Micro Focus, creators of visual programming tools for software development, is pleased
to provide major funding for the Computer Chronicles, the story of this continuing evolution.
Welcome to the Computer Chronicles. I'm Stuart Chaffee and this is Gary Kildall, whom I'm
trying to beat in a game of Pong. Pong is the granddaddy of all computer games and that's
the subject of our program today, Computer Games. And Gary, computer games in fact were
important, weren't they, in getting the whole personal computer thing going? Well, they
certainly were a part of it. One of the unique aspects of a personal computer is that it
often has bitmap color graphics like the Apple II, for example. And that way you can do very
dynamic things, games that you couldn't do, say, with a teletype style or scrolling display
you would find in a larger computer system. This particular game, obviously, is a pretty
old vintage and they've gotten a lot more sophisticated since then and we're going to
see some of that today. Indeed, we've got a very exciting show. We'll be meeting some
of the superstars of computer game programming from Electronic Arts, from Atari, and from
Activision. And while the idea of computers in games may be new, the idea of people playing
games with machines is not really new. Now that was a first one. Before the first program
was written to simulate a starry background or a speeding racer, Penny Arcades offered
simpler, more mechanical amusements, but with the same goals in mind, to challenge and entertain.
If the locale was less exotic and the competition less ferocious, at least some of the game's
interactions were similar. A player needed manual dexterity in competing for points or
a reward, more tangible in some cases than in others. As a device for escaping daily
routine, computer-generated graphics brought a level of fantasy that no mechanical game
could ever approach. Instead of escaping from a schoolroom or an office, a player could
leave the Earth or move to a different universe. Modern arcade computer games offer different
kinds of challenges, from fast-action games that demand even faster reactions, to maze-type
games where the player threads his way around obstacles, and war games where the object
is to destroy or be destroyed. In one of the latest adventure games, animated images are
stored on laser discs to be recalled sequentially following the story's plot and according to
the player's responses. If the player moves the control stick in the right direction,
he is rewarded with a successful escape. But if the player makes a mistake, the program
picks an alternative sequence of images, and the results can be extremely uncomfortable.
Whether used to create unknown worlds or to enhance the reality of familiar worlds, computer
games succeed in an unlikely domain, transforming pinpoints of light on a little screen into
a believable realm, larger than life and usually more exciting.
Our guests in the studio are Steve Kitchen, designer of an incredible new game, Space
Shuttle, from Activision, and Chris Crawford, one of the top game designers with Atari.
Gary? Steve and Chris, you both build computer-based
games. Do you call yourselves designers or programmers?
I call myself a designer because most of the sweat and blood I expend occurs in the design
phase, not in the programming phase. I spend a great deal of time worrying about what my
audience will experience in the game, and only towards the end of the project do I actually
get down to writing any code. When you think about the design of the game,
what are the elements of the game that make it interesting?
Well, that has to do a great deal with what I'm trying to accomplish. I set a goal. I
want a game to achieve a certain effect. I want to somehow communicate a message to my
audience. That message then dictates the topic and the style of the game, the nature of the
graphics, the feel, the texture of the game that I'm trying to build into it. That's what
I spend most of my time worrying about. Chris, you're talking more like a writer rather
than a computer programmer. Steve, is that how you see what you do?
That's basically what we are. We're writers. We're writing a book, a novel, creating a
vicarious universe in this computer program. We have to model everything we want, put every
small detail in. Very often in my game, for instance, I had to do extensive research for
a year and a half to understand my subject before I could distill the important aspects
out and then put them into this cartridge. Like a writer would.
Exactly like a writer would. When a writer writes a book, the book is a vicarious universe.
You read it and become part of it. It's the same thing. When you play these games, these
programs, you vicariously become part of the universe that the programmer puts into it.
Okay, you've got Space Shuttle up here. Give us a demonstration of how this works.
