The Creation of Missile Command and the Haunting of its Creator, Dave Theurer (Polygon)

Just thought I'd do a mini-post about a great article on Missile Command and the context it was created in and the ramifications it's had.

Axelay/Akusurei (アクスレイ) - Super Famicom/SNES

When you're the legendary Konami, cranking out hit after hit after hit, you're bound to leave a little bit of greatness behind. With a vast stable full of long running, awesome franchises (Gradius/Nemesis, Salamander/Life Force, Parodius, just to name the shmups), ones which consistently turn out good reviews and great sales, the one-off games, the real risks, struggle to find a voice.

But it can be boring to turn out yet another Gradius game (or Gradius-like), with slight tweaks to mechanics long established as tradition. So the impetuous Konami game designer, eager to try out wholly different ideas, has to rally support to turn out a risky and unproven product.

With Konami, this has happened at least twice. In 1989, the extraordinary Space Manbow was released on the MSX and never seen in another platform or sequel again.

(Okay, I lied a little, it was ported to Japanese Mobile Phones (2006) and released against on the Japanese Virtual Console (2009). But the point still stands.)

Released a mere 4 years later, Axelay, perhaps the pinnacle shmup on the Super Famicom/SNES, is yet another game that's almost completely forgotten. Languishing in relative obscurity, unported, without sequel or prequel. It's largely a game forgotten.

(Okay, a little more lying to make my point, it landed on Virtual Console in 2007.)

Evidence that this game has been lost in the hearts and minds of gamers? Read any retrogaming message board, and you'll find people new to retrogaming asking for great SNES games -- Axelay, despite being one of the finest shooters ever released, almost never makes that list. When it does though, it's almost always talked about with gushing praise.

Why is Axelay forgotten? The world may never know the true answer, but I suspect it was sunk by reviews in the professional gaming media, never seeming to have risen up to more than a 7 out of 10 (± .5). Yet player reviews routinely score it 2 points higher. IGN's Virtual Console's score is a great case in point.

I'm not upset with the press over this, on the contrary, it helps keep Axelay a hidden gem, a shibboleth true retrogamers can use to parse away the posers. Okay it smarts a little. In the specifics of the reviews, they seemed confused about the game. It's a Konami shmup, so they expect a Gradius or Salamander style power up system, but it doesn't have that. Okay, so it must be a Parodius style cute-'em-up, but it isn't -- your family is killed by an unstoppable faceless enemy after all. Rather than review it on its own merits, and it's chock full of them, for each thing it isn't, a point gets deducted from the final score.

So what is Axelay? Probably one of the purest shmups ever made -- a kind of F-Zero for shooters. There are no collectibles and no powerups. Before each mission, you choose three weapons to loadout and you begin. New, rather unique, weapons are added to your arsenal as you complete missions. But there really isn't any one weapon better than another. They are situational tools, seasoning for different flavors of delicious combat.

Missions alternate between unique vertical and gorgeous horizontal levels each capped off with amazing, usually articulate, screen filling bosses. Axelay never becomes a grind, it's difficult, but always fair. It's first and foremost a game to experience all the way through -- and this is exactly how the difficulty is calibrated (and it can even be adjusted up or down to suit the player). A full run through on hard takes slightly over a half-hour to 45 minutes.

Along the way, each level will be filled with a never ending cornucopia of enemies, all unique to that level (as far as I could tell). Some might be used only in one instance in the entire game. Your weapons loadout double as a kind of life bar, take a shot and you lose the weapon. Take too many shots and you're fighting for you life with a peashooter and a warning alarm to get your blood pumping -- four shots and you're dead. Regardless of your remaining loadout, suffer a catastrophic collision and you lose a life.

Graphics are fantastic and often mindblowing, even today. Levels range from high tech orbital habitats to organic caves dripping with moisture. Enemies fit the theme of each level perfectly, and your ship has impressively subtle animations as you weave it to and fro. Lots of ink has been bled over the use of the SNES's "mode 7" in the vertical stages to simulate a slightly canted landscape. But I'm not convinced this is a mode 7 effect. It appears to be more likely programming wizardry. Where mode 7 is used, it's a gorgeous and surprisingly subtle tool. The body of the articulate boss in Stage 2 for example.

