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High Score 154

Posted by timothy from the beyond-skeeball dept.
If you have fond memories of happily donating quarters to the Konami corporation for hours on end, or thinking how cool the Dragon's Lair graphics were, or better yet can remember when Pong was hip, you may enjoy Alex McLintock's review below of High Score: An Illustrated History of Electronic Games. Update: 10/04 16:17 GMT by T : Yes, this is the same High Score that Jon Katz reviewed a few months ago.
High Score: an Illustrated History of Electronic Games
author Rusel Demaria, Johnny L Wilson
pages 328
publisher McGraw Hill
rating 8
reviewer Alex McLintock
ISBN 0072224282
summary Words and pictures about sprites and beeps; traces three decades of video game development.

This book is fascinating for anyone around my age (thirty something) who remembers Atari Video Console Systems, Apple ][, and the space invader tables where you sat two people down.

Many people have flicked through my copy of this book and taken trips down memory lane. Almost anyone who has played computer games will find something in here that they remember. The book is a large paperback full of glossy pictures of screenshots, game packaging, and celebrities from the world of computer games. I can't really fault it on production values (though I did spot one photo of an Apple which they printed the wrong way round).

The organisation of this book leaves something to be desired. You would have thought that as a "History" book it might be organised in chronological order, but not really. It has sections on the 70s, 80s, and 90s but within those sections there is only a token effort to write things in order. Thankfully the index saves the day.

The first section ("Before the Beginning") looks at the pre-cursors to computer games such as pinball, and analogue electronic games. These are as fascinating as the computer based games. We learn that "Sega" stands for "Service Games" and "Nintendo" means "Leave Luck to Heaven". The article on "SpaceWar" (probably the first graphical computer game) was fascinating. It ran on a PDP 11 costing 120000 US dollars.

The section on the seventies is (you will forgive me) before my time. The book tells us about "Pong", the early days of Atari, but I don't think I played on any of those machines.

The section on the eighties is where I really start saying "Oh I remember playing that". Missile Command, Defender, Pac-Man and so on. This is the first section where we can't just list everything in date order. The authors have decided to switch between writing about a particular year, writing about different computer games systems and finally writing about different games companies.

It has a couple of pages on Infocom who did the most famous Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Adventure Game including a photo of Douglas Adams (the author) and Steve Meretzky who programmed most of the game. This game almost convinced me to create interactive fiction as a career.

As another example I played Br0derbund's "Lode Runner" on a schoolfriend's Apple ][e. The authors suggest that this might have been the first game that allowed you to create your own levels. That ability found in Lode Runner and David's Midnight Magic was exactly the sort of thing that got me into writing computer programs rather than just playing games.

What it doesn't have is any mention of British companies like Sinclair, BBC/Acorn, or Amstrad. I was shocked to find that "Elite" wasn't mentioned at all in the index. This is a diabolical let down. Sure these companies didn't sell very well in the United States, but they did play an important part in most Brit's growing up. You Americans might not care that much, but I'm reading this book because it is being published in Britain... No where on the cover does it say Illustrated History of Electronic Games played by Americans.

I suppose it does open up the opportunity to some quick thinking British journalist to write an "Illustrated History of British Electronic Games" as a companion piece to this book.

Another snapshot from my youth.... Page 155, Sir-Tech's game Wizardry had a "faux 3D maze". I liked this effect so much that I learned how to program the same effect into my Acorn Electron computer. And some 18 years later I'm still cutting code.

There are real gems hidden away in here. For instance I never knew there was a game based upon the sixties tv series "The Prisoner". I know a lot of Prisoner fans who would love to be able to play that one... And "Wing Commander" which I played for hours on end on my college science fiction society's PC. It was the summer holidays and I didn't have anything better to do....

The Nineties: Maybe I had played myself out, but with a computer degree, and a job I don't think that I played all that many games in the nineties. Sure - it is interesting to read about the SimCity related games. Of course we have a few pages dedicated to id Software, Doom, Quake, and the related games. I've just realised what went wrong. I get motion sickness playing Doom (and all subsequent first person shot-em-ups) I remember playing Doom during my lunch hour at work and then feeling sick for the next hour whilst I tried to recover.

The Playstation, Eidos / Lara Croft, Lemmings, all get a look in, and we finish with Online Gaming, Playstation 2, Gamecube, and XBox.

The verdict -- a great book for delving in and remembering the good old days and a great present for game-playing boyfriends too.

Alex McLintock is the editor of DiverseBooks.com. You can purchase High Score from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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  • Anyone remember that Sega game "Time Traveler" where there was no game screen but instead a hologram acting out your moves? That was SUCH a cool game. I used to spend HOURS on that thing at the "arcade."
    • You gotta admit...

      Was there ever a better birthday party than the ones at arcades (when kids used to go to them)? You'd arrive with the He-man action set and the birthday boy's mother would hand you a little plastic bag/cup with like 25 tokens in it? Priceless!

      • Arcade Parties (Score:3, Funny)

        by mekkab ( 133181 )
        yeah, they were the JAM!

