Whenever you activate the game Snake on your shiny Nokia phone, have you ever paused to think who programmed the game or if the mobile phone is the game’s first platform? No, I didn’t think so.

Well, I did. Not because of curiosity, unfortunately. It’s because I programmed a game just like Snake in Basic language back in the early 80s on my rusty Apple IIc.

“Wait! You mean to say you’re the creator of the first Snake game?”

Duh, no. What I mean is, “I was around 10 years old at that time, and I had been studying how to write different programs on Basic. One of the programs listed in the book I had been using as a guide was Worms, the original title of the game.”

“Really?” Yes, really.

Here’s a short history lesson, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Snake is a video game that came out in the late 1970s and has maintained popularity since then, becoming somewhat of a classic. The player controls a long, thin creature, resembling a snake, which roams around one a bordered plane, picking up food (or some other item), trying to avoid hitting its own tail or the “walls” that surround the playing area. Each time the snake eats a piece of food, its tail grows longer, making the game increasingly difficult. The user controls the direction of the snake’s head (up, down, left, right), and the snake’s body follows. The player cannot stop the snake from moving while the game is in progress.

Wait! Before I post more about Snake’s history, let me point out that in my Basic version of the game, pressing a key in an attempt to make the snake move in the opposite direction kills the snake as it also, technically, counts as bumping into its body. Anyway …

The Snake variety of games originated with the arcade game Blockade, released by Gremlin in 1976. The first known microcomputer version of Snake, titled Worm, was programmed in 1978 by P. Trefonas on the TRS-80 computer, and published by CLOAD magazine the same year. This was followed shortly afterwards with versions from the same author for the PET and Apple II computers.

So next time you activate Snake on your mobile phone, remember that the Snake was once a Worm.

For more retro gaming goodness, keep reading Re:Retro. Those interested in mobile phones, their accessories and applications, try browsing through Cellphone9, another quality technology blog from b5media.

Image shows Kurt Russel reprising the role of Snake Plissken, the protagonist in the film Escape from L.A. by John Carpenter.

Post from: EveryJoe

When Snake was still a Worm

- Monsters wasn’t as scary as I made it out to be.
- It’s probably not worth doing a post on Arcade Action, Acornsoft’s attempt to write some games in Mode 7 so that owners of the BBC Micro Model A could actually play a game at some point in their hopeless, useless lives.
- The fact that games load in seconds means that I don’t have the same patience with them that I did when loading them took a half hour so you’d better be pretty damn sure you wanted to play.

Also, I’ve discovered that I can still write programs (or ‘code’ as you children call it) in BASIC.

So it’s time to bring back… my Fantastic Four Comic Generator! This is a program for the aforementioned BeebEm that I’ll be making more and more complex as the weeks go by, until finally you get randomly generated issues of the Fantastic Four delivered live to your eyes. Right now, all you’re getting is some fairly basic titles.

Download it here, then plug it into your BeebEm and ‘load state’ – then sit back and enjoy COSMIC RETRIBUTION!!

Post from: EveryJoe

Back To BASIC

There are many different genres of games in the world of retro, but by far the most common is the clone.

Making a game is hard. Making an original game is practically impossible. These days, you can at least start off by saying ‘it’s going to be Doom but with sprites of strippers’ or ‘it’ll be Theme Park only with Tycoon in the title’, and when you finally come to release your game, nobody will point at it and say “Hey, that’s just Doom with badly pixillated strippers in it.” They’ll say “Oh, it’s Duke Nukem 3D.”

You can get away with more, in other words. Not so in the dark days of 1980-1985! Then there were only two genres – the Shoot-Em-Up, in which you flew around in space shooting things, and the Don’t-Shoot-Em-Up, in which you wandered around the screen doing something else like collecting dots or crossing a busy road.

If you saw a successful game and wanted to rip it off – tough. Everyone would know. The best you could do would be to make a version that was exactly the same in just about all respects and brazenly shove it out there with a different name as some flimsy protection from the weight of the law. For example:

Here is Acornsoft’s Planetoid.

