like the NES rip-offs, 3D World Runner. We're a little better, and then there's one in the VAMICOM

called Attack Animal Gwacken, or Gaku-in. Gokamoli. Something like that. Oh, Gakuan. Yeah, I think that's a Gakuin. And you're, it's basically space harrier. It's much more open about being a space harrier ripoff, except you're a schoolgirl.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, so it's a schoolgirl. Are you wearing a broom per chance or? No, you're just a little schoolgirl shooting stuff. Just for no reason. Yeah, sure. You're a school girl with a gun. It's like the, it's like the precursor to like every game on Vita.

Yeah. You're right. Every girl's with guns. so let's see what are the other big ones um fantasy zone i mentioned fantasy zone earlier in the context of flicky yeah this is this is like the flicky concept turned into a shooter and also kind of uh it's reminiscent of a cap con capcom a shoot him up because it has an it has an economy has stores yeah yeah so it's sort of it's i mean it's almost a subgenre at some point the cute them up is what they call so yeah so it's so it's a side-scrolling shooter but everything is adorable and

pastel colored. But yeah, it's also got this system where enemies actually drop money and then there's these little balloons that are entrances

to shops. So you can go in the middle of the stage and buy new stuff. It looks fun. I played it. Yeah.

That's also been remade in 3D by M2. Maybe that's either. Yeah, I bought it. I think I bought that one. It's really. They also did the sequel.

Ports galore. Yeah, and it has. And it's got, And it's also, so it's also kind of exploitive in that the stages just loop and you have to beat the right enemies in the stage in order to get to the boss. Yeah. The stages aren't actually that difficult to defeat because you just need to beat like the bosses in the stage or the sort of mid-boss enemies. And they're not that hard to beat. But the thing is, once you get to the boss, you really need to have earned a lot of money and bought good weapons. Otherwise, you'll be way underpowered for the bosses because they're really powerful and have a ton of attacks. Yeah. So in a lot of ways, it's sort of this merger of like an adventure of like an adventure.

your game with a with a scrolling shooter yeah the question becomes like how long do I spend in this level earning cash yeah you know like the longer you stick around yeah the longer you fart around and try to shoot down enemies and collect cash the greater the risk you put yourself at like there's more opportunities to be shot down and killed so it's actually a pretty easy game if you just dash through to each stage but then you won't will be able to be in the bosses eventually you'll hit a boss that yeah um but then you know if you hang around and try to farm cash you'll probably get killed by something so it's tricky yeah and apparently they actually did a polygonal 3d remake of this on ps2 which i have not played i can't imagine it's probably not as good as the

the yeah the more notable thing with the remakes has been with fantasy zone 2 which originally was just a sigma master system game but then m2 ported it back to the arcade hardware for the original game and so when the uh the the the collection came out for PS2, a fantasy zone, they took Fantasy Zone 2 and ported it to the arcade hardware for this unique Fantasy Zone 2 that had never really existed. And then, once they had done that, they did the same thing for the 3DS version. Okay. So if you get the 3DS version of Fantasy Zone 2, you're getting a game that never actually

existed, which is the arcade version of Fantasy Zone 2. Cool. And Opa Opa's tears were because he never got to go back to the arcade. Obama being the name of the little ship. Yeah, so another thing to note about 1985 is that that's the year that Sega really got serious about the home hardware business. The SG-1000 really felt like just kind of a, we should do this thing because everyone else is. Oh, hey, it was kind of successful. It sold like, I don't know, a very small number of units, but it was still way more successful than Sega had expected.

So I don't think they had very high expectations for the SG-1-000. So that was a very primitive piece of hardware. We did a full episode on Master System last year at Midwest Gaming Classic, so I won't go into too much detail. But basically, they took the SG-1000 hardware and turned that into the core of the master system. But then most of the heavy lifting on the master system was done by a new, much more powerful graphics co-processor. So it was backward compatible with the SG-1,000. but a much, much nicer system, like more colors, more sprite depth, more, you know, just more stuff happening than the NES, even.

So that came out in Japan in 1985 is the Mark 3. So a lot of the games you saw around this time, I think were maybe designed with sort of a Mark 3 conversion in mind. Certainly, they became kind of iconic early master system games, stuff like Teddy Boy and My Hero. What else? I guess those are the two from 86. Sega Ninja, aka Ninja Princess. That was another one.

