Rad Mobile (Sega, February 1991)

I’ve got fond memories of this. It wouldn’t be exaggerating to say that it’s my favorite “sprite-scaling” arcade racer of all time; certainly it’s the pinnacle of the sub-genre, which got its start with Out Run back in 1986. It’s packed with awesome little details, from the hilarious voice work to the way your avatar adjusts his gloves right after the start of the game — and no, you can’t control the car while he’s doing this.

The first game on Sega’s System 32 platform (and therefore the first 32-bit arcade game ever), Rad Mobile is neat partly because of its sheer length. A successful trip through Out Run takes about six to eight minutes; crossing the USA in Rad Mobile takes up to eighteen. It’s a test of concentration, especially in the later stages where the roads narrow and get packed full with cars driving at high speed and switching lanes without signaling — a very realistic simulation of East Coast traffic, even today.

Sega released a port called Gale Racer for the Saturn in Japan, but it’s not very good — I mean, the cars are 3D models, for Chrissakes.

Also worth noting: This game actually beat out Sonic the Hedgehog, the Genesis game, to market by about five months, making this (believe it or not) the character’s video-game debut. Wikipedia has no citation for this, but my copy of Famitsu DC’s Sega Arcade History — itself a collector’s item these days, going for 5000 yen or so in the aftermarket shops — confirms the dates.

More Marble Madness madness

As if to answer yesterday’s prayers, I managed to track down a video of someone (Japanese, of course) finishing Marble Madness, the arcade original, at very high speed while recording his hands working the trackball. The three minutes and change it comprises are jaw-dropping.

“Recorded 12/30/2008 at Shinjuku MIKADO. ‘Marble Madness is a sport,’ as they say, so I threw up a video I had handy. An utterly stupid mistake on the last stage keeps me from finishing with 99 seconds, but otherwise it’s a relatively decent run. If I can get a flawless run on video, I’d like to update this.”

I knew about the Silly Maze shortcut, but not the one right at the very end. Sheesh!

Marble Madness [EA, 1986]

Marble Madness, Mark Cerny’s first game-industry credit, is a game near and dear to my heart. People still link to the archived Video-fenky page where I described in detail how to beat the secret stage in the Commodore 64 version. The world it portrays is remarkably well-defined, especially for its time — clean, calculated, wonderful, and merciless. I’d like to think its visual style still influences modern stuff like Mirror’s Edge to this day, but ah, wishful thinking will only get me so far in our modern, shiny, Hollywood-ized game industry, won’t it?

The Amiga version, coded by Larry Reed (who may or may not be the Larry Reed who codes for Crystal Dynamics nowadays), is worth special note. It was the Amiga’s “killer app” for much of the system’s early life in the US, the one title that stood out as massively superior to any other home gaming experience. Even though the Amiga debuted at $1295 (compared to $300-ish for a full C64 hardware set at the time) and Commodore attempted to position it as a professional/business computer, they still used media of the Marble Madness port in much of their advertising. As a kid growing up in the northeastern US, I remember playing only two Amiga games: this one, and Turrican, both of which blew my NES-addled mind.

I never really followed the Amiga the way I should’ve, and I’m in the midst of teaching myself the ins and outs of its game library, a process that I’m sure will happily occupy my free time for eons to come. Along the way, I came across the above YouTube video, demonstrating a pretty astonishing annotated speedrun of the Amiga Marble Madness. The non-TAS-enhanced player winds up with a final score totaling over 200,000 points, which is about 2.5 times what an average player manages in a complete runthrough. Seeing the player wrangle his trackball in person must be a thing of technical beauty, like a master seamstress at the loom or a mile-long line of Toyota assembly robots churning out Camrys. I wish I was there.

The review on the right is from an autumn 1986 issue of Amazing Computing magazine. Click the cut to view another look, this one from the March/April 1987 edition of Amiga World — one of my favorite reviews ever for the sheer looneyness lurking between the lines.

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Pilotwings (Nintendo, 12/21/90)

A Japanese TASser has uploaded a new runthrough of Pilotwings completed in 22 minutes and 27 seconds. He also uploaded a few videos of him screwing around which are, to be honest, a lot more fun to watch. Here’s one of them.

Back in 1991, when my 13-year-old self camped out at a friend’s house to play his shiny new SNES, we’d do a lot of the exact same things you see in this clip — right down to figuring out how spectacularly we could crash the light plane upon landing. Ah, nostalgia! (I also like the demonstrations of him missing each license by a single point. I didn’t realize that was possible.)

