Dragon's Lair had been a huge hit in
1983 - in many ways one of the biggest the industry had ever seen. Many saw
laserdisc games as the savior of a dying industry. In the end, however, this
proved not to be the case when the games faded almost as quickly as they rose.
There were a number of reasons. For one, the hardware was error prone and
buggy. In the January 1985 issue of Electronic
Games, Ron Gelatin, CEO of Just Games, who managed arcades in the
northeast, put it as follows:
[Ron Gelatin] "…the original Dragon's Lair was made with a
three-year-old, discontinued Pioneer player. The company did in all the
operators by doing that, because Pioneer had no parts, no back up, and it was a
piece of garbage player."
In
addition to being unreliable, the hardware was also expensive. Jim Pierce
speculates that, despite their success, Cinematronics probably lost money
overall on Dragon's Lair and Space Ace combined. As with the
industry in general, a glut of poor titles also spelled doom for laserdisc
games. After the runaway success of Dragon's
Lair it seemed that many companies just wanted to get a laserdisc game -
any laserdisc game - in arcades as quickly as possible with little concern for
quality. Ultimately, however, the biggest factor in the laserdisc games' rapid
fall may have been that the games, even the best of them, just weren't that good. Once the novelty of
the technology wore off, players were generally left with little more than a
memory test with little skill involved and once you finished a game, there was
little reason to play it again.
Scion and Freeze
When the laserdisc bubble burst,
Cinematronics found itself in a familiar position treading the waters of bankruptcy.
Even worse was that the vector game market the company had ridden to success was
dead and buried. If the company was to survive, they needed to find a new hit -
and fast. Eventually they began to develop a new raster-graphics-based hardware
development system. In the meantime they released a pair of games on older
systems.
Scion was a Xevious-like
game licensed from Seibu Denshi while Freeze
was an original concept game designed by Bob Skinner. The concept sounded like
a can't-miss proposal (at least to management) - a game that combine play
elements of two Williams classics.
[Bob Skinner] I sewed the Joust
mechanic of “pumping” the thrust mechanism with the Defender mechanic of flipping left and right, with a flamethrower
from somewhere, and an economy of fuel for the jetpack and flamethrower
The game featured a character named Manfred (because
Skinner's favorite song was "Blinded By the Light" by Manfred Mann's
Earth Band) who flew about a frozen multi-platform playfield with a jetpack using
a flamethrower to melt stalagmites and ice-frozen doors while collecting
refueling crystals and avoiding cave bats. One original aspect of the game was
if the player stood still, they slowly froze to death, making Freeze one of the rare games in which you
could die just by standing still.
Despite
its innovative elements, the final game wasn't nearly as exciting as it had
sounded during the sales pitch. With a little more work, things might have been
different.
[Bob Skinner] Dan Viescas was the art
director, and I messed up a good deal of his art. I practically coined the
derogatory term "programmer art".…Better art, a richer design with
more interesting levels, more tuning of the mechanics, and that’s a great game.
Another
issue may have been the game's hardware.
[Bob Skinner] The hardware was the recycled Naughty Boy boards from one of the earlier marketing debacles!
Thinking green! So the run was limited from the start due to the supply of
boards. I think there were 2000. I basically took the challenge to invent a
game and do my first raster game on two-year-old hardware described in
horrendous Japlish, and complete it in a few months. I worked basically
breaking only for sleep and food, and not often. My addiction to the work would
have been a serious problem if I didn’t live alone.
Released
in late 1984, both Scion and Freeze fared poorly and the situation
at Cinematronics looked worse than ever. A new hardware system, however, was in
the works - a raster-based system dubbed Cinemat. Designed around dual Z-80
microprocessors (along with dual sound chips), the Cinemat system was designed
to allow operators to replace software and control panels while keeping the
existing hardware when upgrading to a new game. Leading the Cinemat design
effort was Alex McKay one of a number of former Gremlin/Sega employees who came
to Cinematronics after Sega closed down the San Diego-based Gremlin operations.
Others included artist Dan Viescas, and programmers Helene Gomez, Steve
Hostetler, and Medo Moreno. While McKay did an admirable job with the hardware,
he had to make due with a limited timeline and even more limited funding. While
McKay developed the hardware, Dan Viescas and Medo Moreno were working on a
8-bit graphics development system based on the one they'd used as Sega/Gremlin
(in later years, Cinematronics/Leland would use Amigas then IBM PCs for
graphics development).
Cerberus and Express Delivery
The first game developed on the new
system was Cerberus, a top-down
free-scrolling game in which the player collected pods and placed them on the
arms of a floating space station while fighting off enemy escorts, tugs, and
destroyers. The game ended when all the pods were stolen. The game was
programmed by Steve Hostetler and Phil Sorger.
[Phil
Sorger] I
coded it with Steve Hostetler. I also did all the sounds…what I remember most
was Steve worked on the Player ship and scoring [while] I programmed the enemy
ships and planetary ring. It was cool building weapons and counters to weapons,
me vs Steve. It wasn't much of a game, but considering we built a brand new
game from scratch on new hardware and faced down a "colored pixel"
patent lawsuit…it was quite an accomplishment.
