What’s your FAVORITE C64 game? We have a new contest! Part two of the fantastic David Thiel interview (make sure you catch part one first). We celebrate the year 1982 – the year Before The Big Crash(tm) – the first of our many “Anniversary” segments. Plus, we review the long awaited Dragon’s Lair for Android – did they get it right this time? We’ll tell you. Bits & Bytes round out the show.
Runtime: 03:37:43
Rant: 30th Anniversary of 1982
Review: Dragon’s Lair (Android)
Flashback: None
Transcript (AI Generated; May not be 100% accurate)
Hello, folks. Welcome to the January 2012 edition of retro gaming radio. I’m Shane R.. Monroe, your host, welcome to the program. Well, it’s finally 2012, the year of the end, right? 2012, the Mayan calendar ends, Planet X circles back and we’re going to be invaded whatever mythos you believe in for the 2012 prophecies, it’s not going to matter at all here at retro gaming radio, because we have a full year of incredible shows planned out for you, some of them already in, in production as we speak. I like to start off the new year, especially 2012, New Year with some of my own predictions for the future of gaming. I’ve done this a few times before, and a lot of people seem to like it. So I compiled a list of a few things that I would like to offer up as predictions for the coming New Year. First, there’s another intellectual property crackdown coming not in the form of SOPA, or any of this other stuff. But there’s another IP crackdown coming in. It’s all revolves around the mobile market. The tarries. The Act divisions, the Electronic Arts have a huge backlog of intellectual property that was designed for an older age Commodore 64, Amiga, and yes, right, so we have all of this old software with old IPS that they just couldn’t really get to fly. You know, they tried to make the spy hunters and the Galaga, destination earth and all this other stuff. But they have these very valuable IPS, that could be useful in a brand new marketplace. And that’s really what the mobile market, the tablets, the personal, I’ll call them personal electronic devices, cell phones, tablets, even dedicated, shall we say, grey ware type, handheld systems of someone of which we’re going to talk about this month, these sorts of things are all up and coming. And they all offer up a ripe opportunity for these older, established companies like Atari like Activision, like Electronic Arts, these guys are all primed and set and ready to start bringing this stuff out, you’re not going to get Call of Duty Modern Warfare three playing on the tablet very well, no matter how Tegra three it is, or whatever, because it’s simply not the right control scheme for it. You know, the we all know that controls are King, we’ve talked about this in past episodes, there are certain things that work very well on tablets or personal electronic devices. And there’s some things that just don’t. In reality, it tends to be the more simple items that work right, maybe a single four direction joystick you can get away with putting a touchpad on the screen, and people deal with it. But let’s take a look at something slightly more complicated. How about robotron robotron would be horrible using virtual controls. But there’s a huge arsenal of four way eight ways single button gains, an IP is out there, that I have a feeling the hammer is going to fall this year. And it’s all around and it’s all due to mobile market, personal electronic devices. Speaking of which, there will be no real gaming solutions for these personal electronic devices. But there will be tons of options. And we’ve already seen some of the Consumer Electronics Show this for 2012. We’ve seen devices let you stick your iPhone into like an Atari Lynx looking case, turning it sideways and have actual controls being played. We have things like the eye Cade, which gives you the ability to use a Bluetooth connection to your tablet or to your cell phone and use actual arcade controls on it. Of course, the problem is, is getting that sort of market
acceptance of that product and to get that sort of penetration where developers actually start wanting to use it. As always, anytime you produce a electronic gaming device that does not have an innate control system. That is what you want to use, then you’re going to have developers not using it. You can’t add something on later and expect that every third party developer will utilize the product. We saw that with the Nintendo Wii, the Balance Board actually got remarkable third party support, the you draw tablet that got added on. And there are tons of examples of other things like that in the classic gaming world as well. Anyway, so there’ll be tons of third party devices and options for controllers and pseudo solutions. They’re very desperate. There’s a desperation that people are starting to finally starting to realize that mobile devices, personal electronic devices, are not great game machines unless they are actually designed to be a game machine. So you’re seeing a little desperate grasp of the market. And you’ll see that throughout 2012, but there will be no good solution. Up until maybe next year, we’ll see something there, I predict almost a video game crash again. Now we’ve talked about this before I predicted a video game crash was going to happen. And as it turned out, I also said that it was averted. The last time we got lucky. However, we are seeing a different type of video game issue at this point in time. And the problem that we’re having isn’t that there’s too much product for the shelves anymore, right? Because that was the big deal. The market got flooded with cheap, uncontrolled software. Now, this emerging market, this very, very young mobile gaming market, portable electronic device market. They are very young. And they are already being flooded. In ex I mean, in ways that that, you know, the 2600 never saw, you know, 500,000 apps up on an App Store 300,000 500,000 700,000. Let’s even say 50% of them are games. I mean, what what, what platform in the past has had 250,000 games available. And as such, we’re having the same sort of problem with quality control. You know, even the beloved Apple isn’t controlling the quality of what gets put up there. And of course, Android is the last bastion of Open Season. Amazon is running their own app store under the the the Kindle Fire. But again, the problem is that there is no certification program, there is nothing some people are trying it Sony’s trying it with their experience program. But none of these things are really doing the job. They’re not solving the issue. And we’ve already got so much to wade through that the average user unless they’re willing to go out and research and go to gaming sites go to websites and have a vetting process, they have trouble actually finding quality titles. That’s a problem. And there’s going to be more of that problem in the coming year. The the PSP visa the next in the PSP line from Sony. I predicted it will be cracked in 2012. It’s already been unlocked, but it hasn’t really become useful yet. And it will do what psps do the best which will become a great portable emulation device. I predict this time around with the PSP vt, you’re going to be able to play PS, two and GameCube games, Dreamcast games all at full speed on the PSP Wii. So that is my prediction for that platform, you can forget about it’s going to be just forget about it as a commercial gaming endeavor, it’s going to become a great emulation device, and that’s when everyone will start picking it up. Also, in 2012, I do predict that the PC will return to a proper pillar of gaming, let’s be honest, we’ve had the PCs had a lot of competition. In the last 10 years, we’ve had console gaming, we’ve had portable gaming, dedicated gaming devices. And now we have these personal entertainment devices, sometimes doubling as cell phones or tablets. And that’s taking up a chunk of the pie. However, I do believe that the PC is going to see a resurgence. And the reason for that is very, very simple.
Part of its going to have to do with the sneaking in of html5. Now I’ve set it up before on one of my other shows that Chrome, the Google browser and Google themselves. I personally believe they’re secretly working at turning the PC into a gaming device again, and not using a digital locker crap or any sort of proprietary steam, download the client do all this crap. They’re sneaking in under the radar. They’re using their Chrome store, and html5. And all of their genius is over there and they’re creating, they’re secretly creating a game machine out of the Chrome browser. You’ll be able to use the Chrome browser as a window into emulation, all this, all this stuff is being played on mobile devices, the Angry Birds, the cut the rope, all of those things are play great in a browser. Right. So this is what I think Google’s secretly doing, that’s going to be the frontier, they’re going to take a big chunk out of the entertainment. And they’re going to use the PC to do it. Along with the fact that you’re starting to see while you’re continuing, I shouldn’t say to see top notch triple A titles such as Call of Duty Modern Warfare, three, and Skyrim. And all of these other huge titles, doing very, very well on the PC platform where before they had a modest following. I predict to that in the next generation of console gaming, console gaming and PC gaming will start to merge. We’re going to start seeing cross platform, playable playability, cross platform leaderboards, that sort of thing. I think that will be Microsoft’s next step, because they need the windows market to continue to thrive. And they’re going to be taking their Xbox and merging it in with Windows. So much, in fact, that if you’re willing to buy into the Microsoft platform, their phone, their tablet, their operating system in their console, it’s almost going to be a ubiquitous gaming scenario across the board, it’ll be interesting to see if they can pull it off. Because that’s a stunt that I don’t even think Microsoft can do. I think the approach that Google is secretly taking I have no proof of this. I think that’s the approach that’s going to win inevitably in the end. So those are my predictions for 2012. I thought it’d be nice to open up the show. with that. I do want to mention that retro gaming radio has primarily been a Shane R. Monroe production, right? I’ve had various assistants I’ve had co hosts. And I do believe that the show could use at least another voice. I know that in the past, I have brought in several guest speakers on a per show basis. And a lot of people didn’t really care for that approach. They didn’t like other people, other than me versus except for like interviews, right? They love everyone loves the interviews, but they wanted me to keep the show more pure. So my goal is going to be to bring a guest speaker in every few months to document something that I don’t have a rich history in, like MS DOS gaming, I don’t have a huge history in that spectrum. I don’t have a lot of specie information or knowledge, early gaming consoles, Nas, super NAS, I was still a PC or a computer guy back then. So I wasn’t really playing things on that platform. But they deserve to have representation here. So our first one should be up next month, Alex J. Lopez is going to come in with das based gaming, he’s going to do a segment for us, we’ll see how it goes, we’ll get your reactions. And if you like it, maybe we’ll do more. If you don’t like it, maybe we’ll do less. And we’ll see what sort of demands you guys have and what you guys would like to hear here on the show. So what do we have up for the show a little quick summary for him. For those of you wondering what’s going on this month, we’re gonna announce a brand new contest our first contest since returning back to retro gaming radio. It’s the I heart, Commodore 64, the 30 days 30 years later, promotion. We have a contest brand new contest, win prizes, we’re gonna go, we’re gonna read some reader mail, I have got a 30 year anniversary of the greatest era of gaming 1982, of course, probably the the banner year for gaming. And I’ve got a nice little editorial commentary to explain to you why. We are also forced having our rich bits and bytes. We have tons of stuff. And of course, you’ve been waiting patiently I might add for David deals part two of his interview, our interactive sound engineer guy, and a lot of you are dying for the pinball piece of the segment. And that’s going to be coming up this month. And we of course have a couple of small reviews for you. We’re going to take a look at Dragon’s Lair on the Android platform. And we’ve got a couple updates on the mighty Zen pinball x and a lot of people have written in and said that they really enjoyed getting some pinball coverage again. So I’ve got a couple little minor updates for you there. And I’m sure there’s gonna be a few more things sneak in by the time the show’s over. So stick around.
This month we’re featuring a brand new contest. The first one since retro gaming radio has been back on the air and our good friends over at cloanto the makers of Amiga forever and C 64. Forever are donating the prizes five copies of Commodore 64 forever see 64 forevers a fantastic package. We’ve talked about it on the show. It’s turnkey, easy legal, Commodore 64 emulation. It’s fantastic stuff. We’ve talked about it a million times. In fact, we covered it on the show. And it is absolutely great. You will love having access to this even if you’re already comfortable and use a Commodore 64 emulator c 64. Forever is a complete turnkey package. It uses their new RP nine or their retro platform library that allow you to take games and build them into this zip type file that contains screenshots and metadata. They’ve really done a top notch job with with their forever packages and most people know we’ve been using Amiga forever. Well, forever. So this month, we’re going to be starting a new contest I heart Commodore 6430 years later. This is the anniversary to 1982 is when the Commodore 64 was released. It’s 2012. We have 30 years later, Commodore 64 games abound. So here’s all you have to do. list your top five Commodore 64 games in an email. Tell us why you love them why you play them. And if you still play them, send the email over to bits and bytes at retro gaming radio.com. And we will take a look at all the text with all the entries. We’ll tally them all up, we’ll give you the results. Who which games were the favorite because you know there’s going to be duplicants You know, there’s going to be some some top notch games that come out of this list. And we’ll go over them myself and Alex J. Lopez, we will go through them we will pick the best five reasons and we will award five copies of Commodore 64 forever to the five lucky winners. Hey, they’re not golden tickets. But these what you have is better than golden tickets Commodore 64 forever package. And this again is courtesy of cloanto Amiga forever comm c 64 forever.com. Remember, we do offer what you could do get a discount if you’re looking to purchase the packages from cloanto. They are partners with us in that respect, they give a little, just a little discount little 10% off type deal for retro gaming radio listeners. And I’m sure Alex will have some links being populated in the html5 rGr plus TV player for those of you who are watching it online, and possibly even some video, maybe it’ll check some videos See 64 forever and action. Fantastic products. So I heard Commodore 6430 years later, email, five games, your top five Commodore 64 games, tell us why you love them why you played them why you still love them. And we will pick the best five. So please get those entries in now. And we will have the winners announced for the next show. This month. So reader mail comes from Brian Brian says hi, Shane. Just wanted to take the time to thank you and your partner for coming back out with the show. Though I listened to your cast in reverse order. I wanted to do it that way. So I can fully appreciate the first episode since 2008. I never forgot about retro gaming radio. And over the years I’ve been coming back every few to a half a year. Few months, I assume to half year to see if you wanted to come back. I’ve always had my suspicions you would because of your deep enthusiasm for the subject of retro gaming. I’m excited to see what the future will bring. You have any big interviews planned with anybody from the past. Also, I wanted to ask if the CDs you used to sell with your past archives. Do you still have any of those for sale anymore? Thanks again, Shane. Looking forward to the new future casts Brian. Well, thanks for a nice letter. Brian, we had several come in this month. Very happy to see that a lot of our old listeners are starting to find the show again. And I know we had quite a long hiatus and so we’re very happy that people are rediscovering the show.
First up, we do not have any particular interviews planned that we’re willing to discuss at this point in time. But rest assured that retrogaming radio is famous for its interviews and there will continue to be a review and interview element to the show in the future. We do still have CDs and DVDs we do not are not currently selling them on the website right now. But in the near very near future, the very near future, we’re going to go ahead and get those back up there and offer those archives once again for those who want the classic episodes. But in the meantime, if you want to hear the classic episodes, we have a 24 seven shoutcast stream going on right now called the retro gaming radio. Plus, all of the classic shows of retro gaming radio are there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, constantly being played, go to shoutcast comm type in retro gaming radio in the search. And you will get our show 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Get it on your cell phone, get it on your tablet, get it on your mobile devices. The show’s available from any shoutcast streaming client compliments of Alex J. Lopez he does all the work and all the programming for that. So drop him a line and tell him thank you for producing such a fantastic shoutcast for us. Just keep those letters coming. We read each and every one. Even if we don’t read them here on the air. We still read them and we love them keep them coming. For this month’s editorial commentary, I would like to take the opportunity to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the greatest era of gaming of all time. 1980 to 1982 is a significant RED LETTER date in the history of gaming, just like 1955 and Back to the Future was some weird cosmic date in the space time continuum. In the video game time continuum. 1982 represented the most amazing year of gaming ever. And it didn’t matter. If you were a console gamer, if you were a computer gamer, if you were an arcade gamer, this was the year that simply made gaming history. And if you look at it, what is gaming really bad? It’s about the games, right? So listen to this. I was I’ve been compiling this list, Alex J. Lopez, my producer started me off with this list. And I started to realize it’s not just what he sent me, there’s so much more. So I had to go through my personal my personal collection of arcade gaming history. What did I play? What are some of my favorite games of all time? Were they in 1982 when they came out, and it turned out that a large percentage of my favorite games of all time showed up in 1982. Let me give you a list of arcade games, these now these aren’t all of the arcade games that came out in 1982. But these are the ones that I feel have either some historical significance, like they’ve been remade a gajillion times and you could still go down and buy something that plays this exact game right now today. Or it had some personal history to me. And we’re going to talk about some of these, because this is just crazy, right? Listen to this list. First off, Dig Dug, right? A lot of people either loved or hated Dig Dug. I’ve never met anybody like that. That’s all right. They love Dig Dug or they hate Dig Dug. Me personally, when it came out, I played the crap out of it. It was fantastic. But it’s a it’s its significance in history is important because it’s still being made. I mean, you still can buy game packs that have Dig Dug on it. It’s a property that has lasted a long time. bag, man. I loved bag man that was like that. No one hardly anybody’s ever seen Batman in the arcade. Maybe you’ve played a home version like on the Commodore 64. It was actually at the East Wenatchee rec center where I worked. They had a bag man machine. And this was an insane game. Because it was, I guess, it was so hard. That it was fun. Right? It was so challenging. It was hard that so many elements of of gaming kind of wrapped up in there. They had sort of a Pac Man feel when you pick up a pick axe, you go after the guard, but then he’d come back. They had elevators they had mine cars. I don’t know. It was to me, it was an amazing game that got very little love. That’s a string game by the way. Pull position, of course burgertime burgertime has stood the test of time. That’s the burgertime. That’s been horrid everywhere, and it’s still being remade and rehashed and redone now. Donkey Kong Jr. Of course, not, of course, as great as the original Donkey Kong, but it definitely generated some love zaxxon probably, I’m not positive, but I’d say probably the first 3d perspective game that anybody would remember, there was like a robot. But how many people have actually seen an AI robot machine? zaxxon was everywhere. zaxxon got poured after report after report after report. And that was the first time I looked at that. And I was like, holy crap that’s like 3d. You know, you actually had to have 3d spatial skills to play zaxxon and a lot of people didn’t have it, which is why a lot of people didn’t like zaxxon they couldn’t see that three dimension. Who knows? Who knew that would come in to be the most popular type of gaming later? cubert of course,
tron.
Oh my god. This is funny because Tron is not on the list. The original list that I was looking at for 1982 on I think Wikipedia, or one of the Wikis that are out there about video gaming. And Tron wasn’t on there. How do you dismiss Tron? I mean, trans fantastic for a couple of different reasons, right? First of all, it used that I knew as soon as I start talking about I wasn’t going to remember was RC RCR graphics. It’s the ones that like Satan’s hollow, used Domino, the domino rally all of the games right in that era, from that particular developer. And of course, I don’t have any specific notes on that. But Tron was that that same type of glowing graphics, it was a little higher resolution. It looks fantastic. And the theme song, of course, it had the music to back at the arcade cabinets screamed at you when you came into the, into the room, the glowing neon, it was just fun. It was gorgeous, right? Despite the fact that most of the game and most of the elements of the game that are actually in the game weren’t really significant in the movie. Forget about that, that doesn’t matter. It’s still a great game. And Tron was a 1982 title, who Yan polyenes another one of those games that I absolutely love. I’ve had it on a million platforms. And it was also one of the weird games that a lot of people Haven’t seen there was actually at the East Wenatchee rec center when I worked there. And it’s like, you know, this is Wenatchee, which is no place, right? It’s the nowhere town on a nowhere map. And here it is these weird games like puyang, and bagman existed at this little arcade that I’ve worked at. It’s crazy. Popeye, right? Who does not love Popeye? Possibly. I’m not positive, but that’s one of the very rare third party licenses that Nintendo made. You know, because pop Nintendo doesn’t own Popeye that had to be. You know, I think that’s King feature syndicate that owns that license. But yet Nintendo built a game a very good game, a beautiful game, on a license. They didn’t know. It was very strange. Popeye is a great game. There might have been a conversion cab for Donkey Kong, too. Which of course was helpful in my, you know, poor little town where money was tight. So Popeye Star Trek strategic operations simulator. I loves me some Star Trek. Star Trek is a vector graphics game. They featured an overhead view radar type in one corner, a first person view in the bottom, and it featured photon torpedoes and warp drive. And it was one of those games that had incredible sound. It had samples of all had samples of Spock, and Scotty. And it was an etching game. Right. Up until that point, Star Trek had always been some sort of like a turn based game. We’ve all played that Star Trek game where you’re in a nine by nine galaxy and each quadrant has x number of star bases and Klingons right? We’ve played this stuff. We played Star Trek over and over again as a sim as a strategic simulation. But this was like an arcade simulator. How freaking cool is that? Right? This of course is the year for Williams games robotron, joust, Bubbles, Bubbles, another game No one’s ever played, but bubbles was at the East Wenatchee rec center. It’s totally crazy. And of course, the venerable senate star was also rounding up that lineup. Also a 98 to one of my favorite arcade games of all time, time pilot, time pilot was fantastic. It used like a 32 direction joystick or something like 16 or 32, something crazy like that. And that lets you control of course, a ship in the center of the screen. This is where you didn’t see a lot of these type of games. This the ship stayed in the center of the screen while everything moved around a Cadillac Bostonian only with instead of being for direction, it was like 32 directions. So you had very finite tight control of your bullets. And it was frantic and it’s a greed game to a lot of my favorite games of course are greed games, and time pilot is all about greed. That’s perfect. One of my last in the last arcade game that I’ve got on the list. This game to me has a lot with robotron has withstood the test of time. For me personally, the longest of any arcade game of all and that’s Mr. Do I still play Mr. Do I would say on the average you could say I play Mr. Do a couple times a month. Right? I’ll fire it up whenever I need something to do. And I don’t have any more TV to watch. I don’t have any new games on the on the 3ds to play or on the Android. I will fire up Mame on my tablet and I will throw down Mr. Xu it’s a game that I can continue to come back to over and over again. And Mr. Do is agreed game without question is the bet one of the best greed games on the planet? Maybe zookeeper is more of a greed game than Mr. Do but overall Mr. dues got to be one of the top greed games right up with robotron absolutely fantastic. The best part of Mr. Do is a casual player gets in and out of the game in a couple of minutes right you get dead A lot of people don’t know the higher level strategies of how to play Mr. Do but if you’re good at Mr. Do most arcade games doesn’t matter how good you are. You’re dead in five minutes. They want your quarters in you gone, and the next quarter and as soon as possible. Mister do much like Galaga if you’re good at it, and you knew how to play it, you can play Mr. Do for 20 or 30 minutes on a quarter, no problem. And then it gets to a point to where it becomes insane. Right You can play for like 30 minutes and then all of a sudden the game turns into Satan himself. And you’re lucky to live another two rounds. That much like other greed type games like Pac Man championship edition, that five minute the five minute version of Pac Man championship, where essentially, you’ve played the game so much that you’re now fine tuning each level to get the maximum points returned. That’s a crazy game. That’s a game that embeds itself into your psyche and Mr. Do is one of those Those types of games, even maybe more so than one of my other top favorites, which would be robotron. robotron is all about greed. But robotron has an element of a bigger element of randomness where you have strategies for finishing each level. But you don’t really have. You can’t go back and say, Okay, how can I perfect level seven? What could I have done differently? with Mr. Do? It’s still random enough to keep you on your toes. But there’s definitely a specific set of things you can accomplish on each level based on how many guys there are, how many apples there are, it’s formula. It’s, it’s a deeper game than what it looks like. Let’s put it that way. But listen, the arcade was not the only place that was enjoying unbelievable games in 1982.
