Next Generation recently began running content from the respected British gaming magazine Edge, and today they're sharing The Making of Ghostbusters. The article is a look back to a barely-remembered but (for the time) forward thinking movie tie-in for the Commodore 64. Instead of a lame 'action' title following the movie's plot line, the game was set in the world of the Ghostbusters, and allowed players to build a financial empire through ghostbusting. "Crucially, for a game with so many parts - driving, simple resource management, shooting and trapping ghosts - the pieces snapped together well, and the money-making, business-upgrading elements gave the game a lasting replayability. Activision's Ghostbusters is polished, intelligently-paced, and suggests a measured and meticulous development approach: something which wasn't the case at all. 'A typical C64 game took nine months from start to finish,' laughs David Crane, the game's designer. 'Ghostbusters took six weeks!' Crane is one of the most prolific developers of the early videogame era. Creating titles such as Little Computer People and Pitfall made him Activision's star programmer."
It brings back memories of driving the ghost busting mobile down the streets and capturing ghosts. building and customizing the car and people for better catching was amazing back then. I'm feeling old now.
That game was a lot of fun. You could get a Beetle, station wagon, the hearse, or a sports car to drive around. Then it seems like there were add ons for each car that I don't remember what they did.
It was an awesome game, but very challenging. I remember finally getting the hang of it after a few weeks. You really had to think fast to decide where to drive to next, around the city.
I remember the marshmallow man would show up, too... What did you have to do with him again? I think you had to place a bait somewhere so he didn't smash a building.
I also remember listening to the intro sequence for 30 mins straight, watching that bouncing ball. That was some fantastic C64 music!
The best way to make money was ALWAYS the station wagon, making sure you were totally kitted out and then being quick with picking up the ghosts on the way into Zuul while you got to teh next place late in the game. After that it just became a little boring. I got to $128,000 and stopped playing but up until that point it was awesome.
And that was one of my favorites back on the C64. It was very addictive. This really shows it's the overall creativity and playability that matters most in a game, not necessarily the complexity or graphics.
Interesting coincidence that it's posted on the same day as someone from Microsoft belittling the Wii for its lesser graphics and simplicity. Doesn't make it less fun!
I agree. Some of my favorite games are 5-10 years old. Are the graphics mind blowing? no. But the graphics don't make the game. I wish modern game makers would quit making graphics laden games with no plot, no strategy, no replayability. Most new games won't even run on a middle of the road PC... (unless you count turning every single graphics option down to "low" - but at that point you've just thrown out most game's only redeeming feature.)
Interesting coincidence that it's posted on the same day as someone from Microsoft belittling the Wii for its lesser graphics and simplicity. Doesn't make it less fun!
Funny, though, that this game is the one that finally made me jealous (game-wise) of my friends with C64s... and it was because it had great gameplay AND good graphics. Until then, I was quite happy with the PET2001, since there plenty of text and ASCII games that kept me content (never mind writing my own games in BASIC, which was perhaps
Too bad the E.T. you're talking about was made for Atari 2600 with 128 bytes of RAM and all, rather than a state of the art complete home computer system five or so years later.
Well they did one better... Stephen Spielberg and my buddy John O'Neill worked on "E.T. Phone Home" for Atari home computers!
http://www.mobygames.com/game/et-phone-home [mobygames.com]
I hear it's alright.
Haha! Come on Howard did a great job with E.T. There's nothing particularly wrong with that game, just that any point of chronic frustration whatsoever in a 2600 game seems magnified by the tiny overall scope that's possible on 2600. I'd rather climb out of pits repeatedly sometimes than play a thousand identical levels of most other games. It's just an industry pariah, a fall guy, a scapegoat for poor management and risk assement and for the stock market crash! When I met him at Classic Gaming Expo 20
Man, did I ever love this game back then! I still fire up the C64 or SMS emulators every so often to replay it. A full-page ad for the game, torn from some computer magazine, had a place of honor among the posters on my wall.
The game gets a bad rep nowadays, usually because of the botched NES port made by a team of crack-smoking monkeys, but the original will always be one of my all-time favorite computer games.
No, your right it never really died, it was just zombie-fied. Its fun to watch pillage the countryside and devour human brains, but its not the sharpest bulb in the drawer.
