CHEGheads Blog

Remembering the Dark Tower

Posted by Eric Wheeler - 10/30/09 at 01:10 pm

 

As I took the field and prepared for battle, a tiny yellow flag with a double-headed eagle marked my kingdom, the Citadel of Durnin.

While this fantasy adventure took shape, my friend handed me a cardboard score chart and some tiny red plastic pegs to keep track of my men and supplies. Much of what my friends were setting up looked familiar: molded plastic warriors and dragons, cardboard tokens, and, of course, a colorful game board.

And then they took it out—the electronic game unit that dominated the board. Already, Milton Bradley’s game, Dark Tower, struck me as something revolutionary.

 The electronic component to the game was an imposing 10-inch-high plastic “tower” with a digital display window, multiple light-up flashing color graphics, and a 12-button keyboard interface. As they finished setting up, I quietly thought about the countless hours spent playing Dungeons & Dragons; but, all that did me little good in this fantasy world.

The object of the game, they explained, was to journey around the board, collect magic keys while fielding an army, and then attack the Dark Tower itself. Whoever accomplished this task first won. I took a few minutes to study the instruction manual and formulate my strategy. Unlike D&D where a “Dungeon Master” (a fellow player) facilitates the game play, in Dark Tower action was controlled by the electronic game unit. Players interacted with the Tower, following their warrior’s move as the system flashes graphic symbols representing the outcome. If you were lucky, your warrior’s move was safe.  Then again, your warrior might wind up in a pitched battle or fall victim to the plague.  

The game could have been guided just as easily by dice or spinners, but the visual elements and sound effects the tower provided made this game innovative. The Tower had a personality—as if you were directly competing against it.

How did this particular adventure end, you ask? My fearless warriors fell victim to hordes of evil “Brigands” that day, as my friend stole the glory of defeating the Dark Tower. I wasn’t too upset; I was mesmerized by the Tower. Although I asked repeatedly, we never played again.

 Looking back, this was an  innovative example of a game that combined electronic and traditional play. In an attempt to cash in on the popularity of fantasy role-playing games, such as D&D, during the early 1980s, Milton Bradley promoted the game as “a fantasy adventure born of electronic wizardry.”

We recently acquired a copy of this 1981 Milton Bradley Electronics game for the NCHEG collection, and a feeling of nostalgia crept in on me as I cataloged the game in my office. It’s still a fascinating game and I’m glad we have a working copy.

You’ll have to excuse me now, the Tower is calling.

Did You Get Your Goo?

Posted by Marc Check - 10/27/09 at 09:10 am

Now that the special is over, I am curious to see what you paid for World of Goo.  Do you think the game is a worthy investment?

Get Your Goo

Posted by Marc Check - 10/22/09 at 01:10 pm

Here’s a neat opportunity you might want to seize from 2D Boy Games.

Their World of Goo is a unique and quirky physics-based puzzle game that won both the Design Innovation Award and the Technical Excellence Award at the Independent Games Festival in 2008.

 World of Goo’s success demonstrates not only the rise in popularity of independently-developed games, but also the emphasis on physics in several recent puzzle games. World of Goo is included in a survey of casual games guests can play on the first floor of Strong National Museum of Play, home of NCHEG. In addition, museum guests will soon have the opportunity to play the physics-based independent game, Crayon Physics (2008 IGF winner) in our National Toy Hall of Fame exhibit.

This week only, in order to celebrate the first birthday of World of Goo, 2D Boy Games is offering this game to the masses at the incredible price of “pay whatever you think it’s worth.” It’s available for Windows, Mac, and Wii, and we highly recommend this opportunity to try out a fabulous game at a great price.

 

POW! – The Original Online Game?

Posted by Marc Check - 10/22/09 at 08:10 am

Howdy Buckaroos!

If my greeting strikes a familiar chord with you then it is likely that:

1. You’re a native Rochestarian;

2. You’re my age, give or take a few years.

If you’re still clueless, let me help you out.

