Game 334: Montezuma's Revenge

If 1983 was a curiously solid year for computer platformers, with games like Alley Cat, Lode Runner, Jumpman, and Manic Miner offering richer set-piece and puzzle-oriented gameplay experiences compared to arcade offerings, 1984 brought a more curious trend; a nearly unprecedented explosion of exploration-focused platformers. Pitfall II, Jet Set Willy, Bruce Lee, Impossible Mission, the not-yet-covered Below the Root, and this post's subject, Montezuma's Revenge, all offer interconnected worlds of varying degrees of openness filled with collectable items, and all seem to have been developed without knowledge of each other, or of any obvious predecessor (1983's Spelunker and Pharaoh's Curse have been noted as earlier examples but I am not aware of any direct lines of influence). We're still a way's off from when Metroid codifies the genre with an emphasis on progression and unlocking permanent upgrades and tools through exploration, but for now, Montezuma's Revenge is the closest thing I've seen yet.

A partial map of Montezuma's pyramid

 
As fedora-wearing adventurer PANAMA JOE, you have excavated a lost pyramid somewhere in Central America, but to seek its priceless treasures you must also survive its corridors filled with spiders, snakes, and booby traps. If this premise sounds a little, shall we say, inspired by Hollywood's second-biggest movie event of two years prior, designer Robert Jaeger claims he never heard of Indiana Jones before making this. I don't believe him.

Two doors, one key, one rolling calavera. Which way first?

Montezuma's pyramid, entered from the top, consists of 100 rooms distributed over ten stepped floors, widening to 19 rooms at the base, which contains the exit in its very center. This is no quick descent to the bottom, however - walls, ladders, and other barriers make for a sprawling maze, and an abundance of locked doors can sometimes force you to backtrack to find the correctly colored key. Furthermore, the lower rooms are darkened, and deadly to explore without a torch. Not every room must be explored (and not every room is unique; many are just copies or variants of each other), but some of the most valuable treasure rooms are out of your way. Mapping is a useful and encouraged skill.

Gotta come back here when I have a key for the blue door.

There's one! Good thing I have a sword to deal with the bonehead below me.

Progress is gated by keys and torches (the only semi-permanent upgrade), but also collectable are coins, which award 1000 points each, hammers, which grant temporary invulnerability to creatures, and most valuable of all, swords, which allow a one-time disposal of an enemy in your way and a 2,000 or 3,000 point bonus for skulls and spiders, respectively. Depending on your path, you may even have an overabundance of these items - only five may be carried, the torch takes up one permanently once found, and for what I assume is a programming error that Jaeger didn't bother to fix, you can't even collect treasure when your inventory is full. Sometimes I would backtrack to use up items.

I'm still not sure how to get this key and live.

Passing this tricky room gains you passage to an all-important torch. Lucky thing you don't have to do it in the dark... yet.

Montezuma's Revenge is, despite some Metroid-like trappings, still very much born out of the Donkey Kong era of design and mechanics, and PANAMA JOE'S fragility is just something you need to deal with. Several rooms require knowing just how far you can fall with pixel precision, as dropping by anything slightly more than his height is lethal. The various critters infesting the tomb aren't too bad and can mostly be easily jumped over, but often the combination of them, short or moving platforms, and traps can make for a very tricky timing situation if you don't have a spare sword. That said, the game is generous with extra lives, awarding one every 10,000 points, but you can expect to use them up pretty fast. At least the death animations are pretty funny.

Complete the pyramid, and in arcade game fashion, you'll loop back to the beginning with an empty inventory and do it again after a brief bonus round intermission of looting Montezuma's vault. Subsequent loops are made more challenging with the addition of monsters, rearrangement of doors, barriers, and keys, and with each loop an additional floor is plunged into darkness, requiring you to either find the torch sooner or deal with navigating blindly. Paths that worked before become sealed off while other, longer, more dangerous ones open up.

In a clever bit of design, the first loop configures the barriers as such that only the pyramid's left half may be explored. The second loop allows only the right, and from the third onward, the whole 100 room pyramid is accessible, though the left and right halves remain partitioned in a manner that there's no way to traverse from one to the other without re-ascending to the upper levels first. You generally don't need to visit both halves to finish the pyramid - they both converge at the bottom at the very center, and contain enough keys to open their respective doors - but depending on the pyramid's configuration, one may be easier than the other, especially with regards to finding a torch.

The farthest I could make it is the sixth loop, at which point almost the entire pyramid is darkened, and you have no choice but to blindly navigate multiple floors before you find a torch. Not only that, but one of the game's few mercies - removing from the room the creature that killed you - is removed, and the increased creature population just turns so many rooms into frustrating death pits that no longer become any safer after repeated failures.

 

Rather than record a video of a multi-loop run, I made one showcasing a grand tour of the third loop, which can be selected at the start of the game. Here, I explore every room of the pyramid, and collect every treasure and item except for redundant torches, as they take up inventory space that you can't spare.

 

GAB rating: Good. Montezuma's Revenge does exploration-based platforming well, and I had fun tackling and retackling its ten-level pyramid maze, despite some repetitive elements and some frustrating rooms.

