Intermission: 1984/1985

Just over two years ago now, I began the now complete 1984 phase of Data Driven Gamer, coinciding with my move out to Boston Metrowest. These years, far surpassing the 400 days it took to cover 1983, reflect the ever-increasing complexity and volume of video games over time, but have also been perhaps the most eventful years of my life so far.

As for the state of gaming in 1984, global sales had fallen far from the heights of 1982, but you wouldn't know that from looking at my ivory deck. Compared to 1983, a year with 16 entries and two harpoons, 1984 had 19 entries and three harpoons across a wide distribution of regions, making it perhaps the deck's best year yet.

I went back to my chart of 1982 and 1983 whales by platform, adding 1984. Arcades continue their downward trend, no surprise. Console games actually uptick a bit, but the driver is Nintendo's local output, as US console games have bottomed-out with a mere two Atari cartridges successful enough to attain fame. Computer games more than make up for the arcade deficit, and North America sees the biggest gain, jumping from 17 to 33!

Platform type	1982 count	1983 count	1984 count
Arcade	19 total 15 Japan 4 NA	14 total 9 Japan 5 NA	11 total 8 Japan 3 NA
Computer	16 total 13 NA 1 Japan 1 UK 1 AU	24 total 17 NA 3 Japan 3 UK 1 AU	43 total 33 NA 3 Japan 6 UK 1 USSR
Console	10 NA	7 total 6 NA 1 Japan	9 total 2 NA 7 Japan

 

As before, I broke this down by genre, adding to my 1982-1983 chart.

Genre	1982 count	1983 count	1984 count
Adventure	5 total 4 NA 1 AU	6 total 5 NA 1 Japan	8 NA
Arcade	5 total 4 NA 1 UK	6 total 4 NA 2 Japan	18 total 13 NA 4 UK 1 USSR
Platformer	1 NA	7 total 4 NA 3 UK	7 total 6 NA 1 UK
RPG	2 NA	3 NA	6 total 3 NA 3 Japan
Strategy	3 total 2 NA 1 Japan	2 total 1 NA 1 AU	4 total 3 NA 1 UK

 

Once again, "arcade" is a catch-all term for action games that aren't platformers, and "strategy" is a general miscellaneous category. Some placements aren't so obvious - is Tetris more arcade or strategy? I picked arcade. How do you even classify Ghostbusters and Spy vs. Spy? These got lumped in arcade as well.

The arcade category had the largest gains, so I broke this down into yet more granular categories, before giving up on the last seven and sticking them into "misc."

Genre	1982 count	1983 count	1984 count
Shoot 'em up	3 total 2 NA 1 UK	1 Japan
Sports		1 NA	4 total 3 NA 1 UK
Sim			6 total 3 NA 3 UK
Maze		2 NA	1 NA
Pinball	2 NA
Misc.		2 total 1 NA 1 Japan	7 total 6 NA 1 USSR

 

Arcades still in decline

Arcade games continued their fall from relevance, and stagnated technologically with a trend toward reusing cheap and dated hardware. Atari, the sole American developer represented, stood alone in pushing the cutting-edge, with high res, stereophonic games Marble Madness and Paperboy, and the polygonal 3D non-whale I Robot, though the cheap and shoddily made Return of the Jedi showed even they weren't immune to industry-wide downsizing.

I need to give a special mention as well to Nintendo's non-whales Punch-Out!! and Super Punch-Out!!; two of their last original arcade games, which featured huge, detailed, and colorful boxers that scaled up and down in a quasi first-person view.

Still, there were good and important games this year. Technos' Karate Champ was the deepest versus fighting game yet, almost certainly influencing the modern formula despite playing completely unlike it. Pac-Land is a critical stepping stone in the evolution of the side-scrolling platformer. Tower of Druaga, though nightmarishly cruel, planted seeds of its action/adventure/rpg gameplay into something that would start growing almost immediately.

 

Exit Atari

It's cliche to point out that 1984 was a bad year for the North American video game market. If arcades were in a decline, the console market was grim. So grim that by June 1985, Computer Entertainer magazine declared, at this time, we are not aware of any games scheduled for any dedicated game system. Ouch! But good things were on their way from Nintendo, who were already testing the American waters with their "VS." line of Famicom-based arcade machines.

Atari 2600 reached the end of its relevancy to me with two of the most advanced titles ever released on the system; Pitfall II and H.E.R.O., both by Activision, both deserving good ratings in my deck, though I had not covered the former. The system did make a post-crash comeback of sorts, even as its successor the 5200 did not, and the 7800 was practically dead on arrival, but it only puttered along as a cheap Nintendo alternative, its huge back catalog doing more to keep it on life support than any exciting new games did.