        Heck- I had an arcade bachelor party- Dave & Busters [daveandbusters.com]- I drank this whack midori drink all night long (green tea) and played games till the cows came home. Even a lil' skeeball, jsut for old times sake! You gotta love cashing in hundreds of those damn tickets for a $5 stuffed animal...
        • Dude...

          Don't try and make it sound sophisticated. Midori is basically honeydew melon schnapps. Sometimes I have an all girly-drink night too, but I don't try and call my pink ladies "Whiskey Reds" or something like that!

          but seriously, an arcade bachelor party sounds sweeeeeeeeeet!

          • I was in no way trying to make it sound sophisticated- The name of the drink was "green tea" for goodness sakes!- sure it supposedly had rum and vodka and gin (WTF?! WHo mixes vodka and gin aside from dumb experimenting 12 yr olds and hardcore alcoholics?!), but its electric green...

            however if your balls are chained to one woman for the rest of your life you might as well have a girly-drink night. Bring on the blue curacao!

            Hmmmm...."Whiskey reds", what a great idea!
    • They actually converted this to PC/PS2! The review is here [gamenationtv.com]... What were they thinking??? Let's do an arcade -> home port of a novelty hologram game... but without the holograms.... I suppose 3 or 4 people will buy it :)
    • Yeah, I remember that game. I remember how bad it sucked. Basically the same thing as Dragon's Lair: you pay quarters to watch a movie and hit a button at the appropriate time.

      Innovative? Sure. But it certainly wasn't a good game.

      • Re:Time Traveler (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Schnapple ( 262314 ) <tomkidd@gmail . c om> on Friday October 04, 2002 @11:53AM (#4387779) Homepage
        Can we clear something up about Time Traveler? Namely that it did not use holograms.

        What it did was this - it used an optical illusion involving lenses and mirrors and it made a video on Laserdisc (I assume) appear to be "standing in midair". I've seen patent diagrams Sega filed and while I admit the machine was complex, short of the laser used to read the Laserdisc, there were no lasers used in making these "holograms". If you moved from side to side while watching this game you didn't see the other sides of the figures, all you saw was the same thing, only the angle kinda threw the picture out of thwack. These holograms were about as 3-D as the characters in the original Wolfenstein 3-D (remember the bodies on the floor that looked the same from all angles?)

        Also did anyone else notice how the machine was kinda generic, in the same way that Neo Geo arcade machines were generic? I think the original idea was to have a string of "Hologram" games, but since the idea died away quicker than you could say "Dragon's Lair II" it didn't happen.

        And yet, with the exception of the review linked above, I've always heard this game referred to as using holograms. Now, am I the stupid one here? Is this what is considered a hologram? I know we all see the Holodeck on ST:TNG and we all figure that eventually "holograms" will be these things we use to make fake people and situations, but do we have a generation of people thinking we have holograms in existence already because they saw a video game? Or am I just sorely misunderstanding this whole thing - are the things in Time Traveler actually what we're calling holograms now?

        Oh, and the game was "ported" (snicker) to the PC and to DVD players. Digital Leisure has made a niche industry out of porting Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, et al to the PC (in many times in many formats) and recently employing very creative use of DVD Video authoring. Of course the problem was always the somewhat flaky remotes that come with DVD players - they weren't meant to be game controllers. So when Sony releases the PS2 and the controller is the remote, it's a perfect match for their titles, so they slap a "Works with PlayStation 2!" sticker on the discs and they get lumped in with the PS2 games at your better Toys 'R Us stores. This is precisely what Sony feared and XBox (since DVD Video isn't a given) and GameCube (since DVD just isn't) nicely avoided - games for their console relying soley on DVD authoring capabilities and not owing Sony a dime in royalties or development costs. I hear there's a porn game industry that does the same thing...

  • 30 something? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by qurob ( 543434 )

    This book is fascinating for anyone around my age (thirty something) who remembers Atari Video Console Systems, Apple ][, and the space invader tables where you sat two people down.

    I was born in 1981 and I remember that shit like it was yesterday!

    As sad as it sounds, I grew up in Bowling Alleys and they had the best video arcades.

    C'mon!

    Then again, many people my age barely remember Nintendo.

    On a side note, Cedar Point, in Sandusky, Ohio, has like 15 rollercoasters AND a pretty big arcade full of older games.

    • I don't know what to think of this post.

      Is it a parody on the failure of the education system starting especially around 30 years ago.... To the point at which basic addition and substraction are problematic?

      Cedar Point by the way, has more like 30+ roller coasters. That have something like 14 of the world's top 20 largest roller coasters.

      • Re:Wha? (Score:2, Funny)

        by jandrese ( 485 )
        To the point at which basic addition and substraction are problematic?

        Yeah, it looks like it already got our spelling!
    • Yeah, I remember these days. I practically grew up in my local arcades. That was in those glory days when the games in arcades were innovative and simply had better graphics than the home comp stuff. It stayed that way all the way up to Sega Genesis, just then there started to come games that actually looked better than the games down the arcade. That was basically the beginning of the end for arcades in general. As soon as the games became cooler, better looking and had more replay value, then people startd shunnig arcades. I at least looked up to the arcade machine manufacturers for innovation...
    • ...don't work, which sucks...

