All this hullabaloo this past week at this past week’s GDC and the big announcement of the PlayStation Move had he thinking back to when motion control was a fantastical dream. Take a trip with me in the Hot Tub Time machine back to 1983 when those wacky kids went to this thing called the “arcade.” There amidst the clank of quarters and the blips and beeps was beckoning the call of sci-fi nerds everywhere was the coolest game ever — Star Wars. The game cabinet was huge and you had to sit in it. Inside you were transported into the cockpit of an X-wing you got the blast the beejeezus out of tie fighters in an all out battle to destroy the Death Star. What made this game so cool was that the game used 3D vector graphics to create the visualizations on the screen.
If you’ve never heard the term basically it’s a style of graphics that use shapes, points, lines and curves to represent images. Back then, if you were sitting in the Star Wars machine it was the closest thing you got to full immersion gaming. Add to that was a Star Wars game. There was also a stand up cabinet but it was so not the same.
FPS Action and Celebrity Voices
step into some hella fun
So the game boiled down to three levels and featured the digitized version of the key cast members (Hamil, Guinness, Ford and James Earl Jones). Jumping into the X-wing you to fend off Tie-Fighters and Darth Vader, get to the surface of the Death Star then finally make your run in the trench to fire the day-saving photon shot. If you got through that you would start over only this time it would be harder. Wash, rinse, repeat. Simple but fun and really well put together. The cool part about the first part was you didn’t have to kill all the enemy ships. You just had to survive the dogfight. Once you made your killer shot you got a a really cool explosion of colors and a big bucket of points.
Later on there were some console ports Atari 2600, Atari 5200, the Atari 8-bit family, ColecoVision and Commodore 64 (even NES) but they all paled in comparison to the cabinet thrill ride you got in the arcade. Let the quarter sucking begin.
So imagine if you will it’s the early 1980s . You and the brain trusts at Atari and enjoying all the relative success of this new form of entertainment your company has created called videogames. Now you’ve been tasked to come up with something that will blow people’s minds. So you you hunker down in that room with your team of video game wizards and you come out after several hours of proposing all sorts of fantastical ideas and you come up with this … A controller that allows you to use the muscles in your brain — yeah that’s right a brain controller. Feast your eyes ladies and gentlemen … on the Mindlink.
think jump, think punch
Back then Atari had made several games that required a paddle controller.
why use paddles when you can use your brain
This was the controller that Atari had for games like Pong and Breakout. And the Mind Link was created to work with games used a paddle controller. The idea behind the Mind Link was that the movements would be read by infrared sensors attached to your head and transferred as movement in the game. Early tests proved that the device, which looked like some kind of weird headband was causing headaches as players moved their eyebrows to try and control the game. They even developed two games for it — Bionic Breakthrough and Mind Maze. Unfortunately Atari realized this would never work after trying to tinker with it and make the device better so they just tanked the whole project. So the brainchild of designer Tom Palecki never made to the shelves. At least the made a really cool ad for it.
What is this strange thing you speak of .. ColecoVision? The year was 1982. We had an actor for a president (Ronald Reagan), an alien that would steal our hearts (E.T), a new way to listen to music (compact discs) and a game system that played cool games and had a controller that looked like a telephone/calculator with a knob. Feast your eyes on this mastery of videogame machinery…
Yes this thing played games
Game On
Made by the the company whose name sounded ridiculous, Coleco Industries (Vandalay anyone?), this was a second generation machine designed to play Atari 2600 games with arcade quality graphics (remember this is 1982) and the machine also boasted it’s own library of stellar titles on what was then called ROM cartridges. ROM you ask?
Read Only Memory cartridges or carts were basically what Nintendo was using pre-discs and you could also find them used in places like broadcast radio. The big seller for Coleco right off the bat though was Donkey Kong which they licensed from Nintendo and had what was considered to be a close to perfect arcade port. The game came with the system and so by Christmas of that year the company had already sold 50,000 units. Their strategy was simple, offer games the 2600 didn’t have which meant partnering with developers like Sega and Knonami and delivering into the hands of gamers titles like Donkey Kong Junior, Carnival, Lady Bug, Mouse Trap, Zaxxon, Time Pilot and Frenzy. They were also still porting Atari 2600 games as well as Intellivision games to broaden their library.
What the *&^% is that?
1 plus 9 = jump? Witness the majesty of the Coleco controller
Looking at this contraption on you have to wonder how the heck you played a game with this thing. Well you used that joystick in the middle and then the buttons on the side which basically were the same button. The keypad’s numbers corresponded to plastic overlays that came with some games that allowed the use of the number pad. While it mirrored Intellivision’s controller in many ways it was sturdier and had the joystick rather than a control disc. It sounds confusing but at the time it was the bomb.
