Asteroids and Galaga were walks in the park by comparison.
To the Williams team:
For a time, I had Playstation, Dreamcast, in one corner of a living room, and MAME loaded up with the best of Coin OP in another.
It would ebb and flow, but the Coin OP side always saw a lot of play. At the time, MAME was running on a pretty great PC, big ass SONY Trinitron CRT with solid keyboard, mouse, other controllers. Sometimes I would make one if a game proved compelling enough for the kids, not just mine. Neighborhood kids. They would come to play on the killer MAME setup.
In my bedroom, during those times, I had an SGI Indy that I built XMame on, and it would just play Smash TV, when compiled with aggressive optimization. That was my machine to play classics on, Defender, Asteroids, Smash TV, Robotron...
To be fair, the console side was on an even bigger, like 200 plus pound SONY WEGA.
Might as well make the most of the tech at the time.
Those Coin OP games worked even when it was not about hard won quarters. And we (family) toured the local arcades as long as we could. And did drive in movies too.
The Internet did a similar thing at home. It encroached on gaming time, then became gaming time. Quake 3 Arena displaced all of it for quite a while. Networked FPS is amazing, as we all know.
Cell phones had an impact too. Suddenly young people could talk away from parents, without having to have a place to meet up. This aligned roughly with the Internet, and maybe gets missed. Text was huge. I used to teach other parents how to read all the shorthand lingo. Many parents had no idea.
SMS and chats of various kinds were as intoxicating as the best video games were, Coin OP or not.
As an 70's and 80's era kid, I saw the arcades from later pinball (which I still find amazing and fun), to old black and white arcade games, vectors (another experience worth having if you can on a CRT in an arcade), through Defender and all that we see in this film. For a little while, arcades felt new again when the bigger machines and more body movement games, Dance Dance and others, got people moving in many ways, not just flogging controls and a few buttons. I liked that time as much as I did the often smoke filled arcades where I could find hard core, Star Castle, Rip Off, Defender, Tempest, and many others.
At the arcade, we could play, talk, live out parts of ourselves, share that, and do it away from parents. Same goes for cruising around in cars, until that was made illegal... networks were a concept many knew about and few experienced. Phones had wires and or were an expensive resource, often including watchful eyes and ears.
Cell Phones, home consoles, Internet really did take out the arcade, but for a few today able to exist reasonably.
Also, see those 1up cabinets? People really like them, even when the game experience is sub par. Seems like the arcade experience is still relevant, but with poor economics. And annoying ticket / prize schemes.
It all was a fun time. Glad I was there. Sometimes want to go back.
I can't get past about level 5 or 6 in robotron.
Defender was a stand out experience. At that time, there was nothing like it.
Needless to say, getting pizza was amazing! We, friends and I, would wolf it down and run off to dump the money we saved and whatever we could mooch from the always intrigued, and somewhat confused adults at the table.
Curiously, one remarked to the effect of the pizza being a side show with the real money going into beer and games. I do not recall them playing much, content to drink and enjoy our antics.
The very first time I saw Defender, a friend and I had been studying the games, reading about graphics, and thought it was something special just from attract mode. Good resolution for the time, color cycling, 16 colors, and the motion spoke to something intense.
Of course it totally was!
Those sounds pumped out of a respectable amp, lots of bass, and bang on clarity were the kind of experience one does not forget. Same goes for the visuals. That particular cabinet was not totally new. It has seen some love.
All combined, little bits of dust on the CRT, great, worked in controls, other artifacts one would see from a machine seeing consistent and aggressive plays, the only way I can describe our impressions was like that of a powerful sports car, idling after a pro worked it in on the track, and then... our turn.
I say, we, our... because the first few runs was a two player experience. One would be watching, trying to understand all the baddies, flow, what happens, when, why, all while the other is staying in game, blasting away, hoping to clear the level.
We would alternate too. Play every other level, whatever made sense as we gained the skill needed to play through.