“Can’t Wait for the Pole Vault Cartridge”

Chicago Tribune December 11, 1987 Friday, SPORTS FINAL EDITION

Copyright 1987 Chicago Tribune Company

Now you can pretend you’re Carl Lewis, and you won’t even have to get a funny haircut.

Bandai America Inc. of Allendale, N.J., has come out with “Stadium Events,” the second in a series of game cartridges in which people can participate.

The game cartridges are used in conjunction with the company’s Family Fun Fitness control mat, which hooks into a Nintendo Entertainment System, which, in turn, connects with your TV set. It’s much easier than it sounds.

Here’s how it works: The control mat is covered with large circles. You run in place on two of them. As you run, a computer-produced figure runs on the TV screen. As the little video guy approaches the hurdles on the screen, for example, you jump. The little man jumps, too. Jump late, or hit the wrong dot, and your little video man takes a dive and skins his little video legs.

“Stadium Events” features the 100-meter dash, hurdles, long jump and triple jump. You can compete alone or against a computer opponent or another person running on the control mat.

The Nintendo system is about $80. Bandai’s basic set-the control mat and a game cartridge-is $70 to $80. “Stadium Events” is about $30. It’s a small price to pay for fun, exercise and the chance to really bug the neighbors.

 
Evidently neighbor-bugging is an activity in high demand these days.
 
(Thanx to Mr. Cifaldi)
 

Terrifying NES User-Made Levels

I would not want to be friends with anyone who made levels like these.

The Amazing Waldemar, King of All Polish Game Pirates

I spent the past few minutes reading this interview with one Waldemar Czajkowski, a man who made a living in late-era Communist Poland selling and distributing compilations of pirated Commodore 64 games.

He had a pretty spiffy small business going at the height of it, producing thousands of tapes and distributing them all over the country in his Volkswagen minivan. The operation was successful enough that he was able to buy a new car and condo with the proceeds — nothing to sniff at considering how far a zloty got you (or didn’t) at the time.

Waldemar’s biggest problem? Procuring the cassettes to meet the demand for his game compilations, no small feat in a regime that didn’t exactly smile upon people recording things by themselves:

In the first years of my business, getting any clean cassette was a real art! There was only a possibility to buy only already recorded tapes. If any of the music band from Poland during 1988-1990 period has won the Golden Plate, including the sale of cassettes, I can say that it is partly caused to me! [laughter] When I had some connections I’ve heard that in Szczecin on some street there is a shop selling haberdashery, where you could buy the cassettes! [laughter] Seriously! In the haberdashery! I went there and stood in the queue. At the counter I’ve asked for audio cassettes, thinking also, that for the moment the saleswoman will kick me out, but she came with a question: „Which ones? 60-minutes, 90-minutes long? [laughter] In such strange places I had to buy tapes for my production! When there was the possibility of placing an order in Stilon, it turned out that it was necessary to come with a lot of formalities, to write applications and wait for weeks to process the application. There were problems, for example questions like „Who are you? What is the company?”. Hence, in Stilon was really hard to order something.

Waldemar kept his C64 pirate business going until 1994, when Poland finally got around to passing modern software copyright laws. He spent a few years afterward selling legal software, but — predictably — sticking with the law led to smaller profit margins and he eventually gave it up in 1997.

Read the whole thing — it’s in kind of fractured English but is an endlessly fascinating peek into a scene people like me never had a taste of.

How Knight Rider saved Activision (sort of)

A neat passage from an interview with Activision Blizzard head Bobby Kotick, printed in the February ‘10 Game Informer:

We had a guy in Japan who was an intern in our Japanese office. A very aggressive guy — an American who spoke Japanese. He would sell things that we didn’t actually have the rights to. The first one he did was Knight Rider. He went to one of the Japanese licensees of Nintendo and sold them the rights to make a game based on Knight Rider. We didn’t own Knight Rider! The deal he did was “You make the game, you get to publish it in Japan, and Activision gets to publish it everywhere else.” So he calls us and says “I just sold Knight Rider” — it was to Tecmo, I think [actually Pack-in-Video]. I said “How much did you sell it for?” He said “$400,000.” I said “That’s incredible, but we don’t own Knight Rider!” So we had to go get the Knight Rider rights.

It turned out that this was going to be our little business. We’re going to sell rights of things that we could own, and the Japanese publisher will make the game, and we’ll sell it to the rest of the world. We did a lot of these. The next one he did was this old ’60s show Combat! How we got this one, I don’t know, but he got another $200,000 advance. Then, the thing that kept the company alive for the rest of the year was Shanghai. We sold Shanghai to everyone. If you had an LCD screen on your microwave at home, we sold you Shanghai! That got us through the end of 1991.

