On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
The critical consensus on Ultima Underworld is that it was a high point of the Ultima franchise, a then-unique (and still fairly distinctive) kind of game, a 3D fantasy adventure released nine months before Doom, with a detailed dungeon and a high degree of player agency.
Ultima Underworld got a Playstation release, but only in Japan. It is not a straight upgrade from the DOS version, it’s got different cutscenes and anime character portraits, as well as interface differences. Still, it could well be worth playing for its own sake.
Often for these romhack posts I’ll try to apply the patch myself and take my own screenshots, but in this case the patch is over 120 megabytes, and itself to be applied to a CD game ISO, and a substantial game to learn and navigate in itself, so I’m going to pass this time and just use screenshots from the game’s romhacking.net entry.
Look at that anime-style character art. I guess this counts as the third JRPG post in a row.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
Some months ago there were the “Gigaleaks,” huge troves of internal Nintendo files and documents that revealed a lot about abandoned projects and the development history of popular games.
There was so much information in them that people are still discovering new details. One thing that was surprisingly overlooked was source code for the version of Super Mario Bros. included in the SNES remake within Super Mario All-Stars. The source contained quite a lot of interesting commented-out lines and other data, that seemed to indicate that it may have been a hacked-up version of the source to the original Super Mario Bros.
A lot (but not all!) of this has been covered on the Prerelease page for Super Mario Bros. on The Cutting Room Floor. You can go read about it there. There resides information on scrapped enemies and objects, weird modes and behaviors of existing objects, and lots of other curiosities.
For the 38th anniversary of the release of Super Mario Bros., Nimaginendo Games made a romhack that seeks to recreate many of these abandoned elements, and shows it off in a Youtube video. The hack can be downloaded from a link in the video’s description, but only for a little while! I should emphasize that it’s not a real prototype, but a speculative recreation based on information from the leaked source. It even has an older version of SMB’s title screen.
Extra! Did you know that an early working English title for Super Mario Bros. was Mario’s Adventure? And Nintendo of America even made a promotional flyer with that name! These images come from Flyer Fever:
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
It’s another romhack post that’s really not a romhack, but kind of pretends to be one. Gridlock’s 21st Century Roguelike Pac-Man (which I’m going to call 21CRPM) at first looks a lot like the arcade classic, but then becomes something really, really different.
It becomes so different that the game it most brings to mind isn’t Pac-Man but Frog Fractions. It keeps piling on the play mechanics, in a way that the game makes apparent is meant to be humorous, but also sort of, kind of works. I mean of course it’s me saying this, ๐ณ๐๐พ ๐ฏ๐พ๐๐๐๐ ๐ถ๐๐ ๐ช๐พ๐๐ ๐ก๐บ๐๐๐๐๐ ๐ฎ๐ ๐ ๐ป๐๐๐ ๐ฑ๐๐๐๐พ๐ ๐๐๐พ๐, so maybe I just like that sort of thing. Although the way it’s the most like roguelikes, permadeath, making you start completely over after losing, is possibly the weakest part of it. I had to start over a lot.
You start in the middle of the normal Pac-Man board, in a field of dots, and the ghosts roaming around as usual. It’s not exactly like classic Pac-Man; ghosts can catch you much more easily on corners (you’ll get caught this way frequently times before you adjust), and the AI is a little different. The Red monster, Blinky/Shadow/Akabei/Oikake, can actually turn right after coming out of the box, and move up through the paths above it.
Also, eating the Energizers in the corners doesn’t make the ghosts vulnerable. Instead, Pac-Man can shoot the dots he eats at the ghosts to defeat them, and while an Energizer is active his shots are stronger. Pac-Man must be facing into a corridor in order to fire, meaning he must often be running directly towards a ghost before he can shoot it. The Red ghost has the least health, and can often be gunned down even without an Energizer, while the Orange ghost has a lot of health, and usually must be shot while it’s traveling away down a long corridor. Fortunately, he’s not any smarter than he was in the arcade game.