 

I didn't play it, but Jaeger's 1983 prototype is available as well, and has a few features that were cut from Parker Brothers' 1984 release apparently for space reasons. I don't understand why this was necessary as both versions require 48KB and no cartridge version was made for computers (a 5200 port uses 16KB ROM so perhaps features were cut to ensure version parity). The most notable feature is Montezuma himself as a final boss at the pyramid's base, not yet programmed in a manner that he can be beaten (but he can certainly kill you). Other features include:

• An animated title screen that plays a POKEY rendition of Spanish Flea
• A slightly different protagonist "Pedro" who wears a charro's sombrero and poncho
• Extra ambient details around the pyramid, like cobwebs and pottery
• Better door-opening animation
  
• Burning ropes
• A bat enemy that serves as a time pressure, attacking if you spend too much time in any given room
• A post-death animation showing your extra Pedros standing in a line, one of them stepping up to take the deceased's place

 

Montezuma's Revenge was quickly ported to several platforms - Apple II, Commodore 64, & PC, but also to the contemporary consoles Atari 5200 & ColecoVision, and in 1989, an enhanced port to Sega Master System, but curiously, not the NES. A retro-styled remake hit mobile phones in 2012 and Steam in 2020, but furthermore, as of this writing, Jaeger's production company Normal Distribution LLC has completed and plans to distribute physical releases of a long-belated NES port, and has teased a "Director's Cut" of the original Atari version, restoring the features cut by Parker Brothers.

Ports of Entry: Parker Brothers

Unknown lead platform:

 

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi - Death Star Battle

First released for Atari 2600 and Atari 8-bit in 1983.

Released for Atari 5200 in February 1984.

Released for ZX Spectrum in 1984 by Sinclair Research.

 

Mobygames says that the Atari 2600 and Atari 8-bit versions are ports by James Wickstead Design, but if this is so, and the 5200 is Parker Brothers' original design, why was it delayed by several months? Furthermore, why would the identical Atari 8-bit version be credited to James Wickstead? It doesn't add up.

James Bond 007

Released in 1984 for Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 8-bit, ColecoVision in May 1984.

Released for Commodore 64 and SG-1000 in 1984.

 

The many simultaneous releases give little clue to this game's lead development platform. One clue, though, is that the Atari 2600 version alone is credited to On Time Software, and all other versions to Parker Brothers. Wikipedia states that On Time Software was the contracted developer, so perhaps they developed the 2600 original, and Parker Brothers ported it to other systems?

Frogger II: ThreeeDeep!

First released for Atari 8-bit on August 1984.

Released for Atari 2600 and Atari 5200 on September 1984.

Released for ColecoVision and Commodore 64 on October 1984.

Released for Apple II and PC on 1984.

 

Atari 8-bit seems most likely for being first, but it isn't conclusive.

Select chronology: 

 

Title	Lead Platform	Date	Contemporary ports
Code Name: Sector	Dedicated console	1977
Merlin: The Electronic Wizard	Dedicated handheld	1978
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back	Atari 2600	1982-7	1983 port to Intellivision
Spider-Man	Atari 2600	1982-11
G.I. Joe: Cobra Strike	Atari 2600	1983-2
Star Wars: Jedi Arena	Atari 2600	1983-2
Strawberry Shortcake: Musical Match-Ups	Atari 2600	1983-4
Star Wars: Return of the Jedi - Death Star Battle	???	1983	1983 releases on Atari 2600 and Atari 8-bit 1984 releases on Atari 5200 and ZX Spectrum
James Bond 007	???	1984	1984 releases on Atari 8-bit, C64, and various consoles
Frogger II: ThreeeDeep!	???	1984	1984 releases on various computers and consoles
Montezuma's Revenge	Atari 8-bit	1984-9	1984 ports to Atari 5200 and various computers
Montezuma's Revenge	Atari 2600	1984-9	Mobygames lists as a distinct game from the computer/5200 version

Game 145: Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

I’m on Team Star Wars. Star Trek is great, and certainly produced far more hours of worthwhile television than Star Wars did for cinema, but Star Wars is special to me. I’m a slightly snobbish cinephile; I used to watch Godard reel-to-reel without subtitles, my Blu-Ray library is mostly made by Criterion, and I know about Orson Welles films besides Citizen Kane and The Transformers. But I don’t think any movie ever affected me in the same way as Star Wars, or ever will. It’s not my favorite movie. It’s not even my favorite Star Wars movie. But it is a master class not just in storytelling and memorable, relatable characters, but also in visual worldbuilding, which is why I think it utterly engrossed me. Other films had taken me into the past, or to exotic parts of the world, or even outer space, but Star Wars alone took me to a galaxy far, far away, ungrounded in anything of this world except for its relatable characters, and without ever feeling like it was on a sound stage, like so many fantastic adventure films before it had. The sets, costumes, vehicles, equipment, buildings, special effects, and cinematographic flourishes all contribute to a sense of visual identity, so complete and singular that I can look at something as mundane as a prop crate and know that it belongs in the Star Wars universe.

