Elevator Action/ Erebētā Akushon (エレベーターアクション) - SG-1000

Donkey Kong was a major smash hit in video game history and it helped put Nintendo on the international entertainment industry map. It features a proto-Italian plumber dodging barrels and climbing up a single-screen tower of ladders and girders to defeat the giant gorilla Donkey Kong and rescue Pauline.

Donkey Kong

In the years following, a fairly large number of "clones" appeared in arcades and on home systems and computers, trying to capture whatever it was that made Donkey Kong such a money making hit: Hard Hat Mack, Jumpman, Popeye, Ponpoko, BurgerTime and so on. None were exact clones, they all tried various gimmicks and reformulations, and many of them became classics in their own right, but none of them strayed too far from the single screen vertical up-and-down action -- in this Elevator Action isn't too different (except this time with scrolling).

Elevator Action takes a start-at-the-top-and-climb-down-to-win approach. You take on the role of a secret agent, secretly gaining access through a secure building's elevator shaft. As you work your way down the building via elevator, counter agents try to stop you from stealing secrets conveniently located behind clearly marked red doors. At the bottom of the building you hop in a getaway car and move on to the next level where the challenge gets cranked up a notch, repeat until you run out of lives.

The arcade Elevator Action isn't exactly a flashy game, even by 1983's standards, but it's competent. Ports were released for every system under the sun, but the Sega SG-1000 version interests me the most because of how spare the system resources were at the time. (Note: there was an Atari 2600 port under development, but it was never finished and the leaked game is not quite complete enough to be called a complete game).

Not even as powerful as a ColecoVision (and almost compatible with it), the SG-1000 was Sega's first entry into the home console market and came out a year after Coleco released their console and the same year Nintendo released their gaming colossus, the Famicom -- the SG-1000 never really stood a chance in the market. However, Sega kept trying, releasing a home computer version (that may have informed the legendary MSX standard), an SG-1000 II, then the Mark III, then the Master System and finally achieving global success with the Mega Drive/Genesis. Every one of those systems traces lineage back to the SG-1000.

So it's interesting to see what developers did, faced with the challenge of porting a complex arcade game to hardware so limited it couldn't even display two colors on a given sprite and could only show 16 colors at a time.

One of the things that set Elevator Action apart from other Donkey Kong clones was that Agent 17 ("Otto") is a surprisingly expressive character to control. He has lots of game verbs for a 1983 video game avatar. He can shoot his pistol, jump kick, control elevators, ride on top of them, shoot out lamps (rendering the game dark for a time), ride escalators, jump across elevator shafts, duck under enemy fire, enter red doors and probably a couple more things I can't remember. I'm hard pressed to think of another video game character that can do so many things until Super Mario Bros. redefined how characters should control 2 years later.

Elevator Action is also a violent game. You literally clear a skyscraper by going floor to floor and shooting everybody you see, regardless of any hostile behavior on their part. If you aren't shooting them in the face, you're kneeling and shooting them in the legs or crotch, dropping light fixtures on them, jump-kicking them or in rare circumstances crushing them with the elevators themselves -- turning conveyance into deadly weapon. Philosophically it may be that you are actually the bad guy in this game.

Elevator Action on the SG-1000

Distillation is the process of heating a liquid composed of several components in order to separate them. It's used in the production of petroleum products from crude oil and the production of hard liquor. And this is what the SG-1000 port of Elevator Action is, the distilled hard liquor of the original. It keeps just enough of the game there that you know you are playing the same game, while tossing everything else that's wasn't necessary. It's a remarkable piece of design editing. The graphics are just this side of representational, the signature theme song is intact, your jump arc is correct, even the height of your duck position is correct -- something that not every port got correct.

When compared to other ports on other limited systems, like the ZX Spectrum, it really shines. The Speccy port is a complete redesign of the game and it suffers from this, elevators move too fast, the character's signature duck (allowing enemy bullets to zip right over the classic hair style) is turned into a dive, the bullets move wrong, escalators are weird two part affair and so on. Everything important is here in the SG-1000 version.

There's only a couple places where maybe a little too much was edited out. The first is that your enemies are far more aggressive than the original (or other home ports), often firing the moment you can be hit. This amps up the difficulty so it feels more like the second or third level of the original. There's also a weird bug that sometimes prevents Otto from getting onto available elevators, sometimes putting you into poor tactical positions.

Still, these are minor issues with an otherwise great port of the arcade original. Despite being (or maybe because) such a violent game, I find it strangely soothing to play after a frustrating day at work. You jump in, shoot guys in the face or crush them under elevators, steal secrets and make your getaway. It seems really simple on the surface, but there's a strange depth to the gameplay that keeps it fresher and more interesting than you would think. The SG-1000 port distills this down to perfection and I find myself returning to this version of the game more than any other port -- even later easier versions with more gameplay options.

