We interview David Thiel – an interactive sound engineer responsible for tons of pinball, home and arcade game audio – including Q*Bert, Krull, Mad Planets and Reactor! In our Editorial, we discuss Copyright and how to bring the dead back to life. Plus new reviews on a fantastic fantasy pinball package, Zen Pinball THD and the latest emulation collection to hit portable devices; Atari’s Greatest Hits. A must hear interview – plus we’ll throw in a healthy Bits & Bytes segment to boot!
Runtime: 03:37:43
Rant: Copyright Killer – Bringing the Dead Back to Life
Review: Zen Pinball THD (Android), Atari’s Greatest Hits (Android)
Flashback: None
Transcript (AI Generated; May not be 100% accurate)
Hello Folks, this is Shane R. Monroe and you are listening to the December 2011 edition of retro gaming radio. Welcome to the program. While we’re cutting in close to this month, the holidays always make getting a show out rather ugly. But I think you’ll be pleased with what we put together next month is going to be a juggernaut of reviews. We have Dragon’s Lair for Android, we’ve got the AI Cade arcade cabinet, the mini arcade cabaret style cabinet. We got all sorts of good stuff coming next month. Unfortunately, those things had to get pushed back, but we still have a great show for you. First up, we have an interview with the greatest guy, David Thiel. He’s a sound engineer and programmer. And this guy is fantastic. You’re gonna love listening to his stories. He’s worked on pinball, classic arcade games, classic home console games. Trust me, you’re gonna love this, we actually have two different parts. It’s that long. We spend a lot of time with him. And he’s a fantastic interview, you’re gonna love it. We also have another a new editorial commentary, copyright killer bringing the dead back to life. our usual bits and bytes, we’re going to review Zen pinball for the Android platform, and also Atari his greatest hits for the Android platform, see what we’re doing with classic gaming with modern technology. So with that said, let’s get on with the show. This month editorial commentary, copyright killer, bringing the dead back to life, is mine pleased to interject some form of sensibility into the copyright law. As it stands, copyrights are almost indefinite 75 years is a given. And there’s really no way to challenge what could be considered a dead copyright. Let’s look at it when you find money in the street. Legally speaking, if you find money in the street, you’re supposed to put up signs you’re supposed to. You’re supposed to allow somebody to claim the money before you’re allowed to actually keep it. There’s some sort of legality, right? In that situation, you’re allowed to keep money that you find laying on the street, right? Look at the old games we have in Maine, right? The modern day main supports, what 3700 games. Now those 3700 sure there’s some Atari ones in there, there’s Nintendo there second. But there’s a whole lot of games in there that don’t really have an owner anymore. They were created by some no name company that’s now out of business. The cabinets are dead and buried, a handful of collectors maybe have one or two machines, the ROMs were dumped and released. And technically speaking, it’s still illegal to play these games on your system on a main system, because the copyright law is still in effect. Right? There should be some method of releasing copyright versus waiting 75 years. Here’s my thought. All right, I’m going to call this the released Copyright Act. All right, my goal would be have a global system in place where you register your desire to take this copyright. Let’s say it’s for some AI ram game, what is it Astro patrol or something like that name, let’s say it’s Astro patrol. I know that may not be a real game, Astro patrol in Maine from some company called Iran, which no longer exists, you can’t find it anywhere, you go up to this global system for released copyrights and say, I am laying claim to this copyright of this game. And you know, you could do a search to see if somebody else has already laid claim to it. And you put it in the system. And if it’s okay, we can’t find any matches. So we’re going to issue a preliminary release of copyright. At that point in time, there’s a certain period of time, which would have to be discussed and come up with the copyright is then released. Now, here’s the cool part. Here’s how you keep it safe. The copyright is completely released. In other words, it doesn’t transfer to me. All I have done is said, Here’s I’m the person who’s interested in I found the copyrighted material. I’m the one who would initially like to use it, I would like to register to do so. Now the release copyright can’t ever belong to anybody else other than the original copyright hold. But it releases all legal use of the product. Unless the original copyright holder comes forward and says, No, I want it back at that point in time, it’s stricken from the system, it’s no longer considered a released copyright. And the original copyright holder can come back for it.
So it’s freely usable. Nobody gains any benefit of transferring of copyright now. I think it’s perfectly acceptable to make money on this released copyright. As long as there’s the understanding that anybody can do it, right. I go forward, and I say, Listen, I want to I am proposed to release the copyright on Astro, Astro blaster, I RAMs, the company that originally made it. Here’s the name. And this is the product that is a computer or it’s an electronic arcade video game, or whatever it is, comes up with, right? I request to have this released. And after a certain amount of time, I don’t know, 30 days, 60 days, whatever, at some point in time. The system says, we know we have held this in our system we have publicly projected this we have done whatever right maybe you pay 50 bucks to do it. And the system will actually print something in the New York Times, right? It prints a declaration The New York Times it says Shane R. Monroe has requested releasing copyright on a video game by the name of no Astro, Astro blaster from IR M. anybody you know, if the original copyright holder has any dispute, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, then you go to this website, and you enter this code. And they can probably dispute it. Right. So now, we have a released copyright, we can still use these. And it’s freely usable. Even if I were to go out and say I’m gonna build dead video games library Volume One, right, and I charge 10 bucks for it. That’s legal. You could go out and do the same thing. anybody listening to me could go out and take the same game and make it legal. make it illegal, purchasable copy, I could then start a company online that actually lets you purchase game ROMs that I will deliver to you. And it’s considered legal, unless the original copyright holder comes back to claim the released copyright. You know, I think I think systems that are dead dead systems like the Dreamcast, right, if you cannot purchase that system, reasonably, I’m not talking eBay, I’m talking about going to a brick and mortar store or even going to Amazon directly, not through an Amazon affiliate. Whatever the criteria is, of a system cannot be purchased new in the box. From a major retailer, it should be claimed dead. And the DMCA. restriction, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the restriction that they offer of no reverse engineering should also go into play and say, you are legally allowed to circumvent the DRM in these machines. And it doesn’t give you the right to go and play Shenmue or crazy taxi, those are all still owned by Sega. But the the legal ramifications of altering those boxes for homebrew released copyright games, right. Those sorts of things. I believe that should be in there, I believe that that makes sense that it keeps property still keeps property safe for the people who have invested in it. But it also gives the end consumer an opportunity to get this content again. You know, I know that there’s a whole bunch of ways that this system can be abused. But if in my vision in a perfect world, this is how I would want to see copyright law handled, that’s fine. You get a copyright for 75 years, you disappear off the face of the earth, you’re you don’t have an estate representing you, your company dies, you know, nobody owns this any further and you weren’t absorbed by IBM or whatever. These things should be allowed to be fried. Even if they’re jerked out from underneath you later on. At least there’s an opportunity for people to experience this content. I don’t know what do you guys think I’d love to hear, especially those of you who are very protective of IP, or who are lawyers or legal type people. I would be very interested in hearing what your thoughts are on that. Of course, will it ever happen? Probably not. But the sensible released Copyright Act is what I’m shooting for. That’s my next champion causes released copyright. So let me know what you guys think snover in contact us at the retro gaming radio.com website and let us know what you think. I’d be curious.
This month we interview David Thiel and interactive sound engineer, and you’re gonna find out exactly what that means when you listen to the interview. David Thiel is worked on classic video games classic arcade games, classic pinball and is currently working on modern pinball machines as a sound engineer. Believe me, I never thought I’d be this interested in hearing about sound technologies in engineering, but you know how our interviews go, we get talking and then the sky’s the limit. I hope you enjoy this interview with David Thiel. This is Shane Armin row with retro gaming radio. I’m here with David Thiele, an interactive audio engineer. And even the title alone, David brings me to my first set of questions. What exactly is an interactive audio engineer?
Well, he’s an audio engineer, and all that encompasses. So audio is a discipline with many different capabilities, things you need to do. But when you layer interactivity on it, then you have to involve programming and the behavior of audio, which is in an interaction, you know, lively and non deterministic. And you have to build the behavior of how the audio will work, relative to itself. And relative to the interaction inside interaction. I’ve worked on console games, pinball machines stand up, point up, handheld devices, all of those are the are some kind of interaction pre designed something that a computer chip is enabled.
So instead of calling yourself a game engineer, a game audio engineer, or just a sound engineer for you, there’s a different layer that goes deeper than just the audio.
Absolutely well, and for seven years, I was at Microsoft, where I worked on interactive audio, and absolutely nothing that was like a game. This was audio for non game interaction of which there is a lot of and that’s a field which is even less explored the game audio.
Well, let’s get let’s go back to video gaming. My audience is primarily classic video gamers and a lot of pinball people that listen as well. So let’s go back now. 1980, as I understand, was the first 182 technically when you worked on reactor for Gottlieb, right.
Well, it’s actually I was hired Layton 80. So 81 was the first real full year and I was hired at Gottlieb which is one of the last majors major pinball companies to get into their own game development. People mistakingly when they think of video games, they think of Atari and all the stuff that happened in the Silicon Valley. They think of Japan. They don’t think of Chicago as much. But there’s a lot of game development and a lot of interaction done in Chicago because all the pinball companies primarily came from Chicago.
That’s fascinating. And so was so godly. What was the route just so we get a frame of reference? What was a pinball machine released about the time that you started working there?
Probably bars god of war. That that was a little bit that was probably eight months before I’m trying to think of haunted house.
Okay, that’s probably a good reference. Most people know that pinball were independ ball. And now I understand from watching your fantastic seminar, which I’m going to provide a link to if you guys are watching the show in the interactive html5 show, will go ahead and give you a link to to that right now. If you had 18 months before a godly actually sat down and wanted to write a video game, is that correct?
Well, not before.
The context for this was Gottlieb, the pinball company as a as a pinball company very much believed video games were a fad. And they said so and they didn’t get into it with any enthusiasm at all they did when when forced by the parent company so they had been sold to Columbia Pictures. The gotten right family sold the company off to Columbia Pictures. And Columbia the execs there saw the writing on the wall so Gottlieb could half heartedly got into video games they purchased to video Japanese video games and tried to sell them and they were dreadful.
And the I’m assuming these are not games that my listeners would probably know of,
though. New York, New York.
But based on the the Broadway production, oh,
basically, if
you take Space Invaders, and then if I have enough memory for a bitmap and you put a picture of the Statue of Liberty behind it, you have New York, New York.
Fantastic. Well,
and then they
Had a tank game I, and I can’t think of the name of it right offhand, but it was equally forgettable. So they had a separate warehouse away from their pinball company 10 miles away and Bensenville where they had this warehouse. And they had all of these boards of jack and cabinets of games they could not give away. And Columbia said, you have to have a very, you have to have a serious effort. You need to create your own stuff, as Williams had done, and was doing. And Valley, on the other hand, had purchased wisely. And we’re doing quite well, because they obviously had space in space invaders. And they had purchased Pac Man, though they didn’t want it.
Yes, I chose what they know. Right. But
did you know that story?
You know, I got a it’s kicking around in my head right now. But I don’t remember the exact details.
I you know, I’m trying to think of the other game right off the top of my head, and I can’t but that was Oh, not really x? No.
It was something to do with they had to in order to get one they had to buy the other. Yeah, that
was my deal. And so they had they saw Pac Man, and they didn’t want that they wanted the other one. Right. So they had to buy, you know, 1000 of this and and in order to get this because you want this you have to buy 1000 Pac man’s well, shows shows what people know, early in the development of a medium as you know, nobody has any criteria. Nobody knows what’s fun. Yeah.
That’s right. And unfortunately, you have to spend money before the market can give you that feedback. And well, look what happened with Pac Man, right? Oh,
yeah. When you can’t build a bit of business model on Pac Man.