And here is Defender.

Here is Snapper by Acornsoft. (Before they had to put a hat on the main character to avoid getting sued.)

Aaaaand here’s Pac-Man, as if you needed to see it.

This is Meteors, by – you guessed it – Acornsoft.

And here’s a thumbnail to a screenshot of Asteroids. NOT IN COLOUR. That makes it VERY DIFFERENT.

Finally, we take a look at our old friend Monsters. Who is it by? Acornsoft? You shock me.

And here – finally – we get our first shot of SPACE PANIC!!

What does it look like, I wonder? This is like one of those IQ tests where you have to work out what the symbol is based on what’s come immediately before.

GAAAH!! It’s frigging Monsters, or rather, Monsters is frigging it. This is both a huge disappointment to anyone who’s been captivated by the ever-unfolding Mystery Of Space Panic (ha ha) and also a giant disappointment to me, as I thought Monsters was proof that Acornsoft could write a captivating original game. No such luck.

Well, there’s not much point in reviewing Space Panic, as I’ve done it already. I think I’ll review Acornsoft instead.

Actually, Acornsoft were great.

It’s worth pointing out that this practice of ‘cloning’ games wasn’t as clear-cut as outright stealing. Atari, Nintendo and the other fledgling arcade machine companies weren’t likely to devote themselves to converting their games to work on the British Broadcasting Corporation’s hardware any time soon, so quite frankly it was always going to be somebody’s job to rip them off convincingly. Acornsoft stepped up to the plate to give Beeb owners the chance to experience arcade glory, and if legal considerations meant Pac-Man had to wear a green hat and run around on stumpy little legs, then so be it.

The company’s games all had a solid, well-crafted feel. They did what they said on the tin. The boxes had clearly-printed screenshots on the front to tell you exactly what to expect, along with comprehensive guides to the scoring system on the inside front cover. The loading screens were uniform creations, with the company name recreated lego-style in different-coloured blocks. The tapes corrupted less than other games. They crashed less often during loading. They were better.

There was a sense of… how to put this… Britishness about Acornsoft. Solidly put together product, in no-nonsense packaging, at an affordable price. Arcade games brought to your home by dedicated master craftsmen.

Well, if you want to get technical, master forgers, but hey! That’s free enterprise for you.

Post from: EveryJoe

Space Is The Place – For Panic!

Yes! It’s a comprehensive price guide!

No, it’s sex.

Oddly, this sparked off serious controversy at the time – and not only among my gran, from whom I had to hide the box with the tape in it which had various pictures of Linda Lusardi (I think) in just her pants and a dental floss bikini. I’m not ashamed to say that, while my conscious mind attempted to compose various rational explanations to assure my parents that this wasn’t dirty at all, my lizard hindbrain was REVELLING IN TEH PR0N. I don’t think I ever did spill my seed on any stony ground over the cover to Barbarian, but it would have been a close-run thing. In those pre-internet days, in a household that didn’t get the Sun newspaper or have a hidden stash of Playboy, or late night films on Channel 5, that was probably as close to illicit wank material as I could find. I’m not sure whether or not I was of wanking age at the time, but it certainly made me feel a bit odd in my pants.

Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, controversy. Just as this was the first time I’d been introduced to Linda Lusardi (I’m fairly sure) in her unmentionables, it was also the first time the world of computer game advertising had been quite so blatant. And they picked a good game to test out the magic selling power of sex – Barbarian was a vaguely rubbish beat-em-up, where two identical Conan-a-likes hacked and chopped at each other with swords for eight levels. It was technically possible to behead the opposing player, but apart from that the game held absolutely no interest for anyone – at had all been done better elsewhere, even on the BBC Micro.

Games were coming out of their wild primordial slime at this point, settling into the recognised categories of this-em-up and that-em-up that we know today. It wasn’t enough simply to exist – a game either had to be the best in its particular field or do something that no other game had done before if it wanted to make a real splash. Barbarian didn’t really have what it took to be top of its field, and aside from a couple of minor details it wasn’t doing anything new… until the game went to the marketing department.