Berzerk - Atari VCS/2600

When Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney built their first arcade game, Computer Space, (released just a couple months after similar game Galaxy Game) one of the major bits of feedback they received was that it was simply too complex of a game for people to walk up and play, prompting them to refocus on making simpler games, Al Alcorn's Pong being the first result from this change in philosophy and a major hit.

Computer Space

What sometimes gets lost in this history is the shared lineage of these games in the minicomputer revolution of the 60's. It's inevitable as minds get to know the rules of any system to want to start to explore the boundaries of that system and this turns rapidly into play. In computing, bored academic researchers figured out how to hook a display up to a PDP-1 and quickly started making games -- one of the first was Spacewar. 

Space War

Bushnell and Dabney's genius was not in inventing a space shooter, they didn't, but in figuring out how to replicate the basics of the game cheap enough to make it have a commercial chance. Galaxy Game, in comparison, used the same expensive minicomputer hardware found in the academic research setting, ensuring the games could never pay for themselves and thus not be commercial viable. 

Tennis for Two

Bushnell and Alcorn's later Pong repeated this pattern by adopting William Higinbotham's 1958 Tennis for Two to fit into cheap, commercial deployable hardware. Combined with the lessons learned about complex controls from Computer Space, turned Pong into a tremendously successful and highly influential game, launching Atari into the stratosphere and kickstarting the entire commercial video game industry.

Pong

It didn't take long for this new industry to see a pattern: look at the world of academic research computing, boil the game down to basics, implement in cheap hardware and enjoy buckets full of quarters. 

It turns out that academic computing was full of these little experimental games. On early Unix systems a game simply called Robots was a minor side project by programmer Ken Arnold (better known as the creator of Rogue which spawned its own entire genre of games that still exists to this day).

BSD Robots

Robots has its own complicated history full of clones and copies. But one thing that defines it as a game is the turn-based strategy nature of the gameplay. The player can sit and deliberate over their next move as long as they wish, while enemy mines/robots slowly vector in towards the player. The game is frightfully hard, and also nearly ubiquitous on early Unix-like systems.

And so it turns out that Alan McNeil, an employee of Chicago based Stern Electronics, almost definitely had contact with the game at some point. When Stern decided to enter the new arcade video game market, in addition to its earlier pinball games, they put McNeil in charge of designing and building a game. 

Alan McNeil

McNeil, crediting a bad dream he had about being chased around by robots, made liberal use of Robots basic design. However he turned the game on its head. Robots is at its heart a defensive game, you move about the game screen trying to cause enemy robots to collide with themselves or obstacles scattered around the screen. McNeil, correctly sensing that this wouldn't appeal to the kind of walk-up game play needed for arcade games, armed the player with a weapon. He then expanded the obstacles into a cursory maze, got rid of some of the extra player verbs (that would have required extra buttons and controls), added some speech and finally made the game real-time instead of turn-based.

These changes, as it turns out, where just what the arcade scene needed and Bezerk was born. It hit the arcades at the end of 1980 and was an immediate hit. It's not hard to see why.

Bezerk makes the player feel like the most dangerous thing in the room. The robots are trapped in the maze with you, not the other way around. You can maneuver better than they do, fire faster and use strategies to clear the room. The robots are powerful only in numbers, but they're fairly dumb -- a valid strategy is often to trick them into walking into maze walls (which will kill you also). If you take too long, a bouncing smiley face called Evil Otto will come out and "encourage" you to move on. This keeps the game active and leaves the player with precious little time between waves of robots.

Other strategies might involve shooting enemy fire right out of the air, taking cover behind maze walls causing Otto to collide with enemy robots. In a nod back to Robots, the enemy robots will die if they collide with each other. Virtuoso players play the game aggressively and trade laser fire readily with their enemies. 

Despite the lower resolution, Bezerk survives the transition to the VCS/2600 surprisingly well. This is the version I remember the best, and the sounds of the player dying still send a chill up the back of my neck. The robots can often be brutal, pumping the players electrified body full of laser shot well after death.

Bezerk for the 2600 wasn't released till 1982, a couple years after the arcade release, but the distillation of the controls down to a single button maps well to the 2600's controller. The lower resolution adds a little bit of claustrophobia to the game, though occasionally can make it feel a little cramped. It also loses the voices and diagonal shot take off at a weirdly horizontal bias making learning their angle key to success.

