1982.Game - A Gaming Documentary Series - This year is often tossed around as the one when a many of the games considered to be the worst ever made were released. But truth be told, it wasn’t as bad as people make it out to be. Also, there are a few corrections from past shows addressed in this edition.
Let’s begin this show about 1982 by acknowledging two major blunders in two previous shows. One was the omission of Beneath Apple Manor, an Apple 2 game developed by Don Wort h in 1978. It is notable for being a PC dungeon crawling game that came out before the likes of Rogue or Ultima. It is, in fact, the first commercial PC RPG, and one of the first on the PC to use random room generation. You could argue that the Rogue-Like gerne owes as much of its existence to Beneath Apple Manor as it does to Rogue… but considering how obscure the game is, that is a bit doubtful.
The second glaring and absolutely unforgivable mistake was forgetting about Mystery House. In fact, I have not even mentioned the founding of Sierra On-Line in the show so far, which in itself is a really bad thing. I haven’t mentioned Activision either, but we’ll get to that today. Mystery House was among the first adventure games to have a graphical representation. It was a resounding success and allowed Roberta and Ken Williams to build the adventure game genre as we know it today. I apologize deeply for not including it in the 1980.game show. Mistakes will happen, and since published shows can’t be modified, they will forever remain as a black mark on the series… until the inevitable 7 hour complete edition of this series sometime next year.
That being said, let’s move on to 1982. The year of Michael Jacksosn’s Thriller, the year when Star Trek 2 The Wrath of Khan gave people a glance of what CGI could do, the year when Tron was released, fueling the desire of people to one day venture into cyberspace, the year of the Falkland Island war, and the year in which China passed 1 billion people. Two of the most popular computer systems ever made were released this year, The Commodore 64, which would go on to become the best selling computer of all time, defining a decade… at least in the US. And the Sinclair Research ZX Spectrum in Europe, a cheap as hell and endlessly cloned system that could potentially turn any teenager with time on their hands into a game developer worth millions. To many, these systems are the ones that truly launched the home computing era, even though the likes of the Apple 2 and Atari 8 bit computers would still be popular in their own right. The Atari series actually got a sort of new version, in the form of the Atari 5200, which was literary just an Atari 400 without a keyboard, being marketed as a home console, and didn’t really do as well commercially as the Atari 2600.
1982 is also notable for a few companies being founded. Like Sun Microsystems, Adobe Systems. And on the gaming side of things, Trip Hawkins, a former Apple employee, founded Electronic Arts, and filled with talent from all the major tech companies of the age, he even got Steve Wozniak to be on the board of directors. EA didn’t release any games in that year, but it soon would, and it would also start doing shady things, but that’s a matter for a show of its own one day. The same year, a guy named Bill and another guy named Sid would found a company called Microprose, that within a decade would rob you of your sleep and worry your loved ones that you always say “just one more turn” and never leave your computer.
One of the most successful games to come out in 1982 was the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man, Even though it sold over 7 million copies, it was a pile of crap compared to the original, and highlighted a problem. Within just 5 years, Atari went from creating games that were interesting, in spite of their limitation, to being outright pieces of garbage. And no, I’m not talking about ET The Extra Terrestrial, that was made by Howard Scott Warshaw in just a few weeks. As bad as that game was, it was only the tip of the iceberg. An iceberg made of garbage, that would soon be buried in a landfill. That’s because Atari had a structure that didn’t differentiate between the people making games and the people that were doing smaller tasks, like making the packaging. So, as the legend goes, in 1979 four of its programmers and game designers: David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller, and Bob Whitehead went to the CEO of the company, Ray Kassar, and asked for their names on the game box and to be paid royalties for the games they were making from scratch. In case you’re wondering, Nolan Bushnell had been forced out of the company for many years by then. Kassar said no. So the four quit and founded their own company. It was initially going to be called VSync Inc, but when that didn’t fit, they went with a portmanteau of of Active Television, Activision. The first third party game developer for a home console. Up until then, there were no companies outside the manufacturer of the console that made games for the console. On the computer side things were a lot more open, but tight control was exerted on consoles. And in Atari’s case, it lead to laziness and many, many horrible games.
Regardless of what you may think of the current form of Activision, its existence extended the life of the Atari 2600 by a few years. It had released a few games that I glossed over in the past two years, but in 1982 it released some of the greatest games on the platform. Pitfall became an instant classic. A platformed that further helped shape and define what this genre could be. It released River Raid, Carol Shaw’s scrolling shoote’em-up that went above and beyond the Space Invaders formula, by actually making the player move towards the enemy, requiring refueling and going around obstacles. It sold over a million copies and from my own personal experience, it is a shining gem in the mire of shovelware that Atari was peddling in that age.
Activision broke the mold and inspired many others to create Atari 2600 games of their own, that’s how we got Parker Brother’s The Empire Strikes Back game, an adaptation of sorts of the Hoth battle scene of the second Star Wars movie.
Coming back to Sierra On-line, not only did the company continue releasing graphical adventure games, like Time Zone, which was a globe trotting, time traveling puzzle filled marvel of its age, with over 1300 locations and a text parser that could understand commands made up of even two words. But they also went on to publish Richard Garriott’s Ultima 2… and there were some disputes about it, which lead to the two parts parting ways soon after. FS1 Flight Simulator transformed into Microsoft Flight Simulator, being ported to PC-DOS and licensed to Microsoft, becoming a standard by which people tested system comparability with the IBM-PC standard. It was notable for running within its own operating system, being totally independent from any software present on the PC. SubLOGIC would continue to develop the non-Microsoft version of the game
On the arcade front, things were still going strong. Namco released the beloved Dig Dug, a game about digging yourself into a hole and probably dying there. A developer called Gottileb released another popular mascot based game called Q*Bert, the main character being famous for its tendency to swear a lot in an intelligible fashion.
Tron came to the arcades, in the form of a game adaptation that set a standard of quality which some say hasn’t really been topped since, offering a succession of separate individual challenges, like the iconic light cycle battles.
Sega released Zaxxon, one of the first games to use an isometric perspective, in order to give the 2D graphics of the game a sense of three dimensions, a method of that stuck around for decades, due to its low impact on hardware, compared to actual 3D, and great visual quality, compared to early 3D.
And I can’t pass up mentioning Ms. Pac-Man as well. A sequel to the classic that Midway made without actually getting permission from Namco, that had its own planned out series of Pac-Man games. It proved to be very successful, iterating upon the initial game, changing little, and refining enough so that the end result would keep people coming back again and again.
As for what the game of 1982 was, well, I have to give it to ET The Extra Terrestrial. This is not a joke. It’s not just about what was the best game of that year, what game innovated the most, it’s the game that best represented that year, and ET was just that. A rushed, hastily put together, barely tested, somewhat incoherent mess. That was the state of the home console market in the US. That was the perceived state of the video games industry. That is what ET embodied. And, truth be told, there were worst games on the Atari 2600 than it, at least Howard Scott Warshaw tried to be creative. The game would be a resounding failure, Atari being forced to destroy and bury the unsold copies, millions of them. The company’s hubris got the best of it, believing that anything it put out, especially based on a beloved recent movie, would be an instant success. Boy, were they wrong. And we’ll see the fallout from this next week. Goodbye.
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its totally the last hobby i have left but yours there is really one of the best free indie docus i have had the pleasure of getting to know on youtube, thanks ! ! !
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bit of a hurry sorry, i gotta hide my ass from wednesday before the sun burns away my sanity
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