
Atari Tempest: Dave Theurer’s Masterpiece - videotopia
https://arcadeblogger.com/2018/01/19/atari-tempest-dave-theurers-masterpiece/
======
tasty_freeze
I used to work with Dave Sherman, who was the hardware lead on Missile Command
to Dave Theurer's software lead. He joined Atari right out of Berkeley during
Atari's heyday, and he had a lot of stories about the out of control corporate
culture.

I'm sure this happened after Atari was bought, but Dave said the purchasing
agents were driving around expensive cars, cars that he as an engineer
couldn't afford, the implication that there were obvious kickbacks going on.
Programmers were sometimes given coke by their supervisor during crunch time
to increase work. Some of the technical talent hired agents to negotiate with
Atari -- the thinking being they are in the entertainment business, just like
Hollywood.

------
trailbits
Best. Game. Ever. Tempest came out when I was in high school, and my buddy and
I would rather skip lunch and play this instead of eat each day. We produced a
little booklet of each level we kept in our wallets so we could jot down where
we had the best luck leaving the flipper while we fired away. I was thrilled
to find a working Tempest at the “Game Master” exhibit in San Diego's Balboa
Park last summer.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
I don't think we could ever make people from this generation understand how
awesome and mind grabbing this game was back then. It was like nothing I had
ever seen and I just wanted to watch it, mesmerized.

~~~
mcndjxlefnd
I was born in 1987 and I totally get it. This has always been my favorite
retro game; I first encountered it for PS2 I think. I've only found one
multicade machine at a local juice bar that had it. I've never before or since
been devoted to maintaining high score on a public machine like that before.
Unfortunately, that machine is now gone.

~~~
ZenoArrow
I remember going to a classic games exhibition in London around the year 2000,
I played Tempest for the first time there, it was one of my favourite games I
played at the show.

Jeff Minter is clearly a fan as well:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePW33ZmC04c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePW33ZmC04c)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS9alQbHHPk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS9alQbHHPk)

~~~
bhauer
Yes! Not only Tempest 2000 and Tempest 3000, Minter's Polybius [1] is very
similar to Tempest. (It's also just awesome that Minter named his game
Polybius.)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VXsAiNdelk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VXsAiNdelk)

------
walkingolof
Think your compiler works too slow ?

"The programmer had to do everything: Write the whole operating system from
scratch, design all the graphics, write the tools to do the graphics, create
sound tools, and do the sound design – everything from scratch for every
game….I’d write the code on programming sheets and turn it in to the typists
who’d type them in to a DEC computer, then give us a tape with the resulting
compiled/linked program. We’d then take that to a blue box [which used the
FORTH programming language] for debugging. We’d mark changes to the code on a
listing, give it back to the typists who’d edit our files and give us a new
tape. Repeat ad infinitum."

~~~
segmondy
Actually, our compiler has never changed speed. The true compiler is our
brain. A programmer in the 80's and a programmer today have the same brain
compiler speed.

Before you can write any program, you have to build, run and execute it in
your head. That's the challenge most of us face today. Hardware/Software
doesn't matter much. The average indie developer is writing games in about
20k-50k line of code. Doesn't matter if it's 6502/z80 asm code in 80's or
Unity/C# or Java code in 2018.

------
SwellJoe
In my memory the sound of an arcade is Tempest. If I think about it for a
moment, other sounds come into focus, but Tempest is the first and primary
sound I can identify.

Tempest epitomizes early arcade games, to me. It was subject to all the same
technical limits of games of the era, but it seemed to be apart from them;
there's nothing you'd need to add to make it better. The sound and the look of
it, from the intro screen on, is just really iconic.

~~~
mey
May I suggest,
[http://plork.princeton.edu/listen/green/](http://plork.princeton.edu/listen/green/)
and listen to "The Future of Fun (1983)"

~~~
jjwiseman
You don't need a simulation, there are recordings of actual arcades from the
80s. E.g.,
[http://www.coinopvideogames.com/sounds.php](http://www.coinopvideogames.com/sounds.php)

Tempest, recorded in 1982:
[http://www.coinopvideogames.com/mp3/videogames01/11-tempest....](http://www.coinopvideogames.com/mp3/videogames01/11-tempest.mp3)

------
empath75
Tempest 2000 on the Atari Jaguar is still one of my favorite games of all
time. I can’t think of any other game that can get me into that pure zen
mind/no-mind state as quickly and for as long.