But these are very mild complaints, the game is fantastic, even today. It's still played competitively. The modern retro gaming movement has breathed some new life into it. Bezerk has a long legacy: Robotron 2084, Smash TV, Geometry Wars, Dead Nation, and so on. And modern gamers raised on these progeny are finding new appeal in the purity of the game design. Berzerk is not just a great game for the 2600, it's a great game today and feels surprisingly modern. It was followed by a lesser known, but no less great, sequel called Frenzy, which features several upgrades to the sparse play mechanics of Berzerk.

Additional Reading:

• An interview with Alan McNeil
• The source code for "Chase" in Creative Computing
• A Short History of Video Games

Granada (グラナダ) - MegaDrive/Genesis

When I first fired up Granada, I was expecting some kind of overhead shooter in the style of Ikari Warriors, but with one of those cleverly misspelled Japanese titles evoking Regan-era military interventions. I really had no idea what to expect, and the opening scroller's telling of the story isn't all that helpful either. However, the opening theme music was rocking -- a "theme" that would carry through the rest of the game.

It turns out, Granada is not this kind of game.

The next thing I thought was that it was a re-imagining of 1988's arcade sleeper hit "Assault". Assault is one of those games that shouldn't have been able to exist in the late 80's, it made extensive use of full-screen scaling and rotation and had an almost impossibly refined, tactical gameplay style that rewarded careful planning and use of cover that wouldn't really be seen for another few years. It was right on the cusp of what was commercially possible and was sadly ignored by gamers.

However, the Genesis, which came out the same year, was entirely incapable of providing even a watered down experience of Assault. It possessed no hardware scaling and rotation help of any kind, and the extensive use of digitized audio was also just right out of reach of the system as well. Assault's complex twin stick tank controls were also unlikely to be cleanly replicated on the Genesis' button sparse controller. If anything Assault would have been more likely to become a SNES game except Namco and Nintendo had a famously caustic relationship during this time period, prompting Namco to principally work on the Genesis -- combined with the low sales for Assault, meant a home port of Assault wasn't seen until the Playstation years, and even then only as part of a games bundle.

Whether Granada was influenced by Assault is something only the developers know. There had certainly been previous games in the general style, but Assault feels like a turning point. The tank was nimble, the music was rocking and the levels were huge. Wolf Team built Granada in the post-Assault world and it has that same sort of epic feeling to it.

Granada was originally released on the unstoppable Sharp X68000 and looked and felt every bit a late 80s, early 90s arcade title should. Except it never made it to the arcade. Instead it has the same sort of thoughtful tactical gameplay that Assault has, and a little bit of the methodical game style home computer games tend to have. Instead of trying to wow the player with huge sprites, Wolf Team focused the game around a tiny player tank with a 500 ft. overview of the immediate area around the tank. This viewpoint, combined with a 10,000 ft. objective radar in the lower corner allows the player to plan attacks and take out enemies with more deliberation than Ikari Warriors.

Graphically, the X68000 game wasn't terribly impressive, but a solid visual experience. The levels were carefully designed around the player tank and each level provides a different kind of power up to assist you -- from an A.I. controlled drone to a giant attack disc, the power ups combine with the levels to bring different levels of strategy to each area.

Granada on the Genesis is thus a port of the X68000 original. Done in the same year, it was likely helped by some shared architectures between the two systems. It's remarkably faithful to the original. The graphical fidelity is not quite as good, the colors are a little muted, but it's perfectly recognizable as Granada.

The music, however, survives the transition almost completely intact, and this is a great thing. The soundtrack for Granada is a percussive synth-rock masterpiece that artfully uses the Genesis sound hardware in fantastic ways. Composers Masaaki Uno and Motoi Sakuraba created a pulse pounding soundtrack that helps make up for many of the graphical shortcomings of the game.

It's a shame Granada is not better known as I was unable to find even a single cover of this fantastic soundtrack -- and it's dying for such a treatment.

Gameplaywise Granada is a little mixed. The basic controls are fine, if a little twitchy and slightly encumbered by the Genesis' controllers. However, some of the powerups can be hard to use. The AI drone, for example, generally follows you around, but will sometimes just take off and disappear, and it shoots whenever it feels like it. Sometimes, this is not so helpful. The levels, even with the strategic map, can take a while to learn, and can sometimes be a little frustrating to navigate around. Bosses are likewise mixed, they're either fantastically easy, or frustratingly hard to figure out. It took me several goes at the the level-2 boss before I figured out the trick to kill it, and then the fight lasted just a few seconds. It feels like maybe one more layer of polish and balance would have pushed Granada over the top.

The game is also relatively short once you figure it out, less than an hour to run through it.

Granada is one of those almost entirely unknown sleeper games that more people should definitely be aware of. It's definitely worth playing today and holds up well. It's a solid B+ experience that rewards getting familiar with.