“Howdy Buckaroos!” was the catch phrase of Ranger Bob, host of the appropriately titled, Ranger Bob’s Buckaroo Club. The show aired on WUHF 31 in the late 1970s and early `80s.  This was before cable television (Ranger Bob only had a clear picture when the loopy wire UHF antenna was set at just the right angle), and before most of us had a home PC or game console.  Despite these limitations, this show provided my first memorable exposure to video games and, theoretically, online video game play.

I hadn’t thought of Ranger Bob in years, until recently when we were testing our collection of Intellivision cartridges in the NCHEG lab.   A couple of the games we tested had an eerie familiarity, and with that some of my long-dormant neurons began to fire.  I never had an Intellivision as a kid, yet I remembered these games almost as if I had grown up playing them.  After discussing this memory with my fellow CHEGheads, I realized that I grew up watching other people play them on Ranger Bob’s Buckaroo Club.

The most memorable feature of the Ranger Bob Cartoon Show, a segment of the show, was TV Powww! Viewers would phone into the show to “play” a video game. The participants were able to watch their game unfold from their personal TV screen.  The play consisted of shouting “Pow!” into their phone, which was a verbal cue used to instruct someone in the studio to hit the fire button on the video game control.  The more successful players, as one might imagine, were those who shouted “Pow!” loudly and in quick succession.  Winners would receive a gift certificate or t-shirt, but more precious were the few minutes of fame on a local television show that all of their friends were undoubtedly watching.

My renewed interest in this piece of local history inspired me to do a little research. I was surprised to learn that I had made a few erroneous assumptions about TV Powww!

First, TV Powww! was not a local phenomenon.  The Wikipedia entry for TV Powww! lists approximately 25 television stations from Australia to the UK that ran this syndicated game show.  A small blurb on “Defunct TV Technologies” from the Discovery Channel claims 79 stations aired TV Powww! in 1978.

Second, the original games run on TV Powww! were not Intellivision games at all, but rather Fairchild Channel F console games. When Fairchild quit the video game market in 1980, however, the syndicates acquired and continued their TV Powww! game shows with Intellivision consoles, through a deal constructed between Marv Kemplar, the syndicator of TV Powww!, and Mattel.

My last assumption is debatable—that there was no available technology to facilitate the voice commands of the player; there was only a human proxy in the studio simply hitting the fire button when the player commanded him/her to do. In this sense there was no true “online” play. On the other hand, according to intellivisionlives.com, “TV Powww! used Fairchild Channel F game consoles modified to be voice activated.”   If this is in fact the case, then TV Powww! may be the first commercial example of “online” console play.  I remain skeptical of this claim, though.  Scouring the Internet on this subject only reinforces that there is disagreement and unsettled debate over the existence of voice-activated hacks to the Fairchild consoles.

We have Fairchild Channel F consoles, but none with any evidence of this signature hack.  If anyone can bear witness to the truth or falsehood of this unique technology, we at NCHEG would love to hear from you. Let’s settle this debate once and for all.

Until then enjoy this video of TV Powww! from a non-Rochester affiliate as they air their last TV Powww! contest.

Play it Again, Sam

Posted by Jon-Paul C. Dyson - 10/16/09 at 04:10 pm

Recently my wife and I heard Michael Feinstein in concert. Feinstein has earned fame not only as a pianist and singer of popular songs from Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood, but also as a dedicated researcher into the history of popular song in America. His knowledge was on full display during the concert, when he would often pause between songs and recount the back story of the next number. He explained, for example, why the movie Casablanca featured the song “As Time Goes By.” The song had debuted in a forgotten, and largely forgettable, 1931 musical, Everybody’s Welcome, and Warner Brothers held the copyright to the song. When Warner Brothers needed a song for their new movie they could use “As Time Goes By” for free. The result? The song gained new life, indeed immortality, when Ilsa asked Sam to play it again. Well, what she really said was, “Play it once, Sam. For old times’ sake,” but that’s not how we remember it today.

Not too long after the concert, I played Mr. AahH!, a game I recently downloaded on my iPhone. As I played, I was reminded of Feinstein’s observation. Like film, video games reuse old material. Mr. AahH! features a bulbous-headed stick figure who swings and jumps from block to block. It’s a simple target game, jazzed up with a techno beat, that requires you to use the iPhone’s accelerometer to guide the character through the air. Like other target games, you have to compensate for factors such as the wind and, for some reason in this game, inexplicable changes in gravitational pull. It’s fun, but there’s nothing original about the basic game play.