Sales for Barbarian, as I remember, were brisk.

Today, that might seem strange – every second game has a naked woman somewhere in it, never mind the advertising. But this was a time when games were still primarily for kids, advertising was non-sexual and the cover to Barbarian could legitimately become a glimpse into a hidden adult world – a world that, I was mortified to discover, doesn’t really exist.

Well, I’m sure it probably does, but I’d imagine that in order to have the wealth and amorality necessary to sustain it you’d have to be in advertising. So we’re back to irony again.

Post from: EveryJoe

Commercial Break Monday Says: I Only Play It For The Articles

Questprobe was something of an odd duck – text adventure games written about a selection of Marvel characters, in which they each had to get hold of a number of *gems – not gems – that had been secreted about the place by the Chief Examiner, a shadowy figure who just hung around like a deus ex machina and made life difficult. The first of these games was about the Hulk, my then-favourite superhero, and also had look-ins by Dr Strange and Ant-Man, two who I’ve come to love since then for their quirky charm. Unfortunately the game made no sense, existing as it did in a maze of bizarre domes, energy fields and context-less puzzles. And if you went North you were transported into a room with a *gem which you had to get and a ‘Natter Energy Egg’ that blew up and killed you if you did. Don’t take my word for it, it’s right here. You get past the first puzzle by biting your lip and releasing the rage-fuelled behemoth that Ang Lee managed to comprehensively screw up the film of. By making it pretentious, badly lit and overly complicated. How the christ do you make the Hulk overly complicated? It’s a guy who was blown up by a giant bomb and now hits things with his massive green fists. How is that not a cinematic wet dream? Shame on you, Ang Lee.

The second game was a lot better, as it was set in a recognisable place, and the puzzles made a degree of sense. This was, of course, Spider-Man, in which you must rescue the Daily Bugle from a consortium of spider-foes led by Mysterio. The Chief Examiner is still flitting around and there are still *gems involved in true Scott Adams style, but overall it’s a good, not-overly-difficult and fairly charming game. In which you get to fight Sandman. (Venom hadn’t been invented yet, and the Goblin was dead dead dead at the time, with his miraculous marketing-induced recovery still awaiting him in the future.)

This makes it THE FIRST EVER SPIDER-MAN 3 TIE-IN GAME.

Here is that incredible fight with Sandman in full:

—————-

—————–

OH NOES evidently Spidey is still EMO SPIDEY for he does not know how to forgive! Actually, unlike the film you defeat Sandman not by making him cry so many tears that he turns into a mud creature but by walking on the ceiling, like Lionel Richie, so that he never even realises you’re there and continues having a nap in sand form.

Speaking of Lionel Richie:

WHAT SHALL I DO? dance on ceiling
I don’t know what a “on” is.

Spidey is pretty thick for the guy who invented web fluid. Let’s try that again:

WHAT SHALL I DO? dance ceiling
nothing special happens.

Another dream shattered. Thanks, Spidey.

Post from: EveryJoe

The History Of Gaming, Part Nine: I Exert My Spider-Forgiveness! I Forgive Him & I Do No Damage!

In the meantime, to fill out the week, here’s a link to Elite: The Musical.

This oddyssey into sound included the song Space Worshipper. You have to read this to get the full genius of it.

I am one of the select few,
The last of a dying race,
A whole galaxy’s reject who’s
The mad nutter bastard in space.

I could get into this!

I agree with Ian Bell that Elite: The Musical could be ‘a kicking rock-techno stage show or perhaps the first virtual musical’, and hope to live to see that happen.

Post from: EveryJoe

On The Seventh Day, Elite Rested

Worth pointing out immediately that one thing you couldn’t do in the game was go to war. In fact, you couldn’t really make any kind of proactive decision – your time was spent constantly reacting to news headlines that came through on the ticker machine in the corner in a desperate attempt to increase your approval rating before your time in office came to an end. So it was quite prescient in many ways. Another example of forward thinking was the ‘pointer’ control system – you had to guide the damn thing around the screen with the keys or joystick, but there was a dos version that presumably you could drive with an early mouse.

