Games 473-475: Early Hudson Soft

 

Hudson Soft, a now defunct telecommunications shop in Hokkaido, is undoubtedly best known today for the Bomberman series, their long-running partnership with Nintendo, and to a lesser extent in the U.S. but a greater extent in Japan, the PC Engine console. Appropriately, the Famicom version of Bomberman is their first whale, but in exploring Hudson's back catalog we can see bias in my selection methods; their early output had quite a bit on NEC and Sharp computers, including text adventures Dezeni Land and Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom which look absolutely insane and would interest me if I could read Japanese. They would also port Nintendo's early games to these computers, and some of these ports are downright strange, such as a version of Super Mario Bros. with page-flip scrolling and unique levels and enemies. However, my initial selection are all arcade-style computer games which would eventually be ported or remade on the Famicom.

Incidentally, Wikipedia says the earlier Sega-published Pengo was an influence on Bomberman, citing Zero magazine as a sole reference. Having played Pengo, I can say it's not half bad, but I can't say it's definitely a predecessor. And so we begin this Hudsonsoft retrospective with... Bomberman. The PC-8801 BASIC version.

 

Game 473: Bomber Man 

 

 

Created as a demo to show off Hudson Soft's own BASIC interpreter, this initial version is not great. I was expecting it would be barebones, with no powerups, no multiplayer, no music, only one enemy type, and fiddly movement controls in typical PC-8801 fashion. That last aspect can become a real pain point here; you move in half-step increments, but there is no input latching and instead the game just polls the keyboard a few times each second, leading to dropped inputs, Bomberman getting stuck mid-tile, and bombs put down in useless positions.

But I wasn't expecting a Bomberman game where the bombs themselves are not barriers to your enemies or yourself, and this completely changes the dynamic. There's no trapping enemies with bombs here; instead you need to lay arrays of bombs, often with an angry red balloon monster in close pursuit, and then dodge their line-of-sight and manipulate their movement patterns so that they move into your blast patterns.

My best attempt - and I can't say I had a whole lot of patience to try to do much better -  made it to stage 4 and scored 6730 points.

 

To score well means searching each level for the hidden treasure, which is found in one of the bricks along with a hidden exit. After that, the next-best thing for your score is killing all of the enemies as quickly as possible for a time-based bonus. The stairs themselves, which are also hidden in a brick somewhere, are to be avoided; you'll forfeit the bonus on the current level and advance to the next, more difficult one, and as far as I know, the game is endless.

Bomber Man does seem to have some room to improve performance with strategy. I expect that mastering enemy movement manipulation is key to clearing higher rounds. The balloon monsters cycle between four different colors, and each one has a corresponding degree of aggression, which I'm sure comes from Pac-Man. But there's an unavoidable element of luck, as sometimes the AI or the controls just don't cooperate, and on occasion, the level just begins with an enemy right on top of you, giving you no chance at all.

GAB rating: Below average. Borderline bad, really. Bomberman's classic formula was never great in singleplayer mode, and this clumsy first go at it is no exception.

 

Game 474: Binary Land 

Finding a copy of this game was hard! The Famicom and MSX ports are widely available, but they're not quite the same as the Japanese micro original. Thankfully I found a Sharp X1 copy in a dark corner of the Archive which seems to be more or less a first edition.

 

Binary Land is a world of mazes and spiders in which a boy and girl, Gurin and Malon, must navigate and arrive at the goal together, simultaneously. The twist is that you control both at the same time, and one's movement always mirrors the other horizontally. It's honestly not very difficult, even when the mazes are asymmetrical. Spiders are your only hazard, and their webs aren't fatal; it can be a valid strategy to trap one in a web on purpose while the other clears the rest of the nest with unlimited bug spray. Most of my deaths were due to unresponsive controls. Never presume you can change direction and immediately start spraying; the input poll will most likely skip the direction and you'll be stuck spraying the wrong way as a spider creeps up behind you.

Around level 30, the difficulty does spike a bit, but patience, and a little luck, will get you through. At level 32 you're rewarded with what I think is supposed to be a baby.

 

GAB rating: Below average. It's better than Bomber Man, but not very interesting, and doesn't do very much with its two-player simultaneous control gimmick.

 

Game 475: Nuts and Milk

 

Nuts & Milk is an objectively awful video game title. Unlike Bomberman and Binary Land, this one is almost completely unrelated to its Famicom remake the following year.

