2450: Original Hardware

Emulators are great and all, but there’s something indescribably wonderful about playing old games — or using old applications — on their original hardware.

I hooked up my Atari 800XL to an old-fashioned CRT TV/monitor today, attached the 1050 disk drive and booted up a few old favourites from my childhood. And it’s been marvellous.

One thing that’s struck me with the retro scene of today is that you often hear the same game names coming up time after time, and they’re more often than not console titles. For my money, while the consoles of the ’80s were technologically superior — most notably with regard to scrolling and sprite work, which were done in hardware as opposed to the home computers, which required extensive poking around in RAM to accomplish the same goal — the games were far, far more creative.

I guess this is kind of a reflection of the situation we have today, where all the blockbusters come out on consoles, but the truly creative, weird indie games tend to hit PC first and perhaps consoles a bit later if we’re lucky and/or the developers feel like jumping through Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo’s respective hoops to publish their titles. The only difference is that home computers of today are regarded as the pinnacle of gaming technology, while the consoles represent the “affordable” option.

One thing I find especially interesting about the Atari 8-Bit scene in particular — and I’m sure it’s the same for the Spectrum and Commodore 64; I just don’t know those systems nearly as well — is that some of the most creative, interesting games were put out for free(ish) as type-in listings for magazines. All Atari systems could run the programming language Atari BASIC: early models had it on a ROM cartridge, while later models had it built in so that you’d just turn the machine on and it was ready to obey your every command.

The fact that absolutely everyone had access to this easy to learn (albeit not very efficient or speedy) programming language meant that magazines were able to publish complete programs sent in by readers or composed by staff members. Type the program listings into your computer using BASIC, save them to disk or cassette and voila: a free game or application for you!

Because these games weren’t beholden to the fickle whims of publishers — not that even commercial games were particularly restricted in this regard at the time — the authors were free to be as batshit crazy as they wanted with them. And oh, they were: some of the greatest games on the Atari are some of the most abstract, in which the answer to the question “why does that happen?” is simply “because it’s more fun and interesting that way”.

Take a game called Duck Dash, published by renowned Database publication Atari User in July of 1987. This is a game in which you play a farmer (inexplicably represented by a green diamond) as he runs around his farmyard trying to gather up his ducks in preparation for Hurricane Harriet. A simple enough concept, you might think. But there are two farmer-eating spiders wandering around the farmyard. And the ground is so muddy that you dig out bottomless pits behind you with every step you take, meaning you can’t retrace your steps.

Or how about Doctor Boris, from the same publication a few months later? So confident was Atari User in the quality of this game — written entirely in BASIC — that they declared it “Game of the Year” on their front cover, promising “the ultimate challenge”. In Doctor Boris you play the eponymous doctor, a recent graduate from medical school who has come to his new hospital in the North of England only to find that it’s still a building site, so it’s up to the good doctor to finish the building work himself. Also there are unexploded bombs scattered around the area. And your supervisor has skin so bad it is fatal to the touch. And there are radioactive skulls buried everywhere.

Ridiculous and insane-sounding, right? Obviously. But the thing is, these games play really well. They’re simple, they have clear goals, they’re well designed and their rules are self-explanatory. Above all, they’ve been designed with fun and challenge in mind, not realism, and for this reason they’ve aged better than a lot of other games I could mention, even with their primitive graphics and sound, not to mention their slow initialisation routines thanks to them being written in BASIC.

We have games that are this silly these days, of course, but when it happens today it always feels very much like they’re being designed as wacky YouTube-bait — that they’re trying a bit too hard to be funny. Neither Duck Dash nor Doctor Boris are trying to be funny or ridiculous; their premises and setup are pretty much irrelevant once you start playing, and the focus is entirely on providing a satisfying, enjoyable and challenging experience for the player. To put it another way, they “play it straight” rather than the whole thing being infused with the feeling that the game is going “HEY! HEY! LOOK AT ME! I’M HILARIOUS!” that you get with modern “creative” titles like, say, Shower With Your Dad Simulator and suchlike.

Anyway. So far it’s been an absolute pleasure to boot up these games — many of which are often neglected and forgotten by the broader retro scene thanks to them not being commercial releases — and I anticipate there are plenty more treasures hiding in the disk boxes full of not-at-all-pirated-games-honest that I happen to have standing by. You can probably count on hearing about a few more in the near future!