Now I understand when when you when they when you were working with reactor you were actually using a pinball board the vote tracks or roadtrek spinball. Or
Jim Weiss was the hardware engineer at Gottlieb who created this soundboard for pinball. And it was it was their first talking soundboard. Valley had had the first talk. But they just brute force the problem. They had very few number of phrases and they just digitized it in a crafty way compressed that somehow and played back a few things. I think that was Susan Shani and Xena, maybe. In any case, that was the first talking pinball. So Gottlieb took a different approach and use the voltex chip, which was a speech synthesizer chip. And they could talk a lot. I mean, it sounded dreadful, but they could say a lot. And why I inherited that soundboard. Which they had, by that time, maybe done two or three pinball games on. That was also for the majority of the games that I did. That was also the same board.
Before we talk about the fun that you had using that board with cubert, because I’ve got there’s tons of tons of lore around cubert that I know you can talk to us about. Personally, as a gamer, and it’s sort of an early developer, I used to develop games on the Commodore 64 and the Amiga and whatnot back in that timeframe, I really felt speech was important to the progression of gaming. Technologically speaking, I felt that it it endeared or offered some sort of the companionship to the gamer that standard sound effects alone didn’t offer Now, most people will completely disagree with me, they think that speech is just completed some peripheral lis it’s tacked on, like motion control in a video game. And, you know, they don’t care one way or the other. But I’m really curious as a sound guy, especially your interaction, this early stage, how did you feel about speech back then?
Well, man has been forced it on me for any place.
So you probably weren’t all that pleased?
Well, okay, you know, the word talked reactor was going to talk. And actually the way we used it, I mean, I tried to use things functionally. Sure. Because I have a limited number of resources. And I want to devote my resources to things that are functional as part of the contract between the game design and the player. So I want to be using this to inform the player i, if I’m going to get your attention, I want to have something useful to say.
Sure. And that’s, that’s totally makes sense to me.
So, you know, and speech, speech clearly, can do that really well. But it is like, it’s small arms, I think of music as the hand grenade of sound design.
And then
speech is kind of like a mortar. If you’re going to use it, and you’re going to get somebody’s attention. The user better want that information and you better present it in such a way that they understand it, and that they’re grateful that you know, you got their attention. It said something to them.
Logical Go ahead.
I’m sorry. Well done so and so you use the vote tracks ship. You know, it’s it only marginally sounds like speech. It’s sort of and and the other part of speech, human beings are incredibly sensitive to speech as a channel of communication. Right? And somebody who has a list, let’s say has a handicap, right? A human being who’s speaking, you know, has a hard time speaking normal? Sure. There are a lot of jobs for which they couldn’t even do. So.
locations. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.
So we’re very, very sensitive to the speeds channel. And we don’t accept bogus stuff very gracefully. I mean, after the novelty of Oh, look, computers talking after that’s over, then you people are pretty critical, it needs to be done well, or you shouldn’t do it. So that’s kind of why I wasn’t all that pleased. Then it was also as technically difficult because there were no tools there were there was no way to automate this procedure. The vote tracks chip had an inventory of 64 phonemes. If you look at a dictionary and see how they break up words, that’s a name. And that’s what that was my tool, I went to a dictionary and tried to map dictionary phonemes to what the vo tracks could do. And then turn it loose and see what it said.
It’s interesting that nobody and I don’t know, maybe they did at some point in time, it would seem to me that if there were 64, I mean, that’s a fairly finite number, that somebody didn’t have some sort of a chart or something on the wall that basically said, if you want to say hello, then it’s because I know you mentioned that later on. I don’t want to skip ahead too much in the story. But you said later on, that you actually send it numbers and numbers corresponding to the pieces of speech. So you’d send it two or three numbers. And that would give you the word hello. I think you’d almost have like a dictionary lookup system at some point on the wall, at least that would make that somewhat easier for you.
Well, yeah, but you have a whole lot of words, right? I mean, you can Hello, you can do the hello world with it. And you can understand the mapping at some base level. But we’re going to expand the vocabulary to say a bunch of stuff. It’s just, you know, you break it down to phonemes. But the problem lies in saying okay, well, these are the first obvious choices, that right phoneme in English maps to this phoneme on vote dragstrip. And I string them together and I turn it loose. And when it says if it’s marginally understandable, or it doesn’t even sound like it or sounds wrong.
We’ll move let’s move on into that reactor then that you were talking about is just as a good segue from here. You were having trouble getting reactor to say what you want it?
Yeah, yeah. Well, reactor was, I’d originally been hired at Gottlieb as a programmer, just a programmer, programmer, and I originally did some of the sprite utilities. I understand we are two developments as well, three development systems that got laid one was a very expensive Intel blue box, which is really a hardware design tool that did the ambeo. It did a hardware emulation of the 8088 chip. And you could also develop software with it, but each Deaf station in that day was probably 15 grand. So you know, how many people got their hands, and that’s in 19 $80. So think 6570 grand in today’s dollars. Then there was an equivalent for the soundboard called that Rockwell had a blue box for the 6502.
And then the apple two,
the apple two was my development station. For everything for an awful lot of what I did a godly milestone.
Why the apple to oversee a Commodore 64 that definitely would have better sound, I
would think there was
no Commodore 64 in 1980
Ah, okay, my numbers were just a little off there. But they had an apple two back then I’m not the to eat the original
Apple two and you could crank
you put 48k of memory in it. And you could have have a real disk drive. And you had parallel port. So you had what you needed. And in fact, Jim Weiss designed a ROM emulation board that plugged into the apple two bus that could simulate that could be a 2k EEPROM
Oh, very nice. So yeah, it’s sort of a jack of all trade box you had there
well in the soundboard was a 65 or two. So I didn’t need a cross cross assembler, I just use the 65 I use an assembler that I had and a text editor that I had on 6502 created binaries, had the destination of the binaries be in the memory space where the ROM image emulator was, and I was good to go. So I never burned eeproms to do sound development that would be death.
I was just gonna say what a pain. Oh, that would have been.
Yeah, you can’t do that. It just takes way too long. And since it was in my memory space, then I could also build utilities. To give me what I think of as virtual knobs that I could isolate memory locations which had variables, which would affect some property of the audio. And so while the sound is running, I could go in and poke those those variables and change things. And I thought it was like a knob.
So you had essentially a virtual mixing board. By the time you were done with it, you could do all sorts of stuff.
Yeah, yeah. And you had and that was my early experience. And I was never tolerant from that point on of any system that put a compile link cycle between me and what I was trying to do, because that’s just too cumbersome. It takes too much I needed to be able to while the thing was running, adjust things.
Oddly enough, it seems that technology in that respect, as we moved kind of forward to that type of development. I don’t want to get too technical. My listeners are might be getting glassy eyed now, but I listened folks, I want to hear this stuff. So you get to hear it. It’s funny, because as we move forward, now, you know, to build even a simple game takes sometimes hours, yeah, to let it all go through. And if you had to do that, each time, you wanted to listen to what you done. So you
have as a developer, you have to short circuit, then I mean, even on the most sophisticated systems, you eventually know where things live in memory, you have some address table, you have something. So you got to be able to find the magic locations where there are adjustable parameters. I mean, you build your system so that there are adjustable parameters,
then you need to
whatever system you’re working and figure out where they are, so that you can adjust them at runtime. And circuit that that whole assemble, you know, edit, assemble, compile
link,
load, Run Cycle that can take, you know, 15 minutes.
Are you what would be considered a clean developer? Or do you like going in and doing things that the original hardware really shouldn’t have done to begin with to get your results?
I’m pragmatic. And I, I think clearly that a lot of the things we did were never intended to have been done. Right. And I very much admired, let’s say the 2600. Guys, that was a breakout machine right was built based short, so it could play breakout. And by doing some of the most incredible programming gymnastics, you end up with sidescrolling games,
right?
There’s no bitmap on that machine. How in the world? Are they? Are they drawing a moving background behind the sprites that they have, you know, well, because they’re doing this insane programming, where they’re changing the color of a line on the fly? Right? You know, so they can draw something. It’s vaguely like a river of river rate or whatever. And so you know, that’s an example taken to the extreme, there were half dozen programmers in the universe, who could do that trick on an on a 2600.
Well, in for an example, just for the for my listeners who may not know what I’m sort of getting at the synth chip on the Commodore 64 allowed you to do some very weird things with it. But those sort of things didn’t translate very well say when you move to a Commodore 128, because of some timing issues, or even emulation later on, you can load up the game and go man, this doesn’t even sound anything like I remembered even though it’s full emulation. It still doesn’t sound right, I’ve
heard some of the game, the game that that was most Let’s jump to that for a second, please. Yeah, I never even thought about whether they had intended or not, but sit out a feature where it was memory mapped. And so you could write write the contents of that chip, as fast as you could write memory. Hmm. Now, that’s not true for most audio chips, right there, usually that there’s a pipeline inside or an audio chip. And so if you have some parameter change, or something you want to do, you can write it and we’ll get to it when it gets to it. So basically, things like that are latched you write it into the chip, and eventually the chip gets around to taking the value that you latched into it. But it said the way it was designed was like a memory part. So all of its registers could be written really really, really fast. And there weren’t that many of the relatively speaking I don’t know maybe there’s there’s 48 or 64 registers for a situ so I took that all the way and rockin bowl where I had I had a rockin bowl feature six channel audio. Now, how can you do that? Because Cid only has three channels
plus the fourth for for wave noise right for white noise. Was that correct? I’m trying to remember my remember
no, that that’s just that’s just a sentence. See, basically it’s it’s a fantastic chip. I have a lot of six stores. I got some set. I have a very sad sad story, which we can talk about but said is like three mini moebs Well, that was the first real usable synthesizer from both right? And sin has the capability to not have a complete mini mode, but many more could make one sound at a time. Right said could make three sounds at a time, each one with many of the capabilities of many modes under digital control. It was a fantastic chip.
I mean, it definitely showed I mean, I mean, just just the sheer amazing ways that they that they did gain I mean that they made games with the same chip in terms of audio was insane.
Yeah, yeah, it was there was nothing like it’s it’s it was a fantastic chip, but it only could do it. You know, it did three things at a time. Well, there’s this phenomenon that I exploited. And from early games, one of the things people don’t realize, let’s go to a Williams game, Why
robotron? loved me robotron
Yeah, love me some robot tribe, or Stargate? Or what’s the defender
defender, right?
You have to understand that was the same system as I was using a godly meaning. It’s just a processor, and, and a converter, something, it takes numbers and turns them into a voltage and you stick that voltage on a speaker. So you’re literally controlling the position of the speaker cone. That’s what you have. That’s so
crazy. And I’ve always thought of it that way. That’s all
you got. Right? You can Wow, you have, it was an eight bit DAC. So you had a 256 positions of speaker cone. That I think it was sign. So zero is the cone at rest, right? 127 is the cone all the way to one extreme and negative 128 was the code all the way the other end. That’s what you got. Now, by programming, the way you move air, you make sound. And it was that fundamental. So anything you were clever enough to do within the constraints of how many how complex a program, you could write to move that cone in an interesting way you could make sound, it was a completely fluid. And you could you could make anything that you were clever enough to make within the constraints. But you you have an eight bit processor, you have to dedicate that processor to that program of whatever it’s doing. So you really can’t do more than one of those at a time. Think about that. Think about robotron or defender or Stargate or any of the things that I did in that period. There’s never more than one sound program running at a time.
You’re right. That’s amazing.
It sounds so much richer.