Perhaps most impressive to me in this game is the music and sound design. The music is astonishingly listenable today with barely a hint of the resource restrictions the SNES soundchip put on it. It's typically an uptempo 90s era jazz-rock, but lots of care was put into making it match and work off of the visuals. Each boss even gets its own variation on the level's music. In places, instruments are bent and twisted to build suspense, provide incidental tension, fill out the atmosphere of the stage and even sound like alien speech. An epic 30+ minute version of the Stage 2 music was even produced -- and it's a hell of a ride.

The sound effects are likewise perfect, explosions rip across the soundscape and weapon effects never get annoying or intrusive. It's the remarkable work of a collaboration between Taro Kudo known for work on Super Castlevania IV and sound programmer/designer Atsushi Fujio. As a layer over the game, it binds and tightens up every other facet and makes it a complete whole. There's really not enough that can be said for the audio work in this game.

An interesting side note about Axelay is the small legacy it created. One of the founders of Treasure, Kazuhiko Ishida worked on Axelay, the soundtrack has often been covered and remixed, and the recent Dreamcast game Sturmwind based much of its gameplay mechanics on Axelay -- almost enough to be a spiritual sequel. Another game clearly inspired by the Axelay powerup system is Satazius.

So what does the future hold for Axelay? The end of the game promised an Axelay 2, is it naive to hope Konami reaches back into their bag of awesome but forgotten games and gives Axelay the franchise it always deserved?

Ponpoko/너구리 (Neoguri)/Ponpoko (ポンポコ) - Arcade

1982 in South Korea was a strange time. The country was on the slow climb out of a long dictatorship into modern Democracy, massive industrialization and conglomerates dominated the economy and intense trade and cultural protectionism dictated the import/export of goods. Starting around the end of World War II, South Korea banned "cultural" imports from Japan -- this included video games. It wasn't until 1998 that the import restrictions were relaxed some. On top of this, a strict morality code dictated the kinds of cultural items that could legally find their way into the economy -- censors frowned on excessive violence and adult themes. To put this into perspective, one of the most highly promoted and popular shows on Korean TV during the 1980s was mullet wearing, gun eschewing, smart guy MacGyver.

This doesn't mean that video games were unknown in South Korea. On the contrary, building up the electronics industry in South Korea was a major strategic focus of the government and videogames are a major electronics business. A loophole in the law, conglomerates could license foreign technologies and build/market them in South Korea, allowed versions of many consoles to find their way into the Korean market. Still, these restrictions frustrated gamers and a huge illegal underground market flourished.

Why all this about South Korea? Without the free flow of games from the booming Japanese games market, Korean gamers had to make do with what they could get. This skewed the history of that market in strange directions. Almost entirely unknown in the west, Ponpoko, known as 너구리 (Neoguri) in Korea, is widely regarded there as a classic game and had a welcome spot in most arcades, legal or not. As far as I can tell, it may have been more popular in South Korea than in its native Japan.

It's in South Korea that the game still lives on, a youtube search for "Ponpoko" yields a few results. A search for "너구리" finds speed runs, remakes, reviews. In fact Ponpoko, as 너구리 (Neoguri) has been remade in South Korea again and again and again.

In the interest of even more context, 1982 was an interesting time in Arcade games. Just two years prior, in 1980, the first credited platform game ever was released -- Space Panic (though there's some dispute if Sega/Gremlin's 1978 Frogs owns this title). A year later, in 1981, Donkey Kong hit the market. In 1982, the market was flooded with platformers. Most of them were primitive, but a few stand out as all time classics: Donkey Kong Jr., Joust, Q*bert plus less regarded, but still popular: Popeye, and Jungle Hunt. It's no wonder that with massive heavy weights like that in the same arcade, poor Ponpoko just never really caught on in most countries. It's also interesting that a near clone of Ponpoko, heavyweight Atari's Kangaroo was also a 1982 arcade release and saw much wider release in the West.

