#2 - Mudpies

Publisher: Microdeal(UK), Michtron(US)
Developers: Jeffrey Sorensen, Philip MacKenzie
Approximate release date: December 1985/January 1986

As a bit of an experiment with this one, I'm including some gameplay footage to try and make thing a little less dry and text-heavy. This has resulted in this entry taking a little longer to prepare, as I had wrestle with some video encoding issues, but hopefully it'll be worth it. Maybe.

Okay, we're now going to look at another Microdeal game, but before we get into that, just take a look at this truly horrific cover art:

Unadulterated nightmare fuel.

Gahhh! Thankfully, the clowns that feature in the actual game are marginally less disturbing. Mudpies is another old game repurposed for the ST, but this port seems to have had a little more effort put into it than Lands Of Havoc, thank goodness. The original was only available for one relatively obscure system, the Tandy Color Computer(CoCo), and was itself based on an earlier arcade title released by Atari themselves, Food Fight.

The reason Atari weren't releasing their own arcade titles for the ST at this point is slightly complicated. Following the disastrous videogame market crash of 1984, what remained of the company had been effectively split into two entirely separate entities; Atari's arcade division(Atari Games) was now mostly owned by Namco, whereas the home computer division(Atari Corp.) was now in the hands of Jack Tramiel, former head of Commodore. The restrictions on Atari Games' licence meant they couldn't sell anything with the Atari name on in the home market. However, they could licence games for release under a different brand, leading to the creation of the Tengen label, who would go on to release titles for pretty much every system going. Including the ST of course. Later on, Tengen became embroiled in the infamous Tetris copyright case, but that's a whole other story.

Mudpies was the second ST release from Microdeal, and came out in either the winter of 1985 or spring of the next year (Compute! Magazine reviewed it in their December '85 issue, the earliest review of an ST game I've been able to locate so far).

You control Arnold, "a mischievous 12 year old boy who's sense of humour sometimes goes astray," according to the instructions. Uh-huh. Arnold is a somewhat reckless young urchin who's thoughtless shenanigans during a trip to the circus have landed him in some pretty serious shit. He's trapped in a nightmarish maze of circus tents, trying to avoid the pummelling he is due to receive from an endlessly respawning army of clowns who haven't taken particularly well to his anti-social behaviour.

The object of each room is simply to reach the exit to the next room before the tide of clowns finally overpowers you, making sure to pick enough discarded junk food on the way in order to hold off starvation for a little while longer. It seems there is apparently no way out of this hellish circus, because as soon as you successfully traverse the seven or so screens, you just end up back at the start to do the whole thing all over again. Coming into contact with a clown or their projectiles results in a cute little animation of two paramedics carrying you away on a stretcher, although it seems like these guys must hate you as well, as they just dump you right back in there once you've been patched up.

Graphics-wise, there's not an awful lot to shout about. The game sprites are very small and flickery, and don't animate particularly well, but we should bear in mind that this game came out very early in the Atari's lifespan, at a point when programmers were still trying to work out what on earth to do with it - getting any game up and running at all was something of an achievement, so we should probably cut the programmers some slack.

That's about all there is to it, really. Mudpies is a surprisingly fun little game, but I couldn't imagine it keeping your attention for very long, due to the lack of variation in the "levels". Once you've played all the way through a couple of times(which takes less than ten minutes), you'll have seen the entire game. The only reason to keep playing beyond that is to improve your score, and even that's not especially difficult. Even with my distinct lack of l33t gaming skillz, I was able to beat the creator's high scores in very little time at all.

Here's some gameplay I recorded earlier:

The Computer Chronicles - Amiga vs ST(1985)

Now, now here's a thing: 

This is an episode of the long-running PBS series The Computer Chronicles from 1985, discussing the newly launched Atari ST and Commodore Amiga. if you can get past the slightly drab presentation style, there's some pretty interesting stuff here. For one thing, you get to see the Atari and Commodore marketing guys make their sales pitch. Atari are up second, and I'm pretty sure you can detect a slight hint of panic as they've just seen what they're up against - hence the emphasis on the ST as a kind of budget price Personal Computer rather than a games machine.