A big difference is the Hunger meter at the side of the screen. It constantly runs down, at an alarming rate, as you play. If it runs completely out, the game ends immediately, regardless of how many lives you have left! You have to make sure to keep tabs on your hunger. And dots and ghosts don’t refill it, only fruit does, and only a bit of it. What Pac-Man can do, however, is save it for later: he has an inventory now, and grabbed fruit go right into it. You press the X button to bring up a menu, and can then pick out the fruit and munch it on down.
If you had to rely on the fruit from the center of the board though you’d starve pretty fast, so now Pac-Man has the ability to plant fruit in the maze. If you plant it, of course, then you can’t eat it, but it doesn’t take long for it to sprout and start generating new fruit of its own. You’ll soon have to start relying on this to survive.
When you clear the board of dots, the monster box opens up and when you go inside you get this screen:
This somewhat sarcastic screen appears to suggest that there’s more to the game than the starting screen. And it’s right.
Once you clear the board of dots, the game doesn’t end. Ooooh no, you’re just getting started. No, the board you start in is the “home” location in a much larger maze, accessed through the tunnels on the sides of the screen. As you explore this maze, new locations will be filled in on a map in the lower-left corner. The borders of this map aren’t the ultimate edges either. This greater map is created anew with each play; sometimes you’ll have tricky situations right near outside the starting board, and sometimes it’ll be fairly easy going. There are ghosts and dots and fruit in these boards too, and sometimes more Energizers, but there are no regeneration boxes. Ghosts you defeat out there turn into eyes, but have no way to turn back into ghosts, and eventually just fly away.
Out there in the maze there’s a lot of weird things to find. Like shops.
And quest givers:
And locked treasure rooms:
And areas of solid stone, and ore, that must be dug through Minecraft-style with a Pick (go into the Tools section of the menu to use it):
And a whole Pokemon-themed area:
And there’s crafting! And you can spend Galaxians you find to enhance stats! And boss ghosts to defeat! And probably more! I keep finding new parts to the game as I play. The game’s itch.io page even claims there’s a final boss to defeat, in the form of an evil version of Pac-Man, but I haven’t found it.
You can save your game, but in roguelike style, your session ends when you do it, and its deleted when you resume. Your game ends either when you run out of lives or your Hunger meter depletes, and both are way too easy to have happen. I find it helps to plant at least one fruit on each screen, but don’t carry around too many: if you’re holding too many things you become “Encumbered” and slow way down!
It’s an enjoyable game, for awhile at least. Pac-Man’s movement speed quickly feel much too slow for exploring the huge over-maze. His movement speed is one of the things you can upgrade by spending Galaxians, but I’ve only just recently even found one of those in the maze, and it was in a locked treasure room. It feels like there’s a lot more to the game than the permadeath feature allows me to see, but I’m still trying.
It is true that, ultimately, 21CRPM is a joke game, and the point is that Pac-Man doesn’t need elaboration upon, and the extra mechanics exist mostly to feel tacked on. There may not even be a real point to them. But neither is there a point to video games in general, and it’s still fun to explore them, for a while.
One of those boss ghosts you can receive a quest to defeat. They take a lot of damage, speed up as you deplete it, and can even fire back at you. You might want to craft a shield before taking one on, out of three Iron Bars (made from ore) and a piece of Wood (bought in a shop or acquired from using the Pick on a tree). You might be able to use a Sword on one, but they break quickly and I haven’t tried it yet.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
There was a period during the 8-bit era where games best known for being on the NES could get ports to other machines. Most of the ports we got in the US and Europe were not that great. There were a fair number of classic NES games with lackluster home computer adaptions. Even the best of these, like Mighty Bomb Jack, Castlevania and Life Force for the Commodore 64, usually paled compared to their NES counterparts.
I put the blame for this on the cartridge format. While a much more expensive media for releasing software than disks or tapes, it had the great advantage of being enormously flexible. The whole phenomena of mapper chips and other in-cart add-on hardware on the NES had no counterpart on the C64 during its heyday, even though there was really no reason the ’64 couldn’t use the same kinds of chips that the NES used.