As an early platformer, the influence of the 1981 platform games on Ponpoko is clear. In Ponpoko, you guide a little Tanuki around a single playfield made of platforms. Similar to both Space Panic and Donkey Kong, you move between platform levels via ladders. To advance you collect a number of food items. The food changes each level, likely inspired by Pac-Man from two years before. Bonuses come in the form of a Donkey Kong-like time bonus for fast completion and extra points from bonus jars spread throughout the level.

Hazards come in the form of enemies who crisscross their platform, tacks spread throughout the level, enemies hidden in the odd bonus jar and an important innovation, fall damage from falling off a platform.

The tacks, platform placement and an interesting two-level jump mechanic (the jump button does a small jump, forward + jump provides a flying leap) introduces one of the first appearance of a complex jump puzzle in gaming -- or at least is a big improvement over what was seen in Donkey Kong.

Because the enemies simply mill about and don't follow you, and the level layout stays the same from game to game, it plays like a reflex memorization puzzle. With the added incentive that the biggest scores come from beating the bonus timer, you want to play over and over to find more optimal paths through the level and learn the patterns. Interestingly, "pattern" is what this game calls it's progressively more difficult levels. Very unusual for 1982, there's tons of levels -- 20 at my count.

Your tanuki has no offensive weapons at all. The game is purely an agility exercise and reminded me in many ways of 1984's Impossible Mission. The combination of the bonus timer, easy memorization, jump puzzles and level count in addition to fun graphics and little reward tunes make Ponpoko downright addictive.

So what are the problems with Ponpoko? For one, it's working off of, by 1982 standards, outdated Pac-Man hardware. Enemies may have 2 frames of animation, and your character has maybe 5. The character designs and music are also not very memorable. To most players, the enemies and the main character are virtually unrecognizable.

Control and hit detection are also a little fussy. The tanuki jumps with a difficult to gauge animation making even simple obstacles like tacks into life threatening weapons of death. Worse yet, guessing which jumps between platforms you can make and which are just a hair too far is impossible without pure trial and error.

I think that if Ponpoko had been released in 1981, we'd remember it today as an all-time global classic, have disco songs about it, cartoons, and people would recall fondly going on a date at the local roller rink and stopping to play a few rounds. But in the fast moving and ultra-competitive arcade market of the early 1980's the only place it seems to have really caught on is in illegal arcades in a South Korea winding it's way out of occupation, war and dictatorships.

Further reading:
Mamedb's game page
Hardcore Gaming 101's incredible History of Korean Gaming
Hardcore Gaming 101's discussion board
A modern flash remake
An emulab discussion about permissible games in Korean Arcades
MAME Puckman driver source code
Arcade Archives review of Ponpoko

The Magnavox Odyssey

This is a mirror of a retrospective review I wrote on another service

In the history of videogames, the Magnavox Odyssey stands out for one reason, it was the very first video game console and jump started a $15 billion dollar a year industry. Despite being built with late 60’s technology, in many ways, the Odyssey has everything a modern gamer would recognize:

two analog controllers

various peripherals like a gun controller

interchangeable game cartridges

even the potential to enhance the system functionality via advanced circuits in the cartridges.

Considering this is 1960s technology with very few prior concepts to work off of, the inventor of the Odyssey, Ralph Baer (along with help from Bob Tremblay, Bob Solomon, Bill Harrison, John Mason and Bill Rush) must have built a time machine first because these ideas virtually defined home video gaming for the next three decades. 

(An incredibly detailed history of the development of the Odyssey can be found here.)

Going to market, the Odyssey tapped cleanly into the sci-fi zeitgeist of the time. It looked just like a piece of tech out of the 2001 movie released just a couple years before.

At first glance, the story of the Odyssey seems to define an entertainment device that any modern gamer, young or old, would recognize. But digging deeper there are some major differences in both the technology and the business model behind this device.