      Although, I was able to play the only pinball machine to use que balls (YES FROM A POOL TABLE) as the balls. They have two of them... I believe the pinball game is called 'Hercules'.

      Anyway, I remember back in the day, when Cedar Point had several arcades throughout the park. They had all kinds of arcade games that I never say anywhere else. It was absolutely the sweetest...

      In my area, the only arcade left from "back in the day" is a place that used to be called 'The Butterfly', I believe it's called the 'Van Dyke Sports Center' these days. They have a good number of old school games, a number of rare games and a large number of pinball machines.

    • That arcade is the coolest thing one I have ever been to. That have some really wierd stuff from as far back as the 60's.

  • Repost from July 10th. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Jippy_ ( 564603 ) on Friday October 04, 2002 @10:35AM (#4387217)
    Already reviewed here. [slashdot.org]

    I won't complain though.. It's a great book..

    =-Jippy

  • Good, free, online classic gaming book (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Junks Jerzey ( 54586 ) on Friday October 04, 2002 @10:35AM (#4387219)
    Halcyon Days [dadgum.com]. This used to be commercial a few years back.
    • I interviewed some classic game designers, including Al Alcorn, the engineer who worked on the coinop Pong for Atari (then Syzygy). You can read those here [vg-network.com].

      I also maintain former Atari coinop designer Owen Rubin's (Space Duel, Major Havoc) website [orubin.com]. Yeah, I know the tables are screwed up on the pages in anything but IE. Call it my lack of knowing REAL html :)

  • Do we want a book? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Ed Avis ( 5917 ) <ed@membled.com> on Friday October 04, 2002 @10:37AM (#4387229) Homepage
    What's the point? Why not just sell a CD with a handful of emulators and all these classic games available to be played?

    Oh yeah - legal reasons.

    • Re:Do we want a book? (Score:5, Informative)

      by ngoy ( 551435 ) on Friday October 04, 2002 @10:50AM (#4387326)
      There ARE people who sell full cd's of MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) with all the ROM's (IIRC, the .61 version is up to about 8 cd's). If you really have to have them all or are looking for a certain one, usenet almost always has everything. For mame, alt.binaries.emulators.mame. I think someone posted all 8 cd's not long ago.

      If anyone is interested in playing any of the games from their adolescence, check out http://www.mame.net for MAME, and http://www.classicgaming.com or http://www.vg-network.com for other emulators.

      They have emulators for anything from arcade to Nintendo (original to 64), Apple ][, Amstrad, and Vectrex.

      It is truly amazing the amount of people who have spent their time to keep them from dying out.

      Shango

      • Re:Do we want a book? (Score:2, Informative)

        by AtariKee ( 455870 )
        "It is truly amazing the amount of people who have spent their time to keep them from dying out." Not to mention the many arcade game [google.com] and console [google.com] collectors who are restoring these monuments to good times and originality in gameplay.

        And then there are the MAME cabinets [arcadecontrols.com]

        :)

  • Slashdot Pong! (Score:5, Funny)

    by dildatron ( 611498 ) on Friday October 04, 2002 @10:40AM (#4387250)
    []
    [] *
    • !@#$ing lameness filter, oh how I hate thee. Lameness filter i hope you die a slow and horrible death. Did it work yet?

      No of course it didn't. Can someone temporarily turn off the lameness filter for me? Pleeease???

      Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
      Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.

      Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
      Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.

      Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
      Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.

      Ok. I am really angry now. This could have been fun but slashdot, with your lamness filter had to go and ruin it for me. Are people really that terrified of the ascii goatse.cx? It's ridiculous. Ok I am gonna try one more time. Ok I give up, I am sure you can all imagine what I was gonna type into this.
    • The paddle the paddle the side the side the paddle the paddle the side the side!!!!

      POOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNNGGGG!

      ---
      Don't mod it if you don't get it. :p

  • Squaresoft Not in it. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by freakyfreak2 ( 613574 ) <jeffNO@SPAMj-maxx.net> on Friday October 04, 2002 @10:40AM (#4387256) Homepage Journal
    I have had the book since it first came out. The one big thing I noticed was that SquareSoft was not in it at their request. Square being one of the main reasons the Playstation succeeded, yet not wanting to be including in a book about gaming history. They are ,to me, one of the most influental gaming software comapanies.

  • Memories... (Score:4, Funny)

    by superdan2k ( 135614 ) on Friday October 04, 2002 @10:41AM (#4387263) Homepage Journal
    If you have fond memories of happily wasting time with Slashdot for hours on end, or thinking how cool the book reviews were, or better yet can remember when a post has already been done and a book already reviewed, you may (or may not) enjoy Jon Katz's review of High Score: An Illustrated History of Electronic Games [slashdot.org].
    • Yeah it's a repeat, but at least Michael didn't call them "e-games".

    • Re:Memories... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Mr_Silver ( 213637 )
      you may (or may not) enjoy Jon Katz's review of High Score: An Illustrated History of Electronic Games [slashdot.org].

      I read both and have to admit I found this review not only more interesting, but it had more substance and didn't use stupid Katz-isms like "e-Games".

      Mind you I could be biased because I'm a Brit too ...

      ... or that I think Katz's articles are often full of waffly techno-bollocks :o)

  • Then why not sit back and read this Slashdot review [slashdot.org] of High Score from July 10th.