So they're not really great games. They feel very much like, you know, we see Super Mario Brothers is happening, and we've got to get on that platformer thing too. But like everyone, you know, Super Mario Brothers was just a game out of time.

Like it was so much more advanced than anything else anyone was doing in the platform space. That and ghost and goblins were just like, whoa, these are, you know, massive steps forward. Like everyone else, Sega was kind of sort of doing the best they could, but it would take them a while to really, I think, kind of master the platformer genre. In the platformer space, yeah. Yeah, I can't say, you know, Teddy Boy ever caught on, really. Once it developed into Alex Kidd down the line, then you've always got things people heard of.

Yeah, I don't know if Teddy Boy, actually became Alex Kidd, but I think that's a good argument to make. It definitely feels like a proto-Alex kid. Not really a good way to know. I feel like I've seen Teddy Boy. Is it a platformer? Yeah, it is. It was released on Master System for one of the cards.

Oh, that's why. Yeah. Okay. I've got that. In the arcade, it was called Teddy Boy Blues, and it got that name because it was based on a song by a pop idol, like a one-hit wonder from around that era in Japan called, by the name of Yoko Ishino.

and for whatever reason she was like a major figure in this video game and the title screen, yep, that's her. That soft focus, yep. Yeah, hold it up to the microphone. Yeah, I hope to see it.

80s idols. Picture in 80s, Japanese idols. Yeah, she's on the title screen performing and her band is like monsters from the game and her song plays all the way through the game in the background. Yeah. It's kind of weird,

but this was sort of a thing back then. But as a platformer, it looks less like something like Mario Brothers and more like just the lock of chase mode where you've just got these very simple platforms. Yeah, there's no real cohesion to the world design. There's dice in it, of course. Like every early Sega game.

Sure. I think when you die, you turn into an angel, too. Oh, okay. Yeah. Because that's a Sega thing. That's cool. But this kind of reminds me of something you saw a lot on the Famicom.

And maybe Famicom developers were inspired by this, where they would take the pop singer and put her in there. You know, S&K had Athena, well, Psycho Soldier. and then Athena, where they had a theme song. And, like, that was kind of, yeah, that was kind of, yeah, that was kind of, uh, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the familycom version of Athena came with a tape cassette that had the Psycho Soldier theme in it.

Wow. And then, uh, a company called Imagineer, not Imagineering, Imagineer, which is a Japanese publisher, had a series of Famicom games called Wave Jack. There were three of them, and they came in these big, deluxe box sets. I bought one when I was in Japan a couple of months ago. And they come with all this extra stuff, like books and so on and so forth. But they're all based around different pop idols at the time. Like, you know, more of the one-hit wonders.

So, yeah, each of these games is based around a pop idol and has, like, a, you know, like the pop idol is the character you're rescuing or something. And each of then comes with a cassette tape of a song by that pop idol. I guess we could listen to it later if you want. So these are like the otaku box set deluxe versions of the day, basically. with all the merchandise. Jeremy's pulling something from the shelf. It's a really cool.

It's a really cool pickup from Japan. I'll have to post photos of this. Why didn't they do that stuff in America? I mean, that would be... It was a lot later before we got. On PC games. It was just not...

Yeah, the PC games that box was stuff. I think they were marketing in a different way in America. Yeah. I think the extras came in the form of like, here, have a giant strategy guide manual for Final Fantasy because you don't know how to play RPGs. The Dragon Quest's... The Dragon Quest manual takes you all.

the way to the final boss. It's like, here's what you do step by step. You are stupid and don't understand RPGs. All right. So this is a game called Psycho Calibur. And it has like, uh, whoa. You're losing Phillies. Yeah, there's all kinds of stuff in here.

There's like these little cards that look like Bikuri Man. I don't think they're stickers. No, they're just like. A little collector charts. Break those apart and trade them with your friends. I guess so. But everyone has the same thing. But it reminds me of Bikuri Man a lot.

Oh. There's a big, big manual. Look at that. Look at, oh, there's full color, like, hand-drawn art. Gosh, so nice. But then, you know, the PSTE resistance. Of course, it's, oh, it's a Famicom disc system game, not just Famicom. So it comes to the disc.

But, yes, then the PSD resistance is the cassette tape. And look at this. It's never been open before. I'm going to crack this open someday. We're going to have a psycho. This is worth nothing. Are you sure? There's no value to this.