It does I mean, robotron is to me Williams games and believe me, no, no offense to the stuff you worked on, because because Gottlieb’s stuffs is very much similar, are probably the most recognizable sounds in videogame history, in my opinion,
well, and then, and that’s because they’re so soft that their programs, they’re just the raw imagination of the people writing the programs to move that speaker around.
So crazy. I had no idea. That’s how that works. So
the guy, the guy at Williams, who built an awful lot of the sounds is a guy named Sam dicker who ended up writing the sound system and doing a lot of stuff at cinema
at Amiga
make sense.
But he’d never committed himself. He was a programmer who did audio stuff, and he never fully committed himself to being you know, the audio guy. He just wasn’t he was a programmer who did the audio library. But I learned, you know, I, I never I hadn’t even met Sam until many years after I was going from Gatling. But I certainly admired his work, because he had already done a bunch of stuff before I’d even been hired there. So I want to give credit where he, he was one of the guys and see. I’m trying to think besides Williams and godly, there were very few companies that took this approach. All the Japanese companies took a hardware approach to audio for video games.
Right? And they all kind of sound similar. When really,
they’re, they’re okay, with the exception of Pac Man and some of the things for Namco. There was the TI chip, right? It’s the square wave chip. It makes that’s what you were thinking of it makes three square waves, right? And a noise channel.
There you go. All right, that makes me feel a little better. Wow. My memory is not failing me.
You know, in squared away, you know, in the digital world, that’s like falling off a log. Anything can make a square wave. It’s It’s from the number of heart transistors you need to make a square wave generator as opposed to a synthesizer. It’s a piece of cake. That’s the good news. The bad news is it sounds like a square wave square wave is all the odd harmonics. It’s particularly great in So it’s a very both basic and bright sound at the same time, it’s very cutting. In some ways it’s appropriate for an arcade, but it’s really hard to make it sound interesting or pleasant or anything else. And all you really can do in that time is goof with frequency, right, because you have no other you know, there are all these properties of audio. And frequency and volume are the are the two and, and it provided extremely coarse control of volume, and control over frequency. And so these are the only two properties that you can play with.
But now, other things so right, I mean Sid had the you know, the whole end the whole attack, sustained attack, decay, sustain release way envelope, so
that that’s provided and much more sophistic quite ways of dealing with volume. And they had different tambours different waveforms that it had a square wave, right had a sine wave, and it had a ramp, I had all these things sound different. And you can use those properties to make interesting sound. plus the square wave, that’s that assumes 5050 that it’s square, you know, it’s on 50% of the time, and it’s off, if you can change that percentage, you could narrow that thing down to a pulse. That’s a very interesting sound. And Sid provided that to
an amazing little chip that thing,
it was amazing. So in any case, go all the way back to rockin bowl, I finally built a system. So the important factor is that you can only play one sound at a time, right? But right hey, the human mind works is if a sounds going on, and it gets interrupted by another sound. It’s new and interesting, right? But mine doesn’t go wait.
They just stopped. Sound number one, I’m offended. That’s not the way the human mind works. The human mind goes,
Oh, look at there’s a new sound. This one must be must be much louder than that one. And that’s why I hear sound number two.
Interesting. And that’s the kind of the principle that the Williams games and probably reactor and cube are good as well. Right is?
Yeah, that’s the first thing you have to understand. I mean, intellectually resent. it offends me that I can only make one sound. And I’m thinking people are going to object to this and people are going to notice and it’s going to really degrade the suspension of disbelief that I’m trying to create here. But that’s not the way the brain works. The brain just goes Oh, new sound that must be much louder.
And it’s so weird. That’s what happens in
reality, right? Sounds mask other sounds, or new sounds because of their novelty, catch our attention. And so right, the other sound is still going on. We’re not really giving our attention to it. We’re involved in the new sound.
The Psychology of sound?
Well, if you’re gonna do interaction for people, you sure better start studying perception. Because that’s your mean status. Right? For right.
That’s just, I’d never go and play robotron the same way now.
It’s a met. Yeah, it’s
truly amazing. Okay,
how many stars are in the in the star field of defender?
Hmm. It’s probably only one. No, they just turn on and off quick enough to where you think it’s more than one
right? Well, no, no. But it looks like a lot of stars because it looks like a lot. There’s 16. Right? There’s a lot more than 16. Right, right. That’s just another one of those phenomena. And so all these phenomenon of human perception, the way the wiring the way humans behave game, game guys have to be attuned to that and exploit those whenever possible. You know,
it’s so funny. Just as a little side story, I interviewed David Crane a few years back, of course, he’s just genius. Everything about him is genius. But he was telling me about the way that he played with colors. Just by putting a certain type of border or a certain color of border around there, Activision games, they were able to make the colors look better. And it was the same sort of idea, I never really thought you know, that you could exploit that kind of human perception, it fascinates me to no end that you can do that with sound, too.
Yeah. So to finish up the rocket bowl thing for completeness, the way the rocket bolt sound system works and works on it. Same principle. Ultimately, I can ever only ever have three sounds going at a time. But all the one shots, all the sound effects run in the virtual channels. So I’m playing music using three channels continuously in the background, something you really wanted to do, right? But when a sound effect comes in, because there’s a collision, or you get some points or whatever, that goes in and steals one of the channels playing music, for the duration of the sound effect. And as soon as the sound effects done, because of the design of the CIT chip, I was able to restore everything because that that had been continuing to run it just hadn’t been getting its data, getting that data had beginning data from a sound effects data stream. So it is done. It will store the music
and the hue and in your mind did does I mean I don’t remember rockin bowl well enough to be honest with you. I it’s been a while. But I would think that that would that would as you would say offend the senses to have a set one of the music. Now voice is dropped like
that, but you don’t notice it?
Man, it’s crazy. I got to write this down. So I can go and check that out and
you don’t notice it? I mean, okay, you could design music. That would be offensive if you had long flowing music, long things, you know, it is content sensitive. Okay, but if you have anything that’s that’s got a little little rhythm, and of course appropriate. video game music, some short energy? Yeah. Because that’s one of the functions of having music at all, is it provides some, you know, energy, some, some action.
So did you actually now just to round that off? Did you actually compose the music specifically? Because you were going to steal those channels? Oh, yeah. Okay. So it was it was it wasn’t just a Oh, wow, look what I managed to pull off. It was like you had that plan from the beginning?
Yeah, yeah. But it would have worked for a broad class of music. The trick this this technique, this trick would have worked for a lot of stuff. And that was one of the last original products that I did on this the 64. So I never really got to exploit that anymore.
That’s too bad, too. It seems like a lot of stories like that to go around. And people just when they got things figured out, they moved on. Yeah. That’s so sad. Imagine what you could have done.
You know, the market, the market is a fickle thing. I mean, the other thing that I have a little thing about how disk drives crushed both Commodore and Atari. Well, either the well the Atari 800, or the C 64. Either of those machines should have crushed the apple two.
Right? What’s your theory? I’ve got a theory to? Well, here’s how they line up.
It’s real simple. I really it’s because of the federal government, right? It’s because of the FCC. Because the parallel connection to a disk drive that gives a reasonable performance,
right, is difficult to make cheaply without turning into an antenna and sending out all kinds of hash. Data. Remember, the original Apple two did not sell with a composite video connector, you had to buy an adapter, right? I remember this apple couldn’t sell it with a consumer video out, because then it would have been subject to the FCC is prohibition on
this drive.
Okay,
so now this was such a hobby thing, right? They sold this, this $25 adapter that you attached to the video output, they gave you something, we’re allowed you to connect it to a TV.
Gotcha. And that was why the Amiga did that too. Now that I think about it the 501 video adapter, I wonder if that’s why i digress. Go ahead. Okay.
So Commodore and Atari both decided not to, you know, they were going to be legit. So that meant they couldn’t, and they didn’t attach their disk drives in a parallel fashion to the computer. They use serial, they use serial, much, much slower, like, oh, accurate. 10.
Yeah, lower,
even though these were, quote, intelligent disk drives. I mean, they were computers, right. And
it went to K memory just in the 64 Drive. Right? Right. Right. So
the Atari drive was an intelligent drive to and they could run a nice thin little cable to and stuff, but they were way slow. They were low threshold for anything. But again, you know, if you’re on a game, and it takes five minutes or so, you know, you tolerate that, because you’re gonna play for an hour. Yeah, but if you’re in a load of word processing, do anything useful with it, you’re going back and forth the disk all the time. And that’s why the apple prospered. And that’s in something other than a toy other than a game. And neither the Atari nor the C 64 did when either of those computers taken in the totality were better machines, better graphics better sounds faster, better in every way than an apple two. They could never be taken seriously as a productivity tool, because of the way the disk drives attached to them. That’s very
fascinating. And here it was, I just thought because Apple two product dumped all their crap into schools that that’s how we managed to stay alive,
but it didn’t hurt.
hurt, but fundamentally, you know, you couldn’t take them serious. Actually, we did a focus group once and one of the guys who was that the focus group for some kind of construction guy and he was actually running his business on a C 64 with a couple drives. Sure. And you know, so there was always somebody out there who will do it who’s patient was cheap enough and patient enough to do it but right now it just was a non GAAP not it just was not gonna happen. Sanford and frankly, frankly they mega which should have crushed the Mac to be sure the Amiga is a much better computer than then the original Mac in every way. Yeah didn’t not because so much how they attached the disk drive but because the operating system they bought was like this virtual operating system that wrote wrote all the contents to the Amiga disk drive is a linked list. Hmm. Which is perfectly appropriate. And an interesting technique to use if you have a hard drive. But if you’ve got a floppy trying to read, you know, you say cat, give me a catalogue, show me what’s on the disk, right. But on an Amiga, it had to like scan enormous chunks of the disk because the directory wasn’t in any one place where you could just go and get it and display. You had to go through this link list all over the desk. So yeah, dziga appeared to have this just terrible, slow behavior.
Right? That’s probably why the like, every single game developer wrote their own disk operating system for every game they put out. Yeah, they didn’t want to deal with the Amiga.
Yeah, so Commodore always had trouble with discs. And they, you know, they should have done so much better. And and as a developer, then you’re you vote with your reference. You say, Okay, this looks hot. Let’s do some stuff on this. And if the platform prospers, we prosper. Sure. So you can’t help it be a little bitter.
But trust me, I’m a Commodore guide tried and true. And I’ve I’ve been more bitter about Commodore and their silly decisions, and probably anybody else. So I’m saying, but that’s just from a consumer point of view. You would have all sorts of different I’m sure. Peeves with them with regards to development.
Yeah, so let’s go all the way back to reactor.
Alright, back to reactor now that we managed to segue for 20 minutes. That’s perfect.
Okay, so back to reactor. So I was a I was a writing graphics utilities on the apple two for the sprite system. And Tim Skelly was getting close enough to have a game that was working and you know, hit detection and it was playing and stuff and and then they all addressed it, but who will do sound?
And that was you.
That was I raised my hand or said I can do this. So I got the soundboard from from the pinball division. We still weren’t in the same building at that time. So a truck showed up and gave me a pinball soundboard and gave me some example source code of this is how you do this. And it was off to the races. Now,
let’s go back just I mean, I know we keep going back to reactor, but back to your yourself personally. Now. Did you have an audio background? I have more programming.
Sure, sure. I graduated from college with a degree in technical theater. But prior to college, when I was in high school, I’d been in rock bands. And I was playing in my summers, I was playing in bands during the summer, between college semesters. And when I graduated with this degree in technical theater, I said, Well, I’m gonna do what I do best. And what I like to do and so I joined a band and I played in bands, different kinds of bands, rock bands, lounge bands, show bands, five days, six days a week, five to six hours a night for five, six
years. So there’s a large component of you that’s audio related, and how did you end up then getting into being a programmer, if that was sort of your initial passion?
