For me, the potential of this technology wasn’t in the complexity of the drawing, but in the speed at which the computer could display what it thought of as plain text. Maybe that column of numbers was a list of grocery store sales data, refreshing every time somebody bought a banana somewhere on the East Coast—or maybe it was a fortress of cobblestone number 3s, aiming hyphens at the enemy sales data on the other side of the screen. The computer didn’t know the difference. With the right layout of text, I realized, I could transform it from ASCII art into ASCII animation.
Perhaps there was something subconsciously inspiring about a black computer screen dotted with white characters, or perhaps it was just a case of paralyzing fandom, but I decided I would make a game based on Star Trek. There’s actually a somewhat famous Star Trek ASCII game from the same era, created by Mike Mayfield in 1971. It was turn-based, with Klingons and asteroids plotted out on an overhead grid, and proved so popular that the code was reprinted in several books and nostalgically modified by fans to play on every computer system since. There’s even a modern version that can play on Android smartphones. This widespread and well-documented program was not my game, and I am in no way taking credit for it. To the best of my knowledge, my Star Trek ASCII game never left the confines of the General Instrument network.
In contrast to Mayfield’s turn-based program, mine was designed to run in real time, like an arcade game. First, I outlined the Enterprise’s viewscreen with underscores, slashes, and pipes (the vertical line in the upper-right-hand corner of your keyboard). These remained static throughout the game, while everything inside them moved around several times a second, animating the enemy ships and space debris flying toward you in mock-3D. Missiles and phasers had to be timed just right, and when you took out an enemy, you were rewarded with a little texty explosion. I even added small beeping sound effects, which turned out to be the beginning of the game’s downfall.
Initially, I posted it for only a few interested coworkers, but within a few days it seemed like everyone had heard of it. The company network began to drag, and small beeps ricocheted through the halls as a sort of work-abandonment klaxon of shame. Nobody seemed especially apologetic, though, since it was easy to hear that they weren’t alone.
Eventually, the drain on productivity became too significant to ignore, and I was told to delete the game. But the instruction was delivered with only a knowing shrug, since not even management could cast the first stone when it came to playing on company time. My coworkers were understandably disappointed, but personally, I wore the ban with pride. It was an objective measure of how good the game must have been.
It did leave me with a problem, however. My appetite for making games was growing stronger. If I couldn’t program them in the office anymore, where could I do it? Like a lot of fledgling industries, the home computer market in the late seventies was crowded and nonstandardized. There were a few major players like the Apple II and the TRS-80, but also many less popular machines like the Commodore PET, the Texas Instruments 99/4, and the Heathkit, which arrived as loose components you had to solder together yourself. But all of these seemed geared toward the engineer, rather than the programmer, and none took into account the needs of gaming at all. The TRS-80 didn’t have a color screen, and several of the others didn’t have plugs for joysticks. There were dedicated gaming systems, including the Magnavox Odyssey and the classic Atari 2600, but they were just passive readers. You couldn’t make a game on one any more than you could make a TV show with a television set. Arcade machines could be programmed directly, but their hardware was well beyond my price range. All I could do was wait.
Finally, in late 1979, Atari released a pair of systems known as the 400 and the 800. They were code-named Candy and Colleen during production, supposedly in honor of two secretaries in the Atari offices, and these names live on in the emulator programs you can still find on the internet today. Candy, the 400, was marketed exclusively as a machine that could play games, and didn’t include plugs for a traditional keyboard or a non-television monitor. It was little more than an upgrade to the Atari 2600. Colleen, on the other hand, was a real computer: bigger, heavier, with top-of-the-line graphics and sound capability, a real keyboard, expansion slots for added memory, and no fewer than four separate joystick ports.
Even better, the data output could be stored magnetically instead of on long paper tape riddled with holes. The magnetic tape was only a few millimeters wide, and rolled up neatly into what most people today would recognize as an audiocassette. Aside from being vastly more convenient, this meant that anyone who saw your stash of Atari tapes might assume you were carrying around the latest Billy Joel singles instead of a bunch of nerdy computer gear.
Other computers on the market could in theory make games, but here was a machine that had been designed for it, by the company that knew games better than anyone. I clipped out the mail-order form, and enclosed a check representing almost all of my savings. Several weeks later, the distinctive silver Atari box arrived on my doorstep, and within hours I was programming.
Not that I could make much at first. The Atari came with a single cartridge containing the BASIC computer language, and no additional instructions to speak of. But between my users’ group, several magazine subscriptions, and diligent experimentation, I soon completed my first truly original work, if not exactly my most exceptional one. I named it Hostage Rescue. On the left side of the screen, a small green helicopter hovered, not much different than the one I would later use in Chopper Rescue. On the right was an array of face-ish-looking objects, colored blue for bad guys, or white for the hostages awaiting rescue as the title implied. Behind them was a single, oversized face that I very subtly referred to as “the Ayatollah.” It was a timely game.