It's like a $50 game. That's, I don't know. It's pretty good. We need to crack this open and have a psycho caliber party someday. We should do it. Just like everyone jam out to psycho caliber. It's like cracking me by share pain. So let's see.

I don't even know if it's music on here. Prolog. Oh, it's a... Maybe it's just for a 30 minutes. It might be just a drama. No, there is some music on here. There's something about a melody and adventure, Psycho Calibre theme.

Okay. So anyway, yeah, but apparently the music is performed by a duo named the Poppins. The Poppins. There's a crazy demon on the front, too, is awesome. And these cute little Poppins. Awesome. Are they two ladies?

I can't. It's two girls. Yeah, yeah, totally. I think they're too young to be called ladies. They've got to be like 15. That was just my term of like, I don't know. No, that's fine. That's a polite and respectful way to go.

But I really think you can call them girls, and it's not insulting. Like, they're very, very young. They're teen idols. So anyway, that's kind of a side diversion. but I love this stuff. It's just like these crazy, weird things you can get from Japan. So anyway, yeah, like, I really feel like this Wave Jack series was, it had to have been inspired by Teddy Boy Blues,

or at least that was in someone's model. The idle tie-ins, yeah. Yeah, and then I think... I mean, it's been a thing for a long time. Yeah, probably the best game to make use of this idea was Otoki, the musical Famicom shooter, Famicom Discs Shooter. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I did a video on that last year.

That looked really cool. It's a good, good game. Collect your notes. Most of these games are not good, good games. Teddy Boy Blues, it's not a good good game. Yeah. Otoki is. It's the one exception to the rule.

Anyway. All right. So that's Teddy Boy Blues. And there was My Hero, which was, I think My Hero was another one of those sort of innovative games where they were kind of working in a new genre. Yeah, working out a new format. new, but it didn't quite work out. This one is very renegade-like. Scrolling brawler.

There was another game the same year called FlashGal where you're basically playing as Wonder Woman. And it's weird because it's a scroll and punch brawler, but it's auto-scrolling. So you're always moving forward, even if you like duck on the ground and stop

moving. We just like scoot forward. It doesn't look very good, but you have to respect the fact that there is a female protagonist in 1985, which is still very common. You had Baraduke, and that was about it. Yeah, there's a lot of these you can tell they're really still working

out what the brawler genre is going to be. It's just not quite there yet. Like, no one knows if it's going to be... Not every idea is good. Closer to a shooter or closer to a one-on-one fighter. Well, it's funny that not every idea is good, but they had to make a gigantic arcade machine for each one of these.

Can you imagine? It also has the White House in the background. Yeah, I don't know what's going on. Actually, in terms of gameplay of WonderMomo. Except that you don't have the transformation element and it's not supposed to be like a play acting. There's a very like filtered Americana thing going on here

where there's a White House and a Statue of Liberty and then some palm trees. Oh, I see it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. White House-ish. Yeah. That's totally sad. Let's see. What else was there this year?

Two, okay, there are two games that Sega made, which were based on American console or computer games, and they made arcade games of them, Pitfall 2, and Choplifter, yeah. Have you guys played the arcade versions of these? I have. Well, I've played Pitfall 2. Arcade version.

Just because I love Pitfall 2, the original. This seems like the optimal version of Pitfall 2. Am I mistaken in thinking? I don't know. I felt like I didn't enjoy it when I played it. Really? Yeah, I don't remember why. Maybe it's just the cutesy graphics or something.

Two Japanese were you? Maybe. I'm sure I played it on Maine, you know, about 10, 15 years ago or something. Because I was curious, but, um, huh. Yeah, you know, my Western mind would translate pitfall to to more like a realistic Western style adventure, rugged. So like the Lost Caverns? Yeah.

Or the Mayan adventure? No, the Mayan adventure is kind of lame. It is very colorful. Yeah. Cartoony, yeah. Or like Indiana Jones or something, you know, like an Indiana Jones movie. I don't know. graphics aside, it does feel

it seems to me like it would be sort of like the optimal version of the game because you have more complex maze-like levels and things like a final boss and you actually have lives so you can afford to die. Well, I wanted super pitfall to be awesome on the

NES, but man, it was horrible. It was not good at all. It was just the biggest letdown of all time. Yeah. That one was sad. So we can at least agree pitfall too by Sega was better than super pitfall. Yeah, I'm sure it was. and let's see any last things oh there was heavy metal on here

yeah heavy metal is weird it's like a shooter where you could fire missiles way ahead of the screen so it's interesting because it has persistence of objects outside of your viewing area which you didn't know which is unusual back then yeah but I don't know if it's actually that good 40 Warriors is like super ugly

yeah I figured it didn't they have a master system this Master System version of that 4D Warriors? Are you thinking of Miracle Warriors? Yeah, maybe I'm just thinking a miracle Warriors. That's an RPG. Yeah. I don't think 4D Warriors came to a master system,

but I could be wrong. I'm not an expert. So 40 Warriors travel through time, apparently. Something like that. They work from like one part of the combat zone to another without warning, and it's very disorienting. Wow.

