The game itself was pretty good, but what really made it a gem of the arcade was the physical experience of it. You had to look through a tank-style periscope, inside a dark cowl formed by the game's cabinet. Once you took the controls and pressed your face into the viewfinder, you were transported into another world. The game also had deep, rumbling bass that you'd feel in your chest, ratcheting up the sense of urgency and danger. It was a masterpiece of emotional scenery; most VR games I play today don't achieve what Battlezone did in that regard.
Indeed! It also had two independent joysticks. One for the left tread, and one for the right. One joystick forward, the other back allowed you to turn in place, like an actual tank. My twelve-year old brain was fully immersed.
There was another Atari game that had a similar fate that nobody talks about. There was a 3D shooter called “I, Robot” made in the early 80s - I only ever saw it once, in an arcade in Caesar’s Palace. It did not sell well and half the production run ended up being pushed off the side of a cargo ship, probably to recover production costs through insurance. MAME does emulate it.
I enjoyed playing it, the 3D graphics were pretty amazing for the era. I think it came out around the time the video game market imploded, so it could have been general panic inside Atari that triggered someone to dump it prematurely. Loading them onto a cargo ship and pushing them off the side seems really extreme.
It was very close to being amazing (for the time), unfortunately an aggressive release deadline meant showstopping bugs. Check out this article from someone who fixed it: http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/
I think the bugs are grossly overstated. They weren't showstopping, it was a typical Atari-hard, nothing particularly unusual. It was playable and winnable even without the manual.
Now the SwordQuest games, those belong in a landfill if not for the folklore that surrounds them.
Howard Scott Warshaw, the developer of Yars' Revenge and Raiders of the Lost Ark, famously developed E.T. in a mere 5 weeks.
E.T. being terrible is largely just a meme, though. It sold quite well, and had at worst a mixed reception:
'E.T. sold between 1.5 and 1.97 million cartridges,[3] according to various different figures. This would, in fact, earn it the not-too-shabby distinction of being one of the best-selling 2600 titles of all time. And despite what revisionist history may tell you, the game wasn’t actually critically panned on release! In actuality, it was… Well, actually, it was pretty mixed as it turns out. There were certainly those who found fault in the game, most tending to criticize it for lack of difficulty, of all things. Video Games magazine contributor Phil Wiswell wrote in a March 1983 review “E.T. is really for the kids (the littler ones),” before going on to extol the praises of Raiders.[4] But for every published negative review, there was either a positive or neutral score to balance it out. Kevin Christopher of Vidiot contended in March of ‘83 that the pits were “about the only flaw with an otherwise A-1 game.”[5] You can question his credibility if you will, but the fact of the matter is that not everyone was down on E.T. like the modern narrative claims they were.'
[3] The 1.97 million high estimate is taken from VGChartz, who are a bit dodgy at times when it comes to this sort of stuff. If anything, this figure is likely an overestimation though, rather than an underestimate.
[4] Wiswell, Phil. “New Games From Well-Known Names”. Video Games. March, 1983: pg 69. Print.
[5] Christopher, Kevin. “ET Phones Home for the Holidays”. Vidiot. February–March, 1983: pg 41–43. Print.
I used to work with a guy who got his start at Atari, right out of Berkeley. He did the hardware design on Missile Command. Supporting what Ed Rotberg said in the article, he was a "make love not war" type.
When you lose all the cities in Missile Command, the game ends with a big message "THE END". He would have liked to make a more overt message decrying the madness of nuclear weapons, so they settled on a subtle protest. "THE END" appears inside a stop sign octagon. [1]
That was a brilliant and underrated game imo. I sunk days in to that game. It had a reasonably high learning curve compared to the other FPS or RTS games of the time, but when you could see beyond that wall it was brilliant. I only ever wished it could be bigger!
I'm guessing they (authors of battlezone) and the article aren't aware of BZFlag[1]. I started playing it in 1995 on SGI machines. I now play it on my laptop. This is definitely 3D, and the tanks can jump.
Looks like the article predates bzflag by over a decade, there's a little blurb in there that mentions it, different from the re-publication date near the title.
Sure, at the time, the authors of battlezone wouldn't have been aware, since it predated BZFlag (and SGI) by 15 years. As did this article, written when battlezone was still current.
IEEE has had this bad habit of recently republishing some old era articles as if they were current. I find it nostalgic but also disconcerting.
Is there something we could do to make it less disconcerting? We hoped the bright box with the original publication date would cover that. (This year we're making an effort to identify articles in our paper archives that were contemporary (or 'ish) design stories at the time, that now have some historical meaning. Until this republication they didn't exist in digital form. Thoughts?