It’s a fascinating little peek into the 8-bit era of the game business — even though Kotick’s misremembering a fair bit (and GI apparently didn’t fact-check his tale). Knight Rider was actually sublicensed by Acclaim Entertainment, something that Tom Sloper (a veteran game-industry guy who worked for Activision at the time) confirmed in a GDRI interview. Maybe Kotick heard the story and confused it in his memory such that he thought he was the actual licensor; I dunno.

He is right, certainly, that Activision got heavily involved with Japanese sub-licensing in the ensuing years. But they never released a Combat! game — Kotick’s probably got that confused with Thunderbirds, a ’60s kids’ TV show and an equally oddball choice for a game license. What? There was a Combat! game? Well, set me on fire and call me Bernie! Still, that came game out in 1995, in Japan only, a fair bit after the 1991 timeframe Kotick was talking about. My apologies; I was still thinking in 8-bit terms — Thunderbirds was a 1990 game, after all.

The Tower of Druaga (Namco, June 1984)

  IN ANOTHER TIME
   IN ANOTHER WORLD...

THE BLUE CRYSTAL ROD
  KEPT THE KINGDOM IN PEACE

BUT THE EVIL DEMON DRUAGA
  HID THE ROD
   AND THE MAIDEN KI
     IN A TOWER

THE PRINCE GILGAMESH
 WEARED GOLD ARMOR
  AND ATTACKED MONSTERS
   TO HELP KI IN
    THE TOWER OF DRUAGA

The Tower of Druaga is quite possibly my favorite Namco game of all time. It introduced the concept of role-playing games to a wide Japanese audience before Dragon Quest existed; it has neat characters and audiovisuals; it’s oddly addictive; it’s a direct challenge to hardcore players from hardcore game developers.

Masanobu Endo, designer of Druaga, began working on the game as a side diversion while he was busy learning assembly language on the 6809, the chip Namco was slated to use in their arcade boards starting with Super Pac-Man. From here I’ll let Endo explain the rest, from when he answered questions publicly on 2ch in 2001:

“In order to get this game released to the public, I wanted to follow these core concepts:

So, really, the difficulty of the game didn’t affect the project getting greenlit one bit — I mean, this was a C-grade ROM swap, after all. It wasn’t going to make or break the company either way, and the fact that such an epoch-making title got created in that situation really shows how much Namco cared about the craft of video games, I feel. The only mistake, if you could call it that, is that we had planned to install the game only in Namco-owned arcades, but it wound up earning so much that we actually had to manufacture new boards to satisfy demand.”

Yes, Druaga is ridiculously difficult. No, there’s no way you could ever figure out how to get all the treasures singlehandedly. But Druaga succeeded in 1984 because it forced arcade rats to work together, writing down their discoveries in public notebooks and pooling their wits (and 100-yen coins) together to get to the end. It created a community, in other words, just like Street Fighter eventually did — one that wrote strategy guides and dojinshi in droves. In a way, Druaga solidified the concept of a “game fandom” in Japan more than any other individual game.

It’s a game I like enough that I beat it on Virtual Console Arcade back when it came out — and I figured I’d take a Japanese walkthrough of the game and annotate it for your entertainment. The video’s in 4 parts and each part should play automatically after the previous one ends. Hope you enjoy watchin’ it.

Nightmare Circus (Sega/Funcom, 1996)

After nearly 14 years, someone (a Brazilian dude, of course) has finally figured out how to finish Nightmare Circus without cheats and posted the results online. You can probably click on the video to find the remaining parts.

Serious Genesis collectors probably know about this one. Announced in 1995, the side-scrolling action game (starring a guy who looks a little like John Redcorn) received perfunctory previews in US game magazines but ultimately found official release only from Tec Toy in Brazil. It was reportedly on the Sega Channel for a short time, too, before that service ended in 1998.

The game, as Tec Toy released it, seems about 95% complete by my estimate. Full debug controls are easily available, there’s no story element or ending (besides the credit roll), and actually trying to work your way through the title is a long trial-and-error process. For most players tooling around with the ROM on an emulator, it takes a while even to figure out the controls — Nightmare Circus is meant to be played with a six-button pad, and Mr. Redcorn moves a lot like he’s a Street Fighter II character, right down to the strong/weak melee moves.

There are a lot of good things to say about this game — some of the setpieces are pretty, some of the music atmospheric — but it plainly needed another couple months. As is, it’s a depressing journey into the depressed minds of some depressed Scandinavian programmers. And yet I watched the entire walkthrough anyway. I’m incorrigible.