I loved the game, too, but I was only 7 or 8 at the time.:) It was the first computer game I really played, on a C64 at the Boys Club. My parents soon bought us a Tandy 1000 EX and gave it to us for Christmas. I remember them surprising us with it with the Ghostbusters game playing on the screen. I played a ton of that game.
Six weeks, eh? I suppose this was back when games were simple enough where all developers had to be intimiately familiar with the hardware and code Just Worked(tm).
All the work done in code patterns and abstractions seem to have distanced developers from the metal. It's a necessary evil in some aspects (since the actual C64 hardware was always exactly the same so some safety stuff could be glossed over), but I've always wondered how some of the greats (like Crane) would have fared had they grown up 20 years after they did.
I've always wondered how some of the greats (like Crane) would have fared had they grown up 20 years after they did.
I think they'd have an easier time of it now in some respects. As many computer nerd points as it may earn you to be able to code in assembly, it's a lot easier to write software when you have access to things like arrays and for/next loops instead of building them yourself out of e.g. register checks and jump commands.
"I've always wondered how some of the greats (like Crane) would have fared had they grown up 20 years after they did." You make it sound like Crane and all his peers are retired or dead, but we're not.
As a former Atari 2600 programmer (although unfamous and less accomplished than Crane), I can tell you that today's challenges are just different from the ones we faced back then.
For the 2600 we had to have very precise timing (sometimes to an accuracy of 1 CPU cyle) in our display routines, but we never had to
Of course older games had bugs. But how many of them under Crane had showstopping bugs like we see today? How many of them required patches? Six weeks of development is a pretty short time... especially if you're going to DEBUG assembly. Perhaps if YOU were informed enough about the realities of development in any kind of assembly you'd know that. There takes a level of skill to make it work that's more than just nerd points.
Oh, but wait, this particular game was produced for a variety of platforms. It wasn'
Developers still code to a platform, it's just an OS or a toolkit now, as opposed to specific hardware (though they do that too with SSE and such). Machines have gotten more complex, more needs to be abstracted out to allow the platform to reasonably workable with. This is not just with the IT industry btw, it happened with textiles, farming, boat building, etc. As an industry gains levels of complexity, the ability (and need) to work with the lowest layers become less. There's always a place for those who
One of the compromises made in adopting higher-level abstractions is the inability of contemporary platforms to support hard real-time programming. If you replaced the Atari 2600's 6507 CPU with a Pentium 4 and increased the RAM from 128 bytes to 1GB, but kept the original graphics system, it would actually be harder to write state-of-the-art (for Atari) games. The reason is that contemporary designs have non-determinsitic timing (at least to the extent a human could understand them) because of caches and other features. These systems were designed to make processing faster on the average, not to have consistent behavior.
Of course, we can still have hard real-time systems, we just have to put the hard stuff in hardware. That's a reasonable solution, but it's narrowed the scope of problems that software can solve.
There's something you need to type in the beginning to get the Ecto1. I forget what it is, but it gives you like near infinate cash, and buying stuff in the beginning was like the most fun part.
There was one code that gave you the maximum amount of money you could have, but as you had to have more money than what you started with when the gatekeeper and keymaster met this meant you couldn't complete the game.
In theory you could, as long as you somehow managed to make back what you spent on equipment. As long as you skipped the super high performance vehicle in favor of the ambulance used in the movie you could buy all of the other bells and whistles and pretty easily turn a profit by the time Gozer showed up.
This particular code really made the game unwinnable. Dunno if it was a bug or by design, but the code gave you $1000000 but you could not earn more than $999999 and therefore you couldn't repay your loan and automatically lost. I was rather young back then and played a pirated copy without instructions, but it still took me an incredibly long time to realize this. After switching to another code I at least got to the tower, but I still never managed to complete the game.
IIRC, the game used a password system to store the amount of money you had for the next playthrough, and I'm pretty sure it was an encoding of the amount into letters, not a "level password".
Thus, there's a lot of things you could type to get a lot of money; again IIRC, it doesn't take more than four or five playthroughs to be able to afford everything you want at the starting screen, and any money after that is just bragging rights.
My short term memory is so bad that at least 2-3 times every day I forget what I was saying in mid sentence. I have the attention span of a mosquito (I've already stopped twice so far while typing this to do something else), and on a bad day if there are any distractions whatsoever have difficulty carrying on a conversation. And yet truly random bits of information get etched into permanent memory with no regard to their utility. This is a perfect example. In the 23 years since I saw Ghostbusters in the thea
Same thing happens to me. I think it's perfectly normal for "geeky" kind of people. I just seem to pay attention to different things than "normal" people - human interactions don't rank too highly on my "attention" scale, while stupid, meaningless little things often get my brain's attention. It can be annoying, but on the other hand, it helps with certain jobs - I guess it's probably one of the reasons why we ended up working with computers (assuming you did, too).