Maybe put the repost date and the original date/re-publication date closer together and/or in the same place? I think part of the confusion is people glance at where they expect the dateline to be and then miss the other bit because it looks like a quote or ad box.
This is I think the second piece I've read about Atari that mentions how much cheaper ram was just a short time later. I think during the development of the 2600, ram prices dropped an incredible amount but the design was set and plans on a new gen system were seen as way too forward thinking. At the time, the idea was this was a set appliance like a tv or radio, at least early on, that could last a decade or even decades and the idea that it should be regularly replaced as technology advances was something that industry hadn't fully grasped.
So to me, its tragic the home console market got so hot before ram got affordable because it was a limitation in game design. I wonder what the 2600 would have look like delayed a year or two and taken into account cheaper ram and other components. I imagine it could have had Colecovision-level graphics, which would have been a huge step up. Currently, its hard to view those old 2600 games as anything but overly simplistic and kinda ugly.
Battlezone with more ram would have been something else too, instead of just a dumb tank shooter. Three years later the Star Wars vector game was released and the difference between the two is like night and day. One feels like a technology demo and the other like a full-fledged video game.
Spend countless hours and quarters on Battlezone in 1980-81.
Stopped playing video game after that, saying "I'll start again when I see one as interesting". I'm still waiting.
I had a lot of fun with Activision's Battlezone and especially Battlezone II. I hadn't realized they were inspired by an older game by Atari. They seem to differ in that Activision's games also include elements of the RTS and FPS genres (build your base, command your troops, walk and shoot first-person, get into battleships and drive them, etc.). They have a story mode too, if I remember right, and Battlezone II has a cheat to enter an editor for the level landscapes.
We actually were almost at alpha with the first one before Activision decided to call it Battlezone. We were going to in "Next Generation" magazine and we realized we could be on the cover if we called it Battlezone. We also considered calling in River Raid but Battlezone fit better.
You worked right across the way from me, in Action/Sim I think. I am trying to remember where you were in relation to my desk (Civ, then I82 at that time).
You've played no video games at all since '81? Or no battlezone-like games. Because there are PLENTY of far more interesting games since then. Battlezone is interesting and charming, to be sure, but certainly not the height of arcade gaming.
Have you tried VR Battlezone on PS5? I have it but haven't actually played it yet!
I have not - answer to both questions. Got busy with college, work, family. Im sure what will draw me back in will be VR. But I have no interest in FPS games. I await the next paradigm which VR will enable.
In college I wrote a multi-user version of Battlezone. Another student did a "flying through space" version.
What I learned doing that launched my software career.
I feel like maybe you've missed a lot of what gaming has had to offer, like you've only ever seen FIFA and Call of Duty ads and nothing else about modern games. A stab in the dark at what you might find interesting: Try "Outer Wilds" by Mobius Digital on a friend's Switch or something.
LOL. I have a binder with the code printout somewhere.
This was written in 1986 on CMUs "proprietary" hardware/software stack, which evolved into Mach, NeXTSTEP, and ultimately MacOS.
One thing about the original arcade game is that once you got the rhythm and pattern of it, you could play forever. Was the only game I could just play until I got bored and quit.
For whatever reason Red Baron was much harder to find. We went on a late night bike quest to play the only one nearby, which was in an arcade under a pier. We could see the relation to Battlezone, but I wouldn't understand that they shared much of the same HW til years later.
I only ever saw a Red Baron in the arcade at the Circus Circus casino on a family vacation. I wasn't old enough to gamble so spent all my money it instead.
lol, Circus Circus really had a lot of hard to find games, around that time. I too once spent an entire family vacation in there, playing Crazy Climber (another game with dual joysticks).
Obviously very different but Battlezone 98 absolutely blew my mind as a kid, I loved the way that your HUD would label stuff with boxes and dynamically moving lines. Always imagined that any sort of AR glasses that added metadata to the real world would work with that exact UI.
Oh? Completely missed that until I came here. I really enjoyed the strange aloofness (my interpretation, then) of this passage:
If he had the game to do over again with today’s technology, Mr. Rotberg said, he would change it even more: instead of a monochrome display, a color vector display could be used, and newer microprocessors and cheaper memory could add realism and complexity.
That text juxtaposed with the stark monochrome images of line-based vector graphics (no filled surfaces, of course) and my sense of what computer games look like today created a fun sense of ... I don't know. That the IEEE publication was very much removed from the real world in terms of games, or something. :) Learning that the text is 40 years old explains that, obviously.