This is an automatic demo flight we're going to fly. This is a complete Space Shuttle mission
from launch to landing. This is actually themed after the STS-2 flight back in November of
1981. We're starting off now at Cape Kennedy in the morning. The clouds are rolling by.
The sun is coming up. And we're doing our countdown now. Now at T minus four seconds,
we're going to turn our main engines on. You're going to see the thrust indicators at the
top of the screen there moving along. There we go. At T plus three seconds, the solid
rocket boosters are going to turn on and we're going to go through the clouds and off the
pad. And there we go. Now the aspect of the game here is to fly the Space Shuttle successfully
into a 210 nautical mile orbit, doing all the control functions that an astronaut would
really do, setting your yaw and your pitch, keeping on a trajectory line. At 26.2 nautical
miles, the solid rocket boosters will jettison off. Now this is a very important point of
accuracy is there's a yellow flash. There we go. This is something that wasn't noted
until STS-1 when the first astronauts went up that this actually happened. I had to find
all of these details out about what you would experience if you were inside of the Space
Shuttle and you were doing the flying so that when you play this game, you feel like you've
actually flown. Steve, it seems to me the incredible thing is this game is running on
an Atari 2600, not a computer. How do you squeeze all of this into that unit? Well,
it takes a lot of time programming, coding. You have to model the universe as you feel
it should really be. And then you have to find how you can fit it all in piece by piece.
You start off with the basic mission and then you add features and you add the functions
all along the way. When I finished the game, I was not happy with it. And I had an additional
list of 146 separate items I wanted to put in that I still felt were important. I spent
an additional three months finishing those off and getting them all in. I wanted this
to be absolutely accurate and absolutely complete. And it is. You put this all inside of a, how
big a ROM? It's an 8K cartridge. It's an incredible amount of... It took 13 months
of programming and a lot of that time was spent putting it all together. Now, we've
just achieved orbit. There's the Earth's room rolling underneath. The external tank will
jettison. There it goes. And we've docked with an orbiting satellite, which actually
was themed after the Skylab. In fact, Dr. Ed Gibson did a review on the game and he
noted that it looked like you were trying to fly into his old nemesis in space. And
then we do our de-orbit and we come in for a landing at Edwards Air Force Base. Now,
one thing unique you did in adapting this game to the 2600 is using the switches in
the 2600 as functional switches. How did you do that? What we had to do was I had to throw
out all the old ideas of what this machine would do. This was originally a video game
console so I said, look, all these switches are controlled by the computer. I'm going
to redefine them to be computer switches. I'm going to control the main engines, the
backup engines, the cargo bay doors, the landing gear, the sequence of information on the screen.
It became so different that we had to develop an overlay to fit over the screen. We had
to develop a, what's called a cheat sheet, which is just what the astronauts use. This
gives you all the instructions that are necessary to fly your shuttle. And the instruction book
is 30 pages long. And it gives you a lot of detail into exactly how to fly the space shuttle.
And basically it's a small flight manual. We provide a glossary. We provide drawings
of the space shuttle, engine indicators. Here's a side view of the space shuttle that we provide.
So really, you understand all about the space shuttle in order to fly this game accurately.
Do you get a little pilot's license when you get through this? If you fly successfully,
you receive a patch. And if you fly just as an astronaut would, you might get your wings.
We're entering the Earth's atmosphere now, and you see we're getting the ionization cone
that appears around the space shuttle. If you saw the movie The Right Stuff, you would
see in the sequence with John Glenn, this is what the astronauts see in the window.
This is hot ionized gas being superheated by the friction of the shuttle on the way
in. We've even lost our signals. We've lost our altitude and speed information. We've
lost our computer screens.
Steve, it seems piloting the space shuttle is very difficult to do, one would think.
Can a kid or a normal person actually pull this off?
Well, what I did when I designed this was I understood that problem. Having the average
individual fly the space shuttle would take years of work. But I looked at how NASA trains
its astronauts, and they start off, first of all, by giving them a lot of book exercises.