Well, the whole the whole of playing live music, which, you know, if you’ve been born in the last 20 years, it’s environment, you would just hear children use your imagination. This is what it used to be like, right, right. Every hotel chain, and every small bar used to have a lounge and they used to have live human beings in their 234 or five, playing music for people to dance and drink to five or six nights a week, all over America. And this was true for quite some time. And so that’s where I was able to, I could play and I could sing and I wanted to do that. So I did that for quite some time. But eventually it was subject to automation. sure that the cheap amplifier, the cassette tape, the turntable came in and, and disco specifically. And then the DJ pretty much wiped out three quarters of the venues that have had live music that just went away over a period of like two or three years.
So you were you were Rift, I guess out of Yeah, yeah, it’s a industry and and
the job that I got the first day job that I ever had since college was a company called the electric keyboard, all Ks. And they sold electric keyboards, they sold synthesizers back in the day, when they were pretty much just motto. They only made one sound at a time. So we both moelgg and our, and Korg. And Roland, we sold all these synthesizers. It was like a bowtique kind of shop and it was unique in the United States. There was only one other in LA or New York that did did such a thing. We didn’t sell home organs or pianos, or we’re a music store that only sold this cutting edge synthesizer stuff. So I was retail and a demonstrator I mean, I had a background where I could do that. Right. I had used a synthesizer for years and playing out live Hello, are badasses to channel thing.
And
the other half of the store was the first Apple to dealer in Chicago. Hmm. And I was also a computer a wannabe computer hobbyist, I built my first computer, which was an RCA c mos 20. I forget what the name number of the chip was in. And all it had on it was a keypad, which allows you to put in hexadecimal numbers and just display
old school
Wales. And I built this myself. And I got to the point where I could put the Starship Enterprise in blocks black and white blocks on the screen. That was my crowning achievement. That’s fantastic. And you had to enter the data. And you know, and there was no way to save the data.
Every time you shut the thing, I’ve yet to do it again. Yeah, so
I was like, I really, really wanted to have my own computer. So here I am, that an apple two dealer. Now this is prior to the time that was the active even release the disk drive. So the apple two that we sold was 16k. And interface with a tape recorder and safe stuff, right. And it cost two grand 19 $78. But there was
your third mortgage there.
Yeah. So and we had terrible winters in Chicago at that time. And no customers because I couldn’t even drive around. But I had a front wheel drive rabbit. So I was able to get to the place. And so I would have six hours with no customers. And so I spent all my time in the back. Learning how to program. So I learned programming that the two years that I was at the electric keyboard, I also had great mentors. I don’t know if you know the name Chris Oberth.
doesn’t ring a bell? No. Well, Chris
was one of the first guys who created all kinds of games for the apple two, they used to make the desk and you stick them in a plastic bag with a piece of paper and they were sold at computer stores.
The old early Lord British stuff there. Yeah,
yeah. Chris did a ton of games. Wow. And then he ended up. He actually worked. I worked with him later on and action graphics. He worked on Winter Games. Actually, yeah, which thing did he do? i? Oh, he did the speed racing, I think.
Gotcha. Okay,
but so Chris is a real pioneer. He also did some games for us. Wasn’t stern. I guess it was stirred when Stern, you know, post Berzerk Stern, right? When they still had a video game division. Right. So Chris was there. And you know, he was he was, I learned a lot from Chris. And then there’s another guy there. And so I learned really, the nuts and bolts of programming on it on an apple two, I mean, of course, there was a disk drive, and the first day the guy walked in with with visicalc. That was amazing.
Now explain to my younger listeners, what exactly programming was back then? We’re not talking about, you know, dotnet framework, we’re talking about hardcore 6502 type assembler, right? Yeah.
Well, there was there were three styles, right? You could get down and dirty. And you had to have a map of the code that was in ROM to exploit that on the apple two that was really your, your, your class library, if you will. But you could program in basic and there are floating point basic and integer basic. So he had a language they could only they could only do integer numbers, no fractions. Wow.
How fun is it to make like physics type stuff with only integer numbers,
not fun. Not fun. You don’t do it.
At all costs.
a theater major
and a programmer and I was never I never had that much math. So this kind of programming really suited me because I was on machine. could barely do math. So, you know, we had to figure out other ways of doing things you
and me both my friends, you and me, both formulas need not
apply, because that’s a good way of even putting them in the machine. But then if you get down to 6502 that was a fun line, which there were two armed camps. At that time, there were there was the 6502 camp, and the Z at camp, the JT or z at camp. And depending on which machines you liked, and stuff, these were assembly language languages, and you picked one typically, and I very much like the 6502, because it was very simple. And really, it is the first risk language, reduced instruction, whatever that stands for,
right.
Because it has very few instructions. And they they execute really, really fast. So even though the clock rate on you know how fast instructions are executed, typically low, a one megahertz 6502, programmed, well would do more work than a four megahertz, the 80, right? Because the instructions, you know, you start exploiting zero page and all these crazy modes, you could really get throughput on at 6502
didn’t 6502 Now again, this is not my realm of expertise, but it seemed to me that there were a lot more like z 80 arcade games, and there were a lot more 6502 home systems would that be a fair statement? That
would be a fair statement. You know, the trash 80 was?
z 80.
So you know, the stuff done on the radio shack computer was was z 80. But you’re right. Atari Apple two, Commodore are all 6502
didn’t wasn’t click on glico Adam 6502 as well are now. Oh, that’s okay, right. Yeah, yeah.
So I mean, the Japanese were much more fun. The z 80 than the 6502 really comes down to that. So it depends on who you know, designed your hardware? Sure.
Okay, so how do we how far do we mentioned digress off reactor this time?
reactor must be an incredibly boring subject. There. In any case, you know, you got to the point is I’ll do the sound. So we worked on reactor we worked really hard. And then at some point, you know, came down from above reactor has a speech chip on it, you will make this toxin. I’m a, you know, I’m just do with this company. I’ve only now been there six months. Yes, sir. That’s right. I’ll do anything you want. So I did it. And it was not rewarding because no matter what you did with it was not going to sound good. The end and keep in mind, the novelty was off the fact that a computer was talking, you know, okay, so show me something new. And besides the fact of it, of it miss forming and mispronouncing and doing bad stuff. The other thing that we use speech for it’s a carrier for emotion. Yeah, I can say something to use six different ways. I think you look nice today.
I think you look nice today.
Right?
I think you organized that, you know, and and so there’s a whole nother channel that’s laid on top of language, which is prosody and speech and the way it’s done and also the speaker.
Sure, fidelity. Well, no, but
more than that, I mean, you think about something like Seth MacFarlane there’s a guy can do about 10 different characters that are like really far apart from each other.
And you can do it all at once. He doesn’t have to use multiple tracks for that.
He can have a conversation with himself. He’s a scary guy.
That’s a whole nother piece. And I hope we have time to get to.
Yeah, yeah, well, I was Family Guy, I got to do that. So in any case, given all those things, the vote tracks is devoid of everything. It has this one way it can speak and it doesn’t speak well. So I was not happy. And then I got to the point where there was a place in the game where you pushed, you could push the enemies into these little side chambers, and they would bounce around. And that was the bonus chamber. And every time they hit the wall, they took some damage and you got points. And when you got so many points, you would you would cross the threshold like 5000 points or 10,000 points. So that was a nice opportunity because your your your eyes are probably somewhere else you’re not looking at the bones chamber with it, then you’re over here is trying to stay alive. Sure. So it’s a great opportunity in the sound channel to give you information that you care about, but it’s not critical. Sure, so it’s a nice time to stroke. player and reward them and say, Oh, you’ve just gotten 5000 points because you. So we eventually determined with the script, what we wanted to do was, say the number of points, number of bonus points 5000. Bonus points 10,000 bonus points 1000 bonus points. So I tried to program the volt tracks to do that. I’m pretty sure. I can’t say for a certainty, but after what 16 working hours trying to say, bonus points. It would only say bogus points.
That’s such a great story.
1000 bogus
points. On arbitrary everything. I mean, after the obvious thing out of the dictionary didn’t work, then you start getting creative. And I substituted all kinds of stuff. And then there’s another phenomenon. We’re working on things particularly sound called individuation, where after you work on a thing, you begin to habituate on it. And you think, Oh, yeah, I’ve got it. It’s doing it and get so familiar with it. And this is very frustrating phenomenon, because I would I would somebody would walk through my lab, and commit, commit, commit commit, and then I would play it for them. And then they would go, what are bogus points?
But you actually at that point, we’re hearing bonus at that. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, you do the phenomenon of habituation. You can understand things that other if you hadn’t been working on, it wouldn’t make any sense. Right? Not to walk away, right. But I mean, I’m under the gun to get this thing done. So I just keep working working. So at some point, we just dropped vote bonus from the phrase, I think we just write 1000 points and that sort of work. But born of that frustration, was at some point, I couldn’t stand it anymore. And Chris Brewer, who was my tech at the time, he offhanded said, well, gee, I wonder what happened to you just said the random numbers, which would mean random phonemes, right, because one to one mapping between phonemes and numbers. And so we did that. And it sounded great. I mean, obviously, it wasn’t understandable. But it sounded great. It made this great alien voice. And then you could vary it right? The number of phonemes, you sent it, the pacing that you sent it, we also could control the pitch of the chip. So we could make different voices. And we had this and I had, you know, this is great. In parallel with this. Warren Davis was working on his first game, and he’d gotten some art Jeff Lee, and he was beginning to do turn it into a game. And so I saw this orange character jumping around on this tessellated field. And I, and I didn’t know Warren very well. And I said, Warren, I’m you’re going to be your sound guy. And boy, do I have something for you.
Warren’s told me the story of Cuba, but he never he never told me about. I mean, he told me that it was random, but he never really gave me the backstory of it like you’ve gotten to do.
Yeah, so it was it was like it was the voice was created independently of Cuba. It had nothing to do with it. But as soon as I saw cubert, and the other characters, I said, Oh, this is perfect. And we can use this functionally. That was a good thing, right? Because I could make different voices. And they had, you know, the very annoying small character and the very big character, I could pitch the voices. And I could use the Middle Voice, which is the every man’s voice for cubert. So he could talk. So when you could hear the low voice, but you didn’t see anything yet. As a player, you would know to direct your attention to the edge of the pyramid. Right? Because something was going to come on.
It was odd. It was an audible cue.
Yeah, yeah. So I like that. I mean, I insist on that, if at all possible. I, you know, you could just decorate something. But that’s not enough. Audio is too important of a channeled player to just use it for decoration.
Do you feel while we’re on this topic, I want to get a little philosophical with you. Do you feel that as we all know that, that when you have to code in a smaller environment, a tighter closed environment, you’re forced to be a little more creative? And I think that that’s why such the earlier games tend to be still playable. Do you feel that as technology moves forward? That games especially like today, right, I mean, look at Modern Warfare three. I mean, it is an audible feast, but do you feel that they have become decorators with that sort of technology?
Well, to be fair, I, I’ve my survey of modern games is is limited. I am I am crazy in depth on the Halo franchise. Okay,
fair enough. Same idea.