The Atari 2600, which was at the time, still the champion. And some of the games that actually came out are the reasons why it was no longer the champion, and why video games in general took a nosedive. Not very long after 1982 of the turnout, think about your favorite 2600 games, right? Put them up just mentally start thinking about what would you call your favorite 2600 game? chances are it came out in 1982 It’s crazy. Listen to this list. River raid right from Activision, one of everybody’s favorite 2600 games. There it is. Maybe you remember the weird stigma stuff. The 2600 remember the first porn game that ever came out? Beat Amanita and custers Revenge. Both of those games 1982 Atari 2600 porn games. A lot of people when you ask them what their favorite era of video gaming is on the Atari 2600. They’ll say two names Activision and the magic. Both companies were dedicated to making the highest quality games. Activision, of course, had a handful of many so many titles. You don’t even you can’t even think straight. However, imagic also had some games everybody loved to play. There were fantastic cosmic Ark, Dragon fire, demon attack, right? These were all imagined games. And they came out in 1982. And these games set the bar for video gaming right along with Activision, even Atari themselves were making as good a games as Activision in a magic word. It’s funny, funny side stories. I know you guys like these things. And I’m sure I’ve mentioned it on retrogaming radio like a billion years ago. We have demon attack right demon attack is in all honesty, a rather unremarkable shooter your little ship at the bottom of the screen and demons appear flying above you and you shoot him there’s nothing all that exciting about that game I’m telling you. But what’s funny about that is is we were promised a Commodore 64 port now myself and my friend Troy to live Of course he’s been the subject of many many retro gaming radio shows. He and I had been watching magazines because that’s how you found out about new games back then. Right you found out by reading magazines right you get computes Gazette and it would show you ads for the games were coming out in the next month or two right and demons held their demons out we didn’t have a 2600 neither one of us we had we were computer guys so it’s all demon attack demon attack demon attack and apparently demon attack came and it went and we never found it. We never saw it. You know we lived in Wenatchee for crying out loud nobody had it. So it I think it was like maybe two years later, Troy and I finally dug up a cat was a pirated copy, dude, we couldn’t find the damn original. So we ended up finding a pirated copy of the game file and of course we played it for like two seconds that guy we’ve been waiting two years for this. absolutely crazy. But on the 2600 that was that was some fantastic gaming. Also in 1982. Yes, what other will say those for the last favorite commentary. pitfall pitfall in river Ray kind of walk hand in hand. They’re both high profile Activision games, of course. pitfalls, David Crane. I don’t remember who did reverberate it might have actually been David Crane. That would not surprise me in the least. Of course, my mind’s a little bit foggy on that one. Anyway, so we had pitfall Raiders of the Lost Ark. Right, Howard Scott Warshaw, right made the greatest game of all time for the Atari 2600 being yars Revenge, and he was also responsible for the worst game of all time, et the Extra Terrestrial, which by the way, yes, indeed, et the Extra Terrestrial came out in 1982, along with what is often referred to as the start of the downfall of video gaming, which was Pac Man, Pac Man on the 26th This poor guy had like six weeks to make it. And let’s be honest, the 2600 ain’t exactly a powerhouse.
And all in all, if you were to look back at Pac Man, the heart was in the right spot. You know, of course, the game doesn’t look exactly like the arcade game. Of course, it’s not gonna look like that. Even Miss Pac Man, which was more critically acclaimed, that came out later, even it didn’t really look like the arcade game. But there were some basic things that were missing, right? pac man didn’t turn when he moved up and down instead of right and left, he would turn in the arcade game, right? His mouth would be pointed up or his mouth will be pointed down. Never happened in the 2600 version of Pac Man. Right? We had a huge flickering problem and Pac Man, right. A lot of emulators actually fix that. So if you were to play Pac Man now on an emulator, you wouldn’t see that every single goes flickered like mad, which you would if you saw it on the original 2600. A lot of people Pac Man, by the way, for those of you not keeping score was the best selling 2600 game of all time. However, it also was the most returned video game of all time for the 2600. So while they sold like an unbelievable number back then, like 7 million copies, like 5 million of them are returned or something crazy like that, simply because it you know, it did not hold up Pac Man was. And this is a perfect example of people wanting an arcade translation, but they wanted it as perfect as possible. Right? The general public did not believe that Pac Man on the 2600 was a viable enough alternative to the arcade game. They took Space Invaders, but they didn’t take Pac Man. All interesting information. Also rounding up the 2600 games from 1982. Empire Strikes Back that was Parker Brothers. And let me tell you something, man. Everybody was playing that game. I don’t know what the sales numbers were on Empire Strikes Back. Everybody I know that had 2600 had Empire Strikes Back now just because it was a Star Wars licensed game. But it was actually good. I mean, for those of you who don’t remember, it was almost defender, like where the world that you were playing on was like 10 times longer than the screen you were looking at. You only got a viewport in like 1/10 of the level and you would fly the snow, the snow speeders to take down ad ads, the big giant walking robots from Empire Strikes Back those giant, you know, they look like big dogs or whatever, whatever. People call them back. And they had somebody always had big dogs or something. But anyway, so the whole game had you taking down ad ads. It was brilliant. It was so fast. It was so clean. It was brilliant. The ad ads walk was realistic. It was fantastic. Everybody was playing Empire Strikes Back 1982. And lastly, rounding out the great 2600 game list of 1982 haunted house, which even today has been remade, rewritten, rehashed and redone. It’s a game that has withstood the test of time. But what about the other consoles? What about those guys? Well, there were several things that were also very good on other consoles as well. Probably the most memorable one to me, would be on the Intellivision, which was the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game. Unfortunately, the license to that game was lost. So when you see it nowadays in emulation packages in various locations, you’ll notice that it’s not called Advanced Dungeons and Dragons anymore. They lost that license, but it’s the same game. Here’s a great story for him. The TV show out about at that point in time was a show called The greatest American hero now I’m a huge fan. Anybody who’s you know, followed me for years knows I’ve talked very fondly about the greatest American hero in one of the episodes and of course, I didn’t write this down. But you can find it easy enough. There’s, there’s a guy that’s really good at video games. And he’s playing a game in a cabinet at the arcade. It looks if I remember right, it’s a tempest cabinet, the game Tempest. It use it but it has a joystick and a fire button on the control panel because they zoom in on the control panel to show somebody playing. But on the actual screen, they are showing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons from the Intellivision as do funny. It’s worth looking just to see that piece of the episode. You know, people don’t spend a lot of time recreating video game sounds or making things accurate for video games and TV and movies. This one was definitely the worst one I’ve ever seen in terms of mix matching as much as much as possible.
Let’s move on to computer stuff though, right? Because let’s put it this way. I was a computer guy and the Commodore 64 came out in 1982 and along with it, several fantastic The game now some of these games came out for other computers to Atari 400 or 800, whichever was out at the time. Sinclair also released the ZX Spectrum in the UK back in, I think, April of 1982. That’s significant to a lot of my UK games. And some of these actually appeared on Atari second gaming console, the Atari 5200. That came out later in that year as well. But let’s go over some of the great things that came out for the Commodore 64 and for other computers to shoplifter right. We just saw remake of shoplifter come out for I believe, consoles for Xbox Live and for PlayStation Network. Right. So shoplifters alive and well. fantastic game that’s broderbund which by the way, broderbund put out some of the greatest stuff right? I think half this list comes from broderbund. David’s midnight magic fantastic pinball game. Unbelievable Physics for a Commodore 64 that one I know got ported to or was ported from the 64 from other platforms. For apocalypse. I still play for apocalypse today. insanely hard game, but insanely satisfying game. Minor tool 49 or 2049 or however you pronounce it. Minor 24 and uniter came out on pretty much every a bit platform possible. And I love that game. fantastic game Chutes and Ladders with toxic monsters you gotta love them. paratrooper was a game that came out not as a commercial entity. But there were ports of paratrooper on various platforms on the Commodore 64, I believe it was called paratrooper. On the apple, the apple two, which we had at school, right because Apple product dumped so many apples in the schools, everybody had him. It came out of sabotage. And when we would sneak into the computer Resource Center and we were playing Apple two video games, we weren’t supposed to probably on pirated discs to sabotage was one of our old time favorites. stellar seven came out for various platforms that was crazy on the Commodore 64. Essentially, it was Battlezone on steroids. Telling guard right? A lot of people including my first real, what I would consider an RPG was telling guard from Avalon Hill. And they later became SSI think strategic simulations incorporated or something. But telling guard was ours. I mean, when you when we talk about marathon gaming sessions, where you would literally play for 810 hours straight and you would take turns playing and all that stuff. telling God was one of those games. Fantastic. And I’ve got to give special props to a game that almost made me buy a second computer right now back this at this point in time, you’re talking about four or five 600 bucks for a basic home computer like the Commodore 64. So buying another computer when you had one already ludicrous, right? Nobody owned one of everything back then now like it is today. The ti 99 for a Texas Instruments computer. It was kinda like the trs 80. It almost even looked like a trs 80. But very few people have. And I had one friend that had one that’s that was kind of cool. The idea back in those days when I was a teen was you wanted different people to have different platforms. So you go to their house and play it. A lot of my friends were c 64 people but I did have an Atari person was in my in my network. I had a colleague, a vision friend. And I had one guy that had a ti 99 for a he moved. So I didn’t The only thing I ever got to look at on it was a game called parsec. And if you were to go in Google parsec you’ll find the game has a huge following so it wasn’t just me. parsec actually made me think maybe I need to have a ti 99 for a computer. It was just that great of a game that also came out in 1982. What else just to give you an idea 82 was a great year not just for gaming, but for other stuff too. And let me just give you a little bit of memory jolt, shall we shall we? In addition, of course to the Sinclair and the Commodore 64 and the 5200 being released in 1982. The little show known as starrcade, a video game game show came out at the very tail end of 1982
Epcot at Disney World opened in 1982. I remember I remember when Epcot opened. It’s it’s in my memory bank is something that was pertinent and huge when Epcot opened. It was huge. People rich people went to Epcot. Right. The rich people that I knew in my friends list went to Epcot. I finally got to go to Epcot in late 87 or early 88 as part of training in Orlando for the military. That was my, for those of you who’ve been in the military, you have an eight week boot camp, right? And on your sixth or seventh weekend, you got something called unsupervised. You had a supervised weekend down, and then an unsupervised weekend at where everyone had to go to the same place for the supervised one. And they had, you know, company commanders and stuff running all over the place. And then they had an unsupervised one, which is a little more laid back. And I believe that’s when I went to Epcot. I can’t remember what it was a long time ago. But Epcot was a huge thing in the early 80s. What about Michael Jackson’s Thriller? remember way back when when Michael Jackson was alive and black? Well, that was Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson of my day of 1982 when thriller came out. That was huge, right? The video came out of thriller, they played on MTV, like every hour on the hours and 2017 or 22 minute video with directed by john Landis. You just made American Werewolf in London. And here’s Michael Jackson wolfing out and freaking out was fantastic, right? That was a huge period piece of that 1982 timeframe. If you were in the arcade, and arcades typically had jukeboxes Michael Jackson’s Thriller was probably the album you were playing robotron to. And of course, the year round it out with the 2600 releasing at the Extra Terrestrial, which, by most standards, I mean, researchers all agree. Et on the 2600 began the fall of the video gaming era, which only a year year and a half later came tumbling to a crash. Et the Extra Terrestrial was such a horrific failure, that they were actually taking cards and they were burying them in landfills. That you can actually Google this. We’ve talked about this before. But these things were in such surplus. They made so many of them because he was so huge, that like Pac Man, they didn’t figure that that property could fail. Et was done by Howard Scott worshop. And I have an interview with him in the classic retro gaming radio collection where he talks all about et the Extra Terrestrial, what happened, why it was what it was. So if you have access to those, I would definitely recommend going back and listening to the archives. Because the Howard Scott Warshaw interviews are probably some of the best stuff that I’ve ever aired on the show. to round up this 30th anniversary Look, I wanted to share with you the cover 64 was the 80s to me. Right The Amiga came out later, I didn’t get an Amiga until like 1989, the majority of my 80s life my most important years, my impressionable years, high school, junior high school, middle school, whatever. I lived on my Commodore 64 810 hours a day, 12 hours a day, I played games on I programmed on it, I played music on it. I did everything with that unit. And so it’s a near and dear thing to my heart. And so I picked out my 15 greatest memories of the Commodore 64 It started off as 10. But I overshot. I think there might actually be more than 15 on here, but you have to put up with it. So maybe it’s like my 16 greatest memories of the Commodore 64. And these are in no particular order, by the way, but I’m going to share these with you some of these I have covered on previous shows. Some of them I have not, but we’ll try to keep it we’ll try to keep it shorter. The first memory of the converse 64, as most people will tell you is the smell.
I have never ever smelled anything quite like opening a Commodore 64 there’s a distinctive smell associated when you cracked open a Commodore 64 box and opened it. It was a combination of the styrofoam and the plastic manufacturing. It was something but believe me, you ask any Commodore 64 person and I guarantee you they will remember 30 years later, what the Commodore 64 smelled like when you opened it. So that’s my first greatest memory of the 64. Next up legacy of the ancients, right? I’ve covered this extensively on more than one show. As far as I’m concerned legacy of the ancients to me, was my first real experience outside of telling God right telling God was the first really the legacy of the ancients, to me, represents the epitome of what great role playing games should be like. There’s level building, there’s character building, there’s statistical building. There’s a story that is compelling, but not so intrusive, that it interferes with the game. The story concept was insane, right? Essentially, the concept revolved around this ancient race of people. They went from planet to planet and put up museums, for their kind when they visited each planet. They would have some place to go to learn about the natives and the culture to get weapons and money, that sort of thing. So they can Be tourists on these planets. So it was like, it was like a tourist center, right? But they were built around these museums. So you awaken on in this strange land and you find your way into this museum. And in this museum, you start learning about this land that you’re in, they start you off with some money in a money exhibit, you know, this is the currency of the realm here. Here’s $200 in currency, you know, here’s a weapons display. This is a, you know, a crude knife, but it’s effective. You’re willing, you can as a museum patron, you can borrow it for as long as you want. And the museum, the museum had a ticket caretaker, right? That would he’s the guy that handled your leveling process, right. So he would send you out on quest, he would communicate with you, and he would tell you various things that need to be done. And when you were ready to level up when things were good for you, and you completed quests and whatnot, there was there’s like this little there’s a phrase that gets used and it’s still kind of kind of gives me shivers a little bit.
You get a little note that pops up in this text box at the bottom that says the caretaker wants to see you. And anytime the caretaker wants to see you there’s some good stuff gonna happen usually it’s the level you up. And that increased all your stats and gave you more health. It made you more powerful Legacy The ancients to me was a brilliant and a lot of people say oh, well, it’s like Ultima and all that stuff. And listen, it was like ultimate on steroids. Back at that time. The Commodore 64 version was far and away the best version, the IBM version looked like, well, let’s say look like hammer crap. All right, the sound effects the flickering of the torches in the museum. It was an insane game. And even today, I wish somebody would port the engine and give us a new adventure using this platform because I loved it that much. Next up, said player simply and I’m not talking about city music. That’s something different. A lot of people confuse like high voltage sin collection and all these other things with the actual term Cid player. Sin player was made by Craig Chamberlain nice guy, by the way, I got ahold of him about 10 years ago, and he answered my email. I gave him a lot of praise and kisses, but a little bit simpler was a compute Gazette licensed program, you actually had to pay for this, even though it came from computers that magazine, and you would purchase the editor called said that said edit I think was the name of it. And using that you would make Cid player files, simply or music.si. d files would play on actual on an actual onscreen piano. And it was fantastic. When you wanted to show off how great your Commodore 64 is, you loaded up sin player and you played Sid music, you played Sid files. This went in line with quantum link. Quantum link was the early AOL. AOL actually was quantum link. A lot of the things that you see like people connection that were an AOL that stems from the original quantum link days. This was back when there was no real internet, right? So it’s not like le E’s de la let’s grounds. Yeah, well, there wasn’t anything else. All right, that was it. That was all there was. You had some local BBs as you could call. And then you had an online service. And that was it quantum like, it was cool as all visual and graphic and that games, you can play it all that kind of crap. I mean, this is a long time ago, this is 1982 83. Right? Way back when when Quantum Leap was start, I still haven’t disk quantum like a sign up, kid. So anyway, so back to Syd player. Quantum link was a file repository to so you had 10 but I’d say I’d say hundreds, I wouldn’t say 1000s you had hundreds of professional music composers, kicking out the most amazing said music ever on synth player. And you can get to that repository to I got a link that I’m going to send to you. If you’re on the rGr plus TV player. I’m going to send you guys a link. They’ll take you right to a huge collection of this quantum link, Cid player music and you can play that music excuse me with a native PC app, so you don’t have to actually run a Commodore 64 to do it. But it’s fun to see. My next favorite memory of the Commodore 64 was bypassing a protection dongle with a paperclip access software came out with the greatest games and the Commodore 64 they were responsible for beachhead beachhead, to raid a raid over Moscow. What was the other big game they did 10th frame bowling the best bowling game ever. And they were the first ones that I’ve ever even heard of. They came out with a hardware protection dongle. What this was is a little piece of plastic. This is how they combat in piracy. You took a little piece of plastic and you plug it into the tape import the cassette tape port on the back of the Commodore 64. You plug that in, and then the game would run. If it wasn’t in, you didn’t play. Right? Well, some of us who still had tape drives laying around. We also found out that what this dongle did was simulate pressing play on the cassette tape. So if you did it right, you can actually plug a cassette player in, you know, a Commodore 64 data set, you can plug that in, and at the right time, you can press play on the tape. If you did it too early, it wouldn’t work. You press play on the tape, it would bypass the protection. So you can play a pirated copy if you had a tape drive, which is totally bizarre. And then it’s like, oh, what does that actually do?