But the real show was an older kid who showed up one day able to play for a considerable time. Game difficulty ramps for a while. New players have no real idea what is to come, and the moment they do, they crave it again and again. A person can get into flow just watching someone play this game.
Raw games like this, and by that I mean having really solid basics along with slowdowns, and such that would normally take one out of the experience, ended up taking one deeper into it all. Soon, those are known, expected, a sign of mastery.
For an example, see the original "Star Raiders" on Atari 8 bit computers. It is similarly raw, with similar slowdowns. Years later that game was fixed with highly optimized particle computations and would run at a solid 50 / 60hz depending on whatever region it was played.
Some appreciated it, but a surprising number of people, myself included, found it more sterile. It just is not the same.
Stargate is kind of like that, but is also a different game, so it does not detract like the fix to Star Raiders did.
And through all this, I just wanted to convey how those early experiences went. This game is remarkable, and for many, again myself included, an experience worth having anytime. This title gets a player into flow, the zone, whatever people call it, rapidly.
Demands it.
I'm curious, how did the source become public? Did the creators release it, was it found somewhere, ...?
http://archives.museumofplay.org/repositories/3/resources/22...
So perhaps it was scanned and distributed from there? Seems unlikely since the code was either printed on paper or stored on old 8" floppies from the development system. But you never know.
EDIT: looking at Historical Source's repo, they have a LOT of old Williams IP here. This was copied from someone's development machine somewhere.
Williams used the same sound hardware (and many of the same sound effects as well) on all their arcade and pinball games from the late 1970s through the mid 1980s. And unlike other machines that used dedicated sound-generating chips like the AY-3-8910, the Williams sound board was just a 6800 CPU hooked up to an 8-bit DAC. It did everything in software. No square wave generators or hardware timers. The pitch of the sound was controlled by variable-length delay loops!
I spent a bit of time reverse-engineering the sound ROMs a while ago. From what I recall, there were a few different sound-generation algorithms. Some of them generated simple pulse waves or noise. Another was wavetable-based; it used samples in ROM and manipulated them in various clever ways. Another one, which was responsible for their coolest sounds, used a bonkers system of multiple nested loops generating variable-width pulse waves... I was never able to fully understand it...
This was exactly what I wanted to write someday. It definitely brings up a lot of memories if you played a lot of Williams' pinball machines as well. The sound ROM in Defender evolved from the pinball sound board, and some of the sounds marked as (?) came from all the games before Defender.
WOW
https://github.com/historicalsource/williams-soundroms
(Were you the one that ported the code to C# and generated new WAV files from the original algorithms? That was kick ass)
I never published my reverse engineering work, but I think you're referring to http://lomont.org/software/misc/robotron/
How David Beats Goliath: When underdogs break the rules. Malcolm Gladwell, 2009.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/05/11/how-david-beat...
Definitely not easier. But good practice.
And, for the hackers, here's a version of the Defender ROM, modified by a programmer named Jim Bowley, to render an impossibly difficult version of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhZlOwEvd5M
The above is running on JROK -- http://www.jrok.com/ -- custom silicon to emulate the original chip (much better than MAME), it's contained in an original cabinet, with an original monitor, and a custom built control panel, designed to be as authentic to the original as possible, and hand-built by Jim Bowley https://www.jbgaming.co.uk .
Here's a player, mikeville66, whose video inspired me to get better. This is maximum difficulty on the first-run ROM chips, the infamous Green ROMs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrkx6vuiMrE
And if you're interested in an instructional video of how to play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PEpDMgR9D0
Defender was a big game back in the day, grossing about a billion dollars worldwide.
What I noticed about Stargate back then, coming from Defender, was that it was easier to shoot things. I think this was because the Stargate chip was an upgrade--the faster CPU wouldn't steal time slices from me at odd moments, so the game was more predictable. I remember Eugene Jarvis and Sam Dicker talking about the Defender->Stargate upgrade process at the California Extreme arcade convention in 2014. Stargate is a fun game, and these days I play more casually, not really trying to perfect my skill.