You control Milk, the white blobby thing, and have to collect a bunch of fruit in a maze while running away from Nuts, the cyan blobby things, who mainly just encircle the mazes in predictable patterns but can certainly catch you off guard if you don't plan ahead. Parts of each level are filled with diggable dirt tiles, but beware; dirt returns after a few seconds and will kill you and any Nuts trapped there when it does. Plan and time your fruit snatches accordingly.

 

There are 24 levels, plus, interestingly, a level editor, but I got stuck on round 6 and I suspect that in order to pass it I would need to attain a mastery over Nuts manipulation which I am not interested enough to pursue.

 

GAB rating: Average. I'm being a bit generous because I didn't really give this one as much of a chance as I gave Binary Land. I can say that this is certainly the best of the three games I played for this retrospective, but didn't feel very compelled to really explore it and find out how much better.

The 10 most influential video games as of 1985

I've been reworking my DDG grapher program - the one responsible for that chart in the Data Driven Gamer banner and others which I used to use more frequently in retrospectives. On the surface, it doesn't appear any different, but the data sources are normalized. On the downside, this means I had to discard about a hundred corrections that don't fit the format, but on the upside, I can run queries on it now! And I thought it might be interesting to query this - what games, measured by both breadth and depth of influence, have been the most influential?

I won't go into the exact formula, but it is points-based, and the main factors considered are - what games did it influence, how strong or direct are the lines of influence, and how important are they? Magnavox's Table Tennis, though it directly influenced Pong, didn't really impact anything else of importance, and it itself is therefore not ranked as highly as Pong. Pong, conversely, directly spawned hundreds of clones, but the vast majority are irrelevant today and do nothing for Pong's score.

You'll need to click on the charts in order to read them legibly, and then probably only if you have a pretty big monitor! You might even want to open them in a new tab.

 

10: Asteroids

 

 

Atari's most successful video game of all time plays like an update of their own Computer Space, which in turn drew heavily from SpaceWar, which I consider the first important video game, and in turn is the MRCA of that genre, and nearly anything that features 2D space physics.

Apart from the success of Asteroids steering Atari's own direction, and very likely giving vector games a lease on life, there have been dozens of Asteroids clones, and some of them by pretty notable developers. The Stamper Brothers debuted with Vortex in 1980 and led to Ultimate Play the Game, and Rare. Jordan Mechner's first game Deathbounce copied Asteroids, and if nothing else, Broderbund's rejection encouraged him to be more original. Sega's early output included an Asteroidslike Space Fury. And Defender, one of the best and most original arcade games of its era, undoubtedly carries Asteroids in its DNA with its controls, its focus on inertia and wrap-around geometry.

 

9: Pong

By some criteria, Pong is arguably the most influential video game of all time. It's not the first by any reasonable definition, but it proved the industry was commercially viable, and in the earliest years of it, one could say the industry was Pong.

Other games had longer-lasting influence in terms of gameplay mechanics; we don't see all that many Ponglikes past 1980, but before that, Pong launched Atari, where its rebound mechanics would be seen again in games like Breakout and Combat, and hundreds of adaptations and clones, including Sega's Pongtron and Nintendo's Color TV-Game series.

 

8: Space Panic

Described by Chris Crawford as the first ever platform game, Space Panic isn't anywhere near as famous as Asteroids or Pong, and in my estimation, it isn't very good, but pioneering gameplay elements still in use today makes it more influential than either by my metrics.

The ladder-based platform traversal and trap'em up mechanics launched Broderbund into the Apple II era with its weirdly successful Apple Panic and came full circle with the smash hit Lode Runner. Universal themselves would also come full circle, releasing the far superior Mr. Do's Castle in Space Panic's image after years of uninspired shooters. Other notable games made in its image include BurgerTime, Floppy Frenzy, and very possibly another.

 

7. Scramble

Here, we're starting to enter the realm of concrete genre forerunners. Space Panic is a bit, well, alien to the modern concept of a 2D platformer, lacking even a jump mechanic. Konami's Scramble has some quirks that are foreign to the scrolling shmup formula, an arcade mainstay, but it is unmistakably part of that clade. It's these quirks, like bombs, emphasis on terrain, and fuel pickups which help us identify its direct descendants, and few are more direct than Konami's own Gradius, which had to be removed from the graph to keep it readable. Universal's Cosmic Avenger, SNK's Vanguard, and Anco's Cavern Fighter & Skramble copy it unapologetically.