I’m very, very deep. And so I can speak to how they use audio. All right. And I play Halo Wars as well, which is a different same content, different game, different studio. Should I know how they use it. And I’ve done a survey, I played some other stuff. And you know, there’s good and there’s bad in the in what’s going on? Clearly, production values have gone wildly up. Right. And it’s a function of pre rendering, the way I think of it is pre rendering. I mean, I, when I make sound and reactor, I made sound in a pinball machine, or coin out machine, or any of these things, probably, you know, up to some point, the machine was beat was creating the sound on the fly in the cabinet at the time. And that’s, that has some nice properties, but huge constraints, right? You can only like in the in the worst case scenario, you have a one megahertz 6502 running loop that moves the speaker, you can do some really creative things, but your palette is quite limited. Short, as opposed to pre rendering what I do now, right? I, I can use anything, anything I can record I can put in the game. Yeah. So I could go and record the London Symphony Orchestra, I can put it in the game, I can layer up two dozen synthesizers, and just enormous signal processing and all kinds of crazy audio techniques to create some stream that then just gets played back in the thing. And and so I’m only limited there by how good I am in terms of how I can use the studio or how much money I have to go out and hire orchestras and stuff. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s all dead fish.
What do you mean by that?
Well, it’s it’s not lively, it’s not responsive. I mean, you can do something about that. But you have to basically brute force when I play these wonderful streams of audio. They’re dead, I can do nothing with them. They just play. Right? And worse than that, is I know nothing about them. Unless I do something tricky. Meaning, right. Meaning if I wanted to synchronize something in the game world, or in the audio world with a stream that I’ve started, all I know is I started it, and it’s running.
But I need to know that maybe the timecode on it, maybe
I don’t. But anything else that I would know about? I would have to I would have to do artificially to it. Right now. If I’m synthesizing it on a C 64. I’m running a sequencer, right, and I’m creating each audio element in time at runtime. And I know everything about it. I know where I am in the pace, I know about its time and its tempo, and I know where 16th notes are, and I know what key I’m playing in and what notes are being played. I know it all because I’m doing it.
Right. So there’s a starting, they’re just starting to go and just it goes, Yeah, it’s done.
So there’s this tension between beauty, you know, this pre rendering all these wonderful elements, and how opaque they are. And I know nothing about them, all I know is the running. And this very rich synthesizer world where the possibilities for changing them dynamically synchronizing with them to create new streams of audio dynamically at runtime that are some function of the interaction. So I can give you several examples of things that I’ve done that were wildly interactive, wildly interactive music that was from my point of view, functional, that everything that I did it to create interactive sound was somehow bolted to the game bolted to the interaction to head if you didn’t have to pay attention. If you’re just playing and you can hear it and after playing it a few times, you hear this cue you may not understand it, but you know that something has happened for it right? You
need to do something and it’s not blatantly obvious. It’s not like a good examples like a lot of these. These solo First, the first person type adventure games that are out now you’ll be walking along you’ll be hearing this cute nice music and it’s nice and atmospheric. Also, it’s like you know, next thing you know, something, you know, something’s gonna jump out in the trees, because it’s scripted. And you can tell
right, right and so the sound channel and all the elements of the sound channel usually broken down three ways. There’s voice and there’s so there’s voice and dialogue, and there’s Music and then then there’s everything else that’s not those two. So there’s effects of everything that’s there, from my point of view should be there functionally. Right? And, and music is such a powerful thing, it maybe shouldn’t be there sometimes. I mean, there’s just the sort of notion from a lot of people is just, well, music should be playing all the time. And I, you know, I’m not I’m not with that either. I think it’s you, because it’s playing all the time you blunt that knife. By using it all the time, until it becomes a very dull axe.
you’ve reduced its effectiveness. Yes.
So to wrap this notion up, is present, and past. Clearly, the sounds in the past had had the potential not everybody did it. But you could be very interactive. And I could give some functional examples of the really interactive scores that I’ve done. Now, what I have now. And what’s typically done now, it’s it’s much more of a challenge to be interactive. Plus, in the current environment, I’m not a programmer in the current environment. Clearly I was in the past. But now I’ve got a programmer between me and the stuff that I need. Except I don’t have a sound program like the guy from Sony, I don’t have him, the guy who programmed the sound system is the game programmer, and, you know, he’s busy. And if I need something done to make something more interactive, I probably get triage off the list most of the time,
right? And there’s more people to answer to on the way up to right. I mean, yeah, when you’re talking three guys making a game and maybe some sort of a pm or something. Now, you’ve got seven layers of people you’d have to go through. And yeah, in the end, you probably wouldn’t get your way anyway.
Right? Well, I, I’ve been lucky, in some ways, you know, I look at it, let’s look at it in a positive way. When I resumed my career, I, I kind of went back to something I had done before. And I’ve for the last five years, I’m working on my 13th pinball, audio deliverable. And it’s lucky for me in the sense that pinball is is a perfect size of audio project for the lone wolf developer,
right?
For what needs to be done, I can get it all done in spades and get it all done in in the amount of time that’s available. And I never have to take a meeting.
Bonus, I do everything. As I was gonna say, and as a bonus, you don’t have a scripted. Would you got dead fish environment to work in? It’s very alive. It’s very reactive. And it’s not like you play the same pinball game twice in a row, even though it’s the same table and you’re the same person. It’s very, it’s a different experience every single time.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It’s a very, it’s a fun interaction. to augment. And audio from pinball, really, I’ve made the argument that it’s one of the more important things because a player pinball player playing pinball is almost functionally blind. This is true, because they spend all their time staring at the bottom third of the playfield, mostly a glance, you know, they’re trying to keep track of a bunch of stuff, by functionally play this, that interaction between the flippers and the ball, and they’re very, very busy. It’s a very eyes busy task. So now, if you want to tell them things, the dot display is of limited use, they’re not going to look up there. That’s true.
I think about that,
that orange fluorescent display, I mean, it’s nice, but it’s not really for the player, then you have all the lights on the playfield. And, you know, a light is on a light is off, a light is flashing, you know, a good player will will register that fact. But that’s not all that rich on off, it’s not that big a deal. Right? So their audio channel for a pinball machine is perfect to convey all the things that you want to tell them about a monitored interaction. You know, what mode Are you in? What should you be trying to do now? What have you just achieved? Oh, you’ve just done something wonderful. Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up, time is running out, hurry up, Oh, you’ve done all the things that are necessary to set up the machine so that if you do such and such, you will start multiwall so you were in a grace state, a wonderful state, all that stuff, which makes the thing more fun to create, you know, tension, rewards, understanding, you know, feeling a mastery after playing it for a while that you know, you understand that an awful lot of that can come should come from the audio channel. So it’s a great project because I suppose To a video game where it’s just soom that all that stuff will come from you staring at the screen. And audio augments that, for a pinball machine, I would argue that the sound is really one of the primary channels for the interaction to inform the player.
Well, folks, that’s gonna wrap up part one of the David Thiel interview join us in January 2011. For the second part of the David Thiel interview, I tell you, it was fantastic or what, it was just a pure joy to talk to this guy. He’s very excitable about his craft and the history behind it. Fascinating. I could, I could have talked to the guy for days. But Hope you enjoyed this month’s interview. And remember, tune in for part two next month right here on retro gaming radio. We had a huge turnout for Bits and Bytes this month. So I’ve got tons of goodies to share with you. First of what I’ve kept in the back burner for the last couple of months just because I was waiting for the right time to pull it out. This seemed like a good enough time. I’ve talked a lot in the past about a little handheld electronic game called Digital Derby from Tommy. And it’s a essentially two little film strips with little cars painted on them. You steer a little plastic car that’s attached directly to the steering wheel, you have two speeds, one of which simply makes one of the film strips go faster. And if you collide with one of the cars it buzzes and flashes red, you probably know what I’m talking about. If not, I’m sure that Alex has already provided you with a link to see what a digital Derby looks like. Well, somebody came up with something called the video game in a box. And this was sent in by myself, so I don’t have anybody to credit for this one. But I thought this was really interesting. It’s very similar to the way that digital Derby was done. And it’s a Mario knockoff using scrolling paper and control knob on the side of a plain, regular old cardboard box. So this is pretty cool stuff. Take a look at it, see what you think. And if you were a big digital Derby fan, this will be right up your alley. Okay, so here’s an interesting development in the once great giant Atari lifespan, it seems that Atari is looking to reinvent itself as a mobile games company. And they hired an AI one Marvel exec to be their executive VP. Now normally speaking, I would say this would be a fairly poor move. But being is that Atari has such a great wealth of classic games, games that work very well in a what’s the word I’m looking for less technical environment, right, they’ve got a whole stable, full of properties that would make a great translation over to mobile devices, especially mobile devices that maybe have a physical means of control, like say the Sony Xperia, or to a device that has some means of hooking a joystick up to it like a tablet. So for Atari, this seems like a pretty decent move. They’ve taken their stab at trying to keep up in the latest digital age. And let’s be honest, that’s not where tarries strength live. So it’s very nice to see that Atari is is actually trying to play to their strengths and I’ll be really interested to see how this turns out. Let’s see, what else do I have here? Oh, hey, there’s a new HD version of our classic game shoplifter coming out for an Xbox Live PlayStation Network and for the PC, Konami and in exile entertainment are going to co publish this title. Supposedly sometime this winter. I don’t even know if it’s been out yet. I haven’t heard. But you remember the old shoplifter game right it was a side scroller you played in a chopper you shot down enemies or trying to roll over your little guys. You landed the chopper, the guys hopped on yet flew the chopper back to base, you dropped them off, wash, rinse and repeat. So hey, it’s a classic formula, it works very well. And as long as they don’t mess with the formula too much. I think it could be great. It’s a game that could definitely benefit from better graphics. And again, the gameplay should be fairly simple to keep straightforward. So we’ll be watching that one closely. Hey, Alex j Lopez sent in that he bought he by the way he sent in that Atari one as well. Alex sent in my producer sent in this interesting Space Invaders article. In Sacramento County, California. People have been tagging
little eight bit Space Invaders on signs. With spray, you know, they’re either stickers or spray paint. It’s weird. That they’re popping up all over this, this county so it’s kind of funny that Space Invaders are instead of taking over the world or taking over one little California town, Elk Grove California that’s pretty funny and I’ll post will give you the link there right on the retro gaming Radio TV viewer.
Let’s see, I thought that was fun.