As someone else in the comments noted: Defender is more raw. It's like those characters from the older version of the Matrix: Difficult to kill. It's like Yngwie Malmsteen's demo tape before his first album. There is a basic visceral appeal to it.
Legend has it that the reason Stargate is so hard compared to Defender is because the one of the early test units ended up in an arcade where one of the best Defender players in the country hung out; when it came back to Williams with his scores filling the high-score table, they assumed this was because it was just too easy. So they fixed that.
I never managed to really gel with it, probably because of the control scheme. But I always respected how it was SO unapologetically hardcore -- it was a game for the true arcade masters.
I wasn't a total wimp at least. My favorite game from the era is probably Robotron, also by Jarvis. Absolutely punishingly hard as well. Love it to this day.
- The idea that you were orbiting the planet, somehow more than 2D, yet not 3D.
- Not just shooting but also rescuing.
- The speed, fluid movement and quick reverses.
- Color and sound crucial to situational awareness.
I wrote some comments on this article [1] about why it failed, if you’re interested.
[1] https://www.unseen64.net/2020/11/16/lunatik-pure-entertainme...
This game is one I play on sight. The world could be imploding. Do not care.
So great. Everything feels present, and all done at 1Mhz on my favorite 8bit CPU.
Trivia: The Williams sound board is a 6800 running at .8'ish Mhz, connected to a DAC. It plays ONE sound at a time. It can be interrupted, and is all the time in Defender.
Defender has a sound priority system that has always fascinated me. You get one sound, and that team made it count to the max. The player gets the sounds that matter most, when they matter most and it all just flows.
Exemplary!
It also has an interesting way to manage objects to keep the game moving, but for a few slowdown events that actually make the game great. When there is too much to do, baddies are simply moved to an inactive region. Players in the moment hardly notice, but bystanders do.
Finally, each baddie is its own little process. They have their own behaviors, and can be spawned, moved, etc. in simple, fast ways that do not break the experience.
Others have said this game feels raw, intense!
I feel these elements all contribute to that feeling. It is a bitmap game, no hardware sprites, and Jarvis basically aimed to kick the players ass! This game does that.
At 1Mhz, this game is a work of art, IMHO. So many good choices and balancing of resources.
Pedantry: Assembly code is assembled, not compiled. I believe I'm losing my personal war on this, and someone here will certainly try to equate the simple mnemonic->opcode substitution and 2-pass label resolution an assembler does with the more complex and in-depth code emittance a compiler does, but it still grinds my gears.
Have gone as far as a quick hand assembly on paper, then type the bytes in and run them. All that ever happened is numbers got moved around, maybe a few computed, and that's it. And doing that exercise did move some people, who relapsed later on.
Photos: https://twitter.com/txsector/status/1302421155391791104
You can see that the file in the first photo is an exact match of "BLK71.SRC".
I played Defender on an Atari 2600 in Brazil in the early 1980s and remember the ship would disappear when you fired, probably because the 2600 could only draw a limited number of objects on the screen at once.
Here is a blog post with memories of some old games compared to recent ones: https://hypertexthero.com/space-invaders-brazilian-cerrado/
I noticed that Williams arcade machines were better in many ways than others. This applied even more to the pinball machines. There was a quality about them that put Bally and others in the shade.
Maybe Ground Kontrol here locally has a Defender...
But I digress, and really want to pose a tech question:
How robust are the parts of the game managing resources?
Has anyone dropped a 6309 into their game, or run their CPU at a higher clock?
Secondly, have people made modifications, such as something like a lander from hell wave, where they just keep coming, or maybe all pods, that kind of thing?
I was a master at this back in the day, and even better at StarGate (Defender2)
One of the things about StarGate was that you could write almost a whole sentence if you beat the high score instead of just your initials.
I was in fierce competition with my friend and we would troll each other by writing horrible stuff on the high score for everyone in the arcade to see.
"PRAYAH 1: P L O G L A M S T A H T"