The Ayatollah shot missiles at you, you shot missiles at him, and whenever you could, you scooped up exposed hostages and returned them to safety on the left side of the screen. Touching a bad guy sacrificed the lives of all the hostages currently in your helicopter, and their headcount remained accusingly at the bottom of the screen for the rest of the game. Simple graphics, I thought, didn’t have to mean pulled punches.
The next time I went back home to Detroit for a visit, I brought my new creative outlet with me. Both of my parents were European immigrants—my father from Switzerland, my mother from Holland—who had come to America in part because of the modern, cosmopolitan life it offered. My father, especially, was a connoisseur of machinery and gadgets, so I had assumed he would find programming as interesting as I did. Instead, I received a terse reminder that his own career as a professional typesetter was being phased out of existence by this newfangled thing I’d brought into their living room. He was not impressed. But he stayed in the room, at least, watching with languid wariness as I connected the Atari to the television and handed my mother the unfamiliar joystick.
She was excited in the way that all mothers are excited for their children’s accomplishments, and she admired the title screen graphics as if she might find a way to hang them on the refrigerator. Soon, however, my four-color rendition of the Iran hostage crisis had her frowning in concentration, and letting out small cries of “Oh no!” at each new threat that headed her way. As the game progressed, she became more and more rapt, clenching her jaw and dodging missiles with her whole body. Suddenly, she dropped the controller and turned her face away.
She couldn’t play anymore, she told me. Her heart was racing and it was all too much.
We moved on and enjoyed the rest of the afternoon, but I never forgot that moment. My mother had become emotionally invested in this little game, so profoundly that she’d had to abandon it entirely. A few rugged blobs on the screen had given her palpitations, and she had felt a genuine stab of guilt over each dead hostage. If she’d made it to the end, no doubt her triumph would have been wholehearted as well.
Games were not just a diversion, I realized. Games could make you feel. If great literature could wield its power through nothi
ng but black squiggles on a page, how much more could be done with movement, sound, and color? The potential for emotional interaction through this medium struck me as both fascinating and enticing.
Shortly afterward, I experienced a second major turning point in my relationship with games, this time through my Not Yet Inaccurately Nicknamed Users’ Group (NYINUG). We were gathered at the back of the shop one evening, trading tips, stories, and pirated software in equal amounts, when someone new approached us. He wasn’t a big computer guy himself, he explained, but he was looking for someone who was. A local bank had hired him to help with youth outreach, which apparently meant convincing teenagers that nothing was more hip than fiscal responsibility. One pillar of their plan, therefore, was to create money-themed videogames that they could set up in the bank’s lobby. Even more baffling, they were willing to pay.
I took the job, a word I couldn’t help but inspect over and over again in my mind. Were there people who got paid for making games? Could I be one of those people? I knew by now that I was a person who would make games, probably for the rest of my life, but it had never occurred to me that it could be a source of income. If that were true, then being a game designer seemed like the ideal job.
As with everything, I began to pick apart this puzzle in search of repeatable results, and the more I analyzed how this opportunity had come about, the more I began to appreciate the role the advertising consultant had played. Here was someone who, like most people, couldn’t program computers himself, but who understood enough about them to see their potential. I was neither a boisterous salesman nor a self-promoter, and though I knew it was counterproductive to my own goals, I instinctively didn’t want to deal with people who were blind to how incredibly cool these machines were. I had useful knowledge that others didn’t have, but I would have to rely on those who had knowledge of my knowledge, who could be my link to the non-programming world. People, in other words, like my future partner Bill Stealey.
The money games were fun to make, despite being destined for failure in their role as “extreme banking” ambassadors. I designed one with a little piggy bank walking back and forth to catch falling coins, and another as a take on this brand-new arcade game called Frogger, in which you had to get your money across the street to the bank without getting run over. Maybe the cars were supposed to be symbolic of impulse purchases? I don’t know how much I tried to justify my design choices. It was a weird gig.
At the same time, I began working in earnest on a new game that I could sell myself, to test out this professional game designer thing I’d set my sights on. Keeping my focus on marketability for the time being, I decided to build on an already successful formula, namely the smash hit from Taito known as Space Invaders. I don’t even remember what my knockoff was called, but it was probably something obvious like Alien Invasion or Planet Defenders. I was still immersed in hacker culture at the time—which back then looked like a guy in a tucked-in polo shirt deciding between two circuit boards, not a shadowy figure crouched over a laptop in a secret hideout whispering “I’m in”—and I didn’t consider for a moment whether I could get into trouble for selling such an unmistakable clone. To be fair, no version of Space Invaders had been released yet for the Atari 800, so I was still converting the game from scratch to a new system—another thing I didn’t yet know they would pay people to do. If I’d been a Taito employee, they would have called it “porting” the game, instead of “stealing” it.