Here’s another one sent in. Let me take a look here. Make sure I’m giving proper credit where credit is due. Let’s see. Oh, here we go. Alan j Lopez also sent in a lot of people a collect classic handhelds, including the original Gameboy. Well, apparently, one of the ways that people overhaul these things is to add a backlight. Well, Alex wanted to send in this thing called the v3 triple LED backlight. Central essentially, it features three high intensity led strategically placed on the bottom of the panel allowing for the easiest installation of the kit into a Gameboy ever. These panels fit perfectly into the plastic housing, meaning you no longer have to cut any of the plastic surroundings of your liquid crystal display for installation. So it sounds like if you’ve been wanting to do some sort of a light up kid for your classic Gameboy. It sounds like the way to do it for 15 bucks. doesn’t sound too bad. Now this kills me now. This isn’t classic gaming related this particular piece, but a lot of you know that I personally take credit for inventing Redbox The, the red box that sits at the various outlet locations that rent your DVDs for a buck in the in the early 80s. I created something called the video vendor. I had this all put down on a napkin unfortunately, I didn’t patent it. So I lost out. But essentially, I had a large box that sits at retail locations that using a credit card, you would purchase rentals of videotapes, VHS videotapes, and you’d return it to the same location. And it had markings on the side of the containers and a barcode scanner I had all sketched out. And sure enough, you know, sometime down the road, somebody else pops up with it. But I personally, I still think I was the first person to have the idea. Anyway, so my friend Justin and I, we hang out a lot at lunchtime. He works with me. And we were talking about the other day about a formula show based on classic video games where we would go out just and I would go out and we would find collectors, people who have old games sitting in their shed they don’t know what to do with they inherited them or something like that. show people restoring them all that sort of thing. Well, so funny. I swear to god my whole life is bugged. Because along comes this pilot show called high score, which is supposed to be the reality show for classic arcade games. Now there’s a video a sizzle reel. Just to give you the premise of what drives high score is an in development reality show that focuses on TNT, amusements, and Pennsylvania is shown to specialize in the acquisition, restoration and sale of old coin operated video game machines. The video above is a sizzle reel to help the show find a home on network television. There’s clearly reality show template and work here like American pickers or American restorations find a person who has once thing find or make desire thing and have the staff do their Crafty Things to the desired thing and delivered the finished desired thing. You know, watching this video this is exactly what I wanted to do. So once again I snoozed I lose but anyway it’s it’s a fun reel to look at this is definitely show I’d watch it in a heartbeat. I mean there’s there’s some horrible shows about American hoggers and people restoring motorcycles. the least we can do is have something of a classic video game major. Let’s see. Todd Todd Holcomb rode back in and let us know that for Christmas a brand new for game Atari 2600 cartridges coming out called the bite before Christmas. They just had a contest to try to get somebody to make them a label for their game. Unfortunately, the deadline for that is passed. But this has four different games in it. All cores are Santa’s or Christmas related. And let’s see what’s the list of games here. We’ve got naughty list Belle Hopper, Santas, scabs and Christmas adventure which looks like a little adventure type knockoff game. These all look really good. I mean as 2600 games go. And I know that there’s a lot of diehard 2600 collectors, so the buy before Christmas. This is the label contents that we’re going to link you to but you can get the whole deal. And unfortunately, I’m sorry, Todd, I know you sent me a beta to look at of the games. And I simply did not get to it this month. But I tell you what, if I do get a chance to take a look at it, I’ll throw it on my tablet or my cell phone and I’ll give them a whirl in an emulator and maybe I’ll do a little follow up but it’s always nice to see Classic gaming development still going on. So I like to really support this. Thanks, Todd for sending that in.
The next thing I want to talk to you about is sort of classic gaming related, but we’re going to talk about it anyway. Over in California, of course, is Disneyland and attached to Disneyland is the less popular California adventures. Well, inside of California adventures, if you go in and head to the left, there’s a great place called electronica. And what it is, is it is a virtual world of Tron Legacy, the new Tron movie that came out just about a couple years back. Anyway, this whole place is decked out full Tron. decked out with the neon and the glow, they’ve got one of the full light cycles. They’re one of the new ones, not one of the old ones. But forget about all the new Tron Legacy stuff. Forget about the huge Dance Party and the guy that sits up and controls lasers with his hands and does this big laser light show. And all the hot chicks dressed up and tight clothes. Forget about all of that. What you’re interested in is in the back of that lot, is a little place called Flynn’s arcade. And it looks just like the movie from the outside you go in. And there are classic games. And I’ve got pictures and maybe I’ll send them over to Alex, they can throw them into a slideshow or something. But you can actually go in there and play all these classic games. And they even have the space paranoids game that was created. It was a PC based game, but they stuck it in an arcade cabinet. And it’s actually a really damn hard game. It’s really pretty fun too. So if you are looking for something else to do while you’re at Disneyland, and you’re thinking about California Adventure, but maybe not. I’m a huge fan of California Adventure, I think. Tower of Terror. What are some of the other great things over there. soaring over California there’s a whole bunch of different attractions, but this is totally worth going to. You got people dressed up in Tron outfits are thrown around, lit up memory disks or game discs. It’s just it’s too freakin cool. The atmosphere will just blow you away. And I’ve got some video of that too. Maybe I’ll have Alex throw that up. Although it’s pretty jittery, you know me running around by hand. But you definitely want to check that out. If you get an opportunity to be over there. It’s it’s part of the admission price of California Adventure so you’re not paying anything else. It’s fantastic. If you especially if you like that dance club atmosphere. It’s all outside. It’s crazy. It’s wild. It’s insane. Alright, last up because one of my links was broken. Next up and last for this month is something called polybius I’m assuming that’s how you pronounce it. Now. I don’t understand how I’ve been running retro gaming radio, on and off for the past like 15 frickin years. And this item has never came across my desk and I’ve never heard anything about it. polybius is an urban legend video game. It’s an arcade game that supposedly existed. Nobody can produce one people have you know Blair Witch Project videos of it. There’s no wrong. There’s all sorts it’s an amazing urban legend myth around the sing and I don’t understand How come I’ve never heard of this thing until Alex brought it to my attention this last month. And here’s what coin op.org says about the game. The game had a very limited release one or two backwater arcades in the suburb of Portland. The history of this game is cloudy there were all kinds of strange stories about how kids who played a god amnesia afterwards couldn’t remember their name or where they lived etc. The bizarre rumors about this game are that it supposedly developed was supposedly developed by some kind of weird military tech offshoot group use some kind of proprietary behavior modification algorithms developed for the CIA or something. Kids who played it woke up at night screaming having horrible nightmares. According to an operator who ran an arcade with one of these games, guys in black coats would come to collect records from the machine. They’re not interested in quarters or anything. They just collected information about how the game was played. The game was weird looking kind of abstract, fast action with some puzzle elements. The kids who played it stop playing games entirely. One of them became a big anti video game Crusader something we’ve contacted one person who met him and he claims the machines disappeared after a month or so and nobody ever heard about them again. I’m sorry, man. But that’s like gotta be the coolest urban legend when it comes to video games ever. There’s a little bit more information if you search the net. But it’s funny this this thing even has made it into the Simpsons, which is interesting in The Simpsons episode and this is on the slink you’ll see here, please, Homer don’t hammer him. Bard goes up to play a video game called triangle wars and right next to it is a polybius machine.
totally bizarre right? There are people that have made cabinets. There’s some photos here. There’s like I said, there’s a Blair Witch video, some guy who found one hiding it. It’s crazy. Check it out. There’s links to tons of other stuff. If nothing else. It’s fascinating reading, at least it was for me, I got totally caught up in it. So very, very cool. Well, listen, thanks to everybody who sends stuff in. There are a few items that did not get pulled for this month just because we have a very large interview. Bits and Bytes is kind of the filler piece of the show to work around the other content. And we’ve got tons more coming up. If your information was not given this month. Please check back next month, as we’re recycling through them. As always, you can submit your Bits and Bytes stories directly to us at Bits and Bytes at retro gaming radio.com bits bytes at retro gaming radio calm. Or if you can’t remember, just go to retro gaming radio.com. While the link there provided for you. This segment of the show is run just by people just like yourself. So please definitely write in. We get some of the best stuff from our listeners. This month, we’re going to look at Zen pinball THD, which that should let you know if you’re an Android user that that requires the Tegra chipset for your Android device. Zen pinball is of course makers of pinball effects. It’s very popular on the gaming consoles. Zen pinball brings arcade authentic physics and pinball tables right to your Android Tegra device. Currently, it’s only playable on Tegra devices. So you’ll need one of the higher end tablets like the A Seuss transformer in order to play this guy, but I do know that Zen pinball is being ported to the Nintendo 3ds. I believe that Apple’s iOS has a version of it as well, or it’s coming. And I do believe that they are planning to release a non Tegra version for Android. But what makes Zen pinball so fantastic. Why am I bringing it up here on a retro gaming radio show? Well, you know, I’m a fan. I’m a huge pinball fan, right? My pinball lineage goes way, way back all the way to the electromechanical stuff. And pretty much everywhere in between. I love classic tables. I love modern tables. And I like electronic tables. A lot of people know about visual pin name or V pin name, where you can actually play authentic tables using two types of emulators. One is the table emulator or table simulator, backed with actual game ROMs. I don’t know where this project is. Now. It’s been a long time since I’ve looked at it because well, I own a pinball machine. I have tons of consoles and computers that play pinball, so I can get that Jones if I need it. Of course, I also have a great arcade nearby classic gaming as well as pinball, castles and coasters, which has no less than I think 20 or 30 different pinball tables, along with all the newest ones. And of course the best ones like medieval madness and Star Trek. The next generation is one of my favorite of the modern ones. They have the pinball 2000 ones they have the study episode one and equip the Creature from the Black Lagoon was not the right one. I don’t remember it’s been a while since I’ve been down there. But suffice to say they’ve got a very very spiffy collection of pin balls. And of course, you know, I own my own bone busters. So I have a lot of experience with pinball. And up until recently, some of the best pinball has been made by Zen who have been making pinball effects for the 360 the ps3 and I’ve talked in the past about pinball pulse which appears on the Nintendo DS platform from the dsiware store.
Probably the best portable handheld pinball ever. And by the way, for those of you who are still jonesing to have that game on your Nintendo 3ds if you maybe you got one for Christmas and you got your old DSI, you can now copy that pinball game over from the DSi over to your new 3ds that’s something we’ve all been waiting for. It’s one of the last holdout games that for some reason couldn’t be transferred when you bought the new 3ds. Now you can copy over. But let’s get back to Zen pinball. What makes Zen pinball so great. Well, probably the best part of it is is that it’s free. You can actually get the Zen pinball package right from the Android market for free. And it comes with a table called sorcerer’s lair, which a lot of people are used to very, very, very good pinball and I agree it is very good. However more tables can be purchased for just a buck 99 apiece which is reasonable under two bucks. And you can download them. And the neat thing is is these are full blown tables, all the toys, all the missions, all the special multi balls. Sometimes the tables jump a little out side the realm of pure pinball. And we’re going to talk a little bit more about that. But it’s really nice for free, you can get a complete table, as well as this interface, the Zen pinball interface, which is very nice. They spent a lot of time working on it. It does offer up through openfeint, which is a online con activity, sort of like an Xbox Live or a steam only for mobile devices, and openfeint is cross platform. In some cases, Zen pinball apparently is not. So if you’re playing the iOS version of Zen pinball, your scores with your friends will not appear in the Android version. And I’m not sure why that is, I mean, why advertising is cross platform if you can’t do stuff like that, right. But suffice to say, the future possibilities there. Because of the openfeint conductivity, it allows you to really leverage the game just like on the console’s leverage the game with and against your friends. So, currently, we have a large, heated battle going on amongst them enroll world, comrades, if you will, we have a very nice friendly game friendly challenge going on. And it keeps track of your your accumulated score amongst the pin balls, it gives you an overall ranking, and it ranks you amongst your friends. So it’s really really nice if the scoreboard keeps you on your toes with playing the pinball. But how does the pinball and sell for now that’s important? Because pinball there’s two types of electronic pinball really, really good electronic pinball and really, really bad electronic pinball. And it usually boils down to one thing, which is realism. A lot of console and portable pinball games totally leave the realm of possibility. They have things trotting across the board, they have the ball doing things that are completely impossible to do. There are it’s not a realistic table. And because of that, well it makes it more video game friendly. For purists of pinball for people who really really liked pinball. The non realistic you know, goes flying across the table picking up the ball and slamming in against the glass and doing all this other weird stuff. That becomes that loses the appeal for real top notch pinball. The other thing of course, which makes pinball great is physics. How realistic is the ball move? Because just like classic video game programmers who work outside the rules of hardware, pinball aficionados really enjoy using the physics of the table to their advantage in terms of doing things like juggling the ball between flippers, right, you’ve seen the real top notch guys do that, where they’ll roll the ball right off the flipper and toss it right over to the other flipper as if it were magic. Some people can do that. Some people like to catch the ball in the in the pocket of the flipper when it comes down so they can set up the next shot. These are all things that aren’t really possible. If you have really loosey goosey physics were unrealistic physics. Zen pinball, I’m proud to say is brilliant. The ball moves completely realistically, there’s never a time when the pinball what’s the what’s the phrase dispels or
dispels your belief that it’s a pinball. There’s a lot of times when you’re playing these sort of pinball games, you have to suspend your disbelief considerably in order to get through the table. These games these pinball this pinball engine I should say of Zen pinball is very very honed these guys, you can tell this is what these guys do. And they are very good at it. A lot of times you’ll see with these sort of electronic pinball games, you’ll see times when the ball will speed up really fast for no reason just in a certain patch from some piece of weird physics code. Or when you hit it with the flipper, you don’t impart the energy you would have expected to go and this is the the suspension of disbelief that we shouldn’t have to deal with as pinball lovers. Zen pinball Scott back covered. But last thing about pinball for me personally. Now some people love the old electromechanical pin balls. They love the chasing of the score. And the chasing of the score means that you’re just going purely for score. That’s and that’s great. Essentially, the longer you can keep the ball on the play field. Doing something other than going down the drink or holding it, you’re scoring points. For some people that is key. Me personally, there’s a few elements of pinball that really, really excite me.
