Player 2 Stage 3: Stand By For Technical Adjustment

Heading into the 80's, videogames have proven themselves a lasting entertainment venue. While a lot of experts cite the growing home console craze as the death knell of the arcades, the gulf widens with the addition of new facets in arcade games...colour and human speech.

Now In Glorious 8-bit Colour!

In 1955, Nakamura Manufacturing Company of Japan is founded as a producer of merry-go-rounds. After changing their name to Namco in 1974 they establish a videogame presence with the purchase of the Japanese subsidiary of Atari Corp. And in 1979 they design the first ever colour arcade game with Galaxian (colour had previously been replicated with the use of overlays on the screen, al la Space Invaders). As in Invaders, players control a ship and fire at lines of aliens across the top of the screen, but this time the enemy is no sitting duck. They actually leave formation and swoop down the screen after you, dropping bombs all the way. Namco goes on to produce some of the most popular arcade titles of all time. Numerous Galaxian sequels naturally ensue, including 1983's Galaga, an immensely popular title in its own right that spawns its own set of sequels including Galpus (Galaga 3). Galaga's improvements, aside from more detailed graphics, comes in the form of a tractor beam the aliens use to capture the player's ships. By shooting the offending alien the player can win back his ship and double his firepower. Galaga is also the first video game to have a bonus, or 'Challenging' level, interspersed between the main action. With their licensing agreement with the Japanese company, Midway gets to reap the profits of the huge popularity of Namco games here in North America, and Galaxian and Galaga follow Space Invaders to the home platforms with a rash of console translations and clones. Namco remains one of the few arcade game companies still independently producing today.

galaxian.avi - Galaxian movie clip (194K)
galaga.avi - Galaga movie clip (351K)

Videogames Sound Off

Speech comes to videogames in Taito's 1980 Galaxian knock-off Stratovox. The point of the game is to try and prevent the abduction of planet colonists by marauding aliens, who for some reason have chosen a sombrero as their choice of ship design. Speech synthesis requires massive amounts of memory to execute, and the hardware used to emulate the male human voice is a full 1.5 MHz chip (about half the speed of the the Z-80 running the rest of the show), so the alien taunts and pleas from kidnapped colonists are highly distorted and limited to four phrases. Cries of "Help me!" come when an alien grabs one of your men, who then congratulate you with a "Very good" if you mange to shoot his captor. Shouts of "Lucky!" accompany each colonist saved during the tally at the end of a screen, and a very Arnoldesque "We'll be back!" is said when an alien is destroyed. While I remembered playing this game at my local arcade as soon as I fired it up in MAME, it appears to be rather rare, and not a particular success for Taito in North America.

Building a Genre

Arcade game producer Universal (not the movie studio) gives birth to one of the most venerable categories in gaming history with Space Panic, the first platform game, released in 1981. Platform games generally deal with the player climbing ladders and running across platform levels, avoiding bad guys and other life-ending objects. In Space Panic, the enemies are little evil space-apples intent on taking a bite out of the hero's backside. Luckily, the protagonist is armed with a shovel that seems to be able to dig through solid brick, allowing him to trap the aliens in holes that can then be filled in, dispatching them. He must, however, keep an eye on the oxygen level, which will asphyxiate him if it runs out. This game is the basis for the Apple II's Apple Panic, and paves the way for hundreds of other platform titles, including powerhouse Donkey Kong by Nintendo, as well as about a million console games. Universal themselves are prolific game producers until disbanding in 1985, and probably their biggest games are the Mr. Do franchise, starting in 1982 with the original Mr. Do!. Stretching across five games, including Mr. Do's Castle (Asian title: Mr. Do Vs. the Unicorns) and Mr. Do's Wild Ride, the series is generally considered to contain some of the most diabolical gameplay ever.

spacepanic.avi - Space Panic movie clip (569K)
mrdo.avi - Mr. Do! movie clip (600K)

Hail the Gorfian Empire!

Jay Fenton, designer of the Bally/Midway home videogame console astrocade, makes arcade game history with his 1981 coin-op Gorf, who's chipset the astrocade is based around. The game's multiple levels on their own are hardly original, but are nonetheless the first ever featured in a videogame. Gorf sports the "Quark Laser", which allows the player to cancel a missed shot by firing again, and it also allows the player's ship to roam a full one-third of the playfield. The storyline deals with an invasion by the Gorfians, a murderous robot empire intent on the conquering of Earth. The player must defend his planet through five levels in all - a Space Invaders knock-off with the added feature of a flickering protective barrier stretched over the player, two Galaxian clones (one of which adds laser ships that send a deadly line of energy down at the player), a warp sequence where enemy ships come swirling out of a void, and a final level against the dreaded Gorfian Flag Ship. When the flag ship is destroyed, the game restarts at a harder difficulty level. Gorf is also on the vanguard of the first games with speech, utilizing a speech synthesis chip called the Votrax. Emulating a human voice by use of speech patterns called phonemes allows for lesser memory requirements than using actual digitized phrases. The Votrax offers a much higher quality voice than Stratovox along with an astounding 25 available sentences. In fact, the brutal taunts that the game throws out at players become famous, including such memorable lines as "I devour coins!", "Your end draws near" and "You will meet a Gorfian doom!". Jay Fenton apparently creates a sequel called Ms. Gorf in 1982, but the game appears to be extremely rare. Another big hit for Midway, Gorf prompts the usual flood of translations of the game for home systems such as the VCS. In particular, the ColecoVision port is a real standout, almost perfectly reproducing the game, sans Galaxian screen and speech.

gorf.avi - Gorf movie clip (596)