They give them film strips of what it's like to fly the space shuttle. This is flight number
one. You're seeing essentially a film strip. You can pick up the joystick and take control
at any time you want to, but you don't have to.
There's a second flight called a training flight, and that basically is like flying
in a simulator. You can make mistakes, you can make errors, and the computer will compensate
and it will let you know. And then flight three is the actual real thing. So you work
your way up to flying the actual mission. You can get into it very easily, and then
work your way up and finally try to achieve your wings.
The interesting thing about this game, I think, is that it's an educational learning experience
as well as a...
Vicariously educational. You're not sitting there playing flash cards. You're learning
about one of the most technologically advanced items today. There are the dual sonic booms
that occur. The first one was the space shuttle. The second one was the chase planes. And we're
coming in now at Edwards Air Force Base. When you get done mastering this game, you've effectively
learned all about what an astronaut does when he's in orbit. So the next time you see a
launch go off, you're going to know what he has to do, when he has to do it, and what
he goes through.
It's incredible. We need another minute or so before we land here. While we're waiting,
Chris, let's talk about... Your new game is called Excalibur. What is that about?
Excalibur is a game of leadership. The concept... I wanted to express to people the ideas behind
von Clausewitz's statement, war is the extension of policy to other means. That is, I was a
little tired of war games that glorify war. So I wanted to show that war is something
that sometimes cannot be avoided, but must never be entered into in a cavalier manner.
And so really, I was trying to teach concepts of leadership. And so in the game Excalibur,
I make you, as King Arthur, I give you the task of unifying Britain. Now, unification
is entirely different from conquest. That is, you have to convince people of your authority.
You have to convince them to follow you. And that involves more than merely brute force.
Chris, we have a little bit of time left. Can you get Excalibur up on the screen and
show us just a piece of that?
This is the title scene to Excalibur. And it does nothing more than give the title and
set a tone and show off who did it.
And this was designed to run on the Atari 800?
Yes. I've cut it off. This was designed for the 800 with 48K and a disk drive. It's a
huge game. It actually won't fit on the 800. It requires disk swapping. And so you bring
in whole chunks of game at a time. It's actually 66K of object code. Very, very large game,
all written in assembly language.
Okay. Well, if you've played Raster Blaster or messed around with Pinball Construction
Set, you've been manipulated by the mind of Bill Budge, one of the premier game designers.
We'll meet Bill and the president of Electronic Arts in just a moment.
Joining us now is game designer Bill Budge, who works with Electronic Arts and the president
of Electronic Arts, Trip Hawkins.
Bill, there's quite an array of games out here on the table. And what is it that makes
a game successful? Or what kind of factors go into the design of a game?
It's really hard to... You can't ask people what they want to see on the computer and
what kind of programs they want. I really think that a person writing a program has
to have an inner conviction of something and write a program that they want to write and
a program that they want to use. When I started writing this program, it was something I really
wanted to do. I wanted to see it work.
Where did you get the idea for it?
I always liked building things. And it was a funny, indirect kind of process. I got tired
of writing video games. I was really sick of playing them by this time. And I thought,
well, it's fun to make video games. I still kind of like to write them. And I bet other
people would really like to write them.
You're talking about the pinball construction set.
Right.
And this is kind of a nice game because it actually involves you in the construction
of the game itself. It's kind of like a metagame.
Yeah.
Is the success of that been pretty good in the sense that... Is there a special segment
that you're selling to as far as the construction set?
Well, when you start out, yeah, you're looking to really avant-garde computer users. It takes
a while for the message to get out there. When everyone is still discovering Pac-Man
and a program comes along that's telling them they can build video games, well, it doesn't
register at first. But it's got a slow growth that builds up. And finally, now we're getting
very good results. The game kind of craze dies out. This stuff's taken off.
Trip, on the business side, what do you look for for a successful software game?
Well, I think pinball construction set has a lot of the things that you look for. And
that's why it's now one of the top ten sellers in the country, according to Billboard magazine.