Things were a little different in Japan on their native microcomputer platforms. While anemic ports were certainly possible there (like the infamous Super Mario Bros. Special) a fair number of console games got pretty good computer ports. Many of the best of these were for the Sharp X68000, a system I really must cover in detail soon, but the MSX platform got a fair number, many due to the efforts of Konami.
Both Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy for MSX ports with their own unique properties. Today’s post is about Final Fantasy, which recently got an English translation, and which in play and structure resembles its NES original to a large degree. It’s even a slight upgrade, with more colors in its characters and able to make use of an MSX sound expansion cartridge for improved music.
The game was reimplemented from the ground up, so it’s even missing many of the bugs that the Famicom original, forged out of raw bytecode as it was by consummate hacker Nasir Gebelli, is known to have. It would probably be the definitive early version of Final Fantasy if it didn’t play painfully slowly. You can’t see it in these screenshots, but instead of the world sliding smoothly across the screen as on the NES the terrain snaps by in eight pixel steps, and your party also walks more slowly than on Nintendo’s machine. And while it’s not as bad as loading times in the Playstation 1 Final Fantasy games, the game still lingers on a blank screen for several seconds when fights begin and end, which will drive you nuts before long.
The English translation patch that FCandChill put together basically just uses the NES game’s script, so no surprises there. These days games in the style of those early JRPGs are quite out of style, but if you still have a hankering to play a game that basically demands that you grind out levels to have a chance and where you will almost certainly total party wipe at least once during your run, you could do worse.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
You can find romhacks of all kinds and levels of quality. Professional translations that seek to produce what an official localization would be, and slapdash language conversions. Graphic hacks that make Mario into Wilford Brimley. Total conversion games that turn the original into something so different that it seems like it would have been easier to have started from scratch, and juvenile dialog hacks.
This week’s hack lies on the middle ground. Alfonso De La Vega’s The Winter Lion is a game where it feels the creator’s ambition exceeded their grasp, a little. The title screen and overworld of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past really weren’t changed much, and where they were changed it’s kind of ugly. The plotting it a bit clumsy. But the writing has real poetry to it, there are some interesting ideas behind the way it uses the game’s item progression to enforce making difficult choices that fit along divergent plotlines.
I try to put a title screen into these posts to introduce the hack, but The Winter Lion doesn’t change it, at least in the current version–hacks can be updated, after all. For now though, we’ll just have to settle for gameplay images.
The Winter Lion is an interesting take on the Zelda formula in that, instead of a Link as a kid or teenager, he’s an old man. Arguably the best-realized aspect of the hack as it stands is the pixel art that puts a white beard on him. He’s still pretty small compared to the other adult characters in the game, but it looks good enough in play.
The writing is another strong element of this hack, it feels like it was written with poetic meter in mind, although I couldn’t place the type.
Sadly the alternate paths aspect is a bit janky. Bombs have been removed from the early game, except for a single one in the first palace. There’s a political aspect of the game where you can either follow a military path in the story by using that bomb to activate a switch, or a revolutionary path by using it on a certain building in Kakariko. If you use it anywhere else you’ve blocked Link’s progress and have to start over. It doesn’t help that some cracked walls can be opened with either the bomb or the Pegasus Boots; if you open a Boots wall with the bomb, you’ve messed it up. There is a walkthrough in the readme on the Romhacking entry, but you may want to make a save state before using that bomb, just in case.
Some of that good old-fashioned romhack glitchiness!
The story is pretty one sided. It makes it clear that picking the military option is the bad one, and the revolutionary option is the good one, which, regardless of what you think about the moral choices involved is pretty obvious writing. But it’s implemented in an interesting way at least. And it’s not too difficult overall! So many romhacks are made for hardcore players that it’s refreshing to find one with only a modestly higher difficulty level. And it shows a lot of ambition by a first-time hack creator! We await future revisions of this hack, or whatever they choose to turn their attention to next.