(Speaking of alternate versions, it’s worth pointing out here that other versions of the game looked nothing like this. The Speccy is the prettiest, although as a loyal Beeb user I have a sneaking admiration for the BBC Micro version with its big, blocky, teletext-like functionality. It looks like modern art. Meanwhile, the Amstrad is an art-movie close-up of one desk drawer and the aforementioned DOS version is a hideous shade of turd brown and vomit green. See for yourself. You can get the grim-looking DOS version here if you want to play the game and can stand ruling over the inside of a misused public toilet.)

Your mission in YPM is simply to get through five days in the political arena, going to meetings which involve various multiple-choice questions from Sir Humphrey or some visiting dignitary. These could take the form of trivia questions (”Of course you know what the Taoiseach is, Prime Minister”) or simple common sense detectors (”Choose A/ That sounds reasonable or B/ Sir Humphrey is up to something as usual”) but they’re more likely to involve tortuous choose-your-own-adventure style routes through incredibly complex policy discussions – a seemingly innocent one about judging rates of pay for teachers becomes a grim ‘when did you stop beating your wife’-style dead end very quickly if you put a foot wrong early on. Even your choice of what records to play on Desert Island Discs is a web of sinister traps.

Since this is a game based on a cheery comedy series starring Paul Eddington and Nigel Hawthorne at the top of their game, and not based on the harrowing nuclear drama Threads, it isn’t really possible to get embroiled in a bloody quagmire through dodgy evidence, poor planning and fundamental misunderstanding of the ethnic tensions inherent in a particular region. You do get to stare down The Russians over some spying, but it’s The Yes Prime Minister Russians i.e. Geoffrey Palmer with a fur hat and an accent.

Any attempt to push the button and send the nukes a-flyin’ results in Sir Humphrey shaking his head and ushering you from the room – it’s the same if you try anything else that’s likely to bring your government crashing down. At the end of the week, Jim Hacker, and Britain, is exactly where it was at the beginning with a different approval rating, much like in the TV show. The difference is that with the TV show you want to be passively entertained – with a game, you want to interact, which means there have to be consequences, and a lecture – from Bernard of all people – at the end just doesn’t cut it.

Yes, Prime Minster seemed to have little in the way of political allegiance one way or another, but the game, while fun for a while, is conservative with a small ‘c’. Much like Tony, it enters full of promise and then disappoints. Only nobody’s ever called the Yes, Prime Minister game a war criminal.

Post from: EveryJoe

I Always Did What I Thought Was Right, Sir Humphrey

It looked like this:

Thanks again to cpmisalive. If you look closely at that video, you might notice some words occasionally popping up saying PLANET DESTROYED BONUS 4000 POINTS.

Thereby hangs a tale. In Thrust, as you can work out by watching, you had a simple ship with some simple controls – the titular thrust button, a gun at the front to shoot things and a combined force-shield/tractor beam with which you could suck up fuel from the fuel tanks or pick up the hostages in the circular pod in the lowest depths of the level. Once you’d picked up the pod, you couldn’t put it down again – if it touched anything or got shot by you or the enemy guns, it blew up and so did you. The aim of the game was to descend into the depths, grab the pod, and haul it up into space without running out of fuel, getting shot or smashing it to smithereens on the hard rocky walls. Sounds simple, is difficult – in many ways, the perfect retro game formula.

There was one additional complication – a Sellafield-style nuclear power plant which chuffed away somewhere in the level. This was the power to the guns. If you shot it, it stopped puffing for a while, depending on how many times you shot it. If it wasn’t puffing, the guns weren’t shooting. That often meant the difference between life and death as the guns were ruthless little bastards. So it was a good idea to pepper it with gunfire, much as cpmisalive does here.