So I was reading the Commodore 64 technical manual, not the one that came with it. But that really cool programmers Reference Guide. And pressing play on tape really didn’t do anything but essentially bridged two pins on the tape port. pins one and two, I think it was. So I’m thinking Well, that’s all it really has to be right. All you have to do is bridge those two pins. And that’s probably what the dongle did. It had a little pin Bridger. And that was it. So I took a paperclip and clipped over the two pins to short them together. Then I was now able to play all have access to software that use the hardware protection dongle with a paperclip that still remains with me today. quantumly was also hosted my next thing, the digital Dan soundfiles. Digital Dan, good luck finding anything on these guys I looked at I looked at I looked at you if I didn’t know if I wasn’t 100% convinced, I would say the digital Dan was a figment of my imagination. Somebody created a hardware digitizer an audio digitizer a sound sampler called Digital Dan, obviously, the guy’s name was probably Dan, were on the street at the time was there were like five people that had one of these because he made them by hand. He never sold them. So if you actually own one of these things, you were basically God, what this would let you do get this, it would let you sample about 13 seconds of, of course, a bid but high quality audio, right? It used every single ounce of the Commodore 64 is memory, you actually had to shut the machine off or do a hard reset after you were done with it. Because it literally overrode everything that the Commodore 64 had in memory to make it work. And it would play it was either seven or 13. I don’t know why both of those numbers are in my head. But it would play high quality pieces of music. Now, obviously people digitized what was available at the time. Here are the ones that I remember getting. First of all these things were like 202 blocks, right? A full floppy disk. Now wasn’t a full floppy disk cuz I mean bigger than memory. There were huge numbers, the biggest files that I’d ever gotten off quantumly. And you’re talking about hours of paid time, right? When you downloaded files, you were on Pay time. So when you downloaded one of these music samples, it was literally like a two hour download, and you were paying you know what, 25 cents a minute, whatever for that. That ends up being a lot of money at the end of the month. These things were huge. For seven seconds of digital audio. Some of the songs that I did have that I did get were the final countdown from Europe. Laura brand again, self control. And there was one other one that just slipped out of my hand the second I started talking about it. There were like there were like four or five of them. that were out there that I remember seeing but I’m sure somebody posted more digital dance, something I would love to have more information on. It’s not on Wikipedia, you’re not going to find it anywhere. If you happen to remember something about it. I’d love to talk to you about it. Or if you especially if you had one I’d love to have more information about exactly what it was. Because there really isn’t any information about that anywhere on the internet, which is bizarre because everything else is documented. But that floppy disks right? Those people who have never been raised with floppy disks, you don’t really understand floppies five and a quarter inch floppy disks were just it’s it’s a piece of history. Right? You watch like wargames and he has like eight inch floppies that he puts in that Akai disk drive. Well, these were smaller versions of that right there were five and a quarter inches. Those of you were on old IBM days you probably remember those. Now those little three and a half inch discs that you can still buy today. These were full blown floppy disks when you said floppy, they were actually floppy you can wiggle them in your hand and they would bend and they were basically just a little piece of thin plastic with a magnetic coating inside of a protective black. housing, right, there’s a little tiny read window that the read write heads could read on the desk, and a hub in the middle that the mechanical, the mechanism would actually clamp down on the center of this ring, and spin the desk inside. So it’s like a phonograph record. Okay, so maybe not on phonograph record is like a CD. It’s like a CD, right? CD spin when they play. Same thing with a floppy disk, right? So
what’s funny is is floppy disks only came became in single and double sided, right? So you could write to one side of the desk or read, you know, games came on a floppy disk, and some games came on two floppy disks. Occasionally, you would get a game that came on a flipper, which would be game on one side, maybe a data disc on the backside, right? So you could actually take these out and flip them. Well, most floppy disks were certified for writing on one side only. In other words, the factories that made these things came out with a certification that said, okay, we Omni dominant this as high quality elephant memory, or whatever it was, right, we cut we, we think that this is high enough quality to get our stamp on it right? Well, the backside of the disk was coated in magnetic particles, too. So if you knew how to do it, you could use both sides of a single sided disk, saving yourself. However much it was, the floppy disks were back then a buck and a quarter piece. I’m like that. So they had, so they had this, essentially, there’s a little notch in the side of the disk. And if you ever see pictures of these things, you’ll see a little notch, that was a right protect notch. So if that notch was open, the heart the the floppy disk drive could write to it. If you put a piece of tape around it a write protect strip, they called it, then the disk couldn’t be written to anymore, the data was safe, there was no way that it can be written to the switch, right? memory cards have the same little slider things on them now where you can stop them from being written to, same thing. We found out that if you put a right protect hole on the other side of the disk, you could write to the backside to it was like one of the monumentous occasions and but you had to put the hole in the right spot, right so people use a hole punch. Some people use an exacto knife. Eventually, some smart person came up with a dedicated floppy disk puncher. It was like a hole puncher but it was perfectly sized in the line to make a perfectly square notched hole right on the side of the disk he needed it to be. And it worked every time. I remember when colored floppy disk came out, right? floppy disks were always black. I mean, right now nowadays, everything’s got colors, right? Everything’s color based. Back in the old days floppy disks were black. That was just the way it was just like tires or black, whatever. You saw a car driving around with white tires. You’d be you’d be impressed, right? They’d be like, well, that’s kind of different. Well, somebody actually came out with a colored floppy disk. I don’t know why they didn’t come out of that sooner. But the first floppy disk I ever saw that was colored was was a copying package called dismount disk maker. And chasing copy protection to a floppy disk was insane. We’ve talked about that on other shows. But that was another piece of the Commodore 64 memory. But floppy disks in general, are huge in my memory banks. ice pick, right, we talked about the ice pick ice pick was the first commercial hacking tool. And that actually snapshot and your entire memory of the Commodore 64. Right. So let’s say you had a game, most games had some sort of protection on the desk, right? You would load the game. And somewhere during the loader, it would check a particular spot on the desk or would try to validate something, maybe it had type in protection, right? You loaded up the game and it said Enter, Enter words seven of line 12 of paragraph two on page 237 of the manual. So if you didn’t have the manual, you couldn’t type in the word you couldn’t play the game. So piracy was thwarted right?
Well, here’s the thing. If you were past the protection check, if you could just snapshot the memory and reload that. There never be a worry about the protection check happening right. So let’s say you had I think hills far some of the dungeons and dragons games had a typing protection right before the game even started typing protection. So you would load the game, type in your protection right from a code wheel or from the manual. You hit enter, it would jump to the title screen. Bam, you flip the little switch on this icepick cartridge. At that point in time, it would actually copy the entire contents of memory into a floppy disk. And you can reload that and immediately start where you left off. Now this was like a 45 minute process, right? I mean, and that’s if it works. Not all it wouldn’t always work right? The developers got smart and they started figuring out ways of making it not work but I was like 45 minutes or something. Each time you tried to snapshot the memory but when worked it was flawless, right? So you borrow your friend’s copy of hills far, you brought the manual on the desk home, you loaded it up, you got password protection check. And as soon as the title string came up, flip the switch. 45 minutes later you had a copy of ILS var, that would boot straight up with no copy protection. If the game access the disk again later, you would just have a copy of the disk right? You didn’t matter if the copy protection wasn’t on the disk or not. You already might pass some protection check. So you’d have double sided flip or floppy right? On the front side would be the ice pick crack memory dump. And then when it was time to play the game, you’d flip the disk over and it would read the data files or whatever it needed. icepick was insane. It was the very first one of its kind it was duplicated a gajillion times after that. icepick was an amazing piece of technology. My next favorite memory ml x machine language editor. I don’t know why x k means editor, maybe emelie was copyrighted or something. computers that started putting binari machine language games in their magazine? Well, they had code that you would type in in these magazines, right? They would produce the only here’s a new game. caves of ice, right? They would actually print the program listings in basic in the back of these magazines. You plop the magazine up and typed in the code. That’s how I learned how to program in basic was fixing stupid magazine game does, you know game entries? Right? Well, they wanted to offer fast arcade action machine language games. Well, that really wasn’t typing in basic anymore. That was long series of binary numbers, right? Well, they came up with something called ml x. Normally, what you would do is you would write about date and data statements, right? You would say, you know, 10, you know, low, you know, for zero and 40 equals zero to 255. Read data, poke data into memory and repeat. Right? That’s how that’s how they originally did machine language will say well, that’s that’s too hard. I mean, people are Miss entering numbers, right? You have to enter 10,000 numbers, right, three digit numbers, like 10,000 of them? How the hell can you do that with any sort of accuracy, right? So they came up with MLS, so you would enter a string of like eight numbers into this editor. And then you would enter a check some number, if they didn’t match, they made you enter the line again. So essentially, it was a bulletproof way of letting consumers type in 10,000 frickin numbers. And when you were done, it would save the file, obviously, you know, an executable and boom, you now had a machine language, you know, high quality thing that actually ran the way it was supposed to. No accidental twitches or wrong variables typed in or whatever. It was a great tool. I spent so many hours with MLS, we did it as a tag team, I bet you guys did it to try would come over. And I would take I would start entering numbers and you just did this blindly. Right? You got good at there was no 10 key, by the way. So 10 key would have helped a lot. But you know, it’s like, you know, Troedsson, there’ll be going line for line 0362540121273 threes, you know, three, three or 033. Right. And then next line, next line. Next slide. Next slide. We worked hard to play games when I was a kid, let me put it that way. So MLS is a huge memory. The Vic modem, my very first modem 300 baud, which there’s no way that I can equate that to a broadband user, right. A broadband user. Okay, okay, dial up, right. A lot of people that are on broadband now to dial up. Well, you probably had 56k modems. Most I mean, I don’t think there was anything less towards the end of that era, right. 56 came on is maybe 28 eight modems. Yeah, that’s 28.8k.
This was 300. No. k. That’s how slow it was. Let me explain you just how this is. Remember, when you had dial up, okay. And somebody picked up the extension phone in your house. And it’d be like, you know, this group, this horrible, nasty screeching computer sound. And it all sounded like gibberish. You couldn’t hear anything. Right? I mean, all you heard was computers screaming at you. In 300 baud days. If somebody picked up the extension phone and you were connected, and you were typing, they could hear each keystroke going across the line. That’s how slow it was. And as a bonus, it wouldn’t even dial the damn phone for you. What the hell you actually had to do is okay, this is I swear this is God’s own truth. First of all, modems had two modes originate and answer and when you had a modem probably in the you know, right before the internet right before broadband came out. It would know based on whether you send a signal to tell it to dial or whether the phone was ringing, it knew whether it should be an answer or originate on ivig modem, there was a hard switch, you actually had to flip the switch, right? Crazy. Not only that, on old modems on Sorry, I say on newer modems, you plug it into the wall, and then you plug your phone into the modem and had a pass through right now, not on the Vic modem. Here’s what happened when you wanted to call a BBs or you know, call a friend or whatever, on your computer, you picked up your phone, you dialed the number. And as soon as the phone started ringing, you had to unplug the handset, you know the little curly wire that goes up to the handset, you had to quickly unplug that and get that plug into the Vic modem before the phone realize that it hung up. That was the internet in 1982. Now, actually, that’d be more like probably 8384. But you get the idea. If you have broadband, kiss somebody right now you call your internet service provider and say thank you. But I don’t have to actually take my phone apart to get on the internet. Oh, telephone, telephone telephone. Back in the old days in the early 80s, a guy working for the Texas phone company, a Texas phone company had some sort of a beef with a phone company. He worked there, they pissed him off, he left. Well, unfortunately, he took a lot of knowledge when he left knowledge about how phone boxes worked. When I say boxes, I’m talking about the types of tones and sounds used to control the phone system. These guys this guy, I’m sure he had friends. This guy came up with something called tele clone. It was the first and most popular as I recall, phone phreaking device. This guy took all of the knowledge he had in the phone company and stuffed it into this Commodore 64 program called Telecom. What could you do with telecom? telecom? Now here’s an interesting piece of information. At the time that commerce 64 was the only computer that could do three tones sound. Okay, so it requires get this when you push a button on your phone to dial and you hear that beep boop, boop, boop, boop, those sound effects require three voices to make. You can’t do it with two voices, and you can’t make it with one voice. It requires distinctive three tones, or three patterns to make each tone. So the Commodore 64 was absolutely perfect for this, it was able to recreate every single tone required by the phone company to do things as if you were an operator. So get this. So so you could actually use Telecom, this is how I used it. I will admit I was a I was an under age minor at the time. But you know, what’s the statute limitations on this? Essentially, here’s how it worked. You dialed an 800 number. And according to the documentation and whatnot, 800 numbers are basically ignored. Once the call is put through, right, as soon as the call goes through the people that own the 800 number.
Something about visibility, I’m a little foggy. This was like 30 friggin years ago, essentially what it was 800 numbers were perfect to call because the phone company didn’t watch them very close 800 numbers were, I think back then they paid a flat fee for 800 numbers, right. So if I was, you know, Exxon, I had an 801 800 number to call, I paid the phone company, five grand a month, or whatever. And I can have pretty much as many calls as I wanted. So when the 800 number was connected, the phone company just stopped trading tracing, and there was no is like an 800 number we don’t need to know. Right? Crazy, but true. Anyway, so you called an 800 number. And it didn’t matter if it was busy, or whether it rang forever, nobody had to be at the other end. As soon as the call click through, you can send a 2600 hertz tone into the mouthpiece of the phone. That was some sort of an operator tone. Like if you call the operator and say, Hey, I need you to place a call for me. Right, the operator uses tones to control the phone line. So the operator tone, the 2600 hertz tone would open the line. Now, if it was busy, or it was ringing, whenever also when blank is the phone line was empty. At that point in time, you could send a code that says I want to place a call. Here’s the number now send the call request. Next thing you know you’re talking to somebody in frickin Europe. You were talking to somebody in Spain you were talking to somebody across the United States, and nobody was being billed for the call. Name Other people already paid their dues. So they you know, they weren’t getting a bill, at the end of the month, you weren’t charging somebody’s credit card or hacking somebody’s account, you were doing what’s called Blue boxing, blue box was the tones that were required to make a phone call. So I did a little bit of that. There were also other boxes, silver boxes, red boxes that would troll other aspects of the phone lines. One box promised that you can send tones to pay phones. Now, payphones had already gone through a renovation where these bodies boxes didn’t work. But I had heard reports and it could be complete BS. But I had heard reports that people were successfully using these boxes in rural areas where the phone system had not been improved, yet big metropolitan areas, of course, they had them. But what would happen is a friend of yours would go to a phone booth. And they would call you out with you know, they put a quarter in or a dime, or whatever it was back then. And they’d call you, you would then take your phone hold up to the Commodore 64 speakers, and play a particular tone based on the tone, it would crap out a quarter a nickel or a dime, just like a refund and operator would give you right because back then you can hit zero from any phone booth, call the operator and say listen, you know, I just put a quarter in wouldn’t make the call, and she would issue you a 25 cent refund. Well, using silver box or red box, one of those two, you can actually send that sound effect to the phone that would trigger the phone to drop a quarter out. Now I never did that I didn’t engage in activity that would cost anybody money. But I figured, you know, like most criminals do. I figured that blue boxing was a victimless crime. Which kind of was right. I mean, I wasn’t gonna make those calls if I couldn’t get them for free anyway, much like piracy, right? A lot of people say the piracy cost money. Well, most people were pirating software when they bought it anyway. So anyway, I’ve told that story a million times, but I love talking about telephone and, and all this stuff. Now, you couldn’t get away with that for very long that only lasted like a year. And then all of the companies started getting some sort of electronic sound sensing USS boy, the memories are way back on that one. But they started getting in line detectors where they could detect that and I knew at least one guy like in Titusville, Florida, that I had some association with, essentially, they caught on and they let him sit there and rack up bills all month. They let him run that phone all month long. Then sent his parents a $5,000 bill. Needless to say they weren’t pleased with that, at least didn’t go to speaking of telecommunication software.
One of my fondest memories of the Commodore 64 was something called Sixth Sense. Not the movie. Of course, sixth sense was a terminal software. Maybe you use pro comm in the past, if you were a PC user, there were tons of telecommunications software for calling bulletin boards. Sixth Sense was the absolute best was written by a guy named Rick Sterling, which someday I hope to meet because this guy’s a genius. six cents was the greatest terminal software on the planet. Mostly, because not only was it fast, beautiful and elegant. It had macros, right? logging the BBs sucked, right? Because you log into the BBs usually you had to hit a Ctrl C to stop the BBs intro from streaming in. And then it would get you have to log in with a login name and a password. And then it would prompt you do you want to see your new messages? You want to look at this you want to so you had to answer like a whole bunch of stuff before you can actually use the damn thing. Well, six cents let you make macros. So the macros can determine if something came in and what to do if that happened. So like like filtering on your email, right? You know, when you saw the word BBs, like the first thing that would stream in at the top of the thing was Welcome to so and so BBs. That’s when you hit Ctrl C to break out of that video, but not video, but the intro screen and the bulletin board. So you hit Control C well you set up six cents to have a macro that said, when that BBs showed up, hit Ctrl C, and then be done. Next time BBs showed up don’t do that. So then it would then would pass it to the next macro. When the name username came up type in, you know, dark uni when the password comes up type in password. When you see the what if if you see the phrase new messages hit Y for yes. Or if you don’t wait for a prompt this prompt so you hit one. So six cents had the most amazing macro system I’ve ever seen in had something called Virtual buffering. I know this goes way back. We’re in an era where we have scroll bars. scroll bars didn’t exist back then folks when something went off the screen, it was gone. When something scrolled off the screen, it was gone folks. Well spro calm and a lot of other terminal software had something called a buffer, right? So it would have like an 8k buffer, where if something scrolled off you’re like, Oh crap, I really needed that. You could hit like Ctrl l or something like that, or Ctrl B and it would bring up a new window that would show you the buffer that had captured huge pages. In the button, six cents and something called the virtual buffer. So it had a it was a wraparound deal, right? So it had like an 8k buffer. But you can add, you can scroll up and down, just like a web page, right? if let’s say that you’re coming in scroll on the screen, you can hold down the Ctrl key or shift or something and hit the up arrow, and it would slide the screen back upwards. I know that sounds like nothing in 2012. But in 1983, or whatever. This was like, this was the greatest thing you’d ever seen. What I don’t have to go look at a buffering log, I can just scroll backwards. And it would it would just would roll over. Right. So it would fill up 8k, and then we’ll start destroying the oldest stuff that was in your buffer. So literally would just sit there and roll. You didn’t have to reset anything out like it was insane. Suffice to say that Rick Sterling made my day. Turns out Rick Sterling also made another one of my great memories, the entertainer, right, I’m not a Ragtime music fan, right. But I kind of like the song the entertainer, Rick Sterling created a version of the entertainer. In basic, it was a basic program that would actually make music it would play the entertainer in three voice harmonious, it was fantastic, right?