I was playing it at the video games exhibit at the Smithsonian a couple of
years ago and setting all the high scores and eventually a small audience was
watching me play and asking me questions about it. I wasn’t sure if the game
was the exhibit or I was.

~~~
egypturnash
Have you tried Jeff Minter's other riffs on Tempest and/or any of his other
games? Jeff did T2k; his other Tempest riffs include Space Giraffe (360/PC),
TXK (PSVita), and Tempest 4000 (forthcoming, maybe). I also _highly_ recommend
Polybius (ps4, vr helmet optional)

~~~
ZenoArrow
Jeff Minter also created Tempest 3K, but as other commenters have already
pointed out, it was for a very obscure system (the Nuon).

~~~
egypturnash
yeah, I was kinda focusing on stuff available on consoles more than three
hundred people ever saw. :)

------
LanceH
I miss the feel of hardware controllers that didn't go through so many layers
of software. The tempest controller the best of all of them. Low latency and
completely consistent response.

------
gedy
I used to work with Dave Theurer post-Atari, he's still programming and a
great guy.

~~~
steveax
On DeBabelizer? God, what an amazing app. Saved me from so much tedious work
when I was in the game biz.

------
blt
The beauty of a real vector display in person is barely approximated by videos
and emulators. I highly encourage seeking one out.

------
dylan604
I knew a guy that specialized in repairing these types of games. I was
fascinated in hearing about how the game controlled the scanning of the
electron beam from the normal CRT horizontal scan. I was always curious of
what was the genesis for the idea to use a CRT in this way. The first thing I
had always thought about was sending this method of scanning an audio signal
to let it draw the sound. For the time period, I can only imagine the images
would have been pretty cool party visuals.

~~~
Mountain_Skies
Think vector arcade games grew out of oscilloscopes where some smart tinkerers
found they could use the oscilloscope as a display screen for rudimentary
games.

~~~
dylan604
After recent threads here about oscilloscope music, I was wondering if this
game style was essentially an XY view type of concept.

Also, I know that the ROM emulators had issues getting games to work on nonCRT
screens as the games had to do some interesting programming "tricks" to deal
with the quirks of NTSC. I wonder if the vector game emulation teams had any
additional issues to deal with to get the game to work on nonCRT displays?

------
dangerboysteve
That was a glorious read! The development read like they were changing the
tires on a moving race car.

------
stevenwoo
What kind of CPU drove the logic? This seems to be missing from the article.
It describes an iterative compile/debug cycle but leaves out the part where
why the DEC computer was needed to make a tape for a Forth debugging machine -
we are never told how that Forth thing made the final leap to the stand up
cabinet hardware or if the tape thing also went to the cabinet after it was
debugged.

~~~
g051051
The game used a 6502 for the main CPU, but had a custom system called "Math
box" that handled the 3D computations:

> The Math Box was built around the AMD 2901 Bit Slice which contained an
> Arithmetic/Logic Unit, a 16-deep dual port RAM, two registers, and a
> multiplexer. Each one was only 4-bits but had hooks so that it could be
> expanded. Four were used to produce a 16-bit machine and they were
> controlled by another State Machine.

> Battlezone was the first game to use a new development system: the Blue Box
> and White Box duo. The Blue Box was programmed in Forth and controlled the
> emulator/analyzer in the White Box. It also had an external 8" floppy disk
> drive as well as a serial port for connecting to the VAX. Unfortunately, it
> did not have a full featured editor/assembler. Editing/assembling/linking
> was originally done on the department's PDP11 Model 20s which placed the
> output file on an 8" floppy, which could then be loaded by the Blue Box.

> Later, when we got the first VAX, the Blue Box could be used as a terminal
> and the VAX was used to edit, assemble and link the program, and the output
> could be downloaded into the Blue Box/White Box.

------
gumby
This game was a productivity destroyer when I was a 19 yo intern at Atari.

------
js2
> and a software bug inadvertently created by Theurer, where a 12% chance of
> 40 credits being obtained by a player scoring 170,000 points in one game can
> occur

I'd love to know the details of that bug. All I've been able to find is this
quote which doesn't really explain things:

 _The fact you can earn 40 free games with a certain score was the fault of
developer Dave Theurer himself. He had created a special security code to
protect against piracy which checked the placement of different objects. If
the objects were not in the correct place, the game would shut down. Before
the game was shipped, however, Theurer, who would fuss over minute details,
noticed an Atari logo was off-center. He adjusted it slightly. This small
change caused the code to malfunction and the player to earn 40 free credits
if a certain score was reached._

Also, I seem to recall the bug makes an appearance in the plot of Ready Player
One.