If nothing else, this does serve to underline some unfortunate issues with the ST's design, which often led to it coming off the worse of the two in performance terms. The Amiga had unique custom designed chips for handling graphics and sound, but in order to beat it's competitor to the marketplace, the ST's build included a certain number of cheaper, pre-existing components. For instance, the Yamaha chip that handled all the ST's sound was a slightly modified of version of the same one that had been in the Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, MSX, etc. Essentially, the Atari was a 16-bit machine with the sound output of an 8-bit. The more skilled programmers would eventually get some pretty impressive sounds of it, and of course the ST's ability to output to a MIDI module made up for it some ways, but it was always something of a handicap that Atari users had to put up with.

While this reliance on "off the shelf" components may have given Atari the initial advantage in sales terms, it would come to hurt them badly in the long run, as the poor old ST just couldn't keep up with the demands of increasingly complex games.

#1 - Lands Of Havoc

Publisher: Microdeal
Developer: Steve Bak
Released: July 1985

British software publishers Microdeal were a fairly big player in the early years of 16 bit computing, and many of the early titles we'll be looking at here were published under their banner. Formed in Cornwall in the early eighties, they initially specialised in software for the Dragon 32 and Tandy TRS-80, but were also one of the first companies to really get on the ST bandwagon.

Lands Of Havoc, developed by Microdeal's in-house programmer Steve Bak, is the earliest known game to be released for the ST. So early in fact it was out in the shops month before Atari's new machine was officially available to buy, in July of 1985. Bak was available to achieve this remarkable feat not only because he had managed to acquire a prototype ST directly from Atari's production facility, but also because Lands Of Havoc wasn't an original game but a port of a version already released for the unsuccessful Sinclair QL range. We'll be seeing a few more QL games resurfacing in the early years of the ST, largely due to the fact that both machines had a processor in common, the 68000 chip, and thus programmers were able to port over their existing games without much difficulty.

Lands Of Havoc is a fantasy-themed maze game with some vague puzzle elements, and I do mean vague. You control what can only be described as a lizard with a beer gut, and your initial mission is to run around nine different maze areas, finding a series of objects which can only be activated by touching them in a particular order. It's up to you to find out what this order actually is, leading to much frustration as you stumble around wondering what on earth you're supposed to be doing and why none of the items you find actually appear to do anything. The game's manual is particularly unhelpful in this regard, as most of it just consists of some largely irrelevant backstory about THE DARK LORDS and THE HIGH VANISH and not actually explaining what you're supposed to do.

The boxed version originally came with nine printed postcards, each containing a map corresponding to one of the nine areas of the maze. The idea was that at the start of each new game, the arrangement of the maze areas would be randomised, and you were supposed to rearrange the postcards as per the game's instructions to reveal the new map. It's a nice idea, just a shame it wasn't in the service of a more worthwhile game.

After some persistence(and a certain amount of bloody-mindedness) I eventually stumbled on a secret library screen not included on any of the maps, containing a mystical book that finally unlocks the game's first item. From then on it's just a matter of following the direction each item gives you, until eventually you can access a portal to The Underworld. This leads on to the next part of the game, which consists of running around even more mazes(this time without the aid of maps) looking for THE DARK LORDS so you can murder them. Strangely, THE DARK LORDS when you find them aren't programmed to retaliate in any way, and just stand there completely immobile until you walk into them and they die instantly.

I have to admit, I didn't actually bother finishing Lands Of Havoc, but I'm pretty sure I'd seen everything the game had to offer, such as it was. And to be honest, I only got as far as I did due to stumbling on a cheat mode by accident - I was basically pressing every key trying to work out how to unpause the game, and when I finally succeeded, it turned out I was now completely unkillable. The difficulty level of the game is so absurdly unfair, that I can't imagine many would've bothered persevering with it without the aid of a cheat mode, in any case.

Undoubtedly the most dickish move the game pulls on you is the "instant death" screen. One screen in the whole maze, if entered at the wrong time, causes you to be completely frozen to the spot, allowing the enemies to trample you to death in a matter of seconds. And there's no getting out of it at all, it's basically an inescapable Game Over. Not cool, Steve.