And like I said, it's a very, very ugly game. It's like the garishness of spatter, but in a sort of like, grotesque it's not quite realistic but like body horror way yeah I think I see what you mean bad color choices

pretty garish that's a good way to describe it the little dude you fly as kind of reminds me of the arcade version of section C yeah sections that you was about to say that just a scrolling shooter where you're a guy in instead of a ship well even like it's a little red dude

he's got kind of like that same curled up posture but I don't think it's as good as section Z then finally one last game another female protagonist in the arcade, Ninja Princess, which when it came to America, they said, Americans won't buy a game about a princess. We'll just call it the Ninja.

But you're still playing as a princess. This was basically a medieval take on Capcom's Commando. Thematically, it kind of reminds me of Icki for Famicom. I don't know if you guys ever played that. It's a popular whipping boy on Retronauts for being terrible. Icky. Ikea. Saga Ninja and Ninja Princess, whatever, is like crazy hard. It's extremely fast-paced. You're running around as a princess top-down view, top-down shooter. There's enemies coming from all over the place as you basically are making your way from the fields to the Daimyo's castle at the end.

So there's kind of a map that you progress through as you make it toward the end. But just really hard. It's one-hit kills. An interleaser, like tossing shirk in at you for. all over. Yeah, that's a big money wasteer in the arcade. Like, that poor princess didn't have a chance. Poor girl.

But anyway, that's, um, that wraps it up for 1985 and, like, I think that's as a pretty good overall, you know, the past two hours have been a good

description of Sega's arc. Ramping out. As, yeah, starting out as like these guys saying, oh, let's make some of arcade games. Yeah, let's copy everybody else at first, and then it'll develop their own.

Yeah, at this point, at this point, we're settling into some genres that are really going to take off. So we've got some good stuff to look forward to coming up in 86. If you listen to the whole two hours, too, you get a special price. Would you...

I just kind of give it to you. Yeah, you get to listen to us talk about psychocaliber. Would you guys say it's fair to describe the turning point for Sega as the arrival of you Suzuki? I feel like that was kind of the point at which their games

went from being like... To, whoa. A creative force. Yeah. Direct thing. Creative and technical. That's what makes Suzuki great. He wasn't just creative.

Like, he thought about things from a technological perspective. Yeah, I mean, the things he's making are really driving the hardware at this point. There's some, you know, there's early video games where people are just sort of making him going through the motions. Oh, we can make money on this and whatever. But then there are people who looked at the medium and said, oh, we can do this and this and this. And let's push everything. And sounds like he's one of those guys. Yeah, he's an early auture, basically.

who had visions of what he wanted to do, and he's going to push the hardware and software until they can do it. Yeah, I know some people don't like the idea of gameateurs, but I feel like if you... Why not? It's awesome. I just don't like it.

There are people who don't like everything. Yeah, I mean, there are people, maybe it's better to say, there are people who don't like the idea of attributing a corporate greatness to a single person. Yeah. And maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe this is not you Suzuki's doing. Maybe Sega just spontaneously, as a collective entity became awesome. There's certainly like whole teams uniting behind these visions that are making them possible. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, definitely there was a learning curve

as Sega became more technically minded. And, you know, that's what made possible the super scalar technology and, you know, that sort of thing. Like, they had to get to that point on their own. But I do feel like you really see a difference when you Suzuki arrives and the games that we talked about here,

that we're really just like, whoa, this is a huge step forward for the company. It's not just a clone. I feel those where Suzuki's doing. It could have been a management shift around the same time, too. It's like, oh, we have all these talented people. Let's give you Suzuki more power to develop as a company. Yeah, that happens in a lot of history. I'm just speculating.