If you shot it too many times, it started flashing, which meant you had ten seconds to evacuate the planet before it blew up. Since this was the enemy planet, murdering the billions of civilians on its surface earned you a nice little bonus, making this THE FIRST GAME TO REWARD ACTS OF GENOCIDE BY THE PLAYER. Unless, of course, you blew it up with the hostages still on it – then you got nothing. MISSION FAILED NO BONUS.

And then you went straight on to the next level, with no other punishment whatsoever.

Now there are two types of gamers in this world – the type who relish getting the highest score and the type who want to succeed so they can see more of the game and explore more of the game world. For the latter type, the score doesn’t matter as long as you get to see the next level. Games these days are generally made for the latter type.

Thrust was evidently made for the former, or they really wouldn’t have put a temptation like that in my way. Starting from level 2, I merrily blew up the entire planet at the beginning of every level, on the reasoning that I wasn’t going to negotiate with any space terrorists. I’d just carpet-bomb the planet from the air. That may have meant MISSION FAILED NO BONUS but it meant a show of strength for the alien scum as far as I was concerned. Things got tougher in later levels as you had to venture deeper and deeper into the complex to find the power plant, presumably to make the final hectic dash for orbit more and more challenging, and eventually blowing up the planet was suicide for everyone involved – not that that stopped me. Sacrifices must be made and my pilots were all volunteers. The ones that didn’t volunteer I simply had shot for desertion, the filthy cowards.

So basically I just found myself playing a slightly easier game with no score – how many planets could I destroy before my lives ran out? How many billions of sentient lives could I snuff out like candles before my hideous genocide spree was brought mercifully to a close? I’d usually get up to about six or seven before nausea overtook me and I had to wash the electronic blood off my hands.

Still, that’s war for you.

And now, the thrlling conclusion to cpmisalive’s lonely battle against the machine:

Post from: EveryJoe

The History Of Gaming, Part Seven: What Really Happened To Krypton

Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, on the other hand, made me want to find the game developers and snap their necks. Thankfully, I’d earned a ‘cheat’ – one of those freebies they give you in games these days when you collect enough pogs or whatever – that made the game possible. Still, it felt like cheating. I felt old.

Back in the day, if a game was so frustrating you wanted to kill the person who made it, it was a sign of quality. I’m thinking of Jet Set Willy here. There’s a Your Spectrum article that breathlessly reviews the game (a sequel to the first true platformer, Manic Miner – play it here) and practically creams its metaphorical jeans over the sheer impossibility of the thing. The peak of perfection, in the eyes of Your Spectrum, is our first sight of The Attic Bug.

This was a glitch in the game that wasn’t corrected before it went to the shops. Essentially, if you went to the Attic before journeying to various other rooms, you died the moment you entered those other rooms even if you had foolishly entered the Attic on a previous game. The only way to survive the game, then, was to visit all the other rooms first - a virtual impossibility, for reasons which I can’t confirm as I died before ever getting anywhere near any of them.

Imagine if something like that happened today. Imagine if Halo 2 had a bug in it that meant that you died instantly if you’d, say, been in a jeep on level 3. (I don’t know Halo well, I’m afraid, but I did play it drunk once and I do remember being driven about in a jeep, so this is inside the realms of possibility.) There’d be scandal. Product recalls. Riots. Fires. Nuclear annihilation and all sorts.

But back then the Attic Bug was practically a selling point. Other games might think they’re difficult… but this one is actively impossible! It will leave you crying in your bed at night, intellectually sodomised by the sheer toughness of the puzzles!

Oh, stop whining, how tough could it have been? Well, imagine jumps from platform to platform needing to be perfect right down to the pixel in order to avoid death – and now imagine that being a really good thing.

It’s difficult to bring that mindset back, but I was swept up in it like everyone else. Exploring Jet Set Willy was like exploring some kind of deadly alien planet – just making it to a new screen was a mind-blowing achievement, never mind that attempting to collect all the objects in it would only end in humiliation and death. I think my best score was twelve objects. But I never got tired of loading it up, never spent the half hour it took for the tape to grind the program painstakingly into existence in anything less than a state of happy anticipation. I still remember the game cover with a special fondness.