The
games graphics were created by art director Dan Viescas and newcomer Dana
Christianson (part of a new policy of assigning two programmers and two artists
to each game). Christianson had attended the Kansas City Art
Institute. He came to San Diego where he found few opportunities for an art
school graduate (artists generally worked as fine artists or magazine
illustrators). After working in a print shop, Christianson began taking computer programming classes at a community college, eventually earning an associates degree. Not finding programming to his liking, he turned instead to computer graphics. In December of 1983 he had decided to head to New York when he got a note from Dan Viescas that Cinematronics was hiring artists. In addition to creating the graphics for the
explosions in Cerberus, he also
created the game's logo plex (marquee) and cabinet art. While the new graphics
system was being created, programmers sometimes resorted to somewhat low-tech
methods to add the graphics to the game.
[Phil Sorger] Cerberus was done with colored markers
and graph paper, and I hand-transferred the values (I had a key: red=1, dark
red=2, etc) using a line editor, and later emacs.
The second game developed on the Cinemat
hardware was Express Delivery, a
game in which the player tried to "…maneuver his car around traffic jams,
police cars, fire trucks, and other obstacles while scoring large bonuses for
arriving at the destination before the time limit is up." Neither game caught fire in the arcades
Mayhem 2002 and Power Play
The
next two Cinemat games would feature slightly more original game play. Mayhem 2002 was a video game version of
the 1975 sci-fi film Rollerball, starring
James Caan as an aging athlete in the titular game, a bloody, futuristic
version of roller derby involving motorcycles in which a team of armor-clad
skaters scored points by stuffing a steel ball into a goal. Programming was by
David Dentt, Phil Sorger, and Bob Skinner (Sorger and Skinner became fast
friends and worked together on a number of games) with graphics from Tom
Carroll and Dana Christianson.
[David Dentt] At that time in particular, we were having some sort of
contest where two teams were trying to develop a game each. I actually started
on the other team, but liked the Mayhem game idea better, and ended up going to
it.
After
considering a number of names (such as "Shattersport") the team
settled on Mayhem 2002. Creating art
for the game proved troublesome, in part because the limitations of the
hardware system only allowed for a limited number of sprites on the screen at
one time. At one point, Cinematronics was on the verge of cancelling the game
when Dana Christianson worked 72 hours straight over a weekend and the game was
released. Once again, however, it proved not to be the hit Cinematronics desperately
needed. Part of the reason was likely the aforementioned hardware limitations,
which allowed for only one player per "team" on the screen at a time
and left little room for additional graphical elements other than the players
and the ball (it was also easy to defeat the enemy A.I. once you figured out
the trick).
Power
Play was a top-down soccer game with similar graphics to Mayhem 2002. Like Mayhem 2002, Power Play
only featured a single user-controlled player per team (though each team also
featured a computer-controlled goalie). Phil Sorger and Bob Skinner handled the
programming (reusing much of the code from Mayhem
2002). To create the game's graphics Dana Christianson filmed Sorger
kicking a soccer ball against the side of the Cinematronics building. While Bob
Skinner remembers that Mayhem 2002 was
designed before Power Play, Phil
Sorger recalls that it was the other way around.
[Phil
Sorger] …in
PowerPlay, if we didn't get the
animation working along with the motion properly, the avatar appeared to
"skate" instead of "run". Moving without animating, sliding
around the screen, but still steering around. We used this as the genesis for Mayhem, added shoulder pads, cool sound
effects, and some tricky ricochets and strategy to make a fun game.
While it may or may not
have been developed first, PowerPlay was
released in September 1985, four months after Mayhem 202 It didn't do much better than its predecessor (though it
was reportedly popular on college campuses).
Striker
Oddly
enough, given its lack of success, PowerPlay
led to another game that many at Cinematronics recall as one of the best
they ever played - a four-player cocktail version of the game called Striker.
[Phil
Sorger] Striker
was a total bastard of a project. We took two cabinets and stood them side by
side. We had the same game graphics running on both monitors, except one was
upside down. The gameplay was similar to PowerPlay,
but with 4 player control, much, much better ball handling, more interesting
wall collisions and funner characters.... We re-colored the sprites on the fly
(which we thought was really slick back then) and allowed the players to punch
and kick each other without consequence. This naughty ultra-violence was later
copied in Quarterback, and continued
all the way through NFL Blitz. We
used simple geometry and simultaneous equation solving to extrapolate pass
directions and speeds. This gave teams a lot of control over the action. The
goalies were the only NPCs and were fun to mess with. They would start off poor
and learn over time, so the first few goals were scored quickly, but after the
score became 5-5 or so, it took a well-designed play to beat the keeper. It was
also fun but difficult to push the goalie back into his own goal, or countering
by smashing the other team if they hassled your goalie. Later, we converted it
into a cocktail table game, that players would sit on both sides of. As fun as
it was, this game never shipped.
While
neither Mayhem 2002 nor PowerPlay had been a hit, Cinematronics
wasn't done with the sports theme yet. Almost the entire development staff had
been at work on another sports-themed game that Jim Pierce hoped would finally
pull the company out of the doldrums and save them from bankruptcy. A baseball
game called World Series: the Season.
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