Well, somebody improved that, and came up with a way to make it even sound better. What they did is, I don’t even know the complexities of it. But it was still in basic, right? It wasn’t machine language, it was slow, you would load up this program was a program, you’d load it up, it wasn’t a Sid file or anything, you load it up, and you would run it and it was basically say, take a break, you got three and a half minutes come back and three and a half minutes. And it would sit there and it would you know would shove music into large arrays inside the computer. At the end of three and a half minutes, it would finally play it was the best version The entertain I’ve ever heard. It was fantastic. It was great. It was phenomenal. And then when it was over, you can play the game without having to redo it. Well, over time, people have come up with ways of avoiding having to do that right they read it into a Cid file, and they stash it is that now you don’t have to wait three and a half minutes. But it took me the better part of 10 years to find a copy of this. And I do have it I’m going to share it with you, my listeners, whether or not it’s playing in the background right now, maybe Alex will do that for you. It might be playing in the background right now. And you could pause the show and turn the volume up on the on the audio. I’ll provide links and stuff for it to where you can download it and play it yourself. I capture it as an mp3. And there’s a video that Alex is probably playing is available on YouTube, you can watch it. But the entertainer was huge and turned out that rich Sterling was the guy behind the original arrangement of that some other guy did the new arrangement and did some stuff and whatnot to it. But rich Sterling gets credit for it. It’s fantastic. The other greatest thing I remember about Commodore 64 most of my memories have to do with sound right? And Skate or Die from electronic guards. wasn’t the greatest game Not gonna lie to you. But skater die had one thing that was absolutely insane. The frickin title screen music. These guys managed to squeeze a fourth voice out of the Commodore 64. I don’t know how they did it. Even David Thiel, which you heard his interview, or you’ll you heard the first part of his interview, and I don’t record the show in order, folks. All right. You’re gonna hear more about David Thiel and some of his exploits here later in the show. Even David Thiel had heard about this, and he’s like, he’s like this mastermind of Commodore 64 sent, he was impressed. And he’s hard to impress. I sent him that intro. And I said, How about you ever heard of this? What’s the technology behind this? And he says, I don’t know how they pulled the fourth, the fourth voice off, but it’s, it’s amazing. That’s often it’s an amazing piece. Essentially, it’s a three voice music file, but they have a digitized guitar that plays riffs over the top. It’s fantastic. I’ve got a link for you. I don’t know how Alex is going to present it to you. But it’s it’s fantastic man. And there’s I’ve heard I’ve looked at all the other versions of skater die. None of them are quite as good as this intro. So I remember that. I just loved that game. Just listen to music and shut it off. Now it’s true strip loadrunner creating levels in Lode Runner that Troy and I’m boy, I’ll tell you what. Lode Runner was incredible. First of all, Troy ran three miles. I did not keep up as well. I wasn’t fat back then though. But Troy and I you know we didn’t have a car. We were like what, 14 or whatever. So we ran all the way across town to pay less to pay less. I don’t remember I know where the store was.
Suffice to say though, Troy ran to to the store, bought load runner on cartridge and ran back and I ran back with him for the next like 48 hours. That’s all we did was build levels for load room. Well, first of all, we played the crap out of it. And then we fired up the editor and he would make levels while I slept. Then when he then when I woke up, I would play his levels while he slept, build some levels for him to play, wash, rinse and repeat. That’s what I did as a kid. You wonder how it turned out this way? Right. Troy’s also the the main focal point of many of my Commodore 64 memories, he created a program called Inquisitor. There was really there was educational software out there, but it wasn’t really high quality educational software. Troy wanted a Test Generator, he wanted something that would create tests, like almost like a sort of electronic flashcard ish, but you had like multiple choice and all sorts of other cool stuff. He created this program and then cover 64 called Inquisitor. Both Troy and I use that for schoolwork for actual use. Funny story though, Troy and I’m going to cashmere High School. Later on in our high school career and I went to Wenatchee high school. I took a basic programming class, I believe, my junior year. And let me tell you something, I knew a lot more than anybody else in that class, including the instructor. So essentially, I ran the class, I knew more. This was these were Apple twos, which, you know, 6502 basic was pretty close. So we were supposed to do a final project for the basic class. My final project, I ported over Inquisitor, to the Apple two. And, you know, Troy did such a great job it was, it was even usable. I mean, usually when you write software, like 15 or 16 years old, it works maybe, but it ain’t the prettiest thing, it may not be the most usable thing. Troy created a truly brilliant piece of software. And even on the apple two, I could not perfectly recreate just how great it was. And what’s really sad is I don’t think in either version exists anywhere anymore. no internet, no real funding, we might have uploaded it to quantum link the quantum links dawn. Yeah, Inquisitor was huge, huge, huge memory. And then lastly, the Action Replay cartridge. Action Replay was the big brother to the ice pack. We talked about the iceberg earlier. One of the other things that most people would remember from the commerce 64 is something called fast load epics, who created great games at the time create a cartridge called the fast load cartridge. And it would speed up almost all disk operations on the Commodore 64. It was a great piece of hardware, Well, technically software, but in a hardware base. And it did its job very well. But it didn’t work for everything and tied up your cartridge port. Right. So if you want to do something else with your cartridge port, you couldn’t have fast load in there.
Actually replay combined fast loading a das shell which by the way, das commands on the Commodore 64 sucked, right anybody who remembers that? You know what I’m talking about. And included a das shell, a fast loader, the essentially the memory snapshotting of the ice pig. It allows you to rip music out of games and let you rip graphics out of games, the actual replay cartridge. It wasn’t just about entering Cheat Codes like it turned into later on for console’s the Action Replay was the frickin bee’s knees. When it came to utility cartridges. There’s almost nothing that thing didn’t do. And it was about it was pricey. It was like 60 bucks. But believe me, it did everything. And it had a button on it had two buttons and also added a hardware reset a lot of Commodore 64 is if you go looking at people’s personal commerce 64 is not stock footage, not stock photos. But if you go and you look on Google, and you look for you know my Commodore 64 and you go to images, you’ll see Commodore 60 fours, they had these little switches and buttons on the top of them. And a lot of them were put in by the owners, right? They didn’t come as part of the thing. They were little switches and momentary buttons that were put in by the owners to avoid having to shut the machine off. It was a hard reset it grounded something I don’t remember what the ground was, but it would let you do a almost power off of the Commodore 64 without actually flipping the switch. Because that switch wore out. You turn the commerce 64 on and off like 17 times a day. Eventually that switch is gonna wear out that’s why Mr. funny man Chris, that’s why I’ve got something like my my power commander unit because I had to turn convert 60 fours on and off 700 times a day. So instead of using a hardware switch on the side of the computer, I put it into this command center rack and flip the just the computer on and off. Mr. smart man. Anyway, so the actual replay cards which featured a hard reset in addition to the freeze button, so it was like the jack of all trades to own a Commodore 64 without an Action Replay cartridge is almost criminal Because that I mean, just forget the piracy part or forget the fact that you can steal software with it. But the ability to go in and, and have a machine language monitor where you can go in and, and give yourself infinite lives by searching for changes, delta changes in the code, right? So let’s say you had five lives, right? You’re playing the game, blah, blah, blah, you hit the freeze button on the cartridge. It says how many lives you have now we have five. Okay, good. Now I’m gonna put you back in the game. And as soon as you lose a life, hit the button again. So you go, you dumped you back into the game you play, you lose a live as soon as you see your number decrement from five to four, you push the button again, boom and picks up. Okay, let me see if I can find a change in memory for you. So dig through memory until it tries to find one. That makes sense. that matches that decrement it’s like oh, I think I found it. Would you like me to attempt to give you infinite lives on that value? And like 80% of the time the thing word, man, it was crazy. It was so crazy what you can do with that cartridge. It was by far the greatest thing and I’d never seen anything like it they tried to make one for the Amiga, but I don’t think I ever got my hands on it. Then they made Action Replay for consoles which was basically cheats right? alter the memory what during the games play so you can give yourself infinite lives or infinite health or whatever. But it was nothing at all like what Action Replay started off as well. I hope you enjoyed this is the longest editorial commentary I’ve ever made. Celebrating 30 years of unbelievable gaming, the computers and the hardware that gave it to us. I hope you enjoyed this stick around. We’ve got David Theo’s interview, we got a huge bits and bytes. We got reviews a dragon’s lair coming up from the Android stick around. It’s gonna be a fantastic show. This month is part two of the David Thiel interview. David Thiel is a classic game sound engineer. And he’s still working today working on stern pinball sounds and this guy is more than just a sound artist. He’s a an interactive engineer. He’s got fantastic stories, working with computers, console’s arcade cabinets, pinball machines, this guy’s touched and worked with an all fantastic interview. This is part two. If you missed part one last month, you might want to go check it out, because we’re going to jump right back into the interview already in progress. And that’s very easy to prove. We have a local place called castles and coasters. It’s like the last bastion of arcade here. And they literally have probably 40 pins, which is insane. And they’ve got them all like from the earlier ones. I mean, they don’t have Hercules or anything. But I mean, they’ve got ones that are you know, fair, I’m not electro mechanical, but maybe one generation above that. But but a lot of them are set for very, very quiet or no sound at all right. And it is it is a very debilitating experience to play pinball have no sound and
not as much fun.
I mean, it’s almost, it’s almost work then, which is weird that you know, you’re being entertained.
Yeah. Now, the audio channel is critically important. So for from the sound guys perspective, both the scale of the projects, and the task, and the importance of the task is very rewarding. And I thought with trepidation about taking some council game jobs. Because I mean, everything is different, right? I mean, I probably wouldn’t enter in a senior designer, though. I probably should.
I don’t know if you’ve based on what I know of you. I don’t I don’t think you would enjoy that work very much. It doesn’t sound like
it depends. I mean, if I’m given godlike powers to move the movements forward, I certainly could do it and would enjoy it. But the reality, the reality being what
it is, I
doubt that what happened. So yeah, you’re right. I probably there could be some frustration.
What about now, I’m sure you’ve explored all of this, but just off the top of my head to me these days, the last, the last, bastion of classic style gaming is moved to mobile devices or portable devices. And that seems like an area which I would think that you would be very interested in. Yeah, I
haven’t. You know,
I’ve been kept so busy with my pinball work, that I just haven’t explored anything else to be fine.
And if you make a living I mean, can you make a decent living? I mean, there’s what one pinball game a year that comes out. You have to augment your income with something else other than just the once a year pinball right,
Shane, let me inform you.
Oh, here we go. I’m in the wrong line of work. I think
I I’m finishing I’m working right now and pinball number four for 2011.
Really?
Yes. I started the year with Rolling Stone. Okay, second one was trying. Third one was transformers, which is is just about finished things out.
You can’t tell me about the fourth. I
can’t tell you about the fourth one.
Can you tell me is the Steve Ritchie game? Okay. I wasn’t sure if I could say that or not. Yeah, everybody
knows, I mean, in the pinball committee, and in fact, I’ve even Steve I’ve even seen Steve mentioned the project in on Facebook. So but I’m not, you know, that’s him. I’m not. I’m a contractor. I don’t want to mess up muddy the waters. So no, I’m not going to say what it is though. I think everybody knows.
But I’m assuming it is and see, I don’t know I’m gonna have to go freakin Google it, but I’m assuming that it is a high profile licensed scenario.
Well, they all are. I haven’t right. Yeah, this is pinball number 13. And every one of them spent a high private profile license.
Good point.
Okay, yeah, there’s, you know, you know, this is an outlier though this year you know, you’re right. But But I have done on average two and a half games since 2006. For the last half years.
Wow. I for some reason, I was seeing that it was a little bit slower going up but Stern’s like still the only pinball machine maker out there at this point, right.
Well, technically, they’re the only ones currently producing. There’s a new company that is working on a Wizard of Oz pinball.
Really?
Yeah, Jersey jack, just use jersey jack is a search term. And they have some of the Williams designers
and interest and
they’re, they’ve been working on this now for, you know,
well over a year.
So and it’s going to be spectacular. And it’s going to be it’s very expensive. I mean, it’s like 7500 bucks.
That’s crazy.
Now there’s a there’s cheaper deals, right? If you’re willing to the starting a company, right? so people could put some money down Sure. And get a deal and this and that. But that basically, that’s what it’s going to be but it’s going to be full of toys. And it’s a wide body, which people haven’t done in a while. And the people involved are top notch. And I’ve had a long time to work on it. so sure. Everybody’s very excited about that.
And then but you guys what a stern think about that is I mean that you can’t speak for stern. I understand. But
yeah, I can’t you know, I actually have it from my my point of view. I think it’s really good. You know, it may not be functional. Enjoy, but in some ways. It certainly pushes things forward for the player. Sure, sure. Because I mean, they’re competing now. I mean, they gamble, sir knows what’s going on. And there are things about the last few games that are just a little little bigger, a little more expensive, little, you know, something that put because jersey Jack’s pushing the envelope that stern is pushing the envelope, I think more than they would have.
Well, competition is good, you know, in any sense. And if even from even from a nice friendly competitive developer point of view, right, I mean, that’s gonna push starting to give you guys a little more cash maybe give you guys a little more liberty to try some new stuff.
Yeah,
yeah. Interesting to see how this works out. I you know, I, I’m I love the pinball work and I like pinball, I’m, I’m not much of a player. But I always have been around now, for five years. The machines come and go.
Jacob attached me on my bed.
Well, you wouldn’t, because they’re all they’re mostly white woods. They’re all undecorated slabs of maple with parts on them.
Gotcha. So you get you get like, not even prototypes, I would imagine you get whatever
prototype is typically the way it works. This is IPF a cast off of the original prototype. And then when they get a nicer one or a painted one and prover and gets that, then I get his cast offs.
So do you think the Ritchie project is is maybe you know this for a fact? Or maybe you can say do you think that the Ritchie project is a direct result of that jersey jag startup?
Ah,
certainly there are aspects of it. I think that that gave him the license to really pump it up. I mean, it’s pretty spectacular. I mean, I I know what it is, and I’ve seen it. And it’s gonna be it’s gonna be spectacular. And I don’t know if if they would have gone there. But see, the market is changing. The whole business model for pinball has has changed. You know, pinball, pinball used to be like movies, right? Yeah, movies come out to theaters. And then eight months later, they make VHS tapes and sell them to the home. Right. So pin balls used to be bought by operators and operated for eight months. And then when earnings dropped off, they that used machine would be sold to a collector. And that’s how it was forever. But little by little over the last 10 years, maybe it started even before Williams kick went out of the business. That percentage has changed and collectors now buy new inbox more frequently. Right. So that changes the market a lot and then you know in the middle of that we have this amazing Economic kerfuffle. So the discretionary money to buy new inbox pinball machines certainly is less available than it was, let’s say six years ago.
Sure. And just just I mean, I haven’t actually priced a brand new pinball in a while, I would say a Transformers pinball go for?
I don’t know, you know, it’s okay.
It’s,
it’s a complicated story, because now they make three different they made three or four different models of pro model, which is really what operators would operate. And then they make a limited edition, which is literally limited, they only make 250 or 400 of them. And then with transformers, then they made a Decepticon transformer model,
which is the limited
edition that’s painted all Decepticon colors, right in an Autobot model. And they did a limited edition of each of those. Wow. So and and the prices for limited editions are obviously more than this, obviously, for a collector, right? Who cares? That there’s a plaque on it that says this is 260 or 400.
Right?
They started this limited edition thing about five games ago. Well, they actually did it, even laundry even there was a limited edition, I think Elvis game, which was before I even started 2004 or five. So they’ve toyed with this model, but they’re really committed to it now. So you know, collector who wants something, who feel feel confident that thing will not drop in value, in fact, will raise the value because it’s limited. Right? And then the pros you know, it’s Europe was always people don’t realize that Europe has been for 30 years, the most consistent market for American pinball machines.
Really? I did not know that.
Well, when I started at Gottlieb back in the day, that was a very dark time for pinball no matter what company Valley Williams got laid, because of Space Invaders and Pac Man operators, just American operators just hardly bought anything balls at all.
Relative czar.
And there were at least five years, maybe eight years. That was that was true. And so you know, of course, all the companies got into video. And, and, and then, you know, pinball companies in the face of that tried to innovate their way out. So you get haunted house and you get these games with playfields underneath playfield but for now lenses or caveman with a you know, video screen mounted inside the pinball playfield or, or games, you know, hyper ball and all these, you know, they just went wild with innovation trying to recapture market share. And that really didn’t work. But eventually, in the late 80s and early 90s, when they finally figured out you know, we’ve had this microprocessor in these games for a long time, but we really haven’t been exploiting what we could do with it. Originally, it was just a replacement for all those relays and, and score rails and stuff. Sure, but you have the the wave of games really Larry to Mars, the man, you know, he’s, he’s the he’s the man, the coal man behind defender. And he’s also teamed up with some very talented pin designers. You know, the man who helps explain the power of having a processor in a pinball machine now all and so pinball starting in the late 80s. And going through to the mid 90s gets huge. And you get games that sell 20,000 units 30,000 it was just it was huge. But they figured out how to make them more entertaining, more better toys and much more programming. They get the dot display so you can put graphics up there and they get much better sound.
What’s your favorite era of pinball?
You know, I’m real happy with where it is now. Frankly. I have a 17 year gap. Okay. When I was at it, our company as contract work created the operating system for the days pinball machines. I got designed the sound board I created the sound software and sounds for like five games in that time. And I like that that was a lot of fun. And then I sat our company stopped doing that. Then I kind of turned my attention elsewhere. And so I have the 17 year gap between that and then when I resumed in 2006 so I missed really the golden age of pinball the Pat Lawler games the Steve Ritchie The Twilight Zone and all that stuff. But I have, you know, it was due diligence for me to go back and do the research and figure out what happened while I was gone. And I played those games, and I liked those games. And I understand why people like those games. But my own preference, I’m a shooter. I really like to shoot pinball, and the modern games, the ones that they’ve been making recently, I like those a lot. The older games with lots and lots of toys, and lots of crazy ramps and stuff, Williams has his deal with a just a little to hide the ball, you choose a thing, and the ball would disappear for a while would roll underneath the play field to go somewhere else and then pop out over here. Right? I was never a huge fan of that. You like
having the ball where you can see it.
Yeah, the modern modern pins, you know, the playfield, there’s less stuff. Part of that it’s economics. But it’s also a matter of design philosophy, you know, you have seven or eight or nine things to do at the top of the playfield mostly. And they’re ramps, and there’s toys, and there’s mechanisms and the jacks, and there’s all this stuff and across the floor left or right, there are like seven or eight things to do. And they require shooting, they require accuracy, accuracy, you know, to, to hit these things and do the different things. And plus you go around the orbits, you get a real nice phasmids nothing is satisfying to me is hitting a spinner setting that off going around the top and coming out the other side, picking that while at the right moment, and then doing it again or making another shot off that for a
combo I
I like that kind of stuff. I’m very bad at it. But
so just to kind of continue moving forward here because I know we’re running a little later than I promised. And you let me know too. If you need to leave at any particular time I can
listen to this forever. cut this up as necessary.
One of the things I found fascinating is I’m kind of I’m always interested in in rights, and IP and copyright and dealing with licensees and things like that. So I’ve talked to a lot of my interviews about that. Now, in your Data East work, I noticed on your presentation, that a lot of the early work was all inspired, you know, Secret Service and time machine. Were all inspired by some pop culture thing that was going on at the time, but you made it You made it clear that there really wasn’t a licensing thing going on at that point in time. But there was themes that went along with that was that financial in nature that we didn’t they didn’t want to spend the money to buy, you know, back to the future, whatever.
Yeah, yeah. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. It is a financial thing. But it’s also let’s call it a dance. Nobody had invented the dance yet. And the dances away way to go into a license or, and convince them that it’s mutually beneficial for them and you, for them to give you rights to their intellectual property for next to nothing because of cross marketing.
Okay, how does that work? I mean, give me a Give me an example. I mean, even if it’s a fake one, you know, just
how would that work? Well, okay, so you have a franchise? Let’s see, let’s pick a franchise that hasn’t been done. So you had that that Twilight vampire franchise, right?