We have a philosophy of having products that are simple, hot, and deep. Simple so that
you don't have to read a lot of instructions. Of course, most people don't want to have
to learn how to operate the computer. They want to just do things with it right away.
And pinball construction set, you can immediately play one of the pinball games that are included,
or you can quickly make up one of your own. And it's very simple to do that, as I think
Bill will illustrate.
We also like to have products that are hot, in that they should fully use the sound and
graphics and other capabilities of the machine. And we also look for programs that are deep.
In the case of pinball construction set, you can make your own pinball game. So it has
a lot of creative possibilities and allows people to control what they're going to make
and interact with it and change it. And that's one of the things that extends the life of
the product and causes people to come back to it again and again.
Bill.
It's kind of fun to take a look at this.
I'm dying.
Dying to see it. Go ahead, Bill.
Well, this is a very simple sort of real-world idea. It's a construction set. You have something
that you're building on this side of the screen and a set of parts over here. And I have a
hand here that I control with the joystick, and I use that to move things around, say,
on the board, the game I'm building. I can modify this game. And I can get parts out
of the box, and I can just add them over here.
So they're kind of bumpers you're putting into your game.
I'm just putting bumpers, yeah. This is a favorite of really young kids. They like to
just grab a whole bunch of bumpers, fill the board up with them, and put a ball on there.
A pinball aficionado would gasp, but little kids don't really build pinball machines.
They just sort of build things with this. And I can get a ball and put that over here.
Then if I want to try out the game, I can just push this menu selection right here,
and the game starts to play.
And now you can see I've got two balls, one up there. I can launch this one, and I can
go out and play the game a little bit. And the balls drop down at the bottom eventually.
But before I let that happen, I'll just go back to the parts box and start editing again,
get rid of some of these.
Bill, this was kind of a new level, I suppose, of computer game, where you really can design
the game yourself. If you can tell us, what are you working on now? What would be the
next step in computer games?
I want to extend the idea of a construction set. I think this one was hard to do when
I started, because there are lots of combinations and things you can't really predict when you're
making a kit to make a metagame, as you said. I'd like to extend the idea even further.
And the problem there is then designing the parts box. In pinball, it's a small set of
parts. You don't really have to worry about thinking up abstractions. In a general construction
set, it's not clear what the parts should be. It's almost like you're inventing a new
language for representing specifications for programs. It gets very difficult computer
science problems.
Chip, at the arcade level, we hear that maybe games sort of peaked and people aren't quite
as interested. Are computer games here to stay, or is it a fad?
I think computer games are fundamentally different from video games, mainly because computer
technology in the home can be extended and become a much broader base of technology.
Just as an example, all of these programs that we're talking about here, they come on
floppy disks, and each one of these holds much more memory than can be held in the memory
of a coin-operated arcade game. And it really is, it becomes a question of the program size
when you finally want to know, how good a program can I have, and how much can I do
with it, and how long will it take before I'm bored with it, or I've exhausted the educational
value. And I can get, oh, something like three or four times more program on here than I
can fit into the memory of a coin-operated game.
Okay, you've got one-on-one there. Maybe we can get it loaded while, I think, Gary, you
had a question.
Well, the only thing I was going to mention is it seems like the games have gone from
relatively unsophisticated games to something that requires a lot of sophistication in terms
of programming, and the memory size is really an important thing, an important aspect of
that.
Yeah, very much so.
So I would really put that back into 8K.
Has that been the difference, really, in the early computer games, pretty limited, now
the incredible graphics and speed? Has it really been a function of the available memory?
Part of it is just programmers getting better, I think. Not many people wrote video games
five years ago. There was a small selection. Now there are thousands of people who are
capable of writing a good video game, and a few people have upped the ante, so it's
not enough maybe to write a video game. You have to write a video game plus a game editor.
I think the more popular games really have these extra features built in.
Can we get one-on-one in there? That's a kind of exciting demonstration of what you can
do, and I think, Chip, you're going to take on either Dr. J or Larry Bird here. Tell us
about one-on-one.