The Winter Lion (romhacking.net, hack of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past)
Pretty lurid!Didn’t we all know a girl like that in college?Some more romhack glitchiness. The art for Old Link is pretty good though!
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
Last month we brought you Metroid + Saving, a passable attempt to make a classic game, that has a number of quirks related to it being a fairly early NES game, less frustrating to newer (younger) players. This week’s hack is another with that theme, snarfblam’s hack of NES The Legend of Zelda that adds a working automap to the game.
Like Metroid, finding your way around 128 screens of Hyrule is challenging, even if the game isn’t as large as, say, the Gameboy Link’s Awakening, which had 256 screens. But the limited number of tiles also decreases each screen’s visual distinctiveness, especially up in the mountainous regions.
The map appears in the upper-left corner of the overworld screens, which you can see in these screenshots. A special touch is that the map isn’t revealed all at the start but fills in as the player explores, and doesn’t consist of blank squares to show explored areas but even shows some detail. Places where screens are blocked internally are shown on the map, which is a great aid to both navigation and memory.
It immediately becomes evident that, like with Metroid + Saving’s mapping feature, it’s how the game should have been written originally, and probably would have been if design trends had evolved just a bit further at the time.
There are a couple of other graphical niceties in the hack, like health being shown in the life meter in 1/8th-heart increments. But overall the map is the main attraction here. It’s such a fundamental change to the game that the much more involved hack Zelda Redux uses it too. It is also worth trying out, if you still find the original Legend of Zelda to be a bit too hardcore for you.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
They have fallen into obscurity in the intervening decades, but it used to be that the Ultima games were some of the biggest RPGs around, and many still have fond memories of them. The story of the rise and fall of Origin Systems, once one of the biggest game publishers, and how now they’re just another of the hundred ignored lines on EA’s balance sheet, is not our business here today, but instead that of one fan’s effort to improve one of the less faithful adaptations: the NES version of Ultima Exodus.
Ultima and Ultima II (and their predecessor Akalabeth) were popular, but Ultima III was the first megahit version of the game, that could be considered to stand up today. Ultima I was pretty small, and Ultima II had a lot of crazy elements like space travel. Ultima III has a much more cohesive game world, a more detailed quest, and generally feels a lot more like what we would consider an RPG game now. Later games would build off of it and become even more popular, especially Ultima IV with its detailed morality system, and Ultima VII with its vast game world, depth of NPC interaction, and many system and UI improvements.
This thief looks a lot cooler here than they did in the NES original!
Back to Ultima III. One of its best-selling versions was the Famicom version in Japan, which had a bit of a media blitz around its release. Both the Ultima and Wizardry games had something of a second life on Japanese computer systems and consoles, where they would go on to sell millions of copies more. While EA’s ownership and neglect have meant that Ultima is mostly gone and forgotten*, in Japan new Wizardry games continue to be made, hewing to that series’ original dungeon crawl aesthetic.
* This is, honestly, partly to series creator Richard Garriott’s ownership of several important characters, meaning both parties have to agree to the other’s vision for any further official Ultima game to be made. And Garriott seems to be chasing fads lately; his most recent idea for a game utilizes that bane of all game design concepts, NFTs.
The font especially is much improved, over the very bland type used before.
So now you have a little idea of what Ultima is. The Famicom/NES version was a hit in Japan, but it differs from the computer version in many ways. This was pretty much the norm for the many Japanese-made Famicom adaptations of Western games. An article could be usefully written on all the ways Famicom ports of RPGs differ from their originals. Maybe later.
The character portraits are especially nice!
The point of this romhack is to change the NES version of Ultima III: Exodus so it more matches up with the computer versions. It uses its own patching system, so Romhacking.net’s web-based patching system won’t be of use.
So many little things have changed in this version that it’s hard to talk about! At the very least, the graphics have received a complete overhaul. The cartoony figures of the original, which were pretty silly even back then, look a lot more appropriate for a series with the stature and legacy of classic Ultima games.