  • Pong (Score:2)

    by tsa ( 15680 )
    I remember playing pong on a game computer a friend of my parents had built himself. That was in the late 70's. I was too young then to realize this was the beginning of a revolution in time-wasting techniques. One year or so later we had a machine that not only could play pong but also a few other ball games. Cool!
    • I remember playing pong on a game computer a friend of my parents had built himself.
      yeah, after pong came out in the arcades a couple different companies released Integrated Circuits with Pong games on them. Then later there were other chips released that also had pong variants on them (most of which sucked, a few were cool though). I think you can still find them around if you look, but they aren't a regularly available IC anymore.

  • Great pictures, needs more text (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Torgo's Pizza ( 547926 ) on Friday October 04, 2002 @10:45AM (#4387286) Homepage Journal
    I picked this up on a recommendation from John Romero. The best part of the book are the hundreds of full-color photos that are presented. Many times in video-game history books, there's plenty of text but often there's a lack of photos that capture the essense of the game design and the look. This is certainly not the case here. That alone is worth the price.

    I was a bit disappointed though in the depth that could have been covered. Johnny Wilson was editor of Computer Gaming World for many years. That being said, many in the gaming industry felt that he was a person that could make or break your game. Problem is that his presence isn't really felt in the book. The guy has plenty of stories to tell about the industry, but it's not told in this book.

    Overall, it's a great read. One thing it does do is focus on computer games more than consoles. Often it's the other way around. There are better books that focus on video game history (such as Phoenix: The Rise and Fall of Videogames) but if you grew up during the 80's and 90's playing computer games, this book will bring back many memories. Just take care of the binding on the book. It isn't the best and you'll be constantly flipping the pages.

  • Not the first (Score:4, Informative)

    by iamdrscience ( 541136 ) on Friday October 04, 2002 @10:48AM (#4387308) Homepage
    <blockquote>The article on "SpaceWar" (probably the first graphical computer game) was fascinating.</blockquote>
    Spacewar was not the first graphical computer game, the first graphical game was created by Willy Higinbotham at Brookhaven National Labs over ten years prior to Spacewar. He made it to entertain tour groups going through the labs, it was written for an analog computer and was displayed on an oscilloscope. It was supposed to be a simulation of tennis, but unlike pong it was from a side view, the only displayed elements were the ball and a net. It wasn't really a skill game because the only controls were two buttons (one for each player) and you could hit the ball back to the other player regardless of the ball's position on your side (I don't know if it even had to be on your side!).

    A lot of videogame books don't talk about it or just brush over it because it was never seen or played by anyone except for the people that visited or worked at Brookhaven National Labs. Spacewar on the other hand was passed around all over the country by the hackers who wrote it (the real deal hackers, it was a product of the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT, members of which were the type of people that coined the phrase "hacker").

    • Re:Not the first (Score:1, Troll)

      by Eil ( 82413 )

      Disclaimer: Before reading this message, the humour-impaired in the audience are asked to please not take themselves too seriously for the duration of this message at the risk of getting upset and/or angry. I am not to be held responsible for any furrowed brows.

      (the real deal hackers, it was a product of the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT, members of which were the type of people that coined the phrase "hacker")

      And then decades later coined a new phrase "cracker" in a fit of jealousy as a label for those hackers who were actually somewhat interesting and didn't wear pocket protectors.

      Shortly afterward, the Keebler Elves(R) filed an injunction against the railroad club claiming that their use of the term "cracker" violated an Elven copyright dating back to 832 A.D.

      Ernie, the head Elf, had reportedly testified in court, "what sort of college students still play with toy trains anyway?"
  • Listen to Ookla the Mok while you read. Their tune "View Master" is a great piece of pop culture nostalgia.
    I can't believe it's been so long

    Since I stayed up past my bedtime just to play a game of Pong
    My Sit and Spin has got me in a whirl
    Was it twenty years ago
    That I'd get up once a week to watch the Krofft Supershow
    With Electra Woman and Dynagirl?

    The full lyrics are here [otmfan.com].


    Karma is what happens between the posts.

  • I'm very surpised that I didn't read anything about the 11+ Million Commodore 64's that were sold worldwide. In its heyday, that was probably the most popular PC to use as a gaming platform, and the thousands of games out there prove it. Better graphics than any other computer at the time it was produced. And, it stood the test of time... How many computers have revisions spanning 7 years without ANY functional upgrades?!?!? Same O/S, same CPU, same RAM, different look. Pretty damn amazing, actually.

    That's my $.02.

  • Books (Score:3, Funny)

    by tiktok ( 147569 ) on Friday October 04, 2002 @10:53AM (#4387345) Homepage
    The only book I ever read on classic gaming showed me the patterns for succeeding at PacMan. But by that time, I had already spent enough money on the game to pay for the book, and to commission the author write another one.

  • Memory Lane...more like Memory Boulevard (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ackthpt ( 218170 ) on Friday October 04, 2002 @10:54AM (#4387354) Homepage Journal
    My first exposure to games were Pong and Space Invaders. And I still enjoy a good SI session now and then. After that it was working with some guy (I won't name drop, but you could probably figure out who it is) who was totally infatuated with Apple ][ games and was developing one of his own. He had written, in RSTS Basic Squash and some other games which ran on Delta College's PDP-11/50.