One, I like missions. I like mission based pinball. I like instead of just knocking down targets, and then letting them reset and knocking them down again, and then letting them reset, and walking, the lights along the dropout shoots, those are all that’s all fun. But what’s more fun is being able to actually purposefully launch a mission, and then perform the mission. And then set it up, rig it up and run another mission. I like mission based pinball. Most pinball machines, at least currently, probably in the last 10 to 15 years all have missions, even if they’re just multi ball Loctite missions. And that works for me too. I like a diverse play field. I like segregated areas of the play field, I like being able to work one area of a play field. One example is Black Knight 2000. very specifically, there’s a top level of the play field and a bottom level. And each one has its own particular missions or whatever it is that you need to get done. And, you know, keeping up in the top play field keeps it away from the scary drink. But all of the good points and all the best bonuses are on the bottom playfield where the biggest risk is the best design pinball machines have all of this. Plus they have what I call savvy. There’s a way that boards can be destructive, destructive, constructed their ways the boards can be constructed that is intuitive to fun. And then there’s other boards, you’ve played these, you know what I’m talking about. They’re pinball machines, that well, they’re loud and obnoxious and have lights, and there’s so much crap going on, you’re playing and going. This is just boring. I don’t like the way that I don’t like the layout of the table. You know, there’s no incentive for me to do double loops or sky loops or whatever it is that you call them. They’re pinball terms, by the way for all this stuff. And listening to the interview or talking to David Thiel revealed a bunch of this, they have tons of explanatory phrases for these areas of pinball. I have my own names for them. Unfortunately, I’m stuck in my ways. I do like toys and gadgets, as long as they’re kept realistic, and they actually offer some fun to the game. And we’re going to talk about some of the the toys and whatnot of these tables that are available. Currently outside of sourcers layer. There are three tab, tablet based versions of tables available, and they’re all three Marvel tables. There’s a Wolverine table, a Fantastic Four table and recently just came out of Thor table. So hopefully you like Marvel and hopefully like superhero tables because other than sourcers layer, that’s pretty much what you got currently going around. Now that’s not the same on the console’s right. So if you were playing pinball effects on the console’s you would have some of the same tables, but you would also have a greater variety. Now, the slots available on the main screen of Zen pinball, and I’m assuming that Alex is going to have some cute video and some screenshots for you on the rGr plus TV player, one of those groovy things you get if you’re watching the show on the website, instead of listening to it as a podcast, you’re going to get a chance to see some of the stuff that we do have video of the different tables. Every time a table comes out. I like to shoot some video and share with people because some tables rub people differently. Wolverine Fantastic Four are both very well done tables. They are realistic tables, they don’t tend to step outside the boundaries of possibility. And I really like that I like realistic tables. I my favorite tables come from developers that I could literally see walking into an arcade right now and seeing the Wolverine table or the Fantastic Four table. I don’t need them to be actual pinball tables though. I do I would love to see black knight 2000 come to a home platform. I don’t know why I haven’t seen it. Black Knights made it. But never Black Knight 2000. I would love to see black knight 2000 made into a home platform. But it’s okay to come up with new tables as long as they play by the rules. And Wolverine and Fantastic Four are both tables that give you the feeling of playing a real exact table. Four on the other hand,
well it has all the elements of a proper table, even from pulling the plunger back which isn’t a plunger but it’s slingshot like a catapult. From that point forward, you’re you’re feeling like this isn’t a real table. It’s a fantasy table. It’s an electronic video game pinball table. And unfortunately, that kind of ruins some of the fun for me, I like I don’t like to be pulled out of that realism of pinball. So we’re gonna cover each of the tables just a little bit in just a moment. I’m actually, alright, you caught me, I’ll come clean. One of the tables is actually missing, I had to rebuild, rebuild my transformer tablet, there was a new update. And if you decide to route your tablet, at least your transformer if you route it, and give yourself that sort of access. When a new update comes out, you have to roll the transformer back to stock, install the update and then reroute it. wash, rinse and repeat. So I’m rebuilding my transformer right now and I was missing this one table. But we’re going to look at each one of these tables just a little bit. Just to give you an idea what to expect. Again, the Sorcerer’s lair table is free, and they’ve already had discount bargains on some of the other tables, not Thor, that Wolverine and Fantastic Four have been on sale for a buck apiece. Now listen, those of you who’ve put massive amounts of cash in your favorite pinball tables, know that $1 is nothing. All right. Before we look at the table, though, I want to tell you about some of the things that the interface should gives you as part of the leaderboard system through open fame. The first tab tells you about the table that you currently have highlighted. Next up are your local high scores, leaderboards for your friends for this table, the challenge. In other words, who’s got the best score on the table gives him a pig gives you a picture of your opponent and it tells you how many more points you need from your last score to beat him. You also have your pro score which is a culmination of your points between the tables they give you the calculated through an algorithm they give you a pro score. So you see how you stack up to your friends. Currently, who has the best pro score challenge which isn’t me and then a team score with your friends they can calculate a score for each table based on you and your friends scores. So let’s I’m going to pull up the Sorcerer’s layered table. The case Alex wants to to pull up the fun along with this in the video window. sorceress table kind of gives you almost a little Harry Potter feel to it. There’s let’s see several different flippers, a spinner, a floor spinner sort of like whirlwind, a couple of nice gadgets a sorcerer looking guy and Gollum and number of different flippers, several ramps, a couple of steel ram ramps this giant tree that looks more like he’s showing you the business. And of course, all of these games come complete with a dot matrix display, which gives you in game video mode type things, the tables very, very clean. Now, again, because this table comes with it a lot of the extra multimedia stuff doesn’t I mean, there’s still speech and there’s still good music and sound effects in this table. But nothing is rich should I should say as the other tables because they’re large downloads. So let’s take a look at let me go back to some of the other tables real quick. Oh, they do. Let me talk a little bit about this. They do give you table guides, which are overviews that tell you each and everything about the table the different challenges to do on each table and how to start the different missions which I thought was really nice of them.
For example, let’s see let’s just go through I’ll do that I’ll do the the one that’s included. They give you some general overview shoot the magic cellar for different challenges on every visit gather as many enchanted obsidian stones as possible and unlock their power against the sorceress creation. So that’s sort of a general overview. Next one tells you about the cellar modes in order to gain entrance to the mystery of seller the three guardians stones need to be hit first. When the stairway emerges, the sellers exposed to the next stage of discovery. And they’re actually showing you the table on the left as well which is really cool. Drawing energy from the unknown round Mrs. Gates to the void. The unknown realm of the void the sorcerer wishes to trick our explorers by teleporting them once they enter one of the four gates to the void summons. The children need to avoid these gates and also seek a way to destroy them. Fortunately whisper the friendly ghost girl who is helping them on their ventures and assistant destroy all four gates to be granted and I’m sitting and this goes on and on bones. The sources layer is full of long forgotten creatures and cluding skeletons entirely chased the kids through the corridors run away from the skeletons by shooting the spinners and the bumpers as fast as you can, and you can win them sitting upon your escape, and so on and so on, and so on, and so on. And they show you close ups on the table too, so that you can see the different areas that they’re talking about. So that’s really neat. Let’s see, what else can I tell you about sorcerer’s lair? Most people actually like sourcers layer better than the Marvel tables. And I’m not exactly sure why because I like Wolverine and fantastic for more. But let me tell you something special though about the THD piece of Zen pinball THD is Tegra high definition. Tegra high definition means that essentially there is a incredibly capable, just as good as a console graphics card in these devices. I know what you’re thinking you’re thinking No, there’s no a tablet looks as good as my high def television. What Not, not true. These are full High Definition tables. And because it uses a superior graphics subsystem like Tegra there’s no hiccups. There’s no slowdowns. There’s no anything. It is like you are playing a high definition console. It is fantastic. You almost have to see it in person to believe that it looks that good. Let’s move on the other tables, Wolverine. And you bring this up. Wolverine has what I call more of an open play field type play most of the center of the table, and top and bottom of the center of the table are very open. This is a very ramp driven game. There’s plenty of toys, there’s plenty of little gizmos on the screen, there’s a whirlwind area that picks up the ball and spins it within you’ve got a whole bunch of characters on the game as well. This I guess is probably one of the benefits of being able to download a full a full new game like this instead of just the one that’s included. Lots more audio lots more medium. It’s a very beautiful game. And let me see here I just want to pan around the table. You are given many different views of the table. In fact, there are a total of eight different views one is more your top overview. Once more helicopter ones more behind the seat, one chases the ball more one gives you better look at the playfield as the ball goes through. So you can continue to sit here and pan through the views until you find exactly which one best suits your playstyle. Now because it’s high definition, even the extended pulled out views of the table are very detailed and clean. plenty to see and do with the Wolverine table. Now let’s go back and take another quick peek at some of the other tables. Fantastic for may be the best tables so far. Simply because it’s got it’s got a lot of steel, a lot of steel ramps which I like I like that look. And I like the feel I like watching the ball, travel a lot of steel girders. It’s fairly open in the middle of the playfield plenty of ramps, plenty of drop down targets a couple of toys to play with. And of course your standard shoots at the top. Dr Doom has an appearance on here as well thing of course and all the Fantastic Four. Now the only thing about Fantastic Four is they occasionally jump out of the realm of possible pinball by having some of the the missions make use of the toys in a slightly unrealistic way. Which is too bad because that kind of ruins some of the fun. But still, it’s a fantastic table and I recommend it to anybody.