Instant Success Followed by Crash and Burn
Unfortunately the ColecoVision’s instant success was followed by terrible failure. By 1985 production was shut down after it had only managed to sell 2 million units over all. A few things contributed to it’s demise including the fact that the company scaled back on video game production. There was also a bit of an overall decline in videogame sales in 1983 that really put a kink in their production.
At the time, there was an overproduction of consoles and games because everyone wanted to cash in on this “videogame fad.” ColecoVision became a casualty of this “crash” and never got back on the gaming horse. Keep in mind this was the like the Mesozoic period of home consoles and in reality there were just too many of them even when you had a standout system like the ColecoVision. Big props though, go out to the company for an innovation that would be picked up by future developers — expansion kits of their system like one with a steering wheel and even a weird looking controller they called the Super Action controller. Showing the power of third party licensing and successful game ports ColecoVision was a worthy entry into the early arena of gaming that got knocked out too soon.
Here’s the thing, every now and then somebody does something so cool and geeked out that it deserves all the props. This one has been floating around for a while but it’s awesome in it’s timelessness. For this edition of Friday Flashback we pay homage to some of the classic games of the 80s in the most absurd way we can … By showing a video of Lego Arcade. This stop motion masterpiece shows off an astoundingly good reproduction of old games like Frogger and Space Invaders. Created by a guy who goes by the name of MICHAELHICKOX . It’s the ultimate in geekiness and we bow to it’s greatness. Enjoy the trip down memory lane, Lego style
In the videogame world of the 80s the battle for supremacy with the home console was vicious. The battles and victories could easily be segmented into the technology that enhanced each new system in the form of bits. For you youngsters out there, bits are part of the technospeak for the processing system — the higher the bit the better the processor. Back in those days each new console introduced a better processor thus improving the quality and gameplay of the games being developed. So of course console makers were trying to outdo each other with a better system which meant better games and for each subsequent upgrade in bits, came some folks ready to throw down. Atari and Commodore get an honorable mention here but the battlefield didn’t really get crowded until the 8-bit beast from Nintendo showed up.
The first significant battle was more like a straight out domination. In the realm of 8-bit technology the clear winner … the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES).
Winner of the 8-bit console battle
This machine could not be beat. It was for all intents and purposes the system to have in 1985 even at a price tag of $199 or $250 for the deluxe bundle. Sega’s first foray onto the battlefield with the Sega Master System offered some competition but comparing 13 million to 61 million in sales, well it’s really not much of a fight. We also have the appearance of the Game Boy basically stomping Sega’s idea of a handheld into the ground with a foot the size of Jupiter. This as we all know was just the beginning …
Flash forward to 1989 and the wizardry of the 16-bit console you get Sega looking to take Nintendo down a few notches with the Sega Genesis (aka the Mega Drive) in 1989.
The 16-bit powerhouse looking to shut Nintendo down
Interesting turn of events here. You would assume better system with “better”games and a processor would totally blow Nintendo out of the water right? Unfortunately Sega’s biggest flaw wasn’t that it had a logically better system. In some respects Sega was actually ahead of it’s time. The problem was Nintendo had become so ingrained as the goto system with a vast array of titles and quality gameplay that even Sega’s little hedgehog coudln’t knock them down. Plus they dominated the marketing landscape thus making it hard for Sega to make a dent with an opposing campaign.
The 16-bit battle was essentially won by an 8-bit machine thus proving the power of a system that was already 4 years old. While Sega was able to fire off a few more rounds in this battle they ultimately never could get the dominance they were looking for in the console market.
Then in 1995, the behemoth that was Nintendo got a beat down of epic proportions …
The console the put Nintendo down
Enter Sony and the 32-bit console that would mark Sony’s dominance of the videogame world for a solid decade even going into the generation of the first Xbox and the Gamecube. Now there are many who have heard tales of how Nintendo had a chance to be part of this and here’s the basic gist of that. Sony planned on creating a console, which would play SNES cartridges and a new CD format which Sony would design. This was also to be the format used in SNES-CD discs but Sony would have control on this since they came up with it. Unfortunately that whole “control” issue was the deal breaker for Nintendo and as a result we have Sony making the machine that would destroy them in sales and popularity with the PS1 and of course the PS2 which is still pulling sales in 2009.
As we all wait for the next, next generation of consoles to duke it out it’s clear that in looking at how things came to be the best system wasn’t always defined by the technology alone.