Oh, geez. Okay.
I don’t like it, but
not fine using it. Perfect.
So you have all this stuff that’s associated with it, you have characters, you have activities, you have faces and voice and the music that goes with Twilight, you have all this stuff. And you go in, you make a pitch in their office, you say? Well, you know, there’s a whole bunch of, of interesting guys between 20 and 45, that you’re not reaching, right. And if you let us make a pinball game based on on Twilight, and it gets out there, you have this thing that so much better than a billboard or a sign or anything else, because it’ll last for years, right? People will play it. And then Twilight will be on their brain, and then they will go to Netflix or they will go somewhere and they’ll be interested in your thing, even if they hadn’t been before because they’re curious. I’m just gonna I’ve never done this, but I’m guessing that this is what they do. Right? Because they can’t. pinball just doesn’t make that much money to be able to go in with you know, $500,000, plop it down on the desk and say, give us the assets. That just doesn’t happen.
Well, and I was kind of, I was kind of amazed to hear I mean, just the whole ritual, just just the piece of getting voice actors, right. I mean, in your presentation, you said that you have to let the original actor say no first, what’s that about?
Well, there are contracts. There’s a standard contract, and the contracts gotten more elaborate and weirder since the strike was a strike.
Right. Right. was like four years ago, something like that. And a lot
of that was about derivative products, okay, of which, of course, a pinball machine is. And so actors rightfully so that they want a piece of bat. Sure. So it’s gotten even tougher. I mean, usually a studio, it used to be, let’s say, three years ago, or four years ago, a studio could just say, okay, anything that’s off the soundtrack of this movie, you can cut up in use. They don’t say that anymore. Now, though, really? Well, you can use this actor and this actor and this actor, because our contract with them included, we paid the money to include derivative products, but these people, we didn’t pay that to them, because we didn’t see the need. So you can’t use them.
Really? Yeah. So So indicate in the demo that you were talking about Pirates of the Caribbean and Johnny Depp. Right. Yeah. So. So the studio, you made the negotiations to use the IP. And of course, they have all this probably carte blanche decision making over that and all that other stuff. And then you got to the parts where you know, you’re doing Captain jack Sparrow. So you had to actually, somebody had to call Johnny Depp and say, do you want to do this?
Well, okay, Disney. Yes. Somebody talked to his agent. Right. Okay.
Yeah. You know, they
make they say, well, we want it we have this gig you could do, and you know, there isn’t that much money do you want to do? And he says no. Okay. Right. In the case of Disney, they’re very protective of their property. So they weren’t going to let you hire somebody to sound like Johnny Depp. Right. But fortunately, because of all the, you know, that Disney is very good about exploiting their intellectual property. They already had a guy who sounded like Captain jack. And in fact, I think he sounds almost more like Captain jack than Johnny Depp.
Where now that works, I can understand that.
I mean, he was great. He was really great. And so there was a recording session where it was done on the Disney property in a big studio, there was a Disney engineer, and there was Disney producers. And then there was the voice talent. That’s the other end of the phone. And they they directed the session from a pre approved script. I would, you know, do 20 lines. And then he would ask the recording engineer to play another example from the movie. So he could recharges there. It was very informative. I was early. That was my first game coming back. And I’m, I’m much more of a recording engineer and a director of audio sessions now than I was then.
I bet.
So I learned a lot from the the Disney session, which was run very professionally. But keep in mind, they ran the session. If he said the phrase three times, they were the ones who picked which reading I mean, they consulted me, but they say we like the second one. Is that okay with you? And I was only easy. I was not going to get the raw session. All I got were the ones that they approved. Well, that seems so.
I don’t know, I guess the term I’m looking for is wasteful. I mean,
well, it’s it’s controlling. I mean, they’re there to protect their IP. That’s crazy.
I mean, it seems crazy to me. I mean, I guess it’s just business as usual for you. But that that would make me mental to have to do.
What, what makes you mental? I don’t know if I should do that. I suppose this is true. I don’t think anybody will care. What made me what would make us crazy was that we wrote this script. We had a whole bunch of other characters in the game that were not in the movie, but they were in our pod. They were pirates in our in our pirate game. Right. Right. And, and we wanted to talk, you know, the custom space to things that refers to game elements that obviously are not in the movie. Sure. Well, the rules came down that we couldn’t have them was a captain jack. I guess we could have. Have them talk about some pinball stuff. Captain jack could not say anything that was anachronistic. He couldn’t talk about a pinball or multi ball or any game element.
What was the purpose? I mean, do they explain why they couldn’t do that? No, they don’t have to explain. No, of course not. But I mean,
but the reason why I mean, they didn’t want it to grow. Their character, you know, by having step out of character and talk about pinball.
But they do it on video games. I mean, there’s video games were kept.
Yeah, but video games step up to the table with, you know,
a lot more cash. Yeah. It’s back to money again. I got it.
Yeah. So but in any case, so we built a script of maybe 400 phrases, and send it off to Disney to their licensing group and they read it. And then it came back, you know, blue pencil with things that changed in this anatomy eliminated for some reason, like, we couldn’t say scallywag. Okay, you can’t say scaling lag. And reason, but you don’t want to spend the time doing it.
I’d love to know, but maybe another time.
Yeah. Take this offline. Why don’t you can’t say scalloway sorry. So great. So then we have these sessions. And in that time, we were also localizing these pinball games to five languages. So we had a session in German and Spanish and Italian in a way
that the pirates have to sound German to or do they have to sound like Captain jack saying German words you know, it
was only in English. But there were there were five other pirates that that spoke when you’re in a certain mode pirate a spoke and there was got it. You had different pirates, like one was that a feat gentleman pirate. And then we had a girl pirate. And then we had all kinds of Bluebeard type, pirate, and so on. And so yeah, it was really interesting to record, the German or the French version. Oh, we had a French pirate. So then we had to have a French reader read the pirate, but how does he make fun? I mean, you know, it’s kind of like, inspector clue. So, you know, how did the French feel about inspect your clue? So I guess that’s
right. It was weird. Like, that is bizarre.
So we had these enormous long recording sessions. So it’s, let’s call it five times 400. So we’ve recorded 2000 phrases. In the meantime, the script had wandered over to Disney creative.
Oh,
yeah, the writers and their writers. And they look at what we’ve written. They don’t like it.
It’s a pinball machine, you guys. They improved it.
And they send it back to us with the improvements. And basically what it was was, you know, you either record our improvements, or you don’t get these lines. So basically, I bought a, I don’t know, a third of the line that ended up on the floor, because we just didn’t have the resources or the time or anything else to go back and have five more recording sessions in five languages, or whatever I happen. So that’s your worst case. Now, to balance this out. I do want to say that was that Disney. And then when we did Tron, it was like, day and night. I had
really
asked, oh, it was it was glorious. I had access to more assets from the movie. And and I had act they sent me gigabytes of raw material that was used to create the sound effects for Tron. Not the sound effects. But the raw material you created by their sound effects designers. I mean, I just had how much stuff? It was, Disney was great. And I, you know, I came away from the first one kind of shell shocked. Boy, if all license owners are like this, this is gonna be hard. But then, you know, it’s a different company now.
Let’s see. Okay, turn that off. So yeah, the whole licenses, I call it the rules of engagement.
It’s probably the most, the best phrase to explain it.
And each facet has its own set of rules. And if you see my talk, I break it all down in that, right. Yeah, quite complicated, but it is, you know, within each domain, okay, got a new project. Are we going to get music? If we get music? Are we going to, you know, get the soundtrack actually, like we did on Indiana Jones. We actually had john Williams waving his stick at the London Symphony Orchestra. We had the piano Jones March. And that plays behind main play. You know, that’s it. Right? It’s fabulous. Of course, then I had to sound like john Williams in the London Symphony Orchestra for all other modes.
That whole segment of your of your presentation fascinated me. The fact that I mean, cuz you don’t no one thinks about this stuff. I mean, it’s like the stunt guy. You never think about the stunt guy. Yeah. And that’s really who you are. I mean, you’re and I am not I am not bud kissing at all. Your work sound. It didn’t sound exactly the same to me. I mean, you could have put the march up and then played your Market chase at the end, and I would have thought it came from the same place.
Well, thank you
that that’s the highest praise I can get for that, because it’s a hard thing to do. I learned a lot about orchestration I’m not I’m not that kind of musician and I, I am more like that kind of musician. Now that’s the other thing about the pinball stuff is the incredible diversity across licenses.
So what do I mean? What kind of insane pressure just because my lot of my listeners probably haven’t seen your presentation, which after you’re done listening to this show, of course, you can go listen to the presentation, but finish this first. You you the only thing that you guys actually got from from an audio perspective point of view was that March that mean, you know, recognize worth every penny, as you said, Oh, yeah, March. And then you had of course, that’s not the only piece of music in the game, you had to go and match that type of music and that sound with all the other pieces of music in the game.
I had to think I had to be able to write like john Williams, and write sit, we featured all four movies in that pinball, right, I know, Temple of Doom, Temple of Doom took place in Asia had an Indian thing going on. And you can see what john Williams did with that, you know how he took his materials and made them sound appropriate for an oriental Asian game. Then the third movie has a strong component that takes place in pre war Germany. So we have a lot of Nazis marching around. Right. And our main villain is Nazi. So you see,
to do with it when game went to Germany.
Oh, you know, you
gotta love it, you know, you know,
there’s going to be to buy in there somewhere. Right. So I mean, I took I learned, I had I bought you can buy the score. I had the the orchestral score from the john Williams March, right. And many things that I didn’t know about orchestration, the techniques of making an orchestra sound that way, by listening and reading the scoring. Oh my god. So that’s how you do one of those runs with a Piccolo to make it sound exciting? Well, and initially, we didn’t know whether we are going to get the recording, or what’s called performance rights
where now go and go into that just a little bit. I think my listeners would love to understand. Because you can you can actually buy the official song and play it right. I mean, what do they call
recording? Well, according that it’s I think it’s mechanical rights. Basically, you have the rights to take a recording, and, and digitize it and stick it in the game,
as you know, as is
as it is. And so in Tron, for instance, we licensed for tracks from the soundtrack album. And then that I cut that up and ends up being maybe six or seven modes in the game. And then for the remaining seven pieces of music. I wrote daft punk music. Right? I call it D punk. Okay, so that’s a type of right. And that’s obviously it’s typically more expensive. The other is, let’s say, like, Family Guy. We could not use any of the music from the show. We couldn’t take it from the show, digitize it, put it in the game, we could not do that. But we bought the rights to the tune the Family Guide theme. Right. Okay. And that’s like buying a piece of sheet music, which has the data, the data that that thing? Yeah. Now, then I performed. In fact, in family guy, I performed it five different ways. There’s a heroic version, there’s a version which is zydeco. Kind of like a perverse Polka. There’s one It sounds like a blanket things in the show, which is a studio orchestra, like from the Dick Van Dyke Show, that’s, that’s the model on which Family Guy music is based, is that show 1960s sitcom, when they still used those sort of big orchestra, they’re not quite an orchestra, right, like a dance band augmented with strings kind of thing. Right? And so I did one of those. And I and I used it like two other ways. So I had that theme, those chain those chords, those notes I that’s what I had a right to use. And then I performed it many I orchestrated it and arranged it and performed it many different ways. And that’s different, right? Typically, that’s less expensive.
So do the so the rights of the original tune right? But you took it an alternative Doesn’t that kind of change the, I don’t know, the boundaries of the license or anything like that?
Well, we had the license for me to read, perform the tune, digitize it and stick it in the game. Right? Right subject to approval, of course, right? So it had to go back to the license or they go, Okay, well, you didn’t like this too much, you can do this. You think
it’d be cheaper and easier for them to just say, here use you, we’ll give you the cutting, you know, cut and dry. And you can just use it I, I guess I don’t understand why it’s more expensive to do that, than to have to go through this whole approval process and back and forth. And you got to go get your own musician.
It’s, it’s a matter of what they own about the music. Right. Right. Okay. When I work for a cleanup company, and, and, or I work for, you know, Video game companies, typically the deal is they pay you money. And it’s worked for hire and everything that you produce, they own right. In for movies, and for television, that isn’t true, necessarily. The guy who wrote the Family Guy theme, retains ownership of the Family Guy theme. And when they recorded it on fox is nickel, that orchestra and stuff those recordings, they probably have a license deal where Fox can use those into perpetuity for the cartoon show. Right? They didn’t secure, it wasn’t work for hire, the fox doesn’t own those performances, they just have a license to use them for the cartoon shows.
Ah, okay,
so the person who produced those things, could take them, put them on a CD and sell them. Right, independent of Fox, maybe Fox gets a taste, but they own them for other purposes. Interesting.
Wow. How convoluted is it? No, it’s very amazing,
anything, you know, anything that can be written in a contract, any instrument that you know, you get lawyers involved, and you have all these rights. And the minute you start licensing things, I mean, I heard your your thing about the cloud and, and whether video, you don’t ever own a video game, even if you have the disk or you’ve purchased as a Limited License to use it for yourself, theoretically, you can sell it or rent it or do anything with it, you can just play it on your council until your council breaks. So it’s the same kind of deal for music. And it gets way complicated, because, you know, musical rights have existed since there had been recordings. So for 100 years, there’s been some form of musical rights, then you add radio to that and you start broadcasting it for free. Well, maybe not maybe an organization like ASCAP or BMI comes in and tries to get the people who are broadcasting it to take some of the money they’re getting from commercials and get that somehow get it back to the artist. Probably Wow.
You know, it’s amazing that anything actually gets done at the end of the day. Oh, yeah.
It’s not like software patents. Right. Right. software patents make it very, very difficult to write anything new. Because somewhere, somebody’s got a patent on a technique that you used, that you would never think that could be possibly protected. Right? And look how Apple’s got after.
Oh, what a nightmare. I mean, that’s just it. Just, you know, I understand that. And that’s, that’s a discussion for a whole nother show, I guess. Well, yeah, copyright
law in America has become increasingly crazy and draconian. And this is in part because of Mickey Mouse.
What Wait, I mean, maybe I missed something specific about Mickey Mouse.
Well, okay, Mickey Mouse, given the way the copyright laws were that this is, what, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, right? The way the copyright law was, Disney was going to lose control, he was going to slip into the public domain, because the amount of time you could protect the thing was was 75 years or something, whatever it was, yeah. So Disney, Disney and maybe other copyright holders petitioned Congress and they rewrote the copyright laws. So that extended the amount of time that okay,
I didn’t know Disney was behind that, but Okay, I understand what I remember that incident.
Yeah, right. So now, you know, copyright if it was have, it tends to squelch certain kinds of expression because they can own their things forever. And that was never what was the intention with copyright law. Like patent laws, it’s meant to provide a financial motivations to the people who create IP intellectual property, but also to, you know, allow things to combine and make new stuff without draconian licensing things. Okay? bypass all these issues. Now, all these issues are Remain right to the question of you know, when you deal with license sores and and the only thing I can ever say when people ask me these questions, you know, what’s it like? Is it well, it’s different every time the rules of engagement.
I
I’ve tried to train my client now to I mean, I need to know this as soon as possible.
Well, yeah, I mean, it could totally change what you have to do.
Right So, so for Tron I had to write six or seven songs obviously for the Rolling Stone game I wrote one, you know, but it was all Rolling Stones music, right? Transformers I wrote every piece of music. And wow, more interestingly, because of the design this sort of bi modal thing where we have you’re either a Decepticon or you’re an Autobot. There are almost 50% more game modes in this pinball game.
Wow. When you
when you play as a Decepticon there are Autobot game modes you will never see. Right? And vice versa. Wow. So and so every aspect of dressing up a game mode right and communicating that you’re in this game mode. I think obviously in the Transformers it’s all based on. I am iron sigh I am Starscream. I am you know, whichever automatic character or Decepticon character. They each have their own music. They each have their own fanfares and stingers for rewards when you score jackpots and do good things. There. Yeah, so this game, besides being completely original, I had to create 50% more assets for it.
Wow. Well, I mean, it means gonna at least be interesting. I mean, if you were just kind of re cutting up the same stuff and doing it over and over again, I could see that being less than desirable. And I have
always resisted that. It’s just they I mean, there was some pressure when I was at Gottlieb, you know, to create a library of sounds and just keep reusing them.
Oh, yeah.
I never did that.
Well, you can tell I mean, crow. I mean, crews got some of the most I mean, I’m a huge curl fan. Okay. Oh, good. I like the one of the last. I think I’m the only person on the planet that loves it. I actually have the marquee from the arcade game in my cube at work. I’ll just send you a picture just because it’s like what’s cruel? I mean, everybody walks by what’s cool, what’s cool.
Let me tell you,
not this last arcade Northwest Game Show. But the previous one. Prior to that show in June, I owned the reactor. Right. In my, in my shop, I had a reactor and was collecting dust and it was over in the corner. I just wasn’t doing anything with it. So I finally decided to sell it to a collector who was very happy to have it. I was happy for space back. Because I mean, I can play on bag if I want to. Sure.
So then when I went to that show in June,
okay. It’s not for me.
When I went to the show in June,
there were in the video game portion of the show. There were the first four Gottlieb games that I had worked on it in order. Whoa. So starting, there was a reactor. And then there was a Schubert. And then there was some bad planets. And then there was a crawl. It was the coolest thing ever. Because I know it’s been years since I’ve seen some of these and I hadn’t played crow probably since I left Gottlieb. And I left that leave in like 83. So I got a chance to play them all again.
That’s so cool. You collectors and weird like that. You know, one of my friends here locally, Brian King. He’s huge arcade collector. And he’s got he’s a Williams nut. And he’s, I mean, he’s, I think that’s how he’s got him. I think he’s got them all in his little arcade in, you know, order by year alphabetical order or something like that. And it’s amazing, but Chrome, you know, Okay, first of all, let’s be honest. Was the movie great? Yeah. Maybe not.
Licensed, licensed project.
What’s it Really?
Yeah. See? Got it was owned by Columbia Pictures.
Oh, of course. Yeah, that must have been a lot easier.
Well, you know, the degree to which you can adapt movie assets to a to a video game, you know, with the horsepower of the gotlib system.
Right. You know, it
really the guys that did it did a fan I think a fantastic job. I completely agree. Matt householder and Chris greubel. Very, very talented guys. That was the only project I worked on there. Were there were two programmers who basically shared things.
No kidding. Yeah, I was. I I always thought that was like, I thought that was a very interesting game in terms of I mean, just in terms of the sound, of course, like I said, for me, a lot of people don’t buy sound as being a huge portion. I mean, obviously you do. And a few of us do appreciate that level of commitment with interactive audio engineering, I’ve got a whole new, I have a whole new catchphrase in my vocabulary. Now. Your title, crawler just immediately just pulled me in with the sound and the audio and the transition audio and everything in there was just way too cool.
I can’t tell you how many days I spent, it was several days that I spent trying to come up with the algorithm program that when it moved, the speaker made it sound like the foot sloshing around in a swamp.
It’s a shame you don’t have like recordings or something of this, I’d love to see, I’d love to see what didn’t make it into the game. You know what I mean? Oh,
you’re right. You know, it’s, it’s when you’re creating a lot with nothing, really, that 65 or two wasn’t even running at one megahertz. It was running it like 896,000. Yeah. Right. Because it was cheaper to put a color burst crystal like from a TV set onto the board and divide that down to something lower than one megahertz. So it was the worst case in some ways. I mean, I liked the processor. But that was very, very hard. So you couldn’t use any traditional methods of synthesis, because the algorithms that ran them all ran way too slow. So you had to think about it very differently. And so you wrote, basically what I did is I just wrote a lot of algorithms, and three quarters of the men on the ground, they never got used, because or I would discover something right? I’m going over here, my goal is over here. And I discover something, oh, I can use that in this other game, you know, it was not as deterministic. There’s a whole lot of serendipity. Yeah. And that actually refers to something the guy who ran the game division was a really interesting guy named Ron Waxman. He’s a huge guy. And he’s just sitting in his office, but he was very wise, right? And Ron said, you know, nobody knows. What’s fun. Nobody knows how to make these games. Really, almost nobody knows. This is very early on. Right? And he’s right. It and so video game design is really a random walk. So the key from a management standpoint is to have as many people walking as randomly as possible.