    I was more into the interative adventure games (like H2G2), but his enthusiasm was contagious. I got to see, and play test a little, his first game "Sneakers" and even suggested a name for one of the screens, which comemorated the wing of the college where the computer labs were.

    He could pretty much kick my butt at anything requiring hand-eye coordination, except one night I truly smoked him on one of those night-driver games (achieving the rank of Speed Racer :-)

    He started at Ferris State University, but an offer from a Sacramento game company lured him out of to the city where I visited a couple times and met developers and heard some of their inside stories about what sudden large chunks of cash does to 18-20 year olds.

    When the game industry crashed (prior to the NES reviving it) he survived, but many sold off their few extravegances and moved back in with their parents or went back to school.

    It was a pretty cool age to grow up in, where entire projects were handled by highly motivated and enthusiastic individuals. Times have changed, where now it's a house thing with teams of 3D artists, sound people, programmers, designers, etc.

    Still, between 1980 and 1985 I saw more innovation and truly fun, entertaining games than I have in the past decade. Back when one person could write a game, some pretty neat ideas were manifested.

    I'm back into playing games, on Apple ][ and C64 emulators and rediscovering those games I always loved playing.

    Oh, and yeah, I did dump some serious money at Alladin's Castle: Mouse Trap, Qixx, Amidar, Tempest, Wizard of Wor and the Black Knight pinball machine. Good thing I had that student job to fund that habi^H^H^H^Haddiction.

    I'll probably be playing more Seven Cities of Gold this evening and maybe a little Paradroid for old times sake...

  • Colecovision (Score:4, Interesting)

    by HeyBob! ( 111243 ) on Friday October 04, 2002 @10:55AM (#4387368)
    My first TV screen interactive experience was in the middle 70's using the 3-sided Coleco box. It had 3 games: Pong, a driving game (keep a dot between two swerving lines), and a shooting game ( a light sensor in the barrel of a gun).

    When tell kids today of those days they think I'm joking. They can't imagine that first time you could do something that caused changes on your home tv set and how important a change that was.
    • You can still buy these things here in Morocco on a lot of junk stalls.

      So true what you say though. Kids can't believe toys didn't have batteries and kept me amused for hours. And stuff like the ZX81 with 1Kb of Ram and an addon 15Kb extra was like the ultimate thing to get

    • I had the same game and I loved it. I remember once, when I was sick with the chicken pox I spend days at home practicing said shooting game, and being so proud of the scores I could rack up- until I realized I was getting 100% accuracy even when the gun was pointed AWAY FROM THE SCREEN. Not sure why, but the game lost a lot after that revelation.

  • The Real Thing (Score:4, Informative)

    by Reality Master 101 ( 179095 ) <.moc.liamg. .ta. .101retsaMytilaeR.> on Friday October 04, 2002 @10:57AM (#4387377) Homepage Journal

    Yeah, books are nice, but there's nothing like the real thing. Ever desired to own almost every video game ever made? Yeah, everyone knows about MAME [mame.net], but perhaps you don't know about Tombstones [tombstones.org.uk], which is network of volunteers who will send you CD-ROMS of all of the MAME roms -- for about $7. 3,486 roms (about 1900 unique games, I think).

    It's unbelievable how much game you can put in about 4K of ROM space.

    Now, what I want to know is when is SOMEONE going to make a hardware emulator of Death Race [spies.com]. The schematics are available [stormaster.com] on the web. [it didn't you use a microprocessor... all electronic! ]

    • Re:The Real Thing (Score:1, Redundant)

      by FyRE666 ( 263011 )
      Well I've got 3469 of the MAME ROMs on the server on the webserver on my DSL line [demon.co.uk] for download ;-) Not sure where the other 17 come from - I built my database by using a script to pull the game details from MAME itself, so I thought I had all of them for the latest version???
    • Funny you should ask about Death Race. I put out a call a couple of years ago for gameplay information and screenshots of the game in action, and I was going to write a TTL sync simulation that would run the game under MAME. Alas, I never received the information and dumped the project. The schematics would help with the underlying logic and sync timing, but I would need to see how the game actually played to put it together correctly. I've forgotten over the years how the thing actually played.

  • ID are mentoined but not Commander Keen ? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mirko ( 198274 ) on Friday October 04, 2002 @10:58AM (#4387388) Journal
    It's a pity, really : Commander Keen was one of the biggest step PC gamer ever made in terms of playability.
    This was the first time a game was so feature-rich :
    • Secret areas
    • Secret levels
    • Lots of various animated characters
    • Ability to save a game at the middle of a level
    • Ability to reconfigure the keyboard

    I remember having to replay the complete 4-5 episodes in order to decrypt the Shikadi alphabet so that I could find read the sign explaining me how to access to the secret level in the gravitational damping hub.
    Oddly enough, I finally almost felt a similar gameplay in Quake's level Satan's Dark Delight.
    Note that this is not the unique re-apparition in ID Software's games.
    You also have the Dope Fish, first seen in Keen's Well of Wishes, then in Quake's Crypt of Decay, and also Commander Keen which appears in Doom 2's super secret level along with a bunch of Wolfenstein 3D soldiers.
    Ah... Nostalgie... :)
    • It's a pity, really : Commander Keen was one of the biggest step PC gamer ever made in terms of playability.
      This was the first time a game was so feature-rich