As for Nintendo's output, Excitebike was far and away the best of them, demonstrating the essence of Shigeru Miyamoto's design philosophy; that controls are the heart of the game, that you want them responsive and intuitive, that you get them that way through intense testing and refinement, and the sooner you can do this, the smoother the rest of the development process will be.

K.O.L.M.

If 1983 was the beginning of a trend of platform games on 8-bit computers with deeper gameplay than traditional arcade-style games, 1984 evolved this trend with no fewer than five new titles with a strong emphasis on exploration, making them in retrospect kind of like Metroid. KOLM for short.

Below the Root, despite clunky controls and frustrating platforming mechanics, stands out as the best of them, with its big, open, and imaginative world of treehouses and caves. No other game this year rewarded exploration nor compelled me to discover its hidden secrets quite like it did. Montezuma's Revenge, a claustrophobic and mazey KOLM with an arcadier angle, joined it in the ivory deck.

Two KOLMs scored average; Epyx's Impossible Mission and Datasoft's Bruce Lee. Both not only anticipate exploration-based Metroidlikes but also cinematic platformer conventions. Both are also irritating to play with dodgy controls and physics, and punishing design in the fashion of the day. Then there's Jet Set Willy on the Spectrum, whose mansion was the most cleverly-designed game world of them all, and sabotaged any joy of exploring it with absolutely ridiculous difficulty and game-ruining bugs that author Matthew Smith couldn't be bothered to playtest, let alone fix.

Roleplaying goes east

For the first time since I started doing these intermission posts, we have no Wizardry or Ultima in this category. But the influence of both is felt.

The most interesting RPG trend of 1984 were no fewer than three proto-JRPGs. None of them are good, but they were all interesting in their own ways. Black Onyx started off the year as one of the very first computer RPGs available in Japan, and plays like a very simplified version of Wizardry, with a few distinguishing features like an explorable town with conversational NPCs. Hydlide, a somewhat infamous game with poor combat and hours of mandatory grinding, bridges the gap between Namco's obtuse arcade dungeon crawler Tower of Druaga and classics like The Legend of Zelda and Nihon Falcom's Ys series. And speaking of Nihon Falcom, their first whale Dragon Slayer is a dog's breakfast of conflicting design patterns and no central vision, but it's a start, and perhaps even more interesting is Panorama Toh, a fascinatingly weird Ultima-style proto-JRPG that I made some progress in with the help of a few commenters. Without my whales-and-ancestors approach, I likely wouldn't have even heard of it, but I'm glad I got to try it.

Two other games - Seven Cities of Gold and SunDog: Frozen Legacy, feel a bit weird to group with RPGs, but being mainly about exploration and logistics, I think are better fits than any other category. In SunDog in particular, the way you explore the galaxy with modal views that zoom down to solar system level, planet level, continent, and city feel like a natural extension of Ultima's open world design. Unfortunately, the RPG mechanics are undercooked and the game goes on way, way too long, far past the point of exhausting its own gameplay possibilities. Seven Cities fared a bit better with more rewarding exploration and substantial gameplay, but only to a point.

Strategy schmategy

As a de facto "miscellaneous" category, 1984 had twice as many whales fall into this category than 1983, making for an eclectic bunch with little in common. And not one of them was bad!

Robot Odyssey, one of the first puzzle programming games ever, was my favorite of them. Already managing the unreal feat of simulating electronic circuits in the space of 48KB, complete with a WYSIWYG designer, Robot Odyssey goes a step further and provides context for its puzzles in the form of an Atari Adventure-style world to navigate and explore with your squad of rewireable robots. It earned a harpoon and my admiration as one of the best games of its kind.

The Ancient Art of War, one of the earliest realtime wargames, took me nearly a month to complete, and made it to my ivory deck despite a great deal of dated inelegance, standing out as more than just an obsolete predecessor thanks to its focus on energy management and supply lines. The Lords of Midnight, a wargame with an identity crisis, didn't quite make it, but it did make me feel well-immersed in its vast world, before utterly destroying me because "immersion" and "being able to see the big picture and coordinate a strategy" are goals at odds.

Lastly, and stretching the appropriateness of the "strategy" label, Will Harvey's Music Construction Set is unratable as a game, but laudable nonetheless as a powerful and intuitive piece of composition software that manages to also be educational and fun.

Indoor sports

Never my favorite type of game, computer sports were more represented in 1984 than they'd ever been before.

The ZX Spectrum's Steve Davis Snooker, to my surprise, earned the sole "good" rating here with its rich simulation model and convincing physics. I don't even like snooker or fully understand its rules and the game still grew on me and my wife with a bit of practice.

