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CINEMATRONICS |
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My next game, Rip-Off was the first two player cooperative video game. In June and July of 1980 it was rated fourth in RePlay magazine, headed only by Asteroids, Galaxian and Space Invaders. In October of that year it was still rated fifth in Playmeter. <B.RIP-OFF< b>was still being built and sold after I had finished Armor Attack and had left the company. I worked briefly for Gremlin/Sega before moving to Chicago in October 1981. There I did three games under contract to Gottlieb/Mylstar: Reactor (Dave Thiel, sound), Insector and Screwloose. Only Reactor was built, but it was done in time and earned enough to jump start that pinball company's video division. This was 1981-1983, and the video game business was about to go down the toilet. The rest is an even longer story, but it doesn't include vector games. |
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Except for the rotating shield rings and a "player" in the center, not one of these game elements was present in the demo I had seen at Vectorbeam, and even those were altered substantially in form and function. No effort was ever made to examine or even save the demo code. And remember what I said about non-functional playfield elements? For Warrior I had used a half-silvered mirror to superimpose playfield art on the screen. For Star Castle I came up with the idea of the colored screen overlays to highlight the rings. Oh, yeah, did I mention that I designed the cabinet art (executed by Rick Bryant) and named the thing too? Scott Boden wrote every single line of incredible, economic and elegant code, and invented many small features that helped add up to the game Star Castle. That is how Star Castle was developed. Period.
When Vectorbeam finished its run of Warrior, the doors were shut. Exidy purchased the rights to build the sit-down version of Tailgunner, which was known as Tailgunner II. As far as the game business is concerned, that was the end of Vectorbeam and Larry Rosenthal.
Tailgunner did well, but not as well as other games. This was not because it wasn't a good game, but because of the failure of the analogue joystick. Chosen by the original Vectorbeam techs, it used a conductive plastic material instead of wires and brushes. This made it extremely durable, a very important feature for an arcade game. (On the plane flight back from Oakland, we stomped on the sample we were given. We couldn't hurt the damn thing. It was a very cool little joystick.) However, what the manufacturer hadn't told anyone was that after x number of movements of the stick the plastic lost its conductive qualities. For other applications, that had been no problem, but for a video game that ate up about a zillion moves a day? As a result, many fewer units were sold than might have been, since the game would die at unpredictable times and the stick had to be replaced on a frequent basis. The sit-down version used a more rugged conventional joystick. |
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Back at Cinematronics I had started work on Rip-Off, but Scott Boden still needed a project. Soon, I came up with a way to make Dan and Larry's shield of rings work. I put the enemy inside of the rings and anchored it to the center. The player would have a free moving ship, much like those in Space War. The player's goal was to shoot through the rings and hit the enemy. This was made much more interesting by the fact that the enemy's shots, very accurate and deadly, could not pass existing ring segments. This meant that by shooting out the shield, the player was shooting away the one thing that was protecting him from that nasty gun in the center. I cut the shield segments down to lines instead of blocks (fewer unnecessary lines) and added more rings. The player scored points by hitting and destroying ring segments and other enemy bits and pieces. A hit on the central cannon resulted in an extra life. Besides the central cannon, danger to the player came from "space mines" that originated in the center and then hopped outwards from ring to ring, giving the player some time to anticipate their approach. Destroying a ring segment that held a mine would free the mine to float towards the player's ship. It would continue to seek the player until it was destroyed or had timed out. Whenever a complete ring was destroyed, a new ring was regenerated from the center and other inner rings moved outwards to fill the gap. You can see at work here an attractive tension between the player's motivation to shoot and score, and the fact that his success made it easier for the enemy to destroy him. |
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Because Warrior was ready to go and Vectorbeam needed product fast, Cinematronics decided to build it at Vectorbeam and sell it as a Vectorbeam product. Once Tailgunner was finished, it would be built and sold through Cinematronics. My contribution to that piece was limited to designing the cabinet with its blue Plexiglas and the cabinet artwork, which was executed by Rick Bryant.
My only other contribution was subtractive. I made one more trip to Vectorbeam. When I got there Rosenthal was working with Dan Sunday on Tailgunner. They were adding the old Space War starfield to the background and Dan's initials at the bottom of the screen. Regardless of motive, these were bad things to do for one simple reason: Larry's board had a watchdog circuit that reset the program counter to zero if it wasn't hit every certain fraction of a second. This was used to prevent a runaway program from letting the cathode ray shoot the side of the display tube. (Bad mojo, believe me.) This scheme also initialized the program counter. The program counter would usually start up at zero, but nothing in the hardware guaranteed that it would. If it came up at some random value, in a very short time the watchdog would reset it to zero. Sometimes the counter would start inside a bogus loop that hit the watchdog continually, but that was very rare and could be fixed by turning the machine off and back on again.
Every moment of frame time was precious. How much we could draw on the screen was based on the worst case. We had to hit that damn watchdog and we couldn't do it while a line was being drawn. If something on the screen wasn't one hundred percent necessary to gameplay, it had to go, and so went the additional stars and Dan's initials. I was sorry to have to delete his initials because giving credit is very important to me. Initially, it was for technical reasons like this (not enough memory was another) that we designers weren't allowed to put our names on the screen. But that continued long after this technical problem was fixed. My first Gottlieb game, Reactor, was the first coin-op game to have the designer's name on the screen, and I only got that because I was freelance and negotiated it into my contract. The other Gottlieb developers weren't as fortunate. |
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HISTORY part 3 |
As told by Tim Skelly |
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