From: shepperd@netcom.com (David Shepperd) Newsgroups: rec.games.video.arcade Subject: Re: The popular games made by Atari Date: 29 Jun 92 02:02:25 GMT bcasper@eos.ncsu.edu (Brian Casper) writes: : (Brian on the rebound...) Hang on a second... That cabinet is a piece of : artwork. I'm sure the guy who designed it would appreciate your comment, and he still works here at Atari Games, btw. I wrote AD (let's see, that was 10 years ago or so, hmmm, seems like just yesterday). A little history about this game with the hows and whys might prove interesting at this point. In those days (I wouldn't call them the good 'ole days), Videos were selling like gang busters. Asteroids had been a record breaking product for us (Atari) and they were eager to capitalize on its success with a sequel and I was tasked to do it. One problem I had was I didn't care too much for Asteroids. I thought the ship wasn't responsive enough and just disliked the hyperspace thing. I also thought that it would be more fun if the saucers (Wally and the Beaver) were to be smarter about what they were doing. So I "fixed" all that. I doubled or tripled the rotational velocities and the ship's acceleration and replaced hyperspace with shields. I made the ship explosion a bit more interesting. I think your shots could be more closely spaced, but I'm not sure and I stuck with no more than 4 shots on screen at once; this was due to the limited processing time the 6502 had. I also fixed it so your ship wouldn't get "born again" in the middle of a bunch of rocks and promptly get blown up again. There had been some improvements in the vector generator, audio and video generation circuits that were incorporated in the board. This gave me a little more flexibility with the game play than Logg had with the design of Asteroids. We had also thought that the players of Asteroids had become bored with it and wanted something more challenging, so we cooked up the kamakazi snowflake to add some spice to the game play. Add to this the pressure we were getting from the owner/operators of the games to prevent the "play forever on a quarter" problem that Asteroids had, and I ended up putting in some limits that made many players outright angry (I probably should have resisted this pressure, or at least somehow made the O/O's THINK there were limits). In our business (then as well as now), we sell to two customers. Both customers have different demands and we have to somehow try to satisfy them. The customer that pays us money for our products is the distributor (and s/he sells to the owner/operator). These guys won't buy our stuff if you guys don't play it, so our second customer is the player (although we don't directly get any of the coins that are dropped into the machines, so we aren't paid by this customer). The distributor (and subsequently the O/O) typically are not game players so they tend to base their purchasing decisions on: collection reports from field test units and if they like the look of the game (especially 10 years ago). I think the cabinet of AD was designed with such flash to appeal mainly to the O/O so they'd think they were really getting a "deluxe" Asteroids. (hmmmmm, sounds like we used smoke and mirrors both figuratively and literally.) I agree with the other's comments that all that flash was distracting to the game play. I personally preferred to play it in what we called the cabaret cabinet (a cab about 1/3 the size of the upright) without all the mirrors and stuff. But, all that aside, I too think the upright looked pretty cool. : Another thing that was added to keep from hunting the small ships was the : killer satelites. Once you cracked the egg, the diamonds and triangles : would hunt you down until you either killed them or they killed you. : (...absolutely will not stop until you are dead...) The saucer always shoots at a target. It will pick a target at random among those available, and approximately 25% of the time it'll pick your ship as a target. This percentage changes with time and it becomes more aggressive at a) shooting at the snowflake and b) shooting at you if it notices that not enough "action" has been taking place from frame to frame. The snowflake appears once there are fewer than a set number of asteroids left on the screen. This set number increases as your score increases and you quickly learn to clear all the asteroids before busting the snowflake (unless the saucer comes along and "helps" you) otherwise, it is like you say, the snowflake will keep coming back like a bad lunch. The snowflake parts get faster and a little smarter the higher your score gets. I agree that AD is a difficult game to play except for the hard core game players. I had to add a special (real real easy) mode for the European version since they (at the time) tended to play games with a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee (or a beer) in the other. With AD, you cannot do that and expect to get any points. If you have one of the later models, you might have the "Europe" switch which will put it in easy (I mean, really really easy) mode. -- Dave Shepperd. shepperd@netcom.COM or netcom.netcom.com!shepperd The company probably doesn't know what I say or do, but they pay me anyway.