I used to love this old gem. Took me a while to get the hang of it I remember.
Was pretty amazed to discover that someone made a remake of the game for Windows.
I didn't enjoy it quite as much but that's because somethings seem different than what I remember of the game play. Anyone else try this remake? Would love to get opinions on this.
"First, if you want to design a game around a licence, you have to be very careful. The best strategy is to design an original game that would stand alone even without the licence. Our original theory was that a licensed game should be a great game first, and a licensed game second. The success of the Ghostbusters game reinforced our belief - that was clearly the right way to go."
'A typical C64 game took nine months from start to finish,' laughs David Crane, the game's designer. 'Ghostbusters took six weeks!'
Anyone else read this as... "We sold this game at full price to marks who bought on brand name only and then laughed all the way to the bank. Thanks - suckas!"
(Long story short, I think the "license the movie tie-in and then release the cheapest game you possibly can" mentality is still out there and has never gone away.)
No, not really. I read this as "the guy we got to develop it was incredibly talented." Not least because this game (or at least the Spectrum port of it I used to have) stands out as a substantially above-average quality game for the period.
Creating titles such as Little Computer People and Pitfall made him Activision's star programmer.
Wow I remember Little Computer People [wikipedia.org]. This was an amazing game for it's time. It was like the Sims, only about 10 years before the Sims ever was released. The god complex you got from playing this game was amazing. I used to delight in torturing the poor little guy. It was very funny to watch.
Heh... I remember some earlier interview where he talked about it as an example of a game you couldn't do on the Atari 2600.... but then later I saw a fairly decent port. (To be fair, they may have been having bigger ROMs to work with by then...)
The article is a look back to a barely-remembered but (for the time) forward thinking movie tie-in for the Commodore 64.
Just because it was a computer game, and not a Nintendo/Sega game, it's not fair to call it a "barely-remembered" title. It was one of the big hits of the year it was released, and was constantly referred to as an example of how to do a movie tie-in.
Actually, it took me just a little while to figure it out.....but then it took me only a little while longer to get bored with it. Capturing the ghosts was pretty much patterned. And then you'd get the Stay-Puff guy...and....and....and.... Seeing that it only took 6 weeks to make, I now realize why it was so patterened.....they must have made a mint with it, though. With a dev cycle that short, and "free" marketing just by the name.....at least it was slightly better than most movie tie-ins.
I played this one on the Apple II and it was fairly entertaining. Not sure why you would have such a hard time with getting some action. All you had to do was drive to any house that was flashing (indicating it was being haunted) and trap the ghost. Take ghosts back to GBHQ and go get another. Rinse and repeat. There were quite a few options you could get, but bait was basically required. If you didn't have bait and the marshmallow alert went off staypuft would trash a building and you would get charged
Zak McKracken was absolutely fantastic. I particularly love self-referential humor, so I really loved finding the gasoline on Mars. Fun game, even if I had to call the hotline to figure out one piece of it (grr).
Empire building... classic meme. (Score:3, Insightful)
I remember this game. (Score:4, Insightful)
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It was an awesome game, but very challenging. I remember finally getting the hang of it after a few weeks. You really had to think fast to decide where to drive to next, around the city.
I remember the marshmallow man would show up, too... What did you have to do with him again? I think you had to place a bait somewhere so he didn't smash a building.
I also remember listening to the intro sequence for 30 mins straight, watching that bouncing ball. That was some fantastic C64 music!
Youtube video (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a Youtube video [youtube.com] for anyone who wants to relive old memories. :-)
Parent
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http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=3133&d=18&h
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After that it just became a little boring. I got to $128,000 and stopped playing but up until that point it was awesome.
6 weeks?! (Score:5, Interesting)
And that was one of my favorites back on the C64. It was very addictive. This really shows it's the overall creativity and playability that matters most in a game, not necessarily the complexity or graphics.
Interesting coincidence that it's posted on the same day as someone from Microsoft belittling the Wii for its lesser graphics and simplicity. Doesn't make it less fun!