Hey Chuckles!
NES Ultima Exodus is also notorious for a number of significant bugs, including the absence of an important clue, it being impossible to cancel a character’s turn without wasting it, poorly differentiated character classes, and the lack of some of the monsters of the computer version. These have been fixed in this version. Some other niceties have been added, including character portraits for the people you talk to, which is really going above and beyond for a game like this!
Seriously now: why haven’t the Ultima games been remade yet? Everything else has been remade, why not Ultima? Money is being left on the table!
It’s pretty much become the definitive console release of this landmark of computer RPG gaming! You should check it out if you have an interest in these things.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
Nintendo is a company with a long history, having gotten started making playing cards. They jumped into the video gaming market, like a lot of companies, making dedicated consoles that were released only in Japan. It was the release of the arcade game Donkey Kong that started them on the path to becoming the worldwide success they are today.
Title screen for the Vs. Super Mario Bros hack
The sales of Donkey Kong, and successor games like Donkey Kong Kr., Donkey Kong 3, and Mario Bros., put a lot of Nintendo cabinets out there. In the mid 80s there arose a market for upgrade kits, an alternate set of internal components for an arcade machine that could make it into a new game for players to enjoy. Simultaneous with the success of the Famicom and NES, Nintendo sold a kit called the “Vs. System” that their old cabinets could be converted into, as well as dedicated cabinets that used it.
Among the software Nintendo made for their Vs. cabinets, so they made special arcade versions of many of their NES cartridges for it. Many of these are expanded versions of the originals, with new features. We’ve already looked at Vs. Castlevania, a version of Castlevania remixed for the Vs. Unisystem by Konami. One of these updated versions was of Nintendo’s first huge Famicom hit, called Vs. Super Mario Bros.
Hey, that flower’s supposed to be a 1 Up Mushroom!
Vs. Super Mario Bros. seems, at first, a lot like the original game. It’s got a high score screen and some other minor changes. Players familiar with the Famicom/NES version will find that it changes significantly as they get further into it. Many later levels are completely changed, and much harder. When Nintendo released the Japan sequel to Super Mario Bros., they used levels from the Vs. System port to help flesh it out.
Many changes were made to the game to support arcade play. “Loops” where players could farm extra lives were toned down or removed, extra lives in general were reduced in number, and warp zones don’t take the player nearly as far into the game. Another change made was to add operator adjustable difficulty, allowing the cabinet owner to set how many coins were needed for an extra life.
SUPER PLAYER’S
Through emulation, Vs. Super Mario Bros is completely supported in MAME. But for technical reasons, you can’t just play MAME roms in an NES emulator. If you’d like to play it in the emulator of your choice, or have a means to get it running on actual hardware, creator BMF54123 applied all of the play changes of the arcade version back into the NES version of Super Mario Bros., and even added a title screen that allows you to apply the same difficulty settings that were available to an arcade operator.
Expect a number of tricks that would later get reused in the Japanese sequel to Super Mario Bros.
If you’ve never played Super Mario Bros before… then wow, I’m impressed you even found this blog. But also, this is perhaps not the best way to experience the game now. The demands of arcade design make for a much more challenging experience than the original. If you’re very familiar with the home versions, though, it can be an interesting new way to experience it.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
A hack of NES Metroid, Junkoid doesn’t offer many changes to the original game besides graphics and area maps. Most of the engine changes it has are pre-existing patches made by other people. It uses the Metroid map and save game patch, but only offers a map for the starting region. Fortunately, while it has some cool secret areas to find, its mazes aren’t particularly complex, and I was able to complete it without keeping any maps on paper.
Junkoid’s premise is that the game world is a dream had by its protagonist, which is its excuse to provide a variety of imagery without any great coherency to it. One area seems like it’s drenched in blood, which I am not usually a fan of) Another like it’s a cloning factory, dedicated to making clones of the heroine, but its boss is a penguin that acts mostly like Ridley.