Well, the basic idea of one-on-one was to get these two guys, Julie serving Larry Bird,
who are probably the two best-known basketball players and probably the two best forwards
who have ever played the game, and to capture their personalities in the game. And so we
decided to hire them to help us design the game, and we had photo sessions where we took
pictures of them in action. In fact, we had a camera mounted at mid-court just exactly
from this angle while we photographed them. And then we worked with them on prototypes
of the product, where we'd sit down and talk to them about the moves that they would use
and some of the strategies and the shooting percentages that they would have in different
places on the court. And that was a fascinating learning experience.
You say programmed in the personality. I mean, these characters play like Larry Bird.
Very much so. In fact, why don't I go ahead and get started? Right now, they're playing
against one another in a demonstration game, but if I press the button on my joystick,
it'll take me to a menu, and I can quickly make a selection. I want to play against the
computer. I'm going to allow the computer to play Larry Bird, and I'm going to play
at the varsity level. There are different levels, depending on how good a player I am.
And now I go ahead and start the game. And that's Larry Bird taking an outside shot,
and he hit it. Now, Bird is particularly effective at outside shots. But watch Julius now. I'm
going to be able to drive around him, I hope. Oops, he stole the ball from me.
You're Larry Bird now. No, I'm Dr. J.
You're Dr. J. And unfortunately, I let Bird steal the ball.
And the computer's Larry, okay. He's trying to work his way into the basket.
So he's got a quick 4-0 lead over me. Oh, and now I have to have the indignation of
seeing it in an instant replay. That's great. Where do you think Tripp
the software games are going to next? I mean, what's the next generation of this kind of
stuff? I hate to interrupt you, trying to get back on something.
I had to have a slam dunk there. Sorry. Yeah, what's happening next? I mean, what's
the next tier, the next level of computer games?
Well, at a really simplistic level, it's very easy to extend the realism and the graphics
that are in the current products. And I think it's also, you're going to increasingly see
more creative possibilities for the player, which is, I think, where a lot of the educational
value comes from. Being able to create your own pinball game is one example. We've extended
that with Music Construction Set to a product that is about music. And of course, there
are a lot of people that are really interested in music and interested in having their children
learn about music. And it uses a lot of the ideas that Bill pioneered with the pinball
construction set. And I think that the area where the greatest challenges will come is
in looking for original ideas and new creative ways to break the mold. I mean, a lot of people
look at what other people have done and try to do something that's a spin off from that.
But the really creative geniuses in the industry are capable of coming up with something completely
new. Do they just come to you, they say, we've
got an idea and here's a program I've written, and then you turn around and sell it?
It happens all different ways. We have one of our better products, it's called Hard Hat
Mac, and two high school boys came into our office one day and they had three sheets of
high school notebook paper they'd drawn up in their physics class, and we signed a contract
based on that. Gentlemen, we're out of time. Bill, Drip,
thanks so much. Thank you for joining us on this edition of the Computer Chronicles.
Micro Focus, creators of visual programming tools for software development, is pleased
to provide major funding for the Computer Chronicles, the story of this continuing evolution.
Random Access is made possible by a grant from Popular Computing, a McGraw-Hill magazine.
In the Random Access file, Hewlett Packard has made another major move into the personal
computer field with a new portable printer designed for the PC market. It is a non-impact
inkjet printer with low noise operation, battery powered, 150 characters per second, and an
11 by 12 character matrix. The price is under $500 and it will be available next month.
IBM in the news again this week. First of all, IBM announced a licensing agreement with
Intel to allow IBM to produce its own 8088 chips, the microprocessor used in the PC.
Tremendous demand on Intel's output of the 8088 has kept IBM from producing enough PCs
to meet its demand. Perhaps more important, though, is the fact that Intel apparently
also gave IBM the right to make its own 80286 chips, a much more advanced microprocessor,
which analysts believe IBM will use in its new personal computer, codenamed Popcorn.