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Funny, though, that this game is the one that finally made me jealous (game-wise) of my friends with C64s... and it was because it had great gameplay AND good graphics. Until then, I was quite happy with the PET2001, since there plenty of text and ASCII games that kept me content (never mind writing my own games in BASIC, which was perhaps
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Re:6 weeks?! (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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http://www.mobygames.com/game/et-phone-home [mobygames.com]
I hear it's alright.
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"Ghostbusters! Ahahahahaha!!!" (Score:3, Interesting)
The game gets a bad rep nowadays, usually because of the botched NES port made by a team of crack-smoking monkeys, but the original will always be one of my all-time favorite computer games.
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http://www.firebox.com/index.html?dir=firebox&act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C64_Direct-to-TV [wikipedia.org]
Layne
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Time (Score:5, Insightful)
All the work done in code patterns and abstractions seem to have distanced developers from the metal. It's a necessary evil in some aspects (since the actual C64 hardware was always exactly the same so some safety stuff could be glossed over), but I've always wondered how some of the greats (like Crane) would have fared had they grown up 20 years after they did.
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I think they'd have an easier time of it now in some respects. As many computer nerd points as it may earn you to be able to code in assembly, it's a lot easier to write software when you have access to things like arrays and for/next loops instead of building them yourself out of e.g. register checks and jump commands.
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You make it sound like Crane and all his peers are retired or dead, but we're not.
As a former Atari 2600 programmer (although unfamous and less accomplished than Crane), I can tell you that today's challenges are just different from the ones we faced back then.
For the 2600 we had to have very precise timing (sometimes to an accuracy of 1 CPU cyle) in our display routines, but we never had to
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Six weeks of development is a pretty short time... especially if you're going to DEBUG assembly. Perhaps if YOU were informed enough about the realities of development in any kind of assembly you'd know that. There takes a level of skill to make it work that's more than just nerd points.
Oh, but wait, this particular game was produced for a variety of platforms. It wasn'
But (Score:2)
Re:Time (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, we can still have hard real-time systems, we just have to put the hard stuff in hardware. That's a reasonable solution, but it's narrowed the scope of problems that software can solve.
Parent
First game I used a cheat code on (Score:2)
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Good times...
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Thus, there's a lot of things you could type to get a lot of money; again IIRC, it doesn't take more than four or five playthroughs to be able to afford everything you want at the starting screen, and any money after that is just bragging rights.
Why do I know this?!? (OFF TOPIC) (Score:2)
And yet truly random bits of information get etched into permanent memory with no regard to their utility. This is a perfect example. In the 23 years since I saw Ghostbusters in the thea
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Game Remake (Score:2, Interesting)
Was pretty amazed to discover that someone made a remake of the game for Windows.
http://files.filefront.com/Ghostbusters/;6357091;/ fileinfo.html [filefront.com]
I didn't enjoy it quite as much but that's because somethings seem different than what I remember of the game play. Anyone else try this remake? Would love to get opinions on this.
a lesson for today (Score:5, Interesting)
if only others thought this way...
Anyone else read this as... (Score:2)
Anyone else read this as...
"We sold this game at full price to marks who bought on brand name only and then laughed all the way to the bank. Thanks - suckas!"
(Long story short, I think the "license the movie tie-in and then release the cheapest game you possibly can" mentality is still out there and has never gone away.)
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Little Computer People was AMAZING (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, back in the days... (Score:5, Interesting)
Today, you can already feel lucky when you get a week of fun for every manyear invested.
Atari 2600 (Score:2)
Barely Remembered??! (Score:2)
Cheat mode: Use the name 'GOO' and the password '11111111' to start with plenty of cash if you're impatient.
The opening of the game had digitized speech (!) and bouncing ball lyrics of the whole movie theme ... Really a great job.
--Slashcode bug # 497457 - unfixed since December 2001 - Go look it up [sourceforge.net]!
There was an Apple II port (Score:2)
Console bias (Score:2)
I loved this game! (Score:3, Funny)
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Seeing that it only took 6 weeks to make, I now realize why it was so patterened.....they must have made a mint with it, though. With a dev cycle that short, and "free" marketing just by the name.....at least it was slightly better than most movie tie-ins.
Luckily, I was
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There were quite a few options you could get, but bait was basically required. If you didn't have bait and the marshmallow alert went off staypuft would trash a building and you would get charged
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+1 FTW!
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