Right.
And that’s the way Game Dev was done at Gottlieb. They had a guy Well, I mentioned Jim Weiss to design soundboard. He went on to design the devastation. So because our processor was the same thing as in the PC, yeah, it was the 8088. Right, he took, he built a board system, he built an adapter board, which extended the processor inside the PC out into the gotlib game system. So the godly game system look like a peripheral to the PC. This allows you to use the PC as its depth station. Wow. Which takes you down from you know, about $20,000 per developer to at that time, about 20 $500 per developer. Wow. So it enabled us to have a lot more people walking more randomly.
Sure.
That’s Jim Weiss, his determination and genius to have figured that out. So all the games that after the first like, yeah, I’m trying to think of Cuba was developed on the blue box or the PC. I’m not sure probably it was kind of halfway. But having the PC was a much better environment development environment than the Intel blue box anyhow. Right. It’d be we had hard disks by that time. You know, a five Meg hard disk. That’s him. That’s happened.
I bet.
I got a 10 gig hard a 10 vaid hard drive. I was like quivering with excitement. That was wonderful.
How my first Amiga drive was 20 Meg’s I think and that was like being led out of prison. So absolutely
off. You’ll always remember as it as you’ll always remember your first hard drive.
It’s totally true or your second disk drive the day you got your second drive, especially if you had an Amiga, because, you know, that was
when they’re so small, like 130k, right? Yeah. You can’t even do it. Just copy and you can’t even do a backup.
No kind of memory. You have to do it in pieces or something tough to be old, but
Well, it’s my second time. Which is not available. I did a little thing which I couldn’t compared and contrasted the enterprise of working on these things with the devastation I had at Gottlieb versus the devastation I have now. Right. And when you run the numbers, it’s like insane.
I bet.
The Apple two in today’s dollars is about a $10,000 thing, right at my computer, which I built. If it’s if it’s 12 $100, I’d be very surprised, right? And it’s got a gig of memory in my apple 240 8k.
And so you do the comparison. And the thing. The reason this is interesting is for people to understand that if you work in this field, imagine if you worked on cars. In 1980, you had a car, which did what it did. And now you work on cars. And it’s been on the same Moore’s Law improvement curve as solid state technology. Sure, you’d be working on a car that would get like 250,000 miles a gallon, right? would be traveling near lightspeed would be free. Yeah, right. And so anybody who works in this field has one of the things they have to be very robust in the face of just relenting improvement. Yeah, in ways that change everything about the business models, and what you’ve learned, you know, the fact that I can probe Graham the 6502, like nobody’s business, that and a nickel would not even get me in the door at Starbucks,
right? Yeah, it’s, it’s amazing. And, and, and those early guys, you know, the early 80s, with Activision, and Atari. These guys were rock stars. And you know, you think about it. I kind of get it now, in this day and age, knowing what I know, and been through everything I’ve been through. These guys actually earned Rockstar status to me. Absolutely. I mean, these guys were like, like, the guy that built that dead board in the gym was just last night wise. Why is it? Come on? Nobody does that sort of thing anymore? Right? Yeah. No,
it’s pretty. It’s pretty amazing. What, what the really good people did. And then, okay, you had an in your notes, you wanted to know, what was it like to work on the atom?
Yeah, I totally dropped the Forgot my atom question. What’s not on this particular list that I have? It’s on a different one. Well, I’ve laughing right, have you because
here’s it, here’s a deal, right? Where you invest a lot of coming up on a new piece of technology. Sure, the atom was more like the colico vision than not, but clearly, it was much more than that. Right? And this is another case where their storage decision, you know, just completely sunk on
your watch tape. Right?
It was it was intelligent tape.
And
so you put a tape in and then they had a tape recorder that was under computer control that attempted to random? Well, what? How how random could tape be? Right? Right.
But so they tried to date so you’re saying and I never owned an atom. I actually had one for a brief time I had it for a raffle something I was doing with regards to the show I gave it away. And so I never actually got to use once you’re saying that the tape drive they used in a random access manner. Yeah. That’s crazy. Yeah.
I mean, you know, okay, for the patient.
Keep in mind, the device was amazingly cheap for what it was.
Yeah, I can’t
remember it had a daisy wheel, typewriter.
Harling, that also doubles the power adapter. And that was like the worst design move they ever made was the fact that the printer went out, the whole system went down,
why it’s really hard to rank the bad decision.
I wouldn’t have a try.
Functionally, you know, this is the ad in there. And there’s the great television graphics pipeline, and a daisy wheel typewriter, which is pretty slick.
That was slick at the time, even if it was like 25 characters per second, whatever.
Yes, slow, but I mean, it looks look good, better than a dot matrix of its time. Sure. And it had, you know, this random access storage thing. So it’s just like, just think it’s a really slow disk drive. But you get all of that for what was quite inexpensive at its time.
You know, what, how big the box was? They might have just saved time by just packaging it in a coffin for you to take home. Oh, wouldn’t that have been that would have been? Yeah. Or that went.
So we were hired with by them by colico to create some titles for the launch. And so we created what would have been several years later. These would have been the first wave of CD ROM titles
really
well because we had big storage relatively speaking the tape storage while slow and stupid was big. Yeah, big like CD ROM big bigger. I think it was bigger than a then it was certainly bigger than an apple two disk drive.
Wow.
Well it’s tough
you know it’s so it was relatively speaking big and cumbersome and if you took into account its serial nature you know for a game you could live with it. Right? So we did three projects on it. We did they have the Jeopardy license. So we did a Jeopardy quiz game on Adam. We did a Family Feud on and these were the first time those TV shows had ever been done. And they were then ported to systems that survived. Right? But we are our company did the first versions of those. And then the most amazing product, which you know, is Richard skerries best electronic word book ever.
I’ve read that in my research of your of your plates and and but just
so are you familiar? Do you have kids? Are you ever seen?
I have I have kids I know the Richard scary line. But I don’t know anything about this particular product? Well,
you wouldn’t read only ran on the clicker. That’s why you would never have seen it. But it was you know, it was a Richard scary thing featured lonely worm. He was your hero driving around in his in his Apple Car. And it was like a CD ROM multimedia product, you drove around. And you get to a place and you had to spell some word into something. And then you get this big animation thing. And then you drive along until you solved all the world’s basic educational product. And then there’d be this tiny second time and then you get another world. What does this sound like? It’s not like any console game first person thing that
it pretty much does.
Yeah. So we were really productive new grounds with Richards, Harry’s best electronic work ever. And a ton of animations and a ton of style to go with animations. It’s a big project. So and the for history. The guy who was the lead programmer on this is Lonny rock. Now, that may not be meaningful, but Lani rock has been at stern since I think they’re their third pinball game. He’s been there ever since then. Nobody has programmed or been involved in the production of more modern pinball machines that
lie, Rob. Interesting. That doesn’t seem like a logical crossover.
Well, I mean, so Lonnie was one of our employees at it. And so when we stopped doing pinball, for data, yeast, and we’d had a layoff while he went over to data aids, he’s been there ever since he’s in charge over there now. And if that’s fact because I know, Lani. That’s how I got this game. Makes sense?
Yeah. It’s all about who you know,
it is all about who you know, pretty much in any field, but particularly a field of small and interesting as creating interaction.
Incredible. So you so let me get the list of things you’ve developed on. So you’ve got you had the atom, commerce 64. You did some Amiga stuff, right? You said you did the Winter Games translation for that?
Well, I programmed the Winter Games translation, but then I did the sounds for three stooges. Oh,
thank you for bringing that up. That was one thing I wanted to make sure I touched on too. And you did the Amiga version of that, right? Yes. And so you worked with cinema aware directly? What was it like working with those guys? Those guys seemed like they really had everything going over there?
Well, they did. They did. Yeah, they were working on I think they had already had what is what is their Robin Hood, title?
defender, the crown
defender of the crown was out when we were working on three stages. They’re interesting, guys, and you can search the web and find out lots of stories that I wouldn’t repeat in a podcast. Right? So just the fact that you know, that’s true, we’ll I can find a lot of amusement.
Alright, I won’t, I won’t pray for details but
the deal with the deal with the product was that we had that you know, they secured a good license and and the cooperation of the people who own the three stooges assets. And so they’ve dumped on us a whole lot of VHS tapes of three stooges episodes. And so this is like my first time ever, that have a platform that was sampling by So I can actually use the assets directly. Nice. So every day I did what I refer to as going down into the stooge mines,
stooge mines,
where I was mined for audio clips that I could use. Now, the good news about that is that the those those shorts were produced so cheaply, right? That they had virtually no background music. They had the three blind mice stuff at the front, right. And then they had the of some kind of vaudeville routine with The Three Stooges doing some kind of thing. And then they were out, and they almost never had any background music. So voice cups were reasonably uncluttered by bad.
Okay, that’d be a samplers dream right there. Well, that’s
the good news. The bad news.
Well, there’s several forms of bad news here. One is that the Stooges were wonderful vaudevillians. And they had honed their craft, in in vaudeville, their timing, their comedic timing was like second to none. They were brilliant. Right? Well, that their lines overlapped half the time. It was so fast and doing all this stuff, finding a line in isolation, you could actually cut out you had to go deep, deep into the storage minds to find those.
Trust me.
Oh, I believe you completely. And then
part two of that is that it was all live sound meaning that they just had some guy with a boom mic slightly out of frame. Right, capturing all this stuff. So yeah, they they sat from from inside one episode 115 minute episode, the samples that you picked sound like they came from six different places.
Wow.
It’s so it was it was really challenging to find a body of stuff that I could actually pull and then, you know, somehow related to the gameplay.
That must have been like, I mean, how much post Could you do back then? I mean, it’s not like you had like, you know, soundforge or anything back then. Right? I mean, surely I did. Really?
Yeah. I
think I did have some forge at that time. It was. Yeah, it was like, you know, soundforge one.
Wow.
I think that was my tool of choice. Yeah, I was always a PC guy. Right, moving against the current. Because early on the Mac was the media creation tool of choice. Right. And I, I had a I was I developed that you remember, there was a company I have video works and and? And sound and sound works? Yeah, yeah. The two eventually turned into macro mind.
Okay.
Well, I developed the sound package for video works. I had a lease, I had a lease at my house, because you couldn’t do development for the Mac on the back. Right? Do you have a Lisa to do development for the Mac. So I had this is when I was independent. And working out of my my bedroom, I had a Lisa in there. It was a monster. I bet. And I basically took the godly work and ported it did that same because again, a Mac had no space, it was really kind of like a video game. Right? So if you if you’re trying to do animation stuff, you didn’t have any space to hold sampled audio. So they created a sound package of stuff that could be used as a library for video works.
Nice.
That’s a little known fact,
by your very Casey guy.
I had this real
attitude, I still sort of do toward apple and Mac and and it wasn’t a positive attitude. I don’t want to get into it. But so the other thing is, I was a founder of that company. And so it was our own money. And we were trying to grow this company from three people to 50 people and so you had to buy your own equipment. Basic right buying it. You didn’t use the money on expensive equipment, you could get more salary, basically. So I was always PC based. So yeah, it probably was Sound Forge. And that’s funny. The only award that I’ve ever been called out directly for in my work came from the software fspa the software publisher Association, because they can have three stooges the Amiga version and award that here.
That’s nice and read the media got something
Yeah, me too poor machine. But that was fun. It was the Amiga was a really interesting machine. And it had a interesting sound system. It was difficult, but Oh
really, the Apollo was a not user friendly or developer friendly chip.
Well, you know, all it really was was a looping DMA controller. There are four of them, right? So you could play handed out a chunk of memory and say play this. And when you get to the end, go back and play it again. Gotcha. Now, if you had a long stream, you could buffer up a series of buffers, right? And you could play a chunk. And when it gets to the end, you get an interrupt you say, okay, play the next chunk. And so you could write strains. But still the machine wasn’t big enough to really just play streams really needed to implement something sort of like a synthesizer on it.
Did. And I don’t remember for sure, but I bet you know the answer to this. I do I know that graphics required using chip ram or chip memory for it. Versus fat faster, quote, quote, slow RAM, did Paul have that same sort of restriction where you could only use chip memory for it? Chip RAM,
that detail escapes me now I you know, I remember the names of the tips that I remembered the distinction. And I don’t remember if I was subject to that or not. I have a feeling that in slo RAM is where I put the body on my stuff. And then I moved it to faster him on on demand kind of thing. Maybe. Yeah,
that sounds about right. Yeah. But listen, I could really keep you here all day.
But at some point, I guess we have to wrap this up. Yeah. Your phone’s ringing.
Oh, no, here we go. I’ll probably still be here. Yeah, we can do this
again in a year. I would definitely love because we’re gonna probably split this up into two shows on my end. And I would I mean, I’ve got so many more things that I want to talk to talk about time machines. I know I love Time Machine. That’s one of my favorite pin balls. You know, just as an off side story, the the listeners like this stuff, too. I own a bone busters, which of course, is Gottlieb. And I was going to talk to you about the whole Ghostbusters bone busters thing which you may or may not know anything about. I think you were gone by then. Yeah. But it’s the first pinball machine that I actually really wanted to own when I came up to myself and I said, Hey, if you would own a pinball machine, which one I wouldn’t be in it would have been Time Machine. Cool. which is which is fantastic. Now, that was superseded I hate to say it because I know you didn’t work on this project by black night 2000. Which, you know, I don’t know about maybe I’m probably pisses you off somewhere in the in in the game, because because sound is your business. I thought that the audio experience of Black Knight 2000 was like the greatest thing ever. What do you think of it? I mean, what do you think of that? Oh,
I thought it was done terrifically well, because he integrates that that whole singing thing in there. I thought it was done really? Well. I like it. So I had this challenge. When I did my first piece with Steve. I did Spider Man. Right. And it took me a while to understand cuz I don’t work in Chicago. Right? Well, Steve was only there. Sometimes he was commuting from California. And it took me a while to figure out what Steve wanted. Finally, I think I just went back and got a pin made version of Black Knight 2000. And listen to it.
I’ve got that.
Yeah. And that informed my Oh, so this is what he wants. Right.
So I didn’t
I didn’t do that. But I mean, I knew where the energy I knew I knew what Steve needed to have. Right? So I went back to his previous work. And so Steve when he was at Williams would wander the halls I think with his guitar, go and pick up a guitar and he plays guitar and he would go play some riff and some thing you know, and then the sound guy would take put that into the into the project. That’s so
funny. multiversity versatile, dude, huh? Yeah, yeah, he’s
also voice talent.
Really? I got it. I got to do more research on on him because I don’t know enough about him and I should
Well, he’s he’s one of the some of the famous voices in Mortal Kombat or Steve.
No kidding. Yes. Yeah. I love Mortal Kombat, too. So and
the voices in
his own game,
I believe are Steve. Yeah, pitch shifted, I think but yeah.
Right. Well, listen, David, this has been incredible. And again, I could sit here and pick your brain forever. And definitely the next time we get together we can we can talk more pinball. I know we talked more. More console computer stuff, but I have a lot of pinball fans. They’re gonna want to hear your your pinball stories.
Yeah, there are a lot of pinball stories. Actually. I’m shocked. Now. Let’s see. 13 and five. I’m
like,
I’m working on my 18th pinball now.
God, that’s crazy. It is crazy. It’s great, though. I mean, I’m so happy that pinball survived. Yeah, it was a time that I didn’t think it would but I’m glad. I’m glad that there’s I’m glad that we’re getting more tables and I’m glad that time
is the thing. It manufactures a second. There’s a third really, I don’t know, there’s a guy named john Papa Lou,
who did a magical one for for Williams ballet. He was a ballet pinball designer. They ended up at Williams when they purchased ballet. And he’s still around. And in fact, well, did you see the sizzle table? The Pirates of the Caribbean the home version of pirates of the caribbean? There was one.
I you know, I saw I saw the table, but I never got pie. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was like a two thirds size or something like that.
was like 10 bucks. Oh, okay. And now he’s designing costume. I don’t know if that cost. Really small numbers, let’s say less than 20. He’s doing these builds a very expensive games, collectors. And he’s done one. I haven’t seen it. But I know we have. And so I don’t know if he’s ever going to get up in bigger quantities. But he’s producing original pinball machines now as well. So take lectors level. Yeah. For collectors. There are now three sources of new machines that’s out there in the universe. That’s good. It’s bizarre. I I’m shocked. Me too.
I mean, it gives me some hope for the human race, though, to be perfectly honest with you. Yeah, yeah. Now, if it did, pinball can still survive. Yeah,
I fully expect I mean, it’s about time for me. I mean, there were other challenges. I clearly my career’s been. I mean, it’s been dominated recently, pinball, but I’ve done a lot more video than I have pin.
Yeah. And I’m and I want to ask you more questions, but I’m gonna resist the urge. And I’m gonna let you go back to your routine and me back to mine. And
people piling up here and
I’m sorry, I’m surprised. Yeah, I have a bad habit of dragging these things out. And so interesting. You guys are so interesting. So hey, are you gonna Speaking of which, real quick before I let you go? Classic Gaming Expo? Have you been to one of those? I have not. They? They were on hiatus for a couple of years. It’s in Lausanne or not? Los Angeles, Las Vegas this year? Wow. Yeah. Yeah. They’re the newly remodeled. What’s that one? It’s on the old strip, the big one. Just suddenly jumped out of my head. The one that’s across from that big pavilion? I don’t know what you know, Las Vegas. I
haven’t been there in a long while and have a you still almost live there? Because the coin op shows were there two or three times a year? Sure. Yeah, I used to go there a lot. And then when I got out of cleanup, and was at Microsoft, I only went there a couple of times. And now that I’m working for myself out of my digital sweat lodge, I don’t travel at all. Right? I don’t get out much at all. So well, these guys up. This virtual conversation is like the way I get out.
You know, I envy you because I actually have to leave the house sometimes. And I’d rather sometimes just sit and do things
that I love. This
is a filter on the new work that I will accept. I mean, if valve or bungee or one of the local companies here offered me a gig, I would probably go down to some office and work. Right. I wouldn’t mind that commute because Seattle is a small metropolitan area, but I wouldn’t relocate to work for anybody. No, and I don’t see the need. Frankly, I haven’t No. I have a great studio here. I have broadband and I have done 13 pinball machines, which is a difficult collaboration across many people and that they have to ship a 300 pound object to me. Sure. These have all been very successful. So if I can do that, I can work on anybody’s handheld console. Anything you know from my studio as long as they’ve got broadband and FTP site.
Well, look, you survived a phone a phone deal with Disney doing that. Pirates of the Caribbean stuff so if you could survive that over the telephone, I think you’re in good shape. Oh, yeah. Well, all the
voice I’ve never been no, I’m only once out of 13 projects I’ve ever been in a studio where the voice talent was.
Wow. voice talent. Oh,
that was the guy the when I happened to be in Chicago and when some of the pirate stuff was done, and I’m trying to think he’s a he’s a wacky local Chicago guy who’s done a lot of weird voicing for pinball machines. Fred, Fred, I can’t think of his last name. He’s just Fred. He’s Fred. But otherwise all these other people that I’ve worked with Sam MacFarlane, the doctor from CSI, Colonel corrige, from avatar, all these actors,
you know they’re in
a studio somewhere in America are not even necessarily, right. And I’m on the phone. And
while I can’t do the audio engineering, because the quality is not good enough, I shouldn’t rely on somebody else to do that. But hey, we paid for a studio and an audio engineer. Right? They’ll record is what’s not clipping. That’s really my only requirement. Yeah, but I can direct the readings. I can hear what they’re doing. And I can suggest to do this, do that do
the other thing. Sure.
