The next post in this series will cover Dragon's Lair and Space Ace.
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Intrepid
Another never-released game created using the ARPA
hardware was Bob Skinner's Intrepid.
[Bob
Skinner] I was able to convince Tommy Stroud Jr. to let me make up a game and
learn how to use the game system. My idea was called Intrepid and was basically an endless strafing run... All I had to
do was make just enough progress to keep ahead of the naysayers. It was a
futuristic fighter jet controlled by a four-way joystick and a gun system
controlled by a trackball that you clicked down with your palm to fire…With
vector graphics you could have nearly unlimited rotations about the x-y axis.
You could also use a trick to rotate in the Z-X plane and appear to “bank” an
airplane. With “Hand Command” the exclusive targeting system, even if you
dodged a heat-seeker, and it swung around and started chasing you, you could
pin-point aim behind you and shoot it off your tail….I am not sure if there was
a single brand-new idea in the game. The Hand Command was simply a missile
command mechanic while flying. The weaving an aircraft left and right had been
used in Astro Blaster and several other space games. I convinced myself this
was unique and special for color x-y. I was moving over land, up a winding
path, facing fixed targets, tanks, and missile launchers, on the way to a base
that in reality I would never reach…
Before Intrepid
was finished Atari released Xevious
(licensed from Namco) which had similar gameplay but a much better
implementation. Stroud quickly lost interest in the game and the project was
cancelled.
Cosmic
Chasm
One
day, while Skinner was working on Intrepid,
Jim Pierce arrived at work with another new toy. This one, however, was a bit
more sophisticated than Mattel's handheld football game. It was a vector-based home
game system called the Vectrex. Designed by John Ross, Mike Purvis, Tom Sloper
at Steve Marking of Western Technologies/Smith Engineering the Vectrex was an
all-in-one system with a tiny 9 x 11" CRT and a small library of games
that would be released by GCE in December, 1982. Pierce inked a deal with GCE
giving them rights to produced licensed versions of Cinematronics' vector classics
like Rip Off, Armor Attack, and Star Castle. In return (besides the
licensing money) Cinematronics got the rights to produce coin-op versions of
any Vectrex game. They picked Cosmic
Chasm. The original programmer was Mike Gomez - a former technician working
on his first video game.
[Bob Skinner] Mike
had been a tester, and knew how to use a fluke meter and an oscilloscope, but
couldn’t have been much of a programmer or give me any reason to worry about.
But it was clear that Mike was pretty quickly shifting some images on his
screen, and they started to be interactive, and damn if he hadn’t gotten to
that point sooner than I did a few months back. It might have had something to
do with my endless summer ethic and his single-mindedness, but Mike was getting
traction, and help from the other lifers. Within a week of the Xevious “giant
thunder-steal”, a meeting had taken place to seal my game’s fate. Jim Pierce
came down to announce that Mike and I were joining forces to finish Cosmic
Chasm. We had three months to complete the game for the arcade. There was
likely some overtone of the dire consequences to the company if we didn’t
succeed, but for me the main consequence was that I had just had an invention
torn from my clutch, had been joined at the hip with someone I didn’t respect,
and for a product I didn’t initially believe in. Mike said “it’s going to be great”
Before the game was finished, Gomez quit to work for a
new company called Simutrek on the laserdisc game Cube Quest, leaving Skinner to finish programming the game.
In the game, the player attempted to pilot a ship
to the center of a reactor, then destroy it and escape. Dave Scott redesigned the
graphics from the Vectrex original.
[Bob Skinner] Dave designed different colored squiggles of bowties, spiky squares and what not for the enemies. The ugly drill at the front of the ship that had one purpose, to deactivate the doors? Gone. The subterranean aspect? Gone. The varied map? Gone. In their place was a tinker-toy space station with pods connected by tubes. The map and radar would remain at the top of the screen, then the scoreboard, then the current room. The jagged rooms cut from rock were replaced by an outer hexagon as this was now the minimalist walls of a station. The doors on the wall would correspond to the exits that were shown on the map. So it was still Cosmic, but it was no longer a Chasm in the subterranean sense. If in space no one can hear you scream, perhaps they won’t nitpick on terminology either.
Another change came courtesy of Jim Pierce.
[Bob Skinner] One thing about owning the company – you get to have your ideas implemented. If they are good ideas, most everyone wins, but implemented they will be. Jim had outlined design elements for the arcade version among these few tenets was that the enemy ships would be narrower than the width of the gun ports. I put that aside as not making sense, why would you design a weapon that when aimed at an enemy misses him on both sides... I implemented it my way. When Jim saw it, he reminded me: “The enemy ships must be smaller than the width of the guns”. This time I verbalized my argument. Jim repeated the sentence, adding some emphasis on "must" and "smaller". On this third invocation, I bit down on my tongue. I changed the code. I came to appreciate the difference. It was what made the shield mechanic so fun.
. Cosmic Chasm was field-tested at the Yellow Brick Road arcade in
the Universal Town Center, where it made
almost $400 in a weekend. Skinner was told that Cinematronics had 3,000 orders
for the game. In the end, however, most of the orders were cancelled and only
about 50-400 coin-op units were shipped. A flop in the arcade, Cosmic Chasm would be the only game
released for the new system as well as the last vector game that Cinematronics
would produce.
Flop or not, Bob Skinner feels that it was one of the company's
best efforts.
[Bob Skinner] I don’t believe to this day that any game had every given the player that much rotational control and firepower. You could fire a slow bullet on this horizontal line, or one on this 45 degree angle in other games, and then hope you aimed perfectly or that your bullet would reload. But here, the more you shot at close range, the faster you could shoot. Twisting the shaft encoder, and rattling the fire with the index and middle finger you could shoot up to 480 RPM, and at very fine angles. This more than made up for the fact that you had to twist…While there was no limit to ammo, there was some energy expended by the shields, which grew dim by some 256 levels of grey to depict the depletion. I was selling adrenaline. People where fully engaged firing, killing dozens of enemies, trying to concentrate fire into their entry point into the room, timing the waves, blasting the gate, and leaving the room, noting the size of the central core.
 |
| Phil Sorger and Bob Skinner, 1987 |
With the failure
of Cosmic Chasm and the cancelling
of Hovercraft and Intrepid Cinematronics, which had
built its reputation on vector graphics games, exited the vector field entirely,
sold its system, and turned to releasing raster games. By 1983, the name Cinematronics was a
fading memory of days gone by that most arcaders thought had disappeared
forever.
They
couldn't have been more wrong. Before the year's end Rick Dyer and Advanced
Microcomputer Systems would provide the company with its biggest hit ever and
almost single-handedly reverse the coin-op video game industry's downward
spiral.
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