How did Atari produce so many innovative arcade games in the

[Rogue Trooper]

Just been reading a Making Of....Asteriods, very good read too.


More than 70,000 units sold, generating revenues of $150 Million and it all came about after creator, Ed Logg had been called in for advice after Lyle Rains (director of Atari's Coin-Op Group) had been testing an arcade game that featured a giant asteriod that could'nt be destroyed, yet he'd witnessed players would still keep shooting it, so thought 'hey, they must really want to blow up asteriods, so why don't we give them a game where you shoot the rocks and blow them up?'.

Logg responded with a suggestion: 'I'd really like to shoot the rocks and break them into smaller pieces, because that way the player would'nt shoot everything, he'd selectively pick...too many rocks flying around after random shooting would be too damn dangerous'.

Logg knew you needed more than just shooting rocks to make game work and suggested having a flying saucer, similar to one he'd seen in Spacewar! to chase player onto next round.

Rains wanted the graphics format to be raster and Logg suggested XY monitor for it's higher resolution (1,204X760 VS raster's 320X240) as you needed the resolution to see the angle you were shooting at.

Also game was 'patched' after coin-op operators complained of lost revenue due to players 'lurking' whilst playing, due to the delay the saucer took before firing, so Logg and team created a new 'lurk-limiting' EPROM to replace the old one.

Never realised Logg was behind Dr Muto on PS2/Xbox and GC either!

[TrekMD]

That is one cool story! 

[Rogue Trooper]

That is one cool story!

I just love reading stuff like that Asteriods story, games designed almost by accident as it were and by watching what players (well in this case, playtesters) did and then people just thinking, well, lets give'em what they want!.

Also engineers saying, we really need this display, as otherwise it just won't work-compare that with today's industry with say MS bean counters looking at 360 Kinect and saying:hmmn, downgrade that camera, take out that on-board CPU, make it cheaper to produce, who cares if it effects performance?.

Got loads more things like that i could share, thought i'd test the waters with Asteriods 1st.....

I just love finding out how games i loved came about....

[TrekMD]

It's always interesting to learn how the idea of a game came to be.  It speaks to the creativity people had at the time!

[Rogue Trooper]

Updated with full 'brief':

Development of Battlezone started out as an experiment, Atari had 2 projects on the go to try to do a 1st person 3D game, Battlezone+Red Baron.The experiment then turned into a competition, which would be the 1st to become a game with 3D Vector technology?

Red Baron won the in-house pursuit for 1st video, Battlezone had the honour of being 1st arcade game to offer 1st person free-motion simulated 3D and every FPS owes it's legacy to Ed Rotberg (lead programmer) and his game.

Asteriods which used the vector tech.had been a goldmine for Atari, so they wanted more vector based games, engineer Jed Margolin developed quasi-3D algorithms to put the potential of a first person 3D vector exp.within sight.To create the vector 3D required a lot of processing power and Rotberg was working with a 6502, so needed the designs to be made simple, cue Atari artist, Robert Hector, who having no C.A.D 3D design tools avaiable, just drew the tanks on paper for Rotberg to code.


Even with simplified tank design the 6502 was struggling to keep up with all the calculations, so how did Rotberg get around this? simple..he cheated on the maths..the pieces of the explosions and the missile were the only thing that moved in true 3D, but they did'nt rotate in 3D..nothing in the game rotated other than around the up-and-down axis, so with the maths cheat in place, Rotberg started designing game proper...


Into the playfield went the tank, some cubes, pyramids..he created a simple pyramid tank shell, it looked great when fired..but Future Tank as it was then known..was looking a bit empty, what else could go in there?

The ' Buzz Bomb', which learning how to deal with, Rotberg sites, was one of his favourite aspects of Battlezone.Next up..the juicy reward factor..the flying saucer..the sucker shot as Rotberg called it..you go after it, you get distracted..it makes it easier for games simple A.I to nail you.The saucers movement is entirely random-unlike all the other enemies in Battlezone, it has no A.I.



The volcanoes (drawn by Roger Hector) were meant to be inactive, but fellow Atari coder. Owen Rubin, keep on hassling Rotberg to make the volcano active, he kept on and on at Rotberg, who at this point was still struggling to get game to work, until he 'snapped' and said 'Owen, if you want the volcano active, you can damn well do it yourself!' and when Rotberg returned to work next day, there placed on his chair was indeed a listing of code which would indeed make volcano active, so he put it in.


The green cellophane gel over the play area and orange gell over the radar came about from Morgan Hoff, project leader and it was also his decision to give the player a scope, but Rotberg had very mixed feelings, thinking that whilst indeed it pretty cool, part of the attraction in the arcades was watching other people play, before you had a go yourself, something you could'nt do with the scope version of Battlezone and that's why it was removed on later versions.

When asked why he thought Battlezone had become more popular than Red Baron, Rotberg simply replied...'most people don't know how to fly'.

[TrekMD]

It would make sense for Atari to want to exploit vector graphics after the success of Asteroids.  They, of course, got another winner with Battlezone!

