"Chuckles" Bueche, long time friend and partner of Richard Garriott, may be best known to retrospective gamers as the real life ego of Garriott's recurring friend-insert avatar, but was also a programmer and electrical engineer who was responsible for converting the first four Ultimas to Atari and Commodore computers, co-founded Origin Systems, and took lead design on the company's first extra-Ultima success and whale Autoduel, a post-apocalyptic "car"-PG inspired by Steve Jackson Games' Car Wars. Imagine Mad Max meets Battletech and you've probably got the right idea.
Before starting on Autoduel, I sampled some of Bueche's early output, but found they just weren't all that interesting or particularly relevant as stepping stones. Bueche himself establishes a pre-Origin ludography which differs slightly from what their copyright notices state:
- Brainteaser Boulevard, published through California Pacific Computer (e.g. Ultima). The only brainteaser here is wondering why it's called that; this is a simple Frogger clone where you control a gang of junior do-gooders determined to escort senior citizens through highway traffic until everyone is safely across - or one of the two groups are all dead.
- Laf Pak, published by Sierra On-Line (e.g. Ultima II). This is mainly notable for canonically taking place in the Ultima universe as an amusement device designed by Chuckles himself. Otherwise, it's just a compilation of four unremarkable arcade-style games.
- Lunar Leeper, also published by Sierra On-Line. The nicest thing I can say about it is that the Leeper animation is remarkably fluid for a VIC-20, which I presume was the lead platform. Because this is a crummy Defender knock-off interspersed with alternating levels of a crummy Scramble knock-off.
Caverns of Callisto, a semi-open maze shooter, was his first game for Origin Systems, but it doesn't interest me. We'll go straight into Chuckles' first and only whale.
AutoDuel is rough starting out. You're no Mad Max - you're more like an extra that gets offed in the opening act for his gasoline. Starting off in New York City with no wheels and two grand, you can technically afford a clunker of a vehicle, but you'll attract motor gangs looking for some easy scrap metal, and they'll get it the moment you hit the interstate. You need more cash, and the only avenue is amateur night at the local AutoDuel Arena.
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| NYC got a lot smaller after the big one. |
I can tell it's going to be rough for awhile too. This is a game with permadeath, and while you can buy a clone at the Gold Cross for $5,000, that won't be viable for some time. Even with a clone, death is going to be painful; it costs another $3,000 to back up your brain too - your clone forfeits whatever experience had been gained since the last one. Even then, death means you lose your vehicle and whatever cargo it was transporting.
The only thing that makes sense to do - after picking up some cheap personal armor (there's no reason to ever be without 100% body armor) - is duel at the Arena. They'll provide go-kart class cars armed with light machineguns, but you play for your life, and at 5:1 odds.
You'll probably want to use a joystick here; the game expects it, and supports analog controls, though in practice it behaves more like Midway's 49-way joystick than a true analog precision. You don't steer; you push the stick in the direction you want to move, and the car moves that way. It's a bit clumsy, and I lost a few of my early games here from inadvertently steering right into an obstacle while trying to encircle an enemy, but with practice and a bit of luck, this is winnable.
I do mean practice and a bit of luck. These cars can't sustain many direct hits, and there's a lot that can go wrong even if you know what you're doing. You can lose control and slam into an obstacle, leaving your hulk a sitting duck for a finishing stream of bullets. You can take a critical hit into your fusion reactors. You can get your weapon blown off its mount point. You can just plain run out of bullets; what you've got is barely enough to total all five opponents. With those last two, at least it's possible to escape the arena, but you'll take a reputation hit.
Eventually, after multiple failures, I succeeded in winning two amateur night events in a row, gaining $1,500 each for a total of about $4,700 in my bank, which I spent on a car of my own; a high powered subcompact with solid wheels and a single machinegun, but not much armor or cargo capacity. With this, I could enter a higher stakes event, but the next one was the $10,000 vehicle division. So instead I went to the courier's board and took a job running a case of wine to Pittsburgh and hit the New Jersey turnpike.
Where I got fatally ambushed by an R.C. car with a laser beam.