And I think that this visual identity is a big part of why Star Wars has lent itself so well to video games, which perhaps have an even greater impetus to arrest the mind’s eye than conventional cinema does. The most successful video games are instantly recognizable from a mere screenshot to even a casual gamer, and this holds true whether viewing at a flat, static single-screen like Frogger and Tetris, or a vast 3D landscape in Minecraft or The Witcher 3. This must be done without the aid of famous actors, and for a very long time having realistic visuals was out of the question, so having a distinct style was a must. As Star Wars already has an immediately recognizable style, adapting it to a video game is more a mechanical exercise in massaging familiar visuals from the hardware available, than a creative one of inventing striking visuals that stand out.

Given the massive popularity of Star Wars and its sequel The Empire Strikes Back, and that their numerous action scenes were well suited to the simple arcade-style video games of the day, it’s hardly surprising that LucasFilm would want to extend its already enormous merchandising scene to video games. Parker Brothers, an established toy company, had exclusive rights to manufacture and sell Star Wars toys. Despite having no experience whatsoever in developing video games, they felt this exclusivity extended to video games, and secured the commission to release the first official Star Wars video games, which I must imagine was a major frustration to Atari.

This one is based on the Battle of Hoth, which I estimate is the second-most frequently adapted movie scene of all time, after the assault on the Death Star (I’m guessing Tron’s light cycle race takes the #3 spot). It looks and plays like Defender, with AT-AT’s as your only enemies.

No harpoons and tow cables here – you destroy them either by chipping away at their health until they blow up, or by firing a single laser into a tiny glowing hatch that sometimes opens up for a very brief period. Let them reach the far edge of the terrain, and they’ll destroy the generator and end the game. Meanwhile, you can sustain up to five hits from their cannons, but every hit after the first has the potential to kill you, and the more damage you accumulate, the more likely that the next one will be your last. Field repairs are possible by landing in a valley, and every two minutes of play, you become blessed with The Force for a few seconds, the Star Wars overture plays, your speeder glows, and you will take no damage until it wears off.

As with most VCS games, there are several game modes, 32 to be exact, covering every possible combination of the available gameplay options. Effectively, there are four possible starting difficulties, two boolean gameplay features (enable/disable smart bombs, which make the AT-ATs fire tracking missiles at you sometimes, and enable/disable solid walkers, which make your speeder crash when touching the AT-ATs, severely damaging them at the cost of a life), and a pointless two-player option. In addition, setting the difficulty switch to 'A' makes the repair valleys a bit trickier to land in.

Because I find that these games are rarely improved by having fewer gameplay options, and that I could manage on the hardest starting difficulty, I played most of my games on variation 16, where the difficulty is at the fourth level, smart bombs and solid walkers are enabled, and with the difficulty switch in the ‘A’ position.



As in Defender, your speeder has a sense of inertia to it. Reaching a high speed takes some time, and coming to a stop or reversing direction of movement takes time too. Getting hit knocks your speeder away from the blast’s epicenter in an impressive way that really conveys the power of the enemy’s blaster cannons. You don’t often see effects like that in these games; your typical shmupoid just has your ship explode if it so much as lightly brushes up against a bullet.

The AT-AT’s are your only enemies, but they are damage sponges, absorbing up to 48 hits before going down, and they change colors every 8 hits, which helps me less than intended thanks to my colorblindness. I found it best to approach them from the front, keeping as far away from them as possible while firing on them repeatedly, and my maximizing my distance from their guns, I’d maximize the amount of reaction time available to me to move out of the way when they fire. This didn’t always work, but it worked better than trying to blast them from behind, as the speeder seems to stay somewhat to the right of the center of the screen, making it dangerous to stay on their tails too closely.

Too close for comfort

Sometimes I’d get a lucky hit on an open hatch, but this wasn’t common at all. Hatches opening on the rear were great; I could just fly over and around and blast it from behind. Most of the time, though, the hatches opened on the front in a position that was blocked by the AT-AT’s head, and I’d be more likely to take a hit from not paying attention to the AT-AT’s blasters than to successfully slip a shot into that narrow opening. As for the smart bombs that often emerged, they track you relentlessly, much like the baiters in Defender, and likewise weave around in a random fashion that makes hitting them tricky. You can’t flip your orientation instantly like in Defender, so the trick of leading it and reversing directions to blast it won’t work. It’s better to fly out of the AT-AT’s blaster range and then play matador with the bomb, letting it circle around you, weaving out of its way with each pass while moving as slowly as possible so that you can quickly change direction to shoot at it, and hope that you get a lucky hit in before it does.

GAB rating: Average. It’s well programmed, looks nice for a VCS game, controls fluidly, and strikes a good balance between your objective of survival, and the urgency of eliminating AT-AT’s before they overrun the base. But there’s no getting over an unpleasant fact – this is as monotonous as VCS games get. A far cry from Defender’s intense arcade action, with its variety of enemies and distinct attack patterns and behaviors, all you do in this game is shoot identical and tanky AT-AT’s while dodging their fire. It wasn’t bad, but I have little desire to ever replay it.