Yes, that’s a man being eaten by a toilet.

So whither difficulty? When did I start taking it easy? When did it become a serious danger to my heart if I couldn’t finish a level? Did I just get lazy, or have I been spoiled by an industry that now values fascinating plot over no plot and mindbending tricksyness? I’ll think more about this tomorrow, but in the meantime, here’s the Spectrum version of the sequel – sped up for added DIFFICULTY.

Post from: EveryJoe

Whither Difficulty?

Well, not quite, but certainly my entire week was a lie as it turned out that not only could I dock, but I did in fact do the boring work of docking for him after he’d done the thrilling space combat bit of the game. Now not only do I have no memory of this, but it seems impossible as I distinctly remember never being able to dock without crashing. And yet, there we have it – two completely conflicting memories of the same event.

I suspect the truth falls somewhere between the two – was I allowed to dock for him until the prohibitive cost of smashed ships and reloaded games drove him to fire me from the company? Was he even worse at docking than I was, so that my one-in-ten success rate made me a pair of capable hands at the tiller? As he admitted, this was probably the last time my brother was better than me at a game (although his awesome prowess with Civilisation, Football Manager and Ape Escape says otherwise) so possibly it was a final chance to lord it over me before I finished Sabre Wulf and the new status quo was set in stone forever. Who knows?

The important thing here is the agreed consensus that docking in Elite was horrible – at best a boring chore to be handed off to someone else, at worst a gruelling, game-ending death run. But there was an alternative. If you had 400 credits or so to spare – or was it 800? Some large-but-not-too-large number – you could buy yourself a Docking Computer.

The Docking Computer, for those who lack the language skills necessary to put two words together, was a computer that would help you dock, instantly, as soon as you were in range of the space station, rather than force you to faff about in space for twenty minutes trying desperately to get your ship into a position where it could dock without blowing up.

They were, effectively, the most valuable power-up in the game – harbinger of a certain school of power-ups that we’ve only just started to see recently. Power-ups to make the game better.

There are those who love docking – Docking Computers got short shrift in THE DARK WHEEL as some hideously conservative space-rogue felt that anybody who couldn’t dock shouldn’t be in space, and I’m sure there are players who found the simple problem-solving mechanic of getting your ship into the space station without crashing to be a blissful relief from the endless swarming of space pirates after your loot. But I can say with confidence that most people found Docking Computers a wonderful time-saving gadget that they wished they could have at the start. But the whole point is that they don’t.

It’s mirrored in MMORPGs of the present – a lot of them require you to reach a certain level before you can do a certain thing. In RuneScape (a particularly nauseous freebie) you have to learn levels of mining metal and smelting it before you can make your own swords – once you can, it’s obviously a great saving and a source of income. In City Of Heroes (my latest extracurricular activity, until the free play runs out) you get the chance to pick a ‘travel power’ at level 14 – suddenly instead of running everywhere, you can teleport to places or fly, or just run at superspeed to save time. Or, as with Elite, you can forego the luxury of ease and buy a big sodding laser instead.

That’s probably why Docking Computers were seen as such a crutch in THE DARK WHEEL – you don’t need them, they’re just nice to have. You could spend that money on an enormous military laser instead, just as you could spend the levelling-up points in an MMORPG on a giant axe or heat vision instead of being able to get from place to place quicker. We’re used to that kind of decision-making now – that training-for-the-real-world gameplay where you either blow your virtual money on some fabulous new toy or on a useful but boring tool, or save it in case you find out you really need it. But in retro gaming, it’s very difficult to find something with a game mechanic that doesn’t rely on just racking up the score.

David Braben and Ian Bell held the score in contempt. On Day Seven of the Seven Days of Elite, we’ll take a closer look at the gestation of the greatest retro game of all time, and tell you to stop staring at a flickering screen and go to your local library.

In the meantime, there’ll be some less in-depth blogging while I try and get work done. See you later for more of our Triple Threat Sunday!

Post from: EveryJoe

Seven Days Of Elite, Day Six: History Is Written By The Above Average