Once I was satisfied with my hand-assembled Invaders game, I put a small number of cassettes into plastic baggies and carried them down to the local electronics store. The manager indulgently listened to my pitch and bought maybe half a dozen for resale, though I imagine he was trying to keep me as a customer more than anything else. I’m not sure if they ever sold, but he didn’t buy any more after that. Commercial failure was probably for the best, given the copyright concerns, and it did strike me eventually that I would need original ideas. But I went ahead and made a version of Pac-Man, too, just for the practice. The time to flex my creative muscle would be later, I figured, after I had mastered the basics.
My users’ group enjoyed the free copy of Pac-Man I’d given them, and in return, somebody tipped me off to a new technology called Player-Missile Graphics, which had to do with how quickly you could redraw an item as it moved freely around the screen. Though most examples involved spaceships and missiles, as the name implied, it occurred to me that the code could also lend itself nicely to a top-down racing game. From that I created Formula 1 Racing, which was the game I successfully sold to Acorn just before the trip to Las Vegas.
Formula 1 Racing box art.
© 1982 MIKE TIEMANN, INFINITY GRAPHIX. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION.
“Formula 1” was yet another trademark that I never paid to use, but at least the game itself was not especially similar to any of the racing games already on the shelves. Then again, it’s kind of difficult for anyone to claim ownership of the premise “travel quickly in a circle.” Like many games I made later in my career, Formula 1 Racing was fundamentally based on reality, which remains, at least for now, uncopyrightable. A racing game doesn’t need a fictional driver with a predetermined back story; it needs that unique combination of emotional and psychological hooks that make you believe, however fleetingly, that you yourself are the driver.
Gaming, in turn, had its hooks embedded in me. I now believed, and not even fleetingly, that I myself could be a game designer. According to my short autobiography at the end of the Formula 1 Racing manual, this enterprising twenty-eight-year-old with exactly one professional title under his belt had two dreams in life.
One was “to develop a music composition system,” which I eventually did. The other was “to write the ultimate strategy game.”
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CRUISING ALTITUDE
Spitfire Ace (1982) * Wingman (1983) * Floyd of the Jungle II (1983) * Solo Flight (1983) * Air Rescue I (1984)
BY OUR FIRST CHRISTMAS, Bill and I were selling almost five hundred games a month. I had just churned out my fourth title, Spitfire Ace, which was the kind of game we’d probably call an expansion pack today. It used the same code base as Hellcat Ace, but moved the battle scenarios from the Pacific to the European theater. The next step, as Bill saw it, was to broaden our audience by porting all of our games onto other systems, and at the top of his wish list was the hot new computer appearing in homes across America: the Commodore 64.
I was not particularly enthusiastic about this plan. For one thing, converting our games to the Commodore would be a purely financial move for the company, and I kind of felt like that was Bill’s problem, not mine. The work wouldn’t involve anything new or interesting; it was just a way to sell more of what we’d already made. I had developed a lot of time-saving tools for myself on the Atari, and I had a lot of ideas for new games that I didn’t want to derail. Digital gaming had already peaked, as far as I was concerned—I mean, could the human eye even see more than 128 colors?—and if I hoped to establish myself in this obviously mature industry, then I didn’t have time to rehash old code.
Bill agreed that a company is only as good as its latest product, and he did want me to keep producing. So instead, we hired two friends of mine named Grant Irani and Andy Hollis. They were both programmers at General Instrument as well as members of my Atari users’ group, but despite this, computers were not our primary social outlet. Billy Joel wasn’t giving up that easily, and being a rock ’n’ roller was still far cooler for young guys like us than being a game designer. So most of our evenings together were spent noodling around in a basement band—similar to a garage band, but in Michigan, where the garage is too cold for nine months out of the year. Andy played drums, Grant was on vocals and guitar, and I played keyboard.
Though we’d technically doubled our workforce, MicroProse was still a nights-and-weekends operation out of our own homes, so it didn’t feel like much had changed. Grant got busy porting Floyd of the Jungle to the Commodore
64, and Andy began altering the Ace conflict scenarios once again to create a version set in the Korean War. Meanwhile, Bill and I compromised on our respective interests with Wingman, a new style of flying game that would attempt to display independent, third-person multiplayer.
Usually multiplayer worked by showing the entire level on the screen at once, like Floyd, or else forcing the players to remain together, as in Chopper Rescue. But Bill wanted a game where two freely flying pilots could either team up or compete across a widespread level, and not necessarily be viewing the same section of the world at the same time. He may have seen the concept demonstrated in an arcade game, but nothing like it had ever been created on home computers. So I figured out a way to split the screen horizontally, keeping each player centered in their own half, but also visible in the other person’s side of the screen when their paths overlapped. Even better, the code was finished with enough time for Andy to add a first-person version of it to his game, MiG Alley Ace, transforming the third title of the trilogy into something unique from its predecessors.
Sid Meier's Memoir! Page 3