Indeed, Mr. AahH! reminded me of an old Atari arcade game, Skydiver, that we have in the NCHEG collection. Created by Owen Rubin in 1978, the game requires you to jump from an airplane toward a target on the ground. You get points for accuracy and how close you get to the ground before needing to pull your chute, and as with Mr. AahH! you have to compensate for the wind. The games look and sound different, but the game play is basically the same: aim, jump, land.

There are plenty of other examples of parallel play in video games. For example, one of my favorite games as a kid was Tron (1982), especially the light cycles section. What I didn’t know as a kid was that an earlier arcade game, Dominos (1977), which NCHEG also owns, features almost the exact same game play. If you’ve played Tron, you know how similar the game play is.

Sometimes the game play is practically an exact copy. For example, the computer game Scooby Doo: The Phantom Knight (2001) features a minigame copy of the 1984 arcade favorite Root Beer Tapper (which itself is a variation on the original 1983 Tapper game).

So, as in the case of Warner Brothers’ famous movie song, is the best inspiration for a video game something that already exists? I’m not suggesting it’s that simple. Mr. AahH! and Skydiver use the same basic game play motif, but I doubt that the developers of Mr. AahH! were even aware of Skydiver. After all, jumping games predate video games, as every kid who has played hopscotch or tried to leap from rock to rock without falling knows. Tron’s likeness to Dominos seems much more obvious to me—I wouldn’t be surprised if the creators of Tron had played a snake-style game like Dominos before designing their own game.  As for the case of Scooby Doo and Tapper, that looks a lot like a straight-out copy.

What other examples come to mind quickly of new games that repackage old game play?

Creating an Ideal Community

Posted by Eric Wheeler - 10/08/09 at 09:10 am

The games I love to play as an adult—strategy games such as Age of Empires: The Asian Dynasties and Sid Meier’s Civilization IV—are clearly influenced by my childhood favorites, perhaps most significantly Utopia for Mattel Intellivision. If you’re not familiar with this groundbreaking simulation game, I suggest you check it out.

Will Wright revolutionized the game industry, yet nearly a decade before his city-building classic SimCity launched, legendary game designer Don Daglow produced Utopia, the industry’s first construction and management simulation game. For the first time gamers found themselves budgeting national expenditures, balancing military necessities with civic infrastructure needs, and pondering the community’s well-being. And as if this wasn’t enough to worry about, at any point a hurricane might lay waste to all you had built or a rebel faction might rise to destroy your factory or school. As a result of Utopia, gamers experienced new thought-provoking concepts and the industry embraced new opportunities and ideas for future games.

After receiving the newly released game as a holiday gift in 1982, it quickly became my favorite. At 10 years old, this was the only game that didn’t get old quickly; as with chess, the more I played and learned about tactics, “governance” tactics in this case, the more fun I had. Although Utopia was a two-player game, I honed my skills with numerous individual practice sessions.

The game can be played cooperatively or competitively, and I clearly remember the first time I launched preemptive military operations against a neighborhood friend. It was a coordinated strike; just as rebel soldiers razed my friend’s cities, naval assets destroyed his fishing fleet. Defeated, he cried and went home. My mother accused me of physically hitting him. “In the future” she said, “you have to “play nice” with those video games.”

Several months later, my friend got over the betrayal and started to play competitively.

Don Daglow’s recent visit to Strong National Museum of Play and NCHEG evoked the same sense of excitement I experienced when I first played his game. I had Intellivision set up in our NCHEG Game Lab, and after I reminisced at length about my Utopia play experience, Don wasn’t surprised when I challenged him to a game. In fact, he readily agreed to it.  Imagine a CHEGhead playing the master game designer himself! 

Who won, you ask? I can’t tell you that, but let’s just say I didn’t get embarrassed. One’s childhood gaming skills never die—especially if you practice for hours and hours before you challenge someone. Be careful of those masters though.

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