For the most part it’s not too difficult going, but I found that the final boss could be very frustrating. It uses Mother Brain’s coding most as-is, and doesn’t have the Zebetite gates immediately before it so you can get by with fewer missiles, but it’s very easy to get tossed around by the various hazards of the final area, and the boss’s weak spot, which can only be harmed by missiles, was a bit too finicky when registering hits. Still though, I can vouch that it’s possible.
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
It’s been a bit difficult getting consistent signals from Earth lately, and what has gotten through hasn’t been of too much interest to my gelatinous brain. Maybe some of this might pique your interest?
Jonathan Bolding at PC Gamer says that playing dual-screen with a Steam Deck proves the Wii-U was a good idea! I knew it! What they’re talking about is the ability of a Steam Deck to play dual-headed via HDMI out. This play style is explicitly supported in Wii-U emulator Cemu. The article also notes that Valve has stated that the Steam Deck has out-performed sales estimates, which is good! After the Steam Link and Steam Controller were put on sale for ultra-cheap, I was feeling bad about scooping them up as Valve was clearing out stock. Not too bad, though.
SMB3 Scribe’s tile selector
Here’s some news from a different source than usual. At romhacking.net, creator Michael Nix has been working on a pair of GUI rom editors for Super Mario Bros. 3! One, SMB3-Foundry, is for editing levels, and the other, SMB3-Scribe, edits overworlds. A game like SMB3 is a bewilderingly complex beast under the hood, and the strictures of platform, rom space and development time sometimes force unorthodox decisions, like hardcoding some object placements. There is an article to be written some time about the lengths NES carts had to go through to encode their data, which was usually done using a kind of domain-specific data compression.
SMB3 Foundry’s level editor
I have been avoiding linking CBR.com for a bit because of some excessively clickbait headlines, but a recent device change has reset my killfile, so they’re back. Shane Foley from there reports on series nadir Metroid Other M having one level that made it worthwhile. The “level” in question is in fact the entire postgame; up until the main boss, the whole game is heavily on rails, with full exploration only possible afterward.
At Polygon, Nicole Carpenter mentions the content warnings on new indie title I Was A Teenage Exocolonist, which has a number of traumatic events in the game, but is quite upfront about what will occur, going so far as asking the player if they’d like to be spoiled regarding which characters die, or may die. It is a heartening development.
(Note: the Guardian is in one of those phases where they nag you with a huge yellow subscription ad. It can be easily closed, and not nearly as bad as some sites out there, but it happens. One article I checked this time-I will not link them-had autoplaying overlaid videos in the corner, which resulted in them being ejected from this post. Bad web designer, no biscuit!)
Baba Is You
Shaun Musgrave at Touch Arcade lists the best recent iPhone game updates. Mentioned are Baba Is You (yay!), Genshin Impact, and Mini Metro (yay again!).
Blogfriend Kyle Orland at Ars Technica reports on Fabrice Breton, creator of indie game Brok the Investigator, and their efforts to track down Steam key scammers, curators who would ask devs for free Steam keys but then sell them. As usual from Kyle it’s great and informative reading!
From Alice Newcome-Beill at The Verge, a report on a new version of a Switch Pro controller from 8BitDo, who seem to make good products, although they note they have not yet received the controller for testing.
I’m sure I won’t see this image a thousand times over the next few months drebnar. (Source: Lorcana’s official Twitter feed)
And for our weekly eyeroll exercises, it’s been reported everywhere but GamesRadar hasn’t been seen in these pages yet so let’s give the link to them: Benjamin Abbott relates that Disney is releasing a Magic: The Gathering style trading card game going by the name of (roll your eyes now!) Lorcana. I’m already brainstorming jokes to make about it as they leak its features over the coming weeks!
Most, maybe like 90%, of romhacks are pretty dumb. Of the remaining 10%, nine out of ten are somewhat intersting. Then you have that last percentile that achieves greatness. The jury is out, but this one could be in that category.