      But it was only a milestone if you were a PC owner who never had any exposure to the NES, SMS, Genesis, TurboGrafx, etc. It was one of the first times a PC game managed to equal the playability of an 8-bit console game from 5 or 6 years earlier. If you think about it, when Commander Keen was a big deal on the PC, Sonic the Hedgehog was the hot console game. And, _man_ did Sonic make Keen look lame. But in comparison with the relative handful of good PC arcade games prior to Keen, yes, it was a milestone.
    • You also have the Dope Fish, first seen in Keen's Well of Wishes, then in Quake's Crypt of Decay,

      Also underneath one of the Quake3 space maps, which you can either see in no-clip mode or when you're falling to your death.
  • One neat thing about this book is its focus on PC game companies like Infocom or Sirrius, which are mostly neglected in other game histories. If you're interested in this subject, you also really need to check out Steven Kent's First Quarter, which has great interviews with Japanese sources, Van Burnhams coffee-table book Supercade, and John Seller's well written and funny Arcade Fever. Hardcore game fans also *must* own Leonard Herman's Pheonix, a detailed, year by year account of the US console business.
  • Everyone has a favorite. My favorite standup games were GORP (rare), Sinistar and Discs of Tron.

    My favorite console/computer games were Bilestoad (http://www.classicgaming.com/vault/roms/appleiiro ms.Bilestoad33395.shtml) It was the original bloody mess, get your mothers pantyhose in a knot, violent game. Aztec (http://www.classicgaming.com/vault/roms/appleiiro ms.Aztec33405.shtml), a Indiana Jones-esque adventure. Zork (http://www.classicgaming.com/vault/roms/appleiiro ms.Zork33393.shtml), now that was a truely classic game.

    All of them suck in comparison to modern games but at the time when I was a kid, I was all over them like white on rice!
    • It's Gorf, not Gorp. Gorp is trail mix, and stands for Good Old Raisins and Peanuts. Gorf, the videogame, might have received its name because it's frog spelled backwards. And the lead character bounced around like a jumping space frong. Gorf was a great game, breaking new ground by being at least three space-oriented games in one. Even today, I'd happily while away an hour eating gorp and playing Gorf.
      • Thank you!!! I couldn't figure out why I couldn't find that game online! I've probably been misspelling it for 10 years! Gorf... geez.

        Yes, it was an epic of 8 bit magic.

        Again, thanks!
        --Pete
      • Or as Kelsey Grammer put it on the SNL episode (a Delicious Dish sketch):

        "Remember: GORP stands for granola, oatmeal.. shoe leather, urine.. and Carl! "
    • My favorite standup games were GORP (rare), Sinistar and Discs of Tron.


      Sure you don't mean Gorf [hiwaay.net]? "Gorfian robots, attack, attack! Too bad, space cadet." (Or was there a video game based on the camper's staple, "Good Old Rasins and Peanuts"?)

      I only played Sinistar and Discs of Tron a few times but they were definitely cool. Probably the most quarters I pumped into a game, though, was a few years latter with "Space Harrier". That, and the videodisk game "Mad Dog McCree", were the only ones I ever got really good at, where other people would gather around to watch me play.

    • If you liked the Bilestoad, you can read a interview [dadgum.com] with its creator, Mark Goodman. You used to be able to find his recent efforts to re-create the game for modern Macs here [continuumsi.com], but it appears to go to his company webpage now.

      I think the most telling quote in his interview is this one:


      "Pretty frequently I see the recurring threads on software piracy on various newsgroups. People really believe that there is no impact from their copying software. Well, there is an impact. I couldn't support myself by writing computer games, so "The Bilestoad" was the last game I did."
  • It is really sad that the didn't mention the Spectrum and the british side of this. For some reason, here in Uruguay [cia.gov] the computer culture grew around the european culture. I guess it was partly because the magazines that came here were published in Spain.

    And there were great games. I particulary remember one called Sir Fred [metropoliglobal.com], that in some way can be seen as a precursor of graphic adventures or CRPGs (and we are talking 80s!!). Did that games get to the US?
  • A friend from high school (we graduated in '86) wrote a book called Extra Life: Coming of Age in Cyberspace (excerpt here [theatlantic.com]). It's mostly about being the first generation of kids to grow up with personal computers.

    fwiw, I'm the 'Scott' with the Atari 800 mostly on the 4th & 5th pages of the excerpt.

  • I can remember the first time I played it, and noticed the shadow of the ship on the base below, awesome! I still think of it as the first 3D game. I would really hate to know how much money I pumped into that stupid box.....

    Anybody know where a copy of the game is, I think I have a few quarters left in my pocket....