With the ability to turn out the chips, it is thought that IBM may now be able to introduce
the Popcorn this summer. The use of the advanced microprocessor will enable Popcorn to do sophisticated
graphics and other complex integrated functions. Sounds like Popcorn may take on the Macintosh
Lisa crowd. Victor Technologies, the high-flying hardware computer company which took a nosedive
this year, may be bought out by the British firm Applied Computer Technologies. The would-be
buyer indicated it might close down the Silicon Valley factory and move operations to Scotland.
Also on the ailing list, Tandon Corporation, the nation's largest maker of disk drives,
says it will lay off about a thousand employees and transfer most of its manufacturing overseas
to cut production costs. In fact, countries all over the world are dropping in on the
Silicon Valley trying to get a piece of the high-tech action. In the last year, 20 different
countries have sent delegations to the Silicon Valley in an effort to lure their business
abroad. The countries offer incentives such as government subsidies and attractive tax
packages. The most successful recruiter by far has been Ireland. One foreign country
very much on the mind of high-tech executives is Japan, with particular attention focused
now on the debate in the Japanese parliament on a new proposed software bill which would
limit software copyright protection for U.S. products to 15 years and force American companies
to allow Japanese firms to sell U.S.-made software. The net result would be little protection
for American manufacturers, with Japanese companies able to sell the same software at
a lower price by avoiding the high research and development cost. And speaking of software,
you say you have a modem but can't use all the bells and whistles because you don't have
the right communication software? Listen to Paul Schindler.
Okay, it's all set. Three men in a monkey suit. Listen, I'm going to have to get back
to you later. Bye-bye. Communications. Did you know that using one of these devices called
modems, computers can talk on the phone just like us, only faster? But if you already have
PC communications, you might be surprised to hear that you're in a minority. Fewer than
one-fourth of PCs communicate. So many of you are waiting to make the plunge. Perhaps
the hundreds of communications packages on the market have daunted you. Well, the Whole
Earth Software Catalog and Review has sorted communications out for beginners. Now, if
your computer runs the CPM operating system, we suggest you consider MITE or Modem 7. For
users of the IBM PC, the best packages are SmartCom 2 and Crosstalk 16. PCTalk 3 is more
limited, but then at $35, it's also the cheapest communications package. Apple computer users
may want TSC Terminal if they use 40-column screens, or Data Capture 2 for 80 columns.
Commodore and RadioShack users will find CompuServe's VidTex a best buy. Now, there simply isn't
time to get into all the wonderful things you can do once you have communications, but
believe me, a PC on the phone opens up new worlds. Just ask someone who already has a
modem, call them, or call their computer. For Random Access, I'm Paul Schindler.
Next week, Paul takes a look at Ken Houston's professional Blackjack program. Well, the
hot software this month, Tax Preparation Programs, two of the more than 20 tax packages, have
hit the software top ten this week. The two best sellers are Tax Advantage from Continental
Software. It sells for about $70. And Tax Preparer from Howardsoft, it's a bit more
complex and sells for $250. And as if you hadn't noticed, there are still more. Computer
magazines coming out on the market. The latest count shows more than 300 computer periodicals.
The fastest growing ones are Compute, Personal Computing, Popular Computing, and InfoWorld.
Finally, the last place you want to see a computer, let alone a robot, is in your neighborhood
bar. Yet it seems the sweep of technology has no limits. In San Francisco this week,
the world's first robot bartender was unveiled. The robot can talk, can take spoken orders,
and can mix 200 different drinks. But on the first test run, when the waitress yelled out,
give me a Bloody Mary and a beer, the robot knocked a glass off the bar and onto the floor
and poured beer all over the counter. The robot's designer said there were still some
bugs to be worked out. Kind of makes a human feel good. That's it for this week's Random
Access File. I'm Stuart Shafae.
Random Access is made possible by a grant from Popular Computing, a McGraw-Hill magazine.