Others take it in some interesting directions; Irem's Moon Patrol is, in my mind, very clearly a Scramble inversion that places the ship on the ground and swaps your bombs for SAM rockets. Alpha Denshi's surreal Jump Bug, also removed from the graph, is said to be the first sidescrolling platformer, but being a multistage autoscroller that runs on Galaxian hardware, I'm pretty sure it owes something to Scramble. Namco's Xevious undoubtedly took direction from it, featuring the same forward-firing guns and surface-targeting bombs but translated to a now-ubiquitous vertically scrolling format. Sega's Zaxxon goes in an even more daring direction, albeit a dead-end one, with a 3D axonometric perspective, which funnily enough winds up feeling more Scramble-like than some of its 2D descendants.

 

6. Donkey Kong

 

A game both massively successful and massively influential, Donkey Kong established Nintendo's dominance and defined platforming for years to come, especially on personal computers where smooth sidescrolling capabilities just weren't ready yet. Atari games Miner 2049er, Jumpman, and Bruce Lee are obvious descendants, as is Electronic Arts' Hard Hat Mack, and a whole bunch of ZX Spectrum platformers, starting with Chuckie Egg.

 

5. Colossal Cave Adventure

Not many games have an entire genre named after them, let alone a mainstream one, but this is the game that adventures get their namesake from. No text adventure but the earliest and/or most obscure have not been influenced by Don Woods' Adventure. Adventureland, a 16KB BASIC reduction was the first, we see multiple points of entry into the catalogs of Infocom and especially Sierra On-Line, and we're by no means done seeing its influence in this blog, even as graphic adventures start becoming viable enough to make text adventures commercially obsolete. Rogue, another, nicher game lending its namesake to a genre is known to have been influenced too, as is Atari's Adventure.

 

4. Breakout

We're reaching the point where I need to really start pruning back items from the graph to keep it from being unreadably cluttered. Several branches are omitted entirely.

Breakout was the first DDG whale, and even more so than Pong, it seems like every Japanese developer of the era, big or small, got their start with a Breakout clone. Sunsoft, Namco, Konami, SNK, Sega, Nintendo, Universal, Irem, you name it. Atari themselves would expand on the formula with Avalanche and Super Breakout, which influenced other games in turn, notably Activision's Kaboom, and we're not done with Breakout clones yet.

Breakout also steered the direction of the Apple ]['s hardware and firmware capabilities to some extent, as designer Steve Wozniak wished to recreate it. It also is known to have been a direct influence on one of the most significant video games of all time.

 

3. Pac-Man

Everyone knows Pac-Man, right? It's only the most profitable arcade game franchise of all time. Like Breakout, Pac-Man has an obscene number of imitators, but if Breakout clones were almost universally unimaginatively derivative, Pac-Man had a refreshingly diverse spawn of games that were clearly following in its footsteps, but also distinguished themselves in a variety of interesting ways. Oil's Well had its break-neck pace and pipeline-laying gimmick. Lock 'n Chase had its maze-reconfiguring barriers and a layer of strategy that came with them. Lady Bug had revolving doors and a pinball-inspired scoring element. Blueprint (again with the Stampers!) had its machine assembling and that bizarre, googly-eye-filled aesthetic that Rare would be known for. Bomb Jack took Pac-Man's scoring system and developed it into an intricate and complex system that challenged you to navigate its bomb-filled stages with precision and grace. And, of course, Midway's Ms. Pac-Man and Pac-Man Junior took the formula in their own distinct directions without overcomplicating its purity.

Namco's own Tower of Druaga would also springboard off Pac-Man's mazes and powerups to inspire a whole new aspect of gaming, but we won't be seeing that come into its own for quite some time.

 

2. Galaxian

 

With its colorful graphics and its comparatively elaborate attack formations, Galaxian might be an iterative improvement on Space Invaders, but enough of one that it quickly became the new go-to title to clone, both for the arcade industry and for bedroom micro programmers. Which leads right into our #1,

 

1. Space Invaders

 

Come on, you had to know this would be #1. Even in the brief few years it took for Galaxian to replace Space Invaders as the new standard, Space Invaders had spread its influence far and wide and at a pace faster than Breakout before it could dream of. Companies that copied Breakout now copied Space Invaders. Companies that didn't exist before copied Space Invaders. And in the years following Galaxian, the industry had gotten mature and diverse enough that blatant copying was beginning to get slightly blasé.

Space Invaders permanently affected the direction of video gaming, perfected the mechanic of "shoot things with your laser," introduced round-based difficulty curves, and to this day there is virtually no action game which can't be traced back to Space Invaders in some manner.

I expect that as my master graph continues to grow into 1986 and beyond, many of the games on this top ten will lose rank, especially Galaxian. But not Space Invaders. I've argued that Space Invaders' importance is often exaggerated, but never that it isn't the most influential game of all time.