So as you may've gathered, Lands Of Havoc really isn't very good. What might've been passable for an 8-bit budget title just doesn't cut it for what was at the time a full price 16-bit release, and apart from the cost, the ST version is full of problems that prevent it from being in any way an enjoyable gaming experience

For one thing, the enemies spawn way too quickly and in too large numbers, meaning the idea of actually engaging them in battle is completely pointless. You end up mostly running full-pelt from screen to screen as fast you can, hoping you can make it to the next one before taking any damage. On top of this, the controls are stiff and awkward, strangely more so under a real ST than an emulated version. Sometimes the fire button just flat-out refuses to respond, and apparently implementing the ability to fire up and down as well as left and right was too much trouble, as you're stuck with shooting along a horizontal axis.

Graphically, the game is almost entirely indistinguishable from the C64 version, and for some reason Bak only chose to utilises the Atari's four colour medium resolution mode, rather than the wider palette of sixteen colours available in low res mode. There's not an awful lot to recommend audio-wise, either. Other than a couple of barely noticeable sound effects, there is one piece of music in the game that loops continuously which becomes intensely irritating within minutes.

C64 version...

....and ST version. Genuinely quite hard to tell the difference.

Thankfully, there were much better games on the way for the ST, but for early users it must've seemed like an awfully long wait.

1985 - An Overview Of Stuff

Let us go then, you and I, on a trip back in time. Twenty-eight years back in time, to be precise...

The home computer market as it was then was a very different place to what it is today. For one thing, there wasn't the same degree of blanket media coverage of new games and systems, no blogs or game sites to scrutinise every forthcoming release in obsessive detail. All of this makes the job of establishing when certain games were actually released extremely difficult. In the case of the ST, the details of what software was actually available to buy in the first six months of it's life are somewhat hazy.

In researching this blog, I've relied on contemporaneous magazine articles and reviews to fill in the gaps in my knowledge, and basically what I've learnt from this is that coverage of the ST and Amiga didn't really begin in earnest until the following year, which is obviously not terribly helpful. Confusing matters further is the fact that the information compiled on sites such as MobyGames and The Little Green Desktop is often highly unreliable, at least in terms of nailing things down to specific dates. They do, however, provide a place to start.

So working out what games did come out in '85 has essentially been a process of elimination, by establishing all the titles that didn't come out that year and crossing them off the list. After removing all the games that I've been able to ascertain with some certainty have been incorrectly dated on the aforementioned sites, here is the list as it stands:

Game	Release Date	Publisher	Developer
Cutthroats		Activision	Infocom
Deadline		Activision	Infocom
Enchanter		Activision	Infocom
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy		Activision	Infocom
Infidel		Activision	Infocom
The Lands Of Havoc	July	Microdeal	Steve Bak
The Lost Kingdom Of Zkull		Talent Computer Systems
Mudpies	December	Microdeal(UK), Michtron(US)
Planetfall		Activision	Infocom
Seastalker		Activision	Infocom
Sorcerer		Activision	Infocom
Starcross		Activision	Infocom
Suspect		Activision	Infocom
Suspended		Activision	Infocom
The Witness		Activision	Infocom
Zork: The Great Underground Empire		Activision	Infocom
Zork II: The Wizard Of Frobozz		Activision	Infocom
Zork III: The Dungeon Master		Activision	Infocom

So it seems from this that if you were an early ST adopter, you would've been pretty much just playing Infocom text adventures for the first six months or so. This makes sense, as Infocom already had a large catalogue of games that all ran on the same interpreter, and thus would've been very easy to port over.

Other than that, there wasn't a whole lot else - most games companies were either hard at work developing software for the new systems, or biding their time before nailing their flag to either the ST or Amiga mast. As far as I've been able to tell, the only other games to emerge in the latter half of 1985 were Lost Kingdom Of Zkull(another text adventure), Mudpies(an arcade game inspired by Robotron) and Lands Of Havoc(a multi-screen arcade adventure game). The latter is what we shall be looking at first, as it happens to be the very first ST game actually released.

Quick Start Guide

Okay, so this is the plan:

Play every Atari ST game commercially released between 1985 and 1996, and write something about them. Simple, eh?

Nothing can possibly go wrong.



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