Excellent article. Great game.
Atari Tempest: Dave Theurer’s Masterpiece
51–60 of 64 posts
Re: Atari Tempest: Dave Theurer’s Masterpiece
#52personally always been a bigger fan of Eugene Jarvis who as a teen write Defender, Stargate and Robotron. I did own Tempest too great game.
Jarvis was 25 when Defender came out.
Re: Atari Tempest: Dave Theurer’s Masterpiece
#53Came out when I was in high school and I had already passed the baton to the next generation of arcade gamers. But I loved to watch a skilled player play (but not as much as I liked to watch a skilled player play Defender). Modern big-budget, big-team games are missing something that could only be achieved by a single gifted game developer such as Dave Theurer.
Re: Atari Tempest: Dave Theurer’s Masterpiece
#54Re: Atari Tempest: Dave Theurer’s Masterpiece
#55I knew a guy that specialized in repairing these types of games. I was fascinated in hearing about how the game controlled the scanning of the electron beam from the normal CRT horizontal scan. I was always curious of what was the genesis for the idea to use a CRT in this way. The first thing I had always thought about was sending this method of scanning an audio signal to let it draw the sound. For the time period,…
Here's someone saving a Tempest monitor. Nice to see them still running.
Re: Atari Tempest: Dave Theurer’s Masterpiece
#56Think your compiler works too slow ? "The programmer had to do everything: Write the whole operating system from scratch, design all the graphics, write the tools to do the graphics, create sound tools, and do the sound design – everything from scratch for every game….I’d write the code on programming sheets and turn it in to the typists who’d type them in to a DEC computer, then give us a tape with the resulting com…
Actually, our compiler has never changed speed. The true compiler is our brain. A programmer in the 80's and a programmer today have the same brain compiler speed.
Before you can write any program, you have to build, run and execute it in your head. That's the challenge most of us face today. Hardware/Software doesn't matter much. The average indie developer is writing games in about 20k-50k line of code. Doesn't matter if it's 6502/z80 asm code in 80's or Unity/C# or Java code in 2018.
Re: Atari Tempest: Dave Theurer’s Masterpiece
#57In my memory the sound of an arcade is Tempest. If I think about it for a moment, other sounds come into focus, but Tempest is the first and primary sound I can identify. Tempest epitomizes early arcade games, to me. It was subject to all the same technical limits of games of the era, but it seemed to be apart from them; there's nothing you'd need to add to make it better. The sound and the look of it, from the intro…
May I suggest, http://plork.princeton.edu/listen/green/ and listen to "The Future of Fun (1983)"
You don't need a simulation, there are recordings of actual arcades from the 80s. E.g., http://www.coinopvideogames.com/sounds.php
Tempest, recorded in 1982: http://www.coinopvideogames.com/mp3/videogames01/11-tempest....
Re: Atari Tempest: Dave Theurer’s Masterpiece
#58Came out when I was in high school and I had already passed the baton to the next generation of arcade gamers. But I loved to watch a skilled player play (but not as much as I liked to watch a skilled player play Defender). Modern big-budget, big-team games are missing something that could only be achieved by a single gifted game developer such as Dave Theurer.
The only art that gets made when there are no constraints is uninteresting and massive. Size. Modern games are big in every dimension. Atari had a medium that artists had to work within.
Re: Atari Tempest: Dave Theurer’s Masterpiece
#59Tempest was the first arcade game I fell in big time. I had Tempest dreams at times. Great game!
That seems appropriate as the idea for the game came from a nightmare.
Re: Atari Tempest: Dave Theurer’s Masterpiece
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was born in 1987 and I totally get it. This has always been my favorite retro game; I first encountered it for PS2 I think. I've only found one multicade machine at a local juice bar that had it. I've never before or since been devoted to maintaining high score on a public machine like that before. Unfortunately, that machine is now gone.
I remember going to a classic games exhibition in London around the year 2000, I played Tempest for the first time there, it was one of my favourite games I played at the show. Jeff Minter is clearly a fan as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePW33ZmC04c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS9alQbHHPk
Yes! Not only Tempest 2000 and Tempest 3000, Minter's Polybius [1] is very similar to Tempest. (It's also just awesome that Minter named his game Polybius.)