I have no idea. No, Sega was owned by Gulf and Western in the 70s, and at some point in the 80s, Gulf and Western divested themselves of Sega. So it is possible. I don't know what the timeline on that was. I'm not sure. Let's look that up. But it's possible that, yeah,

like moving away from the corporate teat and becoming independent freed up Sega to become a lot more creative, much less of like, let's, let's, you know, chase out for the latest arcade and make a room. Giving someone with a vision of resources. Because, like, I know when I was reading up

on some of these, like he was Suzuki said way back when we were talking about champion boxing, which was one of his first ones. So that was such a small team that he was in there actually, you know, drawing sprite frames and stuff. Implying that later he was not doing this, but he was, you know, he had these visions and was putting people on, on these projects to develop. So look at, um, all right.

So Johnny Ive at Apple was like the same, same kind of thing where he was there before Steve Jobs came by. He was, you know, he may have even been the head designer, but what were they doing? Nothing great because the management stuff. Yeah, because Gil Armilio was like, just keep making page boxes. So it took somebody to unleash that power and give him what he. he could do the resources. Here's some substantiation for your theory.

In 1983, Gulf and Western sold the U.S. assets of Sega to pinball manufacturer Valley Midway or Ballet Manufacturing. The Japanese assets of Sega were purchased by a group of investors led by David Rosen, the original founder of Sega, and Hayao Nakayama, who would be the company's president for a long time. Yeah, okay. So, like the backer for the company. So, yeah, I think you have a whole bunch of things happening all at once.

for Sega going from being like just another arcade game maker who had a couple of minor interesting hits like Xaxon and Pingo to a true powerhouse. So I think that's a good place for us to end this episode. Also, we're at the two hour mark now, so my God.

I know you guys have lives and things you need to go do. So I will let you go. And I think we'll reconvene at some point in the semi-near future. Three months. Yeah, to tackle the second half of Sega's arcade history. I want to talk about altered beasts.

We'll get there. That's in the late 80s. Yeah, there's a lot more super-scaley stuff. We'll go, we'll go 1986 through 1990 next time we get together or next time we talk about Sega. I'm going to, little teaser, I'm going to promise to talk about Dump Matsumoto just because. We've got to. Sounds like a verb, but it's actually a game. Well, that person, actually.

Yeah, a wrestler, right? We'll get to that next time. All right. So, thanks guys for coming into talk. Thanks everyone who stuck through this entire episode. Thank you for bearing through the kind of choppy early days of Sega to get to the good stuff, the meaty stuff in the center. This has been the second episode of Retronauts East. I have been joined by...

Benj Edwards. Tell us where we can find you on the internet bin. At Benjedwards on Twitter, vintagecomputing.com. Patreon.com slash binge Edwards, if you want to pay me to know nothing about Sega. And Ben... I do that for free. Oh, cool. I am Ben Elchin.

I'm at Kieran, K-I-R-I-N-N on Twitter. Not a beer. Not a beer. But is it a good beer? You don't like Kieran? There's a lot of other beers I like better. Oh, man. Uh-oh.

Beer was, that's a religion in North Carolina. I mean, if you want where the name came from, it came from the Final Fantasy Sixth summons. So, originally. Not a beer. Not a beer. And this, of course, is Jeremy Parrish. You can find me at Retronauts.com.

And we're never having another show. because we don't agree on the beer. We'll manage something. This is the destruction of the Retronauts East. We're all drinking Jeremy's gin anyway, so it doesn't matter. Don't tell them that. So anyway, yes, what was I saying about myself? Oh, yes, Twitter, I'm GameSpite.

And, of course, Retronauts is now a part of the Podcast One network, so you can find it's a podcast one or at Retronauts.com or on iTunes. if you've downloaded this from Retronauts or someplace and your podcast aggregator choice does not have our new feed for Podcast 1 write to them, petition them, tell them to get their act together because you've got to listen to us on our podcast feed.

Anyway, we're also supported through Patreon, so please continue supporting us that way, patreon.com slash Retronauts. A combination of ad revenue and Patreon money will make this into a real business someday, and that's very exciting because that's how I would like to make my living. So please help with that regard. Anyway, we'll be back again in a week with another episode.

I think it's Bob's trying to do an episode now. So you can look forward to him talking at you. And back in a month for now with another Retronauts East. So please look forward to that. And thanks again for listening. The Mueller Report. I'm Edonohue with an AP News Minute. at the White House, his special counsel Robert Mueller's

Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's

emergency declaration to build a border wall becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonsonson was killed his officer started shooting at a robbery suspect last week.

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