~~~
gp2000
The bug is explained by Dave Theurer himself in this video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41TbGi7u598&t=168](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41TbGi7u598&t=168)

Like many games at the time the code in the ROMs had tamper protection. The
basic idea is to detect if the ROM has been altered and if so assume it is a
pirated copy and do something to cause the game to fail. Pirates could still
make exact copies but they'd have to retain copyright notices and trademarks
which makes them more vulnerable to detection and prosecution.

At the last minute Dave changed the position of some logos on screen but
forgot to update the copy protection. When an illegal copy was detected the
game would use some of the digits of the score obtained at the end of the game
to zap bytes in memory if the overall score itself was within some range. This
kind of random scrambling that only happens semi-randomly is better than copy
protection that triggers deterministically. Imagine if the game did a checksum
of its ROM and immediately said "Illegal Copy Detected - Program Halted". It
would make it easier to find the copy protection routines and disable them.

So the first version that shipped thought it was an illegal copy and triggered
the random scrambling. It so happens that sometimes the random scrambling
would result in giving the player 40 credits.

There were other effects which players discovered and are listed here:
[https://forums.arcade-
museum.com/archive/index.php/t-79058.h...](https://forums.arcade-
museum.com/archive/index.php/t-79058.html)

------
megaman22
When I was a kid, I had a Windows 95-era floppy with Battlezone, Centipede,
Asteroids, Missile Command and Tempest. Wish I still had it; one of the best
parts was the .chm (or .hlp? I forget what was the older one) help file has a
big section on the development of each game.

~~~
LeoPanthera
That would be "Microsoft Arcade".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Arcade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Arcade)

------
dylan604
so i just watched the 23 minute gameplay video linked in the article. after 5
minutes, i realized how much i sucked at this game. it's amazing that even
after so many years of game design progress, these old style games still grab
my attention.

------
linsomniac
I always loved Tempest. I was terrible at it, but loved it.

------
intrasight
Came out when I was in high school and I had already passed the baton to the
next generation of arcade gamers. But I loved to watch a skilled player play
(but not as much as I liked to watch a skilled player play Defender). Modern
big-budget, big-team games are missing something that could only be achieved
by a single gifted game developer such as Dave Theurer.

~~~
sitkack
The only art that gets made when there are no constraints is uninteresting and
massive. Size. Modern games are big in every dimension. Atari had a medium
that artists had to work within.

------
Tempest1981
I loved this game. Color vector graphics. Amazing spinner. Thrilling gameplay.

Thanks, Dave, for so many happy arcade hours!

------
JoeDaDude
" pick an idea from an already-approved (Atari) catalogue of ideas..," Now
that's a book I'd like to see. I wonder if it ever made it out of the company
to the world at large.

------
gorbachev
Tempest was the first arcade game I fell in big time. I had Tempest dreams at
times. Great game!

~~~
coredog64
That seems appropriate as the idea for the game came from a nightmare.

------
evo_9
personally always been a bigger fan of Eugene Jarvis who as a teen write
Defender, Stargate and Robotron. I did own Tempest too great game.

~~~
kenjackson
Jarvis was 25 when Defender came out.

~~~
intrasight
But a teen at heart ;)

------
bryan11
Excellent article. Great game.