[Rogue Trooper]

Might 'cover' Centipede next...any interest?

[TrekMD]

Might 'cover' Centipede next...any interest?

[Rogue Trooper]

Might 'cover' Centipede next...any interest?

Sleep 1st, then coffee, then i'll cobble something together, hows that sound?

Teaser though:

Ed Logg, creator:

'You create a universe, you set your set of rules, and you see what happens.I create worlds for people to play in.That's my style of game development'

And using those 'rules' he created Centipede which generated $110 Million+ for Atari and it was the no.2 best selling game for them, behind Asteriods.

How did it come about?

A brainstorming session that Ed was'nt even present at....


More once i've risen from the slumber i hope to reach.....

[Carlos]

Everything was innovative in the 1980's things were all done for the first time.

My 10 year old said of Pacific Rim, that it was a Halo rip-off, I explained to him that the concept of humongous Dinosaurs came from 1950s Japan.

The same in Music, people fawning over a song that gives them 'goose bumps' not knowing it was a cover. 

[Rogue Trooper]

Ok another 'chunk' on Centipede:


Every year, Atari held a brainstorming meeting to come up with a 'book' of creative ideas, after 1 such meeting had taken place, Logg had a skim through that meetings book, saw a short paragraph of a game called 'Bug shooter' or 'Shoot The Centipede', ideas for title clearly been thrown out there and from these names, he had the ideas for creating the Centipede universe.

Logg did'nt want to repeat the omni-directional shooting Asteriods had, so he decided to put the monitor on it's side, thus granting more vertical room, he also wanted (limited) vertical movement, variable speed, basically he thought it essential the player had ability to dodge things quickly and have very fine control over their movements, so opted for a mini-track ball over a joystick.

Centipedes spider was basically 'playing' the same role as the saucer in Asteriods-it was designed to stop the player just sitting in 1 place, it gave the game a sense of imminent threat, the spider could come at the player from all manner of directions and like the saucer in Battlezone, it's movement is totally random, it has no A.I controlling it, it does'nt look to see where player is or what they are doing.

The spider worked out so well, it made another attacker Logg had planned, the grasshopper (again designed to keep player moving) redundant, Logg felt the spider alone gave the player enough 'headaches' to content with so although the animation for the grasshopper was coded, it was never implemented into final gameplay.

Logg happily admits his 1st 'build' of the game, really was'nt all that much fun, mushrooms were static, you could'nt destroy them, they did'nt restrict the player etc.This all changed when a colleague of Logg's who play tested the game, kicked off and asked Logg why the hell he could'nt shoot the mushrooms?

So, Logg started thinking..if he made it so you could shoot and thus remove the mushrooms, he had to put something to put them back...so, in order to get the fungi re-appearing, Logg decided that shot centipede segements would become mushrooms, so a rule change for Loggs universe in effect.

It still was'nt enough, players were shooting the mushrooms at such a rate of knots, they were dissapearing like snow before the sun, players would shoot mushrooms, the spider jumped on them, they dissapeared.Logg searched for a way to leave mushrooms randomly..hence the creation of the fleas....

If the mushrooms in the player area fell beneath a certain number, the centiped would send fleas to drop a few more.


The creation and destruction mechanic did wonders for the game, it turned it into a constantly changing playfield, it gave it a new stategy element:mushrooms could be a help and a hinderance, with forward planning a player could control movement, if the player let them build up, they became an obstacle.

*will post another chunk later...

[Rogue Trooper]

Next bit:

Whilst Logg knew Centipede was exciting for players, he had a concern..what was missing, that would stop the more hardcore player from getting bored? he needed something that would crate an immediate threat...hence the creation of the scorpion, a nasty which would posion all the mushrooms in it's path and soon as centiped hit toxic mushroom, it'd drop straight to the bottom of the screen.

Logg was also aware of how in Asteriods, players would amass points galore by leaving the last piece of rock on screen, thus stopping game moving too next stage, and they'd blast the saucers that appeared.

Logg did'nt want such 'lurking' in Centipede, so as soon as player left a segment, game brought in extra segments.

Centipede was a huge hit with women gamers and much of this has been put down to Dona Bailey, Loggs assistant coder, Logg being her supervisor at that time had asigned her to Centipede, which was her 1st project and it was Dona who picked the colours for the mushrooms.She's attributed to being the 1st ever female  computer games programmer.

[TrekMD]

Pretty cool about Centipede as well and how the different enemies came about.  The grasshopper didn't even make it into Millipede! 

[Rogue Trooper]

Pretty cool about Centipede as well and how the different enemies came about.  The grasshopper didn't even make it into Millipede!

Glad it went down well.Yep, i liked very much how in terms of games design, everything had to serve a purpose and if it was'nt needed or adding anything to the game, Logg just took it out.

[Rogue Trooper]

Do 'folks' want to keep this thread Atari coin-op specific? or you good people 'happy' to have some tales of how say ZX81 game designers got creative with primitive hardware?.