The Technology

Magnavox Odyssey TV Commercial – February 1973

The first thing that a modern gamer might notice is that all of the games require a second player. Even games we might otherwise consider "single player". This is because the Odyssey doesn’t have a CPU! That’s right, there’s no central logic in the system. In fact, most of the system uses discrete circuits with fewer than 40 digital transistors in the entire device! The second player then acts as the CPU and performs various odds and ends from moving characters around to acting as an AI depending on the rules of the game.

The second noticeable difference is that the games essentially have no "graphics". What I mean is that screen characters are basically limited to two large blocks, a small block and a vertical bar depending on the cartridge. There’s not really such a thing as game resolution or color palette. There’s a simple collision detection circuit in the Odyssey useful for ball games like Ping Pong. However, the system has no ability to display numbers or text, so keeping score was entirely up to the players. Early prototypes were capable of providing some limited color, but the circuits were removed before production to save cost.

It’s clear that this limitation was well understood at the time as the system, and
later games, all shipped with clear plastic "overlays" that players were to place on top of the screen to simulate a better variety of game environments. Obviously inspired by board games, many of them provide simple set playfields for the user to move their character around often even included physical props to go along with the game.

Another obvious difference is that given no central logic unit to handle game rules, and no graphics, the game objects were more often just electronic props that the users could do with as they please, even invent new games. This could be considered a plus for a simple reason. The Odyssey actually was built with all of the games already in the device, the cartridges simply closed various discrete circuits and “activated” the appropriate game. An active imagination and a ready play friend could provide a great deal of playtime. The library was also expanded by using various cartridge and overlays to build up different games.

Oh yeah, and the system had no audio -- of any type. No beeps, boops, whistles, noise channel, nothing.

AND it ran off of batteries. Yes, batteries.

However, the main problem is that just like today, most of the games simply weren’t much fun. A game like States involved picking a card from a deck and moving the character block to where that state was on the map. Cat & Mouse simply let two players chase each other around the screen, but because there was no internal game logic, running outside of the play area, or over obstacles turns the games in a boring free for all.

This fact wasn’t lost on everybody. After seeing the Odyssey at a premier, and realizing that the Tennis and Hockey games were the most fun, Nolan Bushnell (father of Atari) went off and built Pong which went and kicked off the Arcade industry.

Finally, the controllers are kind of...wonky. Today we take the concept of a combined control for the x & y axis for granted. The NES came with the now ubiquitous d-pad, the Atari VCS (2600) and other early systems had a joystick, and on and on. But the Odyssey has separate controls for the two axes. This makes learning to control the on-screen character very tricky, something like using an Etch A Sketch.

Despite all this, the Odyssey was the first, and without other’s mistakes to learn from, it was an amazing first attempt. Here’s a great video by the Smithsonian on the Brown Box and includes a cameo by Ralph Baer, the only person authorized to operate the device today.

The Business

The Odyssey was originally called "The Brown Box" after the fake wood paneling on the prototype unit used to demonstrate the concept. Original funded by a company called Sanders Associates, they realized, being a defense contractor that they had literally no business experience in consumer products. So they decided to license the technology to another company that did have this experience.

At first they approached the early cable television industry. The idea was to have the cable provider broadcast a fixed background that could be mixed in with the game objects to provide a more interesting playfield. Obviously this didn’t pan out -- hence the overlays. Eventually, the television manufacturer Magnavox took to the idea and licensed the technology. In the mix Sanders Associates and Magnavox ended up with a suite of key patents that earned them a great deal of licensing fees over the next few decades.

Interestingly, the cable idea is one that’s been tried in one form or another for quite some time (usually without much success)

• Satellaview
• Sega Channel
• Phantom

This is where the business side gets a bit strange. Magnavox at the time sold their equipment through a direct sales channel – their own stores. This had some interesting side effects.