Ballblazer, the very first video game by LucasFilm, is a futuristic soccer match with a speedily-rendered first person perspective, and earned marks for its presentation but fell short of greatness with shallow, simplistic gameplay.

Summer Games demonstrated Epyx's mastery of C64's VIC-II video hardware and established their decade-long sports dynasty, but I found these games simplistic. Pitstop II delivered the most convincing sense of automotive speed outside the arcades yet, but trying to steer its oversensitive formula cars with a digital joystick is not pleasant.

Shoot'em ups in (3D) space

Space sims, flight sims, tank sims, and sub sims altogether constituted a major category of my 1984 playlist. If I'm not mistaken, the last such computer game I covered had been Star Raiders, of 1979!

Elite, like Star Raiders before it, earned its harpoon with solid space combat, freeform open-world design, and an RPG-like power curve where success brings cash awards to spend on ship upgrades, and with it comes opportunity to pursue more challenging and more rewarding goals yet.

A pair of dissimilar Atari combat flight simulators were both standouts that came up just a little short of a good rating. LucasFilm's Rescue on Fractalis was one of the best looking and sounding computer games yet, but repetitive and shallow gameplay failed to keep me engaged. Microprose's F-15 Strike Eagle struck a good balance of realism and accessibility, but the horrible frame rate kept me from giving it the full recommendation.

Then there were two 3D combat sims for the ZX Spectrum by Realtime Games. 3D Starstrike, a blatant copy of Star Wars, was the more competent of the two, edging out blatant Battlezone copy 3D Tank Duel, but not enough deserve much critique.

Finally, there was GATO, a submarine sim that just couldn't seem to figure out how realistic it wanted to be, and wound up being too simplistic and too slow-paced at the same time.

The rest of them

Seven computer games within the broad "arcade" category defied further classification, compared to two before.

Tetris, of course, earned a good rating, and being able to emulate its (more or less) original Soviet mainframe format was a thrill in itself.

Beyond Castle Wolfenstein and Karateka were two ambitious and authorial but flawed Apple II games. Wolfenstein's random layouts don't quite gel with its stealth gameplay, all but forcing you to rely on your passes, which never quite feels like it isn't cheating. Karateka has elegance and flair, but not much to do except fight waves of identical baddies with a battery of sluggish punches and kicks. Rescue Raiders, an arcade/strategy title joins them as another game that didn't quite live up to its potential.

And then there were the C64 games that were just plain weird; Ghostbusters, Spy vs. Spy, and Donald Duck's Playground. An action/strategy hybrid without much of either, a trap-laying battle of wits that always devolves into button-mashing stick fights, and a set of arcade-style minigames that sneaks in an educational lesson about change-counting (and perhaps on consumerist work ethic). All of these games I just rated average and moved on.

Game of the Year

Three games of 1984 earned harpoons; Elite, Robot Odyssey, and Below the Root. Elite is certainly the most iconic of them, the start of a series that co-creator David Braben remains involved with to this day, and inspiration for every space trading/combat game since, but I feel that the other two are more complete as games.

I had been leaning away from picking Robot Odyssey, as it's a discretionary whale, hand-picked out of personal interest and of somewhat niche appeal. But you know what? It's my list, and I enjoyed it more than any other game of the year. So congratulations, robots - you win this round.

Why aren't you playing this right now?

Upcoming in 1985, we will see:

• The industry remains crashed for some time into the year. American-developed console games cease to be, and surviving arcades continue to subsist on games from Japanese studios Konami, Capcom, and others. Even Atari's coin-op division becomes a Namco subsidiary.
  
• Nintendo's Famicom continues to dominate the console list. Though the NES won't be available stateside for most of the year, several of these games get early U.S. releases as VS. coin-op machines.
  
• Interplay has its first products as a fully-formed corporation.
  
• Introductions of no fewer than four British studios.
  
• Lord British returns with his greatest and most revolutionary title yet. Chuckles gets to throw his balls around a little too.
  
• Two of the most famous edutainment games of all time debut.
• Sega makes a comeback after a year of exclusion.
  
• One positively super game gets a limited U.S. release.
• Jaleco and its partner Alpha Denshi get arcade retrospectives.
• The first whales for Apple's new Macintosh computer.
  
• Mindscape, the U.S. publisher for one of them, gets retrospected to my best ability, but it's really a certain APX ancestor that interests me.
  
• Historical strategy studio Koei gets introduced as I retread territory covered by Wargaming Scribe.
  
• The start of one of the best-selling computer game franchises of all times is prototyped but shelved for years.