Subject: RE: War of the Worlds
Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2001
From: "Tim Skelly" <tim@designhappy.com>


I can't believe that I haven't dispersed the War of the Worlds story!

Some time before Rob Patton left Cinematronics, which I believe was about
when I hired Scott Boden, I designed "War of the Worlds" for Rob to work on.
Rob was not around during the development of "Star Castle," but I think the
two overlapped slightly. Scott would have been writing "Clown Skeet," a cool
little thing he did to learn the basics. Another event places this in time.
For some reason Frank Brunner was unable to do the art for the WotW cabinet.
I remember that he wasn't crazy about drawing 'tech stuff. Somehow, probably
through Frank or the San Diego Comicon, I came across Rick Bryant. Rick
would later do the cabinet art for "Tailgunner" and "Star Castle." Frank
also did side art for Tommy Stroud's version of "Tailgunner," but I think
I've told that story. Even though the game wasn't built at that time, Rick
did execute a painting of an enemy tripod from the game. The plan was to
simplify it for the screened side art.

My idea for the game was to do something like "Space Invaders." To take
advantage of the vector display, I wanted to have the enemies attack towards
the player and scale up, rather than drop on top of you -- the classic
top-down/POV switcheroo. I think the "War of the Worlds" theme came from
wanting the player to shoot the legs out from under the attackers. This
suggested the walking tripods of H. G. Wells. I had a bear of a time drawing
a three-legged walk cycle that still worked at each stage. Just doing a
three-legged walk cycle was bad enough! I also distinctly remember
suggesting to Jim Pierce that we might want to do a copyright search on the
name. Jim, of course, could not care less. ;>)

So, why wasn't WotW it built before "Star Castle?" Indeed, why wasn't it
built before 1982, which is when it was shown at the same game show as
"Reactor?" Well, probably because the game play just didn't work. We
couldn't get enough attackers on the screen to challenge the player. When we
first got it up and running, Rob and I spent a whole night playing the game
and we had a great time! However, we weren't paying to play, and the game
wasn't trying to limit our playing time. Out on test, WotW was a complete
failure and the reason why was quite clear. Unless we could get more
attackers (and some variation) on the screen, it just wouldn't go.

Cut to: 1981. I'm in Chicago working on "Reactor." Back at Cinematronics,
they've finished selling "Armor Attack," my last game for them and, I
believe, Scott Boden's "Solar Quest." From what Scott tells me, they dug out
every game they had on the shelf and in development and ported them to their
new color vector system. All of these were shown at the 1982 game show,
including "Boxing Bugs" which was an attempt to do a "cute" vector game.
(The game play was a corruption of another game, not cute, that Scott had
been working on.)

Hope that helps. ;>)

Tim