1. Magnavox only showed the Odyssey playing on Magnavox Televisions in their advertisements -- leading the brand new video game buyer to think that the Odyssey only worked on Magnavox Televisions. Later home video game systems actually had to advertise that their systems would work on any home TV to overcome the public perception this built up.
2. Training the sales staff was problematic. The sales models for Televisions and Radios is quite different from a video game system. You don’t just move devices, but you also push peripherals and games. Considering that the games were already in the device and all the cartridges did was "unlock"” that content. Moving cartridges was basically free money and the sales staff at Magnavox stores simply didn't push the games. More often than not, they simply left them boxed up behind the counter.
3. The initial price point for the Odyssey, back when it was still a prototype, was $20 in the late 1960s or about $130 in 2010 dollars. The final price point when released in 1972 was $100 or a bit over $500 in 2010 dollars. Considering it was merely a curiosity, with few honestly interesting games, the Magnavox Odyssey sold well under half a million units (or put positively, successfully sold over 300,000 units in an entirely new market they created from scratch).

Conclusion

On the one hand, the Magnavox Odyssey set the stage for literally all of the rest of gaming since. On the other, it just wasn’t a whole ton of fun.

• Magnavox Odyssey System Review
• History of Video Games Pt 2 - Ralph Baer & Magnavox Odyssey (warning explicit language)
• Odyssey - AVGN - Cinemassacre.com (warning explicit language)

Or was it?

Playing Odyssey (Behind the scenes) (warning explicit language)

Behind the scenes, these perfectly modern gamers seem to be having a blast. It might be a booze fueled blast, but they're having tons of fun.

So uh...

I'm a huge fan of video games. I started gaming during the tail-end of the Atari VCS's and I remember loading tapes to get a game going on my TRS-80 Color Computer II -- I've never stopped gaming. But recently, like lots of people who share a similar story, I've fallen out of love with gaming. New games rarely capture me the way old games did.

It's probably a bad case of nostalgia, but I've long been interested in the question, "do games I thought as great growing up still hold up today?". As much as I'd like to fallback on the hardcore gaming line of "it's the gameplay stupid", it isn't just that. There are crap games that somehow just worked. But do they still hold up? Graphics are important, Sounds are important, etc. It's some combination of things that seems to make it work. This is my effort at finding those combinations.

Video games are now well over half a century old. They started as technical demonstrations and idle challenges, turned into bar entertainment, were reinvented as toys, and are now a major entertainment segment of the economy bigger than the film industry. But I think it really only started with my generation that video games became a predominant, cross cultural, entertainment phenomenon -- something that routinely occupied our free-time rather than movies, tv, books, sports or other sources of fun.

We realized, not all that long ago, that the games we grew up with still have value. This realization has manifested itself in broad and sometimes incomprehensible ways: emulation, retrogaming, abandonware, retrorevival, and resurrection of entire genres thought long dead. Games are repackaged for modern consumption, distributed on digital networks undreamed of in my youth, rebooted, remade, reskinned and restarted.

Incomprehensible is that this mantle has been taken up by people a generation younger than me. Except for them, their retro systems are the Playstation or the Gamecube. Mentally I have a hard time moving past the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. But it has to be acknowledged that the transition from 16-bit (mostly) 2d systems to more modern 3d capable systems is probably one of the most important transitions in gaming history, perhaps only after the introduction of home gaming in the first place.

I'm also interested in the incredible parallel gaming histories that I never could participate in. Entire hardware and software ecosystems existed in Japan and Europe, but never made a blip in North America. Tens of Thousands of games and entire multi-generational game series are completely unheard of here. I've grown into having an intense interest in these systems as well.

So how am I going to do this? Well, however I feel like. I intend to review games, genres, systems, historic retrospectives, mechanics and more. I'll use emulators, retrosystems, long play videos and more. I don't want to just cover popular games (there's enough breathless reviews of Chronotrigger on the Internet as is) or only talk about hipster-level obscure games, I want to cover things I personally find interesting. I'll reference the greater community, introduce podcasts or video series I enjoy and just general swim in the vast sea of video entertainment that we have the amazing luxury to sail in.