    • When I was 3 or 4 (1983) there was a game called Monster Maze for the ZX81. That one might have been the first First Person Shooter! It's no small feat considering that the ZX81 had 1 KB of RAM and monochrome TV output...
    • Battlezone [klov.com] is generally thought of as the first true 3D video game. The hardware consisted of three separate processing units: the main CPU (a 6502), the vector processor (a combination of ICs), and the "Mathbox," which used four- 2901 bit-slice processors for 3D calulations. All previous games we generally illusions of 3D, and in most cases, weren't TRUE 3D (Night Driver [klov.com] and Tailgunner [klov.com] are good examples of this).

  • If anyone is around the area of Omaha, you can play some classics at Family Fun Center. They have a section upstairs and kind of in the back where they shove all the old clunkers that people still want to play. I haven't been up there for a while, but last time I went, they had Moon Patrol, Galaga, and Centipede, among others. Good stuff!

    I know, I sound like a big damn commercial.
  • OK, I'll risk getting mod'ed off-topic. Can anyone identify the game from the following description? I've dug around on the Net several times and never turned anything up...

    I played it on an arcade machine that was in my hometown pizza place for just a few weeks in the early eighties. I *think* the name was something like Megmania or Magmania. The levels consisted of alternating shooting modes. In the first mode, you shot at descending spiders that broke apart a'la asteroids and if they reached the bottom of the screen, you got munched. In the second mode (probably almost exactly the same code with different animations) you shot at little loops that would expand and if you didn't kill them before the expanded large enough to swallow your ship... well.. they would swallow your ship! The loops also broke up into smaller loops when hit.

    Anyone else remember this or did I hallucinate the whole thing? It was the early eighties after all...

  • The book may start out well, but it begins to lose steam the further in you go. By the time you reach the Xbox and Gamecube, you're reading verbatim Microsoft and Nintendo launch material, while looking at screen shots of launch titles. In short, they never actually looked at the Xbox or Gamecube -- they just copied the promotional materials on the way to press. Reprehensible.

    You can see this shoddyness reflected in other sections, such as where they mention iD software without mentioning Commander Keen, their original flagship game.

    As for the Katz review, don't worry, Tim, we all know that 99% of /.ers filter him anyway ;)

    • As for the Katz review, don't worry, Tim, we all know that 99% of /.ers filter him anyway ;)


      I think that "Exclude Stories from the Homepage (x) JonKatz" has crossed over into the "sensible default" category.

      How about it, guys. Why not spare newbies and ACs the pain?

      -Peter
  • I was thrilled to download Galaxia for my Palm Pilot. The graphics are lame by today's 64M video standards but it is fun to play. In 20 years, your kids will roll their eyes when you tell them about your cool Palm Pilot.

    I graduated college in 1981 and the excitement over technology is still the same. However, it was better that we at least left the house to play these games.
  • .. thinking how cool the Dragon's Lair graphics were

    Minor quibble, but what graphics? It was all classical animation from a laser disk player. (And it was hell on the laser player.)

    After the initial Oooo! I never really liked that game. I always thought it should dispense food pellets every few correct moves. I called those "rodent trainer games".

  • "Update: 10/04 16:17 GMT by T: Yes, this is the same High Score that Jon Katz reviewed a few months ago."

    I have filtered Jon Katz out...
  • Yes, this is the same High Score that Jon Katz reviewed a few months ago.

    I'm surprised anyone noticed...
  • You Americans might not care that much, but I'm reading this book because it is being published in Britain... No where on the cover does it say Illustrated History of Electronic Games played by Americans.

    So the reviewer complains about no mention of machines like the Sinclair, but all the games he described were Apple II games or arcade games ? Jeez, if the Sinclair was so important to his own personal gaming history you'd think he'd reminisce about a game on this platform, wouldn't you ?

    There's a reason that people don't remember the Sinclair when talking about the history of video/computer games, and that reason is that the Sinclair was and is utterly unimportant in this regard. So why mention it in any history of the genre ?

    • Re:Sinclair ? (Score:3, Informative)

      by vjzuylen ( 91983 )
      There's a reason that people don't remember the Sinclair when talking about the history of video/computer games, and that reason is that the Sinclair was and is utterly unimportant in this regard.
      I disagree. With titles such as Alien 8, Head Over Heels, Laser Squad, Manic Miner and Spindizzy, the Sinclair was both an inspiration and an affordable training ground for many of Britain's current top coders. A lot of promising and prominent commercial game designers have listed Spectrum games among their all-time favorites - among them Frederic Raynal of Alone in the Dark fame, David Perry of Shiny Entertainment and Demis Hassabis of up-and-coming Elixir Studios. Read an interview in the British games magazine Edge sometime, and you'll see just how often the Spectrum pops up.

    • Re:Sinclair ? (Score:2, Informative)

      by TriggerHappy ( 84538 )
      There's a reason that people don't remember the Sinclair when talking about the history of video/computer games, and that reason is that the Sinclair was and is utterly unimportant in this regard.

      Uh, did you ever hear of a little company called Rare which developed various all-time classics for SNES and N64, including Goldeneye? Which has just been bought for half a billion by Microsoft?

      It began as a company making games for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

      Lesson over.

  • I can't help but think of Lode Runner this every time someone refers to the testing app, LoadRunner. Hell, "Mercury Interactive" sounds more like a game company anyway.