So that’s possible. You know, there’s no reason this this thing What? No, you’ve got to have be in an office so that we can drag you to a weekly status meeting. I’m not there.
And you are fortunate you are not?
Yeah, no,
I am. I, I’ve worked in. I’ve worked. I worked at Microsoft for seven years. Trust me.
Oh, live. I have so many questions for you regarding Microsoft. But that’s going to have to wait for another time. All right. Well, listen, this has been fantastic. Thank you, again, for taking over two hours of your time to talk to me. And my listeners. It’s been treat, and I very much
enjoyed it. I I was unaware of your site. I don’t stick my head up and, and spend much time doing anything but writing stuff. And so I’ve been to your site preparation because I listened to a couple of the old shows that was very interesting. I like it.
Thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Well, I will get you out of here. This is Shane R.. Monroe with rich gaming radio. I am here with David Thiele, giving us the scoop on being an interactive audio engineer fascinating stories. And I know there’s many more where that came from.
Well, thanks. I had a great time.
Thank you so much. And we will see you next time. We’d like to thank David Thiel, for being with us right here on retro gaming radio. amazing talent, remarkable guy. great stories gave us tons of his time. We’re really appreciative of that. If you missed last month. Last month, we had a lot of discussion on the computer console gaming side of it, where this month was more pinball. So if you’re more interested in the classic gaming side of sound engineering, you might want to check out the December 2011 show, because that’s where we had david deals first interview again, thanks a lot, David, for being with us. All right, we have a huge Bits and Bytes on an already large show. So let’s jump right into it. Let’s see. First up, we got sent from Nicolas Nicolas sends over the retrode to retro gaming adapter. Now what this guy is, I’ve done some research on this thing. I don’t have one yet, but I’m gonna get lay my paws on one and review it for you. Love this is a small little hardware device. It has two cartridge slots on on it, it looks like it will accept them. Super Nintendo Genesis, I’m sorry, Super Nintendo and Genesis games. So it’ll hold the two of them. And essentially, you plug this in, they have actual ports on the side to plug in a real controller. So you plug in a real Genesis controller, or a real Super Nintendo controller, plugged the cartridge in, it dumps the cartridge to internal memory, and mounts it as a USB drive right on your computer. Right. So it mounts itself as a generic USB drive, which is perfect. That should work on any operating system. And then you also have a keyboard type driver, right. So the controllers that you plug in are translated into some sort of a keyboard or human interface device. And then you simply load your emulator of choice for Super Nintendo or Genesis. And now you’ve got an interface to load real cartridges, real controllers and play them on your emulator. Sounds like a very interesting hybrid solution. I’m curious to see just how well that works. And it’s got apparently enough ports that you can have four players playing at the same time. So that sounds very interesting to me. And let’s see if they’ve got a price on their site here. Looks like it’s going to be at five bucks. So it’s going to be a little on the pricey side to get into it. There’s a few people they’ll be selling them in different regions. But apparently they’re going to be shipping, let’s say Michigan, Germany and Japan. So it looks like you have a few different outlets to choose from. And word on the street is that these should be available even as you’re listening to this. So let’s see real quick I’m going to pop in here and just to save you guys some clicks. I’m gonna see if the Stone Age gamer calm, which is apparently the the local place here in the states that has them. There’s something For 90 bucks with free shipping, and let’s see, it appears that they look to be in stock, it doesn’t say that they’re out of stock. So shipping mid February, so they’re on backorder. So if you’re interested in this guy, definitely check it out retroed two, and it is a super nintendo Genesis interface, plug your real cartridges and plug your real controllers in using emulator on your USB based PC. And you’re good to go. I’m guessing that this would probably work on a transformer or on a an Android tablet, that it’s equipped with a USB port. We’ll find out at some point we’ll get one we’ll get one and we’ll try it out. Okay, next up. Like I said, it’s a long list here. Next up, Alex J. Lopez send in. My producer sent in an article about Atari is finally cracking down on the App Store and the Apple App Store claiming copyright infringement on hundreds of iOS games. Now we all knew that this was happening. We all knew that this was coming. I’m not sure that there’s any real surprise that Atari is starting to SmackDown on mobile devices. Because as you heard me say, the mobile mobile will be the next platform for retro gaming.
So let’s see, essentially, here’s Atari stance on it. For companies like Atari, our intellectual property portfolio is our most valuable asset. We have great respect for any developer community and greatly appreciate the enthusiasm they have for our renowned properties. We need to vigorously protect our intellectual property and ensure it is represented in highly innovative games. We’ve been actively engaging in numerous establishing up and coming developers to help us reimagine our iconic franchises, and outside app developers have already helped us produce to top 10 mobile games successes in asteroids, Gunner and breakout boost, we look forward to furthering developing strong relationships with indie developments, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So bottom line is, you can’t, you can’t just steal this stuff. You know, these are these are, they’re not coming down on emulators. They’re coming down on people who are basically taking their game and calling it excellent. Maria, instead of Super Mario, and they’re just basically cloning the game, it’s hard not to get pissed off about how that’s going on, especially when the copyright holders are obviously still working with the properties. Now granted, they need to be releasing the originals. First. I mean, if you’re going to release a remake a reenvisioning of asteroids, ledges, asteroids, gunner, or breakout boost, I haven’t seen either one of these games. If you’re going to make something like that, then you need to release the originals to You can’t leave those things locked up. Because that’s what we really want. That’s what the emulation and classic gaming community want, we want the originals, you go ahead and exploit the property to your heart’s content. But after you give us the original ones, then you can take the property off and do whatever the hell you want with it. That’s my outlook on it. If you’re going to do that, if you’re going to go after any developers for basically taking games that we want, then you need to produce them yourself. I’m happy to pay, don’t worry, I don’t expect it for free. Just make me the original asteroids. And I’ll be good. I don’t think that the companies understand that that’s what these people are trying to do that people, not everybody. But I think a lot of the the independent developers are trying to recreate these games, because there’s no legal form of them out there. And it’s obvious that they don’t care. Right? If you’re not going to release a property that you own, then you know, someone’s gonna release it, and then you’re gonna have to go after him. And then you find there’s a market then you release it and you make money and the guy that stole it from you makes nothing. That’s sort of the way it goes. I’m just saying that I’m a big believer in exploiting your IP only if you give proper benefit to the original IP that drove it, kind of my thought. So that’s what Atari is up to. And it’s always turning into a computer mobile device. company now, which I think is the smartest thing in Atari has ever done. They’re brilliant for doing that. But, yeah, so they have to go over they have to go against the people who are taking that property and moving on it. So I actually support what Atari is doing. In this case, I think it’s a very smart move. Next up, Marty from sleepy eyed films big fan of the show, he’s been a fan of the show for a long time. He’s also a huge Dragon’s Lair fan. He’s been working on a dragon slayer documentary for God knows how long it’s been forever. And he approached me with this. I think the last time retro gaming The idea was still airing which was several years ago. And he basically wants to interview the guys that he wants to he wants to do the definitive documentary, and I respect that because I’m a big dragon slayer and Don Bluth fan. So anyway, he wrote me this last month and let me know that the documentary is still alive. He’s got a Facebook page, you know, I’m a huge Facebook fan, you know, he’s got a Facebook page, but for him, I’m gonna let it promote I’m going to promote it a Facebook page that gives you all the information you might possibly want to know. And he does have media couple I think he’s got a teaser trailer up there and some some more information. So Good stuff, good stuff. The guys, the guys doing a good public service trying to keep dragonslayer alive and and keeping the legacy of Dragon’s Lair alive because that’s the important part. Rob D Rob D regular contributor to retrogaming radios, Bits and Bytes segment sends over an interesting deal. Super Kid Icarus play a 16 bit game in your browser through the magic of html5. This is a fan recreation of the popular Kid Icarus title. And right here in your browser window, you can launch and play the game. Super Kid Icarus, subtitled an angel land story retold. So that’s pretty neat. I like the concept. I mean, I’m assuming you know Nintendo is gonna come along and smack him down at some point. So you might want to get over and play it now while he can.
But yeah, this is really neat. I like seeing I like seeing games written in classic style. And especially extending or or reaching past the particular property. I don’t think I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all. As long as you know, the original IP holders. I’m going to jump all over you. creepy way and creepy thing going on these days with IP in. And copyright. I’ll tell you. So this is interesting. Alex sent me over this as well. Now I’ve never played this kinetic Cannonball. Cannonball. I’m assuming that’s how you pronounce it. I have no idea. cannonbolt is is much like the game I reviewed bit trip runner. I’m not sure who came first. I’m not going to speculate who started the genre. But this is what they sort of a single button game, right? You’ve got a character and he’s running across the screen. You can’t stop him. All you can do is make him do something to keep him moving. It’s kind of in a weird way. Sort of like Dragon’s Lair, right. Anyway, this apparently this Cannonball was huge. I mean, he and cannonbolt sort of featured retro graphics, and you know, all that sort of thing. And it’s very popular, apparently huge game. I never played it. I don’t understand how that worked out. But I did not. Anyway, they made get this a Commodore 64 port of this anything Commodore 64. You know, I mean, they made it into an actual cartridge. You can buy an actual cartridge and play this game like almost looks identical. I mean, I looked at the two videos of the original, and the C 64 balls siggy 64 and a bolt. That’s a weird name. And they look great. It looks fantastic. I mean, it looks dead on. And it’s a real cartridge. So for those of you who still have original hardware and you want to play this game, you can play it on your original hardware. It’s fantastic. So pretty neat, pretty neat stuff, we’ll send you to the shop that selling that cartridge. And they got video and pictures and stuff like that. It looks like they want better about 20 pounds. So what is that? 1.5. So about 35 bucks. You know, that’s a little on the pricey side. But hey, what do you actually get a cartridge, you know, it’s not just some digital download you’re paying full retail price for. So that’s really neat. Check it out, I might have to actually dig the app to actually dig the game up on the mobile platform and try it out. Looks cool. Next up, this is from Actually, I don’t know if you would want me to disclose my source friend of the show works for a magazine, I’ll say that big friend of the show, he’s helped us out a lot sent me over something about a month and a half ago. And I didn’t want to actually talk about it until there was a little bit more stuff going on. So with the with the item. What this is is this is the game gadget and you’ll again, it’ll appear on your in your browser if you’re on the retro gaming radio plus TV site. And I’m telling you if you’re if you’re listening to this in your car, maybe slot off some time and go back and check the show out in the rGr plus TV format because you miss a lot of this stuff. Anyway, the game gadget is supposed to be okay. Work with me on this one. They want this to be the iPod of retro gaming. In other words, capable hardware that can play an assortment of different product real controls, right, real controls and
USB modern type stuff right. I was just gonna play this video and see if they had anything that they wanted to show us. D pad plenty of buttons. You know now Technology, they look like they’re using nice technology. And they want you to buy, like on the App Store, download classic games. Now, this is the sort of thing that starts to worry me, they got shoulder buttons too. This is the sort of thing that worries me. A lot of these don’t do very well, these sort of ideas. It also has an SD card slot, which is fantastic, which means you should be able to sideload your own games on there. Now, I don’t know how well that’s going to work out. But if they’re going to put some protection in there to keep you from doing that, or what my sources say that that’s probably not going to be the case that you’ll be able to play whatever you want. Anyway, the screen looks very nicely in this demo video that you can play. It’s sort of like a GP 2x type deal. You know, you can play music and video, do media pictures, that sort of thing. A little ebook text reader, right, I’m just going through what they’re showing. And then of course, they’ll have their own built in emulators to handle the types of games that you can download and pick up. It looks like a very nice little unit. Of course, it’s not out yet. And I guess Originally, it was supposed to be in time for Christmas. So this is a pretty decent setback, whatever is holding them up. Now we’ve seen tons of these types of brilliant looking gadgets come and never go right the Pandora. We’ve seen that numerous GP two x’s come through, we’ve seen a lot of different things that just didn’t quite work out. I think what they’re banking on is the constant thing, get publishers behind this and say, listen, look, you’re selling your Atari games on Android or on Apple iOS. And hey, we got another device for you to sell games on. Here’s the store. Here’s how we’ll cut the money. What do you think and we have the we have the legal rights to the ROMs blah, blah, blah. So we’ll see how it goes. I think the game gadget has potential. But like so many gadgets before it, I think they’re fighting a serious uphill battle and making that useful and profitable. Andy j said something in here called them high score musical. And it looks like they’re looking for some funding for this thing. Essentially, they’re trying to make a musical based around classic arcade and home computer games, right? So I’m going to send you to their site, I haven’t had an opportunity to delve very deeply in here. But it looks like that, you know, they got their heart in the right direction, at least for stuff that I’m interested in. Here we go. Let’s see if there’s a little write up here. High School Musical will feature live musicians alongside authentic 80s computer sounds to bring alive the feeling of being huddled over the spectrum, a ZX Spectrum or C 64 and then wasting piggy banks full of pence pieces in the local arcade obviously foreign. That’s okay, though, a musical for anybody who’s lost their last life and found their first love lost their last life. Not sure what that means. But you know, watch the video they got a little trailer. And it sounds like it sounds like a pretty neat deal. They they’re gonna cut a CD and the whole bit. So hey, if nothing else, you got to give people credit for trying to move forward with with something classic gaming related and something artsy. I mean, I like we talked about video games as art is an episode or two ago. And I like the concept. I love music. I love audio, especially Commodore 64 music. So I’m going to be watching this close and see. See how it goes. So do that. Look, see what you guys think and if anybody has more information or you know, wants to add their two cents, and please send me something in. I talked a lot about castles and coasters. It’s pretty much the last place in Phoenix that has a really large retro classic arcade
collection of games to play. Right. So I talked a lot about castling coasters. Well, somebody was helpful enough. Let’s see. Let me scroll down here. Mark Minch wrote in about the galloping ghosts arcade, this is in Chicago. And these guys have got an insane set of games here. They got a website, we’ll bring it up. And they had it looks like they have regular events. This is one of those, pay one fee go in and play games for free the rest of the day, which is actually perfect for me. That would be what I would want to do, who wants to run tokens and all that stuff. So 15 bucks gets you in all day. All machines are set to free play no quarters or coins or tokens, right. And it looks like they got ranked tournaments, they’re constantly adding new games mappy was just added to the arcade on the 19th. Right? So they’re keeping things pretty fresh over there. And let me just poke through here and i’ll i’ll give these guys a good plug here. Let’s see what their arcade game list is. Here’s a list of games they currently have running. I’m not going to read the whole thing but I’m gonna poke through this list and give you guys a couple my god this list just doesn’t stop. Here’s some good stuff. They got z. I’m going to do the retro stuff here. z is z v is enough. Whoa, x men Wizard of war Hey, that’s for you Chris warlords all the vs games it looks like Ultimate Mortal Kombat three. Okay, that’s not that old but Tron time pilot, let’s say which time both time pilots time soldiers, Tetris thunderblade haven’t seen that while Terminator two Judgment Day Tempest Of course. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Super zaxxon Super puzzle Fighter Turbo looks like tons of Street Fighter stuff Star Wars Superman splatterhouse Star Wars trilogy Star Wars The original Simpsons Shinobi scramble course. God only knows what games actually playing on it though. Well, wrath Stan punch out and sweet Popeye a lot of the games we talked about earlier in the show, Pac Man of course outright ninja warriors. That’s a cool cabinets huge. All the Mortal Kombat representative Missile Command. I can read this list all day long. That’s just a little segment of the list. And then they’ve got a list of games that they’re looking to add in the near future. And they give you a list of the games that they have that are currently under repair. Let’s see if there’s anything that’s under repair. That would be super cool, uh, gauntlets on the way Marble Madness, Moonwalker Mortal Kombat Trilogy. Paper boy, that’d be cool kicks. Star Wars Empire Strikes Back. So hey, these guys look pretty cool. If you’re in the Chicago area, or you go there for business or whatever. This looks like a pretty damn cool place to go. I never go to Chicago. So I’ll never get to see this place. But I know a lot of people do. Let’s see, what else do we have here. One of the things that I wasn’t sure where I was getting into putting this so I put it in both spots. The famous entertainer piece for those who may be who’s skipped through the 30th anniversary segment above for the commentary. I talked them. I’ve talked a lot in the past about a great version of the entertainer that was played on the Commodore 64. It wasn’t a sim file or a music file, per se, not a dot s ID or dot m us file. But it was actually a program that you would load and run. And it would come up and say listen, it’s gonna be a while it’s three and a half minutes wait time. And what it would do is it would sit there and poke music into memory into these giant arrays. And it was the most killer version of the entertainer ever. Now, let me tell you something about this particular arrangement. Good luck finding anything on it. I’ve been spending the last like five to 10 years trying to dig this piece up. And there are entertainers like one of the most overdone pieces of computer music of all time. But this one,
this one is almost impossible to find good luck finding it. So I took a different approach. This time. I went out looking for for the 30th anniversary, I wanted to talk about Commodore 64 stuff that I loved and I wanted an opportunity to find it. And so I went searching. And finally I went down I went over to the lemon 64 lemon 64 is a great Commodore 64 site. They also have a lemon Amiga. I mentioned them before in the past, but always nice to give him a plug. They’ve been around a long time. They’ve got huge databases of games, videos and assets and huge community. So I went to the forums and I posted about it. And within a few days, Carson who goes by gyro or gyro might, he lives over in Louisville, Kentucky. Carson came and said, Listen, I know exactly what you’re talking about when really, because I’m starting to think I made it up. Because if you search the internet, high and low to try to find more information about even about the thing, not find the actual file, but about it. I found one reference from like eight years ago, some guy mentioned is one of the most unusual and cool arrangements of the entertainer he’d ever seen. But he’s been I haven’t seen he wasn’t on that forum anymore. And he wasn’t available I’m sure he didn’t even have and he’s was reminiscing about it like me. And so I posted it in after two or three changes. And I said no, it’s not this. It’s not this. It’s not this. It’s not that, you know, it’s not a sin file. It’s actually an executable. Finally, Carson showed up and said, Yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about. I’m going Yes. And he’s like, thanks to an archival project that he did a while back of moving everything to an archival format. He was able to reproduce it, he pulled it off and originally was on a tape he had laying around, right. He pulled it off and he uploaded it and I finally have the entertainer piece that I want. And that’s huge. I was one of the long last things that I was looking for in my Commodore 64 memorabilia. The other thing was trying to figure out which of the colored floppy disks what what product came on the first color floppy disk that I saw. And I actually had to go out and reach out to the Google Plus community and several people chimed in and through a little bit of knowledge And some sharing a little bit of poking in the back of the noggin, I found out what product it was it was. It was not forgotten already. It was a it was a disk copier, it was a disc master or something to that effect. And its whole job was to of course, copy software. But it came on like the coolest disk, it had these really cool like neon colors. And it’s like it was the neatest thing I’d ever seen. No one had ever seen a colored floppy until that point, at least I had none of my group. And so that’s those were the things that I had been searching for was the entertainer. And that particular product, the program that came on that color desk. So the end of the end of an era, I managed to put a couple things to bed. And it’s also the end of our Bits and Bytes segment. Remember, Bits and Bytes is fueled by notes and emails from folks just like you join us over at Google Plus, you can join us over there, the retro gaming radio page posted up there, or go over and go to the website, there’s plenty of contact information there. And finally, you can just email strictly Bits and Bytes at retro gaming radio Comm. We look at them every single month. And if you did submit something, and it’s not in here, it’s not because it may not be in here, or I rejected it or something, it simply means that I try to kind of group things together and and there’s a method to the madness. And if you didn’t see your submission this month, it’ll probably be a lot next month. Anyway, I hope that that wrap it up for bits and bytes. Hope you guys enjoyed it and stick around lots more show ahead. We don’t have a ton of time for reviews this month simply because the show was just so packed with material. But I did want to take an opportunity to discuss Dragon’s Lair on the Android platform. Now Dragon’s Lair has been ported a gajillion times to a gajillion systems with, shall we say some arcade accuracy, and some of them have just plain been games that really aren’t Dragon’s Lair at all. Some of the a bit platforms like any as the Commodore 64 Dragon’s Lair was changed into a platformer type adventure game. Of course, that’s not really the dragon slayer we’ve all come to know and love. But over the years, we have seen some attempts to make a very close arcade accurate translation of dragonslayer we all know about the dafni emulator the dafni emulator is an actual laser disc game emulator. In other words, it emulates the software it emulates the disk seats and everything else and it plays back actual video from the laser desk. This is still today the absolute 100% most accurate way to play this game, other than being on the actual dragonfly arcade machine.