Very good missions to the mission based on this one was pretty good as I remember. Going back though, and once again, we’re gonna look really quick at Thor. So I’m trying to navigate this at the same time. Now I like the Thor property. But you can tell when you look at this then it’s a very fanciful table. There’s there’s a lava mountain that’s actually hanging off the side of the table. There’s ice where the ball gets launched. There are a number of liquid pools that are unrealistic to the pinball genre. Of course I mentioned this the the catapult This is there’s a lot of unusual ways for the ball to disappear, you know up into the into the backboard and some other things. It’s It’s a neat table, but it’s not a real If you like if you don’t have a problem, I guess with you know, Video game, pinball, this is probably going to be your favorite table. If you’re like me, though, and you’re really, really into pure pinball. This is a little too fanciful of a table to be taken completely seriously. So once again, we’ve been talking about Zen pinball THD, the Tegra only version for the Android platform. There’s a couple phones out that’s that have Tegra already. And of course, there’s numerous tablets that have Tegra capabilities. This is really a showpiece. In addition to being a fantastic pinball game. It really leverages the hardware. It is something you’ll be, you won’t be ashamed to show this to anybody. I don’t care if they’re console gamers, if they’re iPad owners, whether they’ve got iPhones, whether they’ve got Android phones, if you want to really show off how clean this game is, you will not have a problem doing so. Now there is a couple of things we need to talk about. I know you’re thinking, you’re thinking, Wait a minute, Shane, this is a tablet. How do you hit the flippers because the other thing with pinball is the tactile medium. People who use flipper buttons to play pinball are not going to be thrilled using touch controls. Now the implement of the touch controls the best they could but let’s be honest, in the end, tapping on the screen is not the same effect the same tactile experience that it is if you are touching an actual button and arcade button. I’m going to tell you though, for those of you who are Android tablet gamers, I’ve started a little site called the green robot gamer, green robot gamer calm and it’s a wiki so you can go and contribute to it all you’d like. What I’ve done is I’ve come up with ways of using standard controllers, like Xbox controllers, Playstation controllers, we controllers, we controllers, these are the sort of things that I want to use when I’m playing video games. I don’t want to use a touchscreen I don’t want to use a virtual D pad. I don’t want to use virtual buttons, or anything else. I want to use real buttons and real D pads and real joysticks. Nicely enough Zen pinball already has most of its functionality
mapped to physical controls if you have them available. For example, if you have the Sony Xperia phone, you already have a D pad and four buttons, this game will work with that out of the box. If what you have is an Android tablet or an Android phone without physical buttons, what you do is you use this little program called USB slash Bluetooth joystick center. And you can then hook up a Bluetooth controller to the tablet. Those of you who’ve been following GameStop recently know that’s what they’re doing with their gaming tablets is providing you with a physical controller that log that links in through Bluetooth to the tablet. Now using this USB joy program, you can easily map your remote and Hey, your wiesmann sitting in the cabinet not getting any love. You got a dusty remote sitting on a charger that you haven’t been using. Drag that sucker off, go pay a couple bucks for this USB join program. And you can then hook this guy up and play all your favorite things, including main using the Wi Fi controller. That’s what I’ve done in order to make this game extremely playable. Now, people are enjoying it with touch controls as best they can. However, it’s a different game. As you know, being able to use a real physical, I use the remote on its side. And I use technically the up or the left D pad direction as well as button to to control my pinball and you’ll see that in one of the videos of the Thor table. I didn’t have that rigged up before for the other tables when I shot video, but for Thor I did. So it gives you an idea how you can really leverage and believe me, this is the best time you can play in both landscape and portrait. So you get to see more of the table lengthwise or height wise, depending on what you like. It’s a fantastic deal. Again, it’s free. I mean, there’s no reason not to if you’ve got to take her device, if you’ve got an iPad to which I believe that they’ve got a release for that. If you’ve got a console and you want to play the same similar pinball games get pinball effects, or pinball effects to fantastic stuff. I can’t recommend Zen pinball enough for anybody who’s a diehard pinball player who’s looking to take the experience back to their house. Well, that’s gonna wrap up our Zen pinball next up the Atari Greatest Hits package for Android. Well, let me tell you Something about this Atari heads. This is this is absolutely crazy. This package. First of all, they allow you to download the package. With a couple of free games, I think you can get Missile Command for free, and a couple of others. And it’s, I’ll tell you what they have a very nice interface is a beautiful display. And you have to do it in portrait mode, though on your tablet or on your phone. And this is out for iOS as well. But the version that I’m looking at, I’ll be covering for Android. So we have a number of different platforms here. This is very similar, okay, to all of the other Atari packages you’ve seen in the past. This time, though. We’ve got it for the mobile or the tablet devices. All right, so they offer 100 different games. This is Atari 2600 and arcade games. I know what a lot of you thinking just talking about the arcade games aren’t care about the 2600 games. So let me give you the rundown of arcade games. Asteroids asteroid Deluxe Battlezone Black Widow, which I can’t believe is in there. centipede Crystal Castles gravatar Liberator. lunar lander. Major havoc always my favorite millipede Missile Command Pong Red Baron, which is kind of cool. You never see that one for the red bear, space duel super breakout Tempest and warlords. Overall, a very solid little package of arcade games. Okay, some of them we’ve seen a million times right? Some of them you never really wanted to play like Crystal Castles. But then you’ve got some amazing titles like Red Baron and Black Widow. I mean, those things never come up in the arcade in the home packages. Now I could spend a zillion years telling you what’s in the Atari 2600 piece of it but you’re gonna see things like yars Revenge warlords video pinball I’m just gonna give you the highlights Tempest all the sword quite well to have the sword quest guess which one’s missing? Let’s see actually know that for this package. All the sword quests are here
at see superbreak out Street Racer steeplechase starship star Raiders space war slot machine and slot racers haven’t helped us skydiver returned to a haunted house. All the real sports are in here. I think football, baseball basketball etc. Radar LOD quadron outlaw always nice to have that one in there night driver Missile Command millipede if you’re watching the video, I’m hoping that that Alex will find a video of all of these things being scrolled through see and see if your favorite games in here. dodgem demons to diamonds Crystal Castles combat thing God circus Atari, Santa p Canyon bomber breakout, bowling battles Battlezone. Pretty much if Atari put out a title and it sold more than like 10 copies. It’s in here. Air sea battle adventure of course is in here. That’s the other one everyone wants to know. Now, here’s, it’s great. First of all, they give you a variety of different control options, which is unlike them to do that. Usually they do not give you that sort of flexibility with these packages. And you can turn on and off mute and you can turn up the volume of the music and the game and the effects and all that good stuff as you would hope. But there’s really nice arcade representation of each of each cabinet. Let’s go to major havoc, I’m going to select that it comes up you have a gallery and when you do select the gallery does hit the internet and it brings you up a few things. From this case, it gives you the sort of the what’s the word I’m looking for the brochure, the pamphlet they sent out, they give you that for major major havoc. Yes, nice. It’s not it’s not fantastic, but it’s nice. For controls on major havoc, they allow you to put this they give you a virtual roller which is kind of fun. And a couple of buttons of course is what you need. And then they’ll let you put it in whatever orientation you want. So you can put it in no landscape or portrait. So they really do give you let me give you just an example. They let you adjust the sensitivity to let me give you an example in major havoc. You’ve got portrait roller on the left, portrait roller on the right landscape roller on the left, overlaid landscape roller on the right overlaid. So you’ve got a bunch of different options depending on what hand you are and what you wear. You like to have the controller it’s it’s as well done as it’s going to get Okay. Here is the bad part. Now they’re promising multiplayer and leaderboards soon. Now we haven’t seen that yet. But they put out a few updates to this thing so far. So it’s not outside the realm of possibility. Oh, by the way, they do give you a nice little organizational piece as well. So you can not only look at like the recently played games, but the arcade games A to Z 2600, A to Z. And then all the 2600 ones are broken down into pieces action adventure, arcade, gambling, mind games, racing, how many gambling can there be? gambling consists of blackjack casino and slot machines? Right? Great. Anyway, so I was an early adopter. I was one of the first people I think that saw this, in fact, I think you’ll find that my comment on the title is one of the first if not the first, on the title on the Android Market. There’s two problems with this one is the payment system. Now you can download Atari Greatest Hits for free, they give you one or two games and then the rest of byens inside the game. The problem is, is
they sell it to you in minor packs. They sell it to you in chunks. And I wish I remembered exactly the the monetary conventions that they use. Once you buy, you can buy the whole package so you can unlock the entire thing for I can’t remember what it was that they wanted for it. I think it was a might have been eight or nine bucks to buy the entire 100 game pack. Unfortunately, their servers or whenever they needed to contact authorize the purchase. Didn’t get me hooked up, I paid and it says well your in game purchases will be available shortly. And it wasn’t it wasn’t and it wasn’t and it wasn’t and it wasn’t. And finally I wrote into the Atari support email and I said listen, it’s not working help us out. And of course, everyone’s one starring this app down the line. One star, one star, one star, one star one star won’t get it won’t give me my things. The worst part is, the way that they set up the purchases in the interface is slightly misleading. You think you’re buying them all. But you’re only buying one of the three packs for a buck. Right? I think I went through two or three different three packs, before I finally figured out how to buy all. So when you do get this game, if you’re going to try it out, make sure you look very closely before you do any buying and make sure you’re getting the entire enchilada and not just one or two or three different games that they’re selling in a package format. So be careful about that. The last thing that makes this game set less than usable is the fact that none of the controls inside the game are actually mapped to physical controls. Remember I mentioned earlier in the Zen pinball, Zen pinball understood that if there was a D pad available, if there was there were buttons available like on the experience of the Xperia phone, go ahead and map them to the controls. There is none of that going on with the Atari classic pack. And that is very, very unfortunate, because the package would actually be a decent deal with some great, unusual games, if we can map some damn physical controls to the thing, which we cannot. So that would be the one thing that I know it’s possible they’ll add it. You know enough people bitch and whine about it, they might add it. I got that done with Dragon’s Lair, which you’re gonna find out about next month, I cried and whined until I could play dragon slayer with my remote control. And they hooked me up, they did it and that release is going to be out by by the time you hear this, I’m sure it’ll be pushed out. But most of these developers on Android, and I’m sure on iOS, too, I don’t want to piss anybody off. I’m sure that the developers are really looking to expand this market. And they’re listening, most of the developers that I’ve written to, especially on the Android platform have been very helpful, very open to suggestion. And many of them have added a multitude of, of useful suggestions that I’ve put in forums. So you know, enough people talk about it will get a push through, I’m sure. It can’t be that hard. You know, a lot of games already have that setup. So that would be it for the greatest hits, I recommend you take a look at especially the free games, see how the interface looks. Maybe purchase the two or three games that you like on their own, you have to buy them in packs. But don’t forget, you know, at some point in time, you’re gonna say well crap, I just bought five packs and the whole game cost eight bucks. I should have just paid the eight bucks. So keep that in mind as you are looking through what you would like to pick up as part of this package. Otherwise it looks pretty good. The emulation is rock solid. I like that the controls Well you know, virtual controls don’t work. For me touchscreen controls are not my favorite thing to do unless the game is written specifically for them. I will tell you though, Missile Command plays pretty damn good by dragging your finger across the screen instead of the trackball. And then using the three buttons to launch from whatever station that actually works pretty good and missile commands the freebie so give it a try. Well, that’s gonna do it for the reviews. This month we touched on Zen pinball THD, and a Trey’s Greatest Hits next month, we’re going to be looking at Dragon’s Lair for the Android, as well as the AI Kade mini arcade cabaret style Bluetooth unit that you can take your tablet, and play your favorite games with real arcade control. So stick around for that next month.
Well, folks, that’s going to wrap it up for the 2011 broadcasting year. And of course, the December show, I did want to make sure that everybody knew to check out retro gaming radio plus, that is our 24 hours a day, seven day a week, classic retro gaming Radio shoutcast server, go to shoutcast comm type in retro gaming radio, and you can listen to the classic shows for free 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There are shoutcast streaming applications for Android iPhone, your PC, you can listen to it right on the website. So catch up on all your favorite classic episodes. And don’t forget to join us on the retro gaming radio website for the html5 retro gaming radio plus TV viewer that allows you to not only listen to the show that we pump in timely videos while you’re watching and listening to the show. And we prevent present you with these links that we talked about right here. The in screen browser will automatically take you to those you can bookmark them or pop them into new windows to look at later. It’s a really neat system. We’re constantly working to try to improve it. Again, it’s an html5 deal, so you’ll have to use the latest browser. Most of you already up on that anyway, but again next month Don’t forget we’ve got the dragonslayer Android review the AI Kade aren’t Bluetooth enabled arcade cabaret mini cabinets that you put your tablet into in play, Maine. We got tons of stuff coming for next year. It’s gonna be very, very busy. And of course part two of the David Thiel interview will be next month as well. This is Shane R. Monroe with retro gaming radio saying until next time, keep it Retro.