This hack changes the cult NES classic Monster Party and repurposes it as an episode of Elvira’s B-movie show! It also changes game graphics to make the main character Elvira, and many of the bosses and their text to make them into classic horror movie monsters. It seems like it should be worth a look from that pixel art image of Elvira alone.
Beyond that, the patch file’s ZIP has some other bits of artwork in it, including a poster, and box art:
I should point out that this is not actually a hack of the release version of Monster Party, but of the prototype of the Japanese version that showed up a few years ago. So you’ll have to hunt that down if you want to try it. And it is worth noting that that version had been held by some time by collectors who were unwilling to let it be dumped. So the construction of this particle of greatness was effectively blocked for an age by their greed. Please remember that.
In monster form, Elvira’s black gown switches to something rather more revealing, which is kind of keeping in character honestly.
Monster Party’s collection of B-movie goofballs have been replaced, with a new series of B-movie goofballs. I love the Statue of Liberty’s face in the background.
It’s nine years old, but I’m amazed by how few seem to know of these old projects that litter the internet, and this is one that’s definitely worth revisiting.
When people talk about reasons for the Great Game Crash of 1983 (which, it should be remembered, was mostly a crash in the U.S., other countries didn’t suffer much loss in popularity), one reason sometimes given was the lack of quality of one specific game: Howard Scott Warshaw’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, for the Atari VCS/2600. (That’s not really the point of this post. For more of this, seen the Addendum, below.)
I should emphasize that it was easy to get frustrated by E.T. Its development was rushed so that it could be in stores in time for the 1982 Christmas season. Warshaw’s previous work Yars’ Revenge was a huge hit for Atari, but its successor, Raiders of the Lost Ark, is possibly a bit too experimental. I think E.T. is a better game than Raiders, it’s easier to learn certainly, but it has some definite issues that make it very frustrating to play.
There were a number of issues, but the biggest by far was that it was extremely easy to fall into the many pits that dotted the landscape of the game’s version of Earth, and after floating up out of one, it was just as easy to immediately fall back into one again. You could fall into a pit merely from changing screens in the wrong location.
Back in 2013, a user in the AtariAge forums using the handle recompile produced a hack to fix the game’s problems, including this one. They made a page that the hack from which could be downloaded, and explained, in great technical detail, how it had been made. The result has slightly worse graphics than the original, but is much more playable, and reveals that there is a very interesting game hidden beneath the rushed product mandated by Atari’s managers. Not only is the page and his work still up now, nine years later, but so is the AtariAge thread he made.
Remember: a delayed game is eventually good, but a bad game is bad until someone with enough time, energy and technical know-how takes it upon themselves to fix it, which in E.T.‘s case was about 31 years from its release.
Addendum
Was E.T. the real reason for the U.S. crash? Honestly, I’m dubious. It’s likely a contributing factor, but a slight one. But the fact that it can’t be ruled out, and probably helped a little, makes it something that many writers can point to without much fear of contradiction. It’s the way many narratives are built.
But there were plenty of good games, by the standards of the time, to offset the fortunes of any single title. A more likely explanation was a deluge of bad games, and a market oversaturated by them produced by companies looking for a quick buck, so that unless a consumer had done their research, it was difficult to separate the worthwhile purchases from the cash grabs.
Video games had, almost overnight, turned into a billion-dollar business. For a few years, specifically 1978 to 1982, the success of arcades, and of the Atari VCS and a number of excellent games for it, tantalized a nation. For a brief period, almost everyone sold game cartridges. I remember seeing them on the racks of drug stores during that time.
Then, almost as suddenly as it had risen, it collapsed. No one knew which games were good and which were bad. Even the good ones were pretty expensive: a $30 game in 1982 was nearly $90 in today’s (2022) money. All of those stores that had jumped on the bandwagon were left with piles of unsold inventory. Console gaming died out almost completely for a few years, until the arrival of the NES, and some canny moves by Nintendo of America, resurrected the industry in the land of its birth.