  • BlarrrgG!!! (Score:2, Informative)

    by NitroWolf ( 72977 )
    If you want a *REAL*, comprehensive/exhaustive, *FREE* and fun to read history of video games, go read The Dot Eaters [emuunlim.com].

    I spent a couple hours reading through this, and refer back to it often, just for fun. It sounds like it's a lot of the same stuff as in the book, but it also sounds like Dot Eaters is much more professional and comprehensive in regards to the *history* of games and what they mean to us (30 somethings).

    It's definitely worth a read.

  • ...how cool the Dragon's Lair graphics were...

    UG!! Dragon's Lair SUCKED! Those weren't "graphics" those were clips playing from a laserdisc inside. You progressed in the game by moving the joystick the right direction during a key moment in the animation. I thought this was disgusting and refused to ever play that hideous monstrosity lest I promote more development of its kind.

  • I just found a magazine at a hamfest, Electronics Illustrated, from 1972, and one of the articles was build you own TV Tag game! It's made of cmos logic (lots of nand, or was it 'nor' gates?) and all discreet components. Appearently two players just move dots around the screen untill one touches the other. At the time it was either that or "Bridget Loves Bernie".
  • I used to enjoy making fun of his posts. Now, we have people actually reviewing books rather than spewing out vaguely related streams of grandiose yet fundimentally meaningless statements.

    ...and when Gannoc realized what had happened, we wept, for there was no more Katz to conquer.

  • Some key books to read:

    "How to master video games" T Hirschfeld 1981
    ISBN 0-553-20164-6

    "Zap the rise and fall of Atari" S Cohen 1984
    ISBN 0-738-86883-3

    Hedley
  • <i>The section on the seventies is (you will forgive me) before my time. The book tells us about "Pong", the early days of Atari, but I don't think I played on any of those machines.</i><p>
    Then there are those of us who still have a Pong console. :-)
  • This weekend the Cinciclassic [ic.net] is going on, are there will be allmost every home computer and game system there.

    An other really good book is "The Ultimate History of Video Games" by Steven Kent. Starts with pinballs and goes past N64. It has lots of good quotes from the people that where there at the time.

  • This looks like a super cool book to relive my old school gaming years. I ordered it imidiately from amazon :) I'll be waiting @ my snail-mail-box...
  • Question: I've been trying to recall the name of a stand-up arcade game for about ten years. Can anyone on Slashdot Name that Coin-Op?

    Description: side scrolling action/platform game, with a fantasy role-playing theme. You chose from 4-6 characters, which included a ninja and a cleric in addition to more traditional FRP characters. Levels were huge, and starting out with it, you explored a level more than anything else. I remember early enemies were golden bees, and that the first boss was a Black Pudding comprised of about a hundred little sphere sprites that jumped around a lot. I also recall that if you couldn't finish the level quickly enough there was a flying skull that hassled you to death.

    Anyone recognize this? Anyone?

  • The review refers to the PDP 11, but the original version of Spacewar ran on the PDP-1, which was a $120,000 computer. Spacewar may have influenced Pong, though there is no proof. I brought Spacewar from Stanford to Sanders Associates in 1969, where it was played on Sanders' PDP-1 at about the time that Pong was invented. Unfortunately, there was no log kept of PDP-1 users, so there is no proof that the inventor of Pong played Spacewar.

    John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)

    • The review refers to the PDP 11, but the original version of Spacewar ran on the PDP-1, which was a $120,000 computer. Spacewar may have influenced Pong, though there is no proof. I brought Spacewar from Stanford to Sanders Associates in 1969, where it was played on Sanders' PDP-1 at about the time that Pong was invented. Unfortunately, there was no log kept of PDP-1 users, so there is no proof that the inventor of Pong played Spacewar.

      Um, actually there is, since Pong inventor Nolan Bushnell's first production arcade game was Computer Space, which was more or less exactly Spacewar in a cabinet.

  • My Anecdote (Score:2, Interesting)

    by eric peterson ( 320592 )
    In 1979, I was a CS student at Utah State University. On of my friends was a grad student in EE. He had access to the "EE grad student's locker room", which was mostly used by the department for storing crap they hadn't quite decided to throw away. Among said crap was an old Hewlett-Packard mainframe, gathering dust in a corner. There was a reel of tape mounted on its drive.

    One night, just screwing around, we tried to fire up the HP. Lo and behold, it worked. We read out the tape, and I recognized it as octal code for the DEC GT-40, an arcane vector graphics box the CS department had (I was taking a graphics class at the time, and we had to code for the rotten thing).

    Very very late the next Saturday night, we stole the GT-40, put it on a cart, and wheeled it across the parking lot to the engineering building under cover of darkness. Plugged it into the HP's RS-232 port, and downloaded the tape.

    Nolan Bushnell's original Space Wars and Moon Rocket Lander, from when he was a student there.

    Some fun. I should have kept that tape, but oh, well.
  • Dragon's Lair didn't have "graphics". It was a database of hand-animated film clips strung together by the choices the user made during the game.

    The game was cool, and the cartoons were cool, and the fact that they could make it run that way was cool, but from a purely graphical standpoint there was nothing innovative going on.

    --Blair

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