Existing comment:
Atari VCS
Action: Pac-Man
Pac-Man illustrates the design challenges in bringing a popular arcade game to a home console.
Programmer Tod Frye was forced to make adjustments to replicate the colorful graphics and sophisticated gameplay of designer Toru Iwatani's arcade original on the far less-powerful Atari VCS.
As a result, the maze had hard corners instead of rounded ones. The "dots" used the same graphic as the walls and appeared as rectangular bars. Most noticeably, only one of the four ghosts could appear at a time on screen -- causing them to flicker on and off.
Pac-Man fans were disappointed by what they considered a pale imitation of their arcade favorite. However, the game is recognized today for Frye's determination and creativity in squeezing the entire game into just 4 kilobytes of memory -- a mere fraction of the
original.
Target: Space Invaders
Many early video games, like Space Invaders, first became popular in arcades.
In designer Tomohiro Nishikado's Space Invaders, seen here, your mission is to defend Earth from space aliens.
As the home market developed in the late 1970s, the game world opened up to a vast new audience.
The limited capacity of the early home systems required simpler design and graphics, but this version of Space Invaders adapted by Rick Maurer, still captured the core components of the arcade game. The ominous soundscape and increasing speed as the aliens approached heightened the tension of the conflict and set the standard for many subsequent space shooter games.
Adventure: Pitfall!
In the early 1980s, Pitfall's creator David Crane achieved a design breakthrough – the fluid animation of a running human form on a video game console.
Crane was inspired by the adventures of Indiana Jones in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, released the previous year, and imagined a treasure-hunting jungle adventure for Pitfall Harry.
You must avoid a range of enemies and guide Harry past obstacles -- water, logs, and, of course, pits -- in a two-level maze as a clock counts down the seconds.
With Pitfall, Crane created the first popular human video game character for a console and established the standard mechanics that continue to be used in action adventure games today.
Tactics: Combat
The designers of Combat used minimal pixels and colors to great effect.
They appropriated elements of Pong, a widely popular video game, to create a two-player battle.
Small alterations in the computer code allowed objects -- known as sprites -- to send out one-pixel projectiles rather than merely bounce a ball between them.
Combat also included flying levels, in which projectiles could travel along straight lines as well as curved paths, suggesting guided missiles.
The rudimentary graphics available at the time required a great deal of imagination on the part of the player.
To help fill out the narrative, the box art for the game depicted a realistic battlefield alight with military machines in combat -- a far cry from the rudimentary vehicles that players controlled on screen! |