However, recently, I did do a review of Bob Monroe world that with regards to the weak version, the dragonslayer trilogy. Frankly, today to the weak version is the best version to play at home. If you can’t play Daphne than the weak version is definitely the best. It has the most accuracy. It’s still not completely accurate. It’s got great looking video. It’s not HD, but neither was the arcade machine, right? So if I had to recommend a version of play outside of the arcade game and outside of Daphne, it would be the weak version. But not everybody has a when some of us have these nice clean a Soos transformer tablets or thrive or an AI Konya. So how does Dragon’s Lair fare here on the Android platform? Android is finally started coming into its own right, we’ve got a large percentage of the market share. Now it’s some 50 something percent, I guess, against apples 28% whatever it is, in any event, Android is finally in the lead and developers are starting to move their content over to Android. So how does dragonslayer fare on the Android platform? dragons there’s always been about two things. The beautiful gorgeous video penned by Don Bluth, Master animator Don Bluth and, and the accuracy of the moves and timing involved with those moves. because really what Dragon’s Lair was was an interactive movie, you kept the movie playing by tapping a direction or tapping the sword button to make the on screen character Dirk, the Daring Do what he needed to do to keep the movie playing. Should you fail to accomplish that
task,
the video would change and you would see a death and you would lose a life. And you’d have to repeat the process again until you got it right or in some cases, it would skip ahead to the next scene. So you can continue to play without having to die over and over and over again because you didn’t know what to do in that last scene. Dragon’s Lair again holds a huge special place in my heart. And as such, I’m a little more or should I say a little less willing to let things slide, right? You guys know that I’ll always give you the straight scoop on a dragonslayer game. And the Android version, while remarkably decent in many areas does fail in several other areas. So let’s talk about it. First, let’s talk about the visuals of the Android version. The best part about this particular port is depending on your device, being a cell phone, a tablet, whatever. When you download the app, it downloads the video files for you to play the game. Based on your device, it downloads a different set of videos. For example, if you’re downloading on, say, droid bionic, you’re gonna get a different set of files. And if you are accessing the application with the A Zeus transformer, or the Galaxy Tab or the Motorola Xoom, you get a different set of video files based on the resolution and the quality of the video that your device can handle. This is fantastic. This is the first time that this sort of thing has been done with the dragonslayer property. I think it’s fantastic. You buy it once and you get it on every device in the proper resolution with the proper quality, huge thumbs up to the boys over digital leisure. For doing that it’s fantastic. You only have to download the videos once there’s no streaming of video involved. So once it’s on your system, you can play without being connected to the internet. Once you start up the game from your device, you are presented with a very nice, interactive menu that lets you watch the trailer or get instruct game, look at your highest scores and change a couple of different options. And we’re gonna get to the options just a couple minutes here. And of course play the game, you’re also allowed to have a safe state you get one safe state. If you’re in the middle of a game and you get a phone call, you’re in the middle of the game and you hit the home button on your tablet. The game is frozen in time, and you can return to where you left off. Next time you run the application. So that’s perfect, right? That’s a good way to do it. Because Dragon’s Lair takes about 2025 minutes to get through all the way. And, you know, you don’t want to have to always do that in one setting, especially when you’re on a mobile device, right you don’t know how long you’re gonna be waiting at the doctor’s office. So you throw down a little Dragon’s Lair and you got to be ready to move. Dragons they’re used a four direction joystick to actually enter tabs, it’s not like you can hold the joystick down and make dirt run anywhere you tapped up to indicate dirt should continue moving up or down left or right and you had one sword button. So four directions and a button. Now, as per normal, I’m not a huge fan of virtual on screen controls, especially when you have to do things quickly. And accuracy comes into play. Dragon’s Lair requires fast action and insane levels of accuracy. Meaning that you need to be able to push that direction quickly. And you need to be able to change from going you know forward to immediately going left or right or down based on the moves required by the scene that you’re playing. Unfortunately, the touchscreen is not a very tactile device, which means of course that you’re going to make mistakes. That makes this game harder to play than on any other platform. Even on the wiki you can use the D pad. And the D pad is easy enough to make quick, fast action responses from one direction to another.
That’s a problem, right and those of you who are diehard fans of the game are going to have problems getting some of those quick sequences of moves in using these virtual D pads. Fortunately, the boys over a digital leisure have provided experior ready play for this game. Which means if you have an experience device, or you have some method of joystick plugged into your tablet, or you use a tool such as USB BD joystick center, you can throw a remote controller, turn it on, hook it up to Bluetooth and then remap the controls into dragonslayer. So when I play dragonslayer on my tablet, I’m playing with the Wii Remote. That way I can use the D pad in a physical button for a sword that totally changes how well this game plays. You’re no longer making silly mistakes trying to make different moves or quick series of moves. That’s the way I would recommend playing it if you’re in a pinch and that’s all you’ve got. And you’ve only got the screen. sorry to hear that. The good news is digital leisure was very ready to help me get this fixed. In the first release of Dragon’s Lair. Maybe some of you looked at the first release and that was it and you haven’t been updating your copy whatever. In the first release, the sword button wasn’t properly mapped to a button which means if you had a joystick plugged into your tablet and you were using the joystick it would register the moves, but no button would actually complete disord action, I fired a note over to those guys. And they were very willing to help. They got the joystick working, I got some sentence, some demo builds from them, I helped them, make sure that it works properly, I mapped all the buttons out, everything worked great. So they were very helpful in that. And there were some other things that I assisted them on as well. Now one thing that digital leisure is less moving on regard is regarding to accuracy. accuracy, to me is the most important part of reliving your past. If you’ve ever played a jack specific arcade controller, you know, you plug it into the TV, you know, we’re not big fans of that around here. But you go when you buy a Pac Man, portable Pac Man game, you plug it into your TV, it’s got Pac Man logos all over the controls, it’s got a real joystick and a real button, while you know your button for Pac Man, but you get the idea. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really use pure emulation. And those people who have played Pac Man before, they know that this isn’t really Pac Man, the patterns aren’t right, the ghosts don’t move the same.
So it looks like Pac Man and it sounds like Pac Man. But in the end, the real Pac Man fan is going to find problem with it. And this is pretty much the same deal with Dragon’s Lair and this is on Dragon’s Lair, no matter what platform you play it on. Whether you’re playing it on the PC, or on the Wi Fi, or the blu ray version, whichever one you’re playing on, you’re going to run into in consistencies and inaccuracy is by moves. And by timing. Sometimes these are very, very minor. Other times they’re very, very major. And over the years, I have butted heads with digital leisure on several occasions with regards to accuracy in the game. In some cases, they have tightened up the accuracy, and have done a very good job of implementing some of the changes that I’ve made. However, as time moves forward, I think they’re a little less interested in providing pure accuracy as they are to get the game in the hands of as many people as they can. And after all, they are business and that’s their job is to make money. And I get that take 10 people who know dragonslayer is in a play Dragon’s Lair and you put this game in front of them. And maybe one of them’s gonna say, Hey, wait a minute. That’s not right. That’s not right. How come I couldn’t do that. But you know, I made that move, I don’t understand why you didn’t take it, that sort of thing, you’re gonna get one out of 10. Right? They’re not interested in catering to the 10%. For those of us who are the 10 percentile, we need to get Daphne running on the PC, what we really need is to get the Daphne team to get a port of Daphne on to the Android platform, which seems like a no brainer to me. I mean, it’s an open source type platform. It’s right in line with the developers sort of mentality on keeping this game alive preservation, that sort of thing. So I don’t understand why we don’t have one for Android yet. with dual core and Quad Core processors coming, there’s absolutely no reason why a tablet could not easily pump out Daphne with any problems at all. So that’s my plea. That’s what I’m hoping to see in the coming years is I hope to see Daphne itself get poured in so we have full accuracy. So just how bad of act and how bad or the accuracy issues within Dragon Slayer. Well, this version of Dragon Slayer, much like every other version of Dragon Slayer, for the most part of the digital Legion puts out contains an arcade version and a home version. Now the home versions pretty much their creation, so accuracy and compatibility and moves and timing. You know what? I can’t, I can’t say anything about that. That’s their, that’s their put together, they they’ve created that as a alternative to the arcade version. So that’s cool. So I can’t say anything about that. But when it comes down to the arcade version, I dare say nobody knows Dragon’s Lair as well as I do. Now, as per all the home versions of the arcade game, this is built around the F two romset. Those of you who are big dafni fans, those of you who played a lot of Dragon Slayer, who were into it, you know exactly what f two means. Unfortunately, as with F two translations, there’s a lot of not quite correct deals. A lot of the things that I came down on the weave version four are also present here in this version. One of the first thing you’re going to notice is the fire ropes, right. Most of you know that on the fire ropes on the real arcade version of Dragon’s Lair. You don’t have to wait for the platform to start pulling back and almost knocking you into the fire before you jump over and grab the first rope. In the arcade version. You can grab the rope the first time it swings over towards Dirk. I’ve yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen a home version. Maybe the weak version did it. I don’t remember it. I’d be tapping my head a little bit. I don’t remember ever seeing a home version where that was done. And that bothers me. I mean, that’s the first scene out of the box. I mean, it sets the tone For the rest of the game, oh, I couldn’t I couldn’t jump on the firearms What’s going on? A lot of people who play dragons, they didn’t even know that the platform would pull back, they just assume the first move was to get on that rope as soon as possible. Right.
f two ROMs had also had a randomization splattering of the first scene that you went into. Sometimes it was the fire rope. Sometimes it was the building, you know, the self building wall. And these sort of timing and random ability type things are what you see in this game. You come up and say, Wow, the fire ropes fire ups, you played five times in a row firearms, firearms, firearms. Oh, there’s the crumbling wall. Go to the emulator booted up. Every I’d say every other game, every third game starts with the crumbling wall. Again, these are not things that 90% of the public are going to see. But 90% of the 80% of the public doesn’t care about Dragon’s Lair to begin with. So what you end up having is 20% of the people who do care about Dragon’s Lair, but of that 20% 50% don’t care about the accuracy. So at least 50% of the people of the 20% of the population that actually care about dragon slayer actually care about the accuracy. So that’s kind of how it works out. It seems like a low number when you say 10%. But when you think of 50% of the 20%, it becomes a bigger number. There are tons of other little things that I could sit here and go scene by scene and tell you all the inaccuracies. There’s enough that I’m telling you right now, if you are a purist, okay, expect this version to piss you off. If all you want is the Dragon’s Lair experience, and you are not a diehard fan, and you are just a casual player, this version is going to do you just fine. Let me give you a couple more of the inaccuracies just so you have an idea what we’re talking about. One of the other inaccuracies deals with the rapids, right, you’re in that sort of brownish orange water. In the rapids, there’s a small vein of lighter colored water as you’re flying through the rapids. On the arcade game, you could go you can use one of two input methods, you can either hit the direction of the rapid which would be right or left, or you could tap forward about the time you were right in line with the rapids. In the Android version, you can’t do that you have to believe you have to go You have to move the direction first, you can’t go forward or backward. It’s been a little while since I’ve played it. Suffice to say though, these are the sorts of things that make people crazy, the Lizard King right, the Lizard King has two different ways you can take him down, the Lizard King also has some very unique timing windows. In other words, as you’re running down the path and the lizard kings chasing you with a mace and then you make a you fall you’re basically following the the the melting pot, the little pot that has the gold in it, you’re you’re essentially following it down the hallway, to get the gold and to get your sword back right because the sword got taken by the little pot. As you reach an intersection, the pot runs by you and you move the direction of the pot when if you don’t, then you get brained by the lie of The Lion King, the Lizard King, the circle of life, you get beamed by the Lizard King and he drags you off and you’re done. One of the things that I love so much about the Lizard King scene is the fact that you can wait a long time on some of the some of the intersections. As the as you approach the intersection the little, the little, the little gold chest goes running by and the Lizard King comes up behind you. he whips the mace up and before he swings you have to move. You can wait a long time in the arcade game. I mean, you can wait almost until the mace pops you on the head before you move, and you can get away with it. It’ll take the move and you’ll continue. On this version of it, you have to move considerably faster, which breaks my rhythm there are some people believe it or not, they can actually play dragonslayer without watching the video they can play entirely by sound. With those types of sound cues. Your mind is entrenched in a particular series of moves based on video and audio timings. This completely throws me I die almost every time I play it on the Android because I’m so tuned to playing the Lizard King level a certain way that I’ll die. Right. There are several other inaccuracies that are right about in that in that vein, and you’ll find as you play that you’ll run across them and they will inevitably piss you off as a diehard dragon slayer fan. But that’s not to say though, that there are positive aspects of this game. The ability to take this with you the ability to get it on any of your platforms once you’ve purchased it. on my tablet on the AC transformer I have an HDMI out so I can literally take my tablet over to my 46 inch to Toshiba. Plug it in and I can be playing Dragon’s Lair on the couch with my Wii Remote on a giant screen.
That’s pretty cool, right? And all of this for me, I can’t remember the price of the game, it might have been 10 bucks, something like that. But you got to figure, they’re shuttling you a lot of bandwidth, right? That’s how I look at it. There’s a bandwidth consideration. And apparently, piracy sucks down a lot of that. And I understand it, right. There’s a lot of things that there’s a lot of cost considerations. But hey, that’s pretty much you know, one of the cheapest versions today, right? I believe, on the, on the, on the DS, the dsiware version was somewhere around eight bucks, something like that. And that sounds about right. I mean, it’s not what I would call. super high resolution on the DS right. on here, you’re getting actual HD video correction, it’s $5 $5 For Dragon’s Lair, and that’s not bad. You know, that’s actually I think, cheaper than it was on the DSi. So the price is decent. The, the simulation of the moves and the techniques, like I said that I’m never happy unless it’s 100% accurate, I’m going to continue to cry and whine about it. And the truth is, is I’ve had to come to peace, come to terms and make peace with myself that we’re simply not going to see dragonslayer done 100%. Right, without getting Daphne ported to whatever device it is that you want to play on. And that’s too bad. I think that this is the sort of thing that falls under preservation, and accuracy and realism in emulation, especially in the style type emulation like this, these period pieces. I believe that accuracy is one of the top notch things that should be worked on. Yeah, great. I’m so happy that they made high resolution copies of the prints, and that we have a high resolution version of the game to play. I love that. Yeah, that’s great. But I’d love to have I would be happier playing a standard definition version, like on the way and having it being accurate. Then to have, you know, high resolution graphics, which we didn’t even have at the arcade back way back when we first played it. So it’s five bucks. Do I recommend it depends on the kind of dragonslayer person you are. Do you have a passing familiarity with Dragon’s Lair? This will probably do just fine for you. Do you have you know, are you playing Daphne every day for a year after you got a hold of the emulator? This is probably going to piss you off. However, I would like to point out as always, that supporting your platform of choice isn’t always about 100% customer satisfaction, right? I paid for Dragon’s Lair. I probably could have gotten a review copy. I didn’t have to pay for it. But my point is I’m want to support the Android platform. I want to show digital leisure. Yes, this platform is viable. Yes. You’re going to make money. And yes, please port spaces. Please don’t make space Ace with blue Energizer video like you did on the week. I have no idea where that came from. But if I get spaces on the Android and it’s got blue grass in a blue color and energize I’m going to be pissed. Just so you’re very, you know, forewarned and forearmed that I will be less generous when it comes to space as because spaces to me is it’s my favorite. It’s my favorite of Don Bluth games. Everyone thinks I’m a dragon slayer fanatic. But in reality space Ace is my favorite of the LaserDisc games. So $5 Digital leisure, it’s available the Android Market. Just remember. It’s like a 22 meg download, so it’s huge. But you also will have to download all of the video files. And believe me that can take a decent amount of time, especially if you’re downloading high resolution ones for the tablet. So again, Dragon’s Lair digital leisure on the Android Market. $5 not too bad. I’d say probably 90% accurate and emulation 10% not so much. Again, if you’re looking for the ultimate experience, it’s only available in one place. If you don’t have the arcade machine, you’re gonna have to get daphney you’re gonna have to play that. If that doesn’t work out for you. I would recommend that we version that’s still the best. And if you need it on the go, and you have say a Nintendo DSi or DSi XL. It’s also available there on their marketplace, and it’s actually a fairly decent version. It’s got the same sort of similar in consistencies with it. But you know, depending on what you’ve got to play it on. Dragon’s Lair is pretty much available for you anywhere.
Alright, a quick update. Zen pinball. We reviewed that recently on the show. And Zen pinball is available for pretty much every platform comes in as pinball effects on the consoles. But Zen pinball was recently released for Android, and they’ve added a couple new tables since the review. The best of the new tables that they’ve added is one called Excalibur which incidentally Lee segues into my next point. Zen pinball was just released for the Nintendo 3ds as a download from the E shop. That’s pretty cool. So you get the game and the tables. For the five bones. You have four tables and the pinball game for five bucks. So it’s basically what a buck 25 table. And that’s great. That’s a great price. And it is fantastic. It is beautiful to play these on the 3ds the screens a little small. But the 3d is incredible. If you’re a huge fan of Zen pinball, and who isn’t whose people are in a pinball, I recommend taking a look at the 3ds version, as well as looking at the Zen pinball THD for your Tegra based Android devices. It is fantastic. The ball physics are great on the 3ds. They’re not fantastic. They’re better on the Android, however, you’ll be you’ll be hard pressed to find better pinball on handheld than Zen pinball. So check that out. No word on a non Tegra version. So if you’ve got a non Tegra, two phone, which most of us do, you’re not playing Zen pinball on there. But if you do have a tablet that’s Tegra, two based like the easiest transformer. I can’t recommend it enough. It’s fantastic pinball and it’s also experior. Ready. So if you have some means of hooking a joystick up, or you happen to have an experience, then you can play the game using an external controller. I don’t know about you guys, but pinball, to me is all about pushing buttons, not about touching the screen, as I think I complained about in the original review. But that’s all by the 3ds. So that’s worth looking at. Well, listen, guys, that’s all we got for review this month. Sorry, there’ll be more in future months. We just, we’re running out of time and we’re running out of space. I’m trying to keep the shows at a manageable size. And this month, we had so much else to talk about and just didn’t have the time. So hopefully you enjoyed that do support the platforms of choice that you’re interested in. If you’re an iOS guy, for God’s sakes, pay for your apps man. If you’re an Android guy, yeah, you can sideload for free. But hey, why don’t you go and buy a couple things at the market. Let the developers know that your platform is viable, and maybe they’ll continue to support the platform in the future. Well, folks, that’s gonna wrap it up for the January 2012 edition of retro gaming radio. Big thanks to all of our listeners, old and new. It’s great to have you with the show. Join us next month, we’ll have even more stuff to talk about. More reviews, more bits and bytes. More editorial commentary right here on retrogaming. Radio. This is Shane Arman rose saying until next time, keep it Retro.