Tempest vs. Tempest: The Making and Remaking of Atari's Iconic Video Game
tempest.homemade.systemsReally nice work! From skimming it, it seems really well written. I'm looking forward to reading through the whole thing. I like how you contextualized how the different versions of the game were written and included primary source documents. The visual diagrams are also neat and help your explanations. If you're interested in even more Tempest source code, the code for the MS-DOS version of Tempest 2000 is publicly available here. https://archive.org/details/tempest-2000-dos-source-code I haven't tried building it myself, but from skimming through the files it seems to be intended for Borland Turbo Assembler in ideal mode.
If you’re looking to play an official Tempest 2000 where some money (presumably) makes its way to Jeff Minter, then Digital Eclipse have published an “interactive documentary” bundle of his games and the surrounding history, available on pretty much every current platform: https://www.digitaleclipse.com/games/llamasoft
It's also in Atari 50th along with the original Tempest.
(It unexpectedly went on sale in the PlayStation store today with 2/3rds off.)
I bought and maintain 2 Atari Jaguars just to play Tempest 2K, which is my all time favorite game. And also have a number of Tempest 2K emulators.
Had the privilege of meeting Jeff "Yak" Minter in Singapore, and also attended his presentation. Another legendary game developer, in the same league as David Theurer
Seeing a photo of a filled-out System/360 assembler coding form is like looking at an ancient stone tablet. Imagine the reams of these forms you'd have to go through and iterate on to arrive at a functional piece of software.
The amount of time needed just for one trip around the feedback loop for the smallest imaginable tweak puts any amount of modern "trying to get the build/CI to pass" nuisance to shame.
The vector graphics are why I always seek this game out first in any arcade.
I once got in a huge argument about the superiority of vector graphics displays around 2010. The idea that LCD could match what Tempest had was silly to me, but the kid I was arguing with had never seen a Tempest cabinet and just assumed old meant bad...
Vector vs. raster isn’t about superiority. Each technology can do unique things that aren’t matched by the other.
The dichotomy hasn’t gone away, though. Vector plotters may still be running in certain print shops or scientific settings.
PostScript, PCL, TrueType fonts incorporate vector technology. SVG is a very popular graphics file format for both writing and reading. I know several artists who specialize in SVG and contribute them to Wikimedia Commons.
Also the spinner. The physical spinner is key (but unacknowledged or at least underappreciated)
It was weighted and solid, like from an old stereo. You let it spin and stop it to move a longer distance quickly instead of doing multiple turns.
My family had multiple (various) machines in an arcade and we kept this at home for some time. I often think of this specific example piece of hardware versus everything plastic today.
Not the tank game (Battletanks?)
Battlezone
That’s the one. Thanks!
This is fantastic, thank you for doing this. I hadn't thought of the poor Jaguar in ages! Heh.
Found a tiny typo, this sentence from quite early (page 17):
Notice how apparently wasteful this file format is: some of the triplets contain only byte.
I think the word "one" is missing before the final "byte".
I just pulled my 1981 Tempest out of storage yesterday. Hope it still works!
That's so cool. I remember loving this game in the arcade but then being annoyed when I had to also buy a paddle wheel to play it on my 2600, which was then useful for exactly 0 other games.
The "paddle" and "driving" controllers looked the same, but they did not have the same function.
A paddle controller for the Atari 2600 had a hard stop, so that it could only make one revolution (or a bit less) in each direction. Therefore, you could use it with Tennis or Pong or whatever else just had you going back-and-forth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paddle_(game_controller)
A driving controller spun freely in both directions without stopping its motion. This was not analogous to the steering wheel of a car, but it did permit driving games to be relatively free-wheeling, and you could spin the car's wheels endlessly in either direction.
In my experience, paddle controllers were more compatible with more games, but if you had a diverse library, it behooved you to keep driving controllers on-hand for that eventuality. Other unique controllers included the BASIC Programming pads, and one of those space games which had some really intricate controls on the dash.
The "driving" controller class was the type that was supported by Tempest. Analogous to the arcade controller, you could spin indefinitely in either direction without having the physical tab to stop the motion. This definitely contributed to the fun and suspense of the gameplay!
I'm not sure about the specific Atari 2600 controllers but my hazy memory has at least three types of what appear to be rotary.
One is basically a self centring sprung up/off/down switch. That would be similar to a car indicator stalk and simple left/right arrow keys.
Another would be rotary with a stop but it sent a physical position, presumably it was something like a variable resistor or very fine resolution rotary switch. With these you could instantly position your character by the position on the ring/slider. This could be interpreted as position 1, 2, 3 etc etc.
The third was a free spinning which moved the character faster the faster you spun it. This would be how I remember Tempest playing, you could slowly nudge it or just do a fast spin & stop to quickly move around. This would produce a signal such as clockwise+very slow or anti-clockwise+very fast.
On the Apple 2 at least the paddles registered a number between 0-255. The joysticks were just “2 paddles” with an x and y between 0-255.
I remember a little adjustment slider to help the joystick center near 0,0
Mine had no stop so it must have been the driving controller (though now I may be mixing up my 2600 with my 7200). Time flies.
Driving controller makes way more sense for tempest, and the lack of use. My family had a pretty extensive collection of 2600 games, and two sets of paddles (needed for four player paddle games, we had one, but it wasn't very good and the 2nd set of paddles was wonky anyway), but no driving controller or any games that used it.
I had several driving games, too. But they used a joystick or the paddles.
Video game history is littered with cool peripherals that were only supported by less than a handful of games. NES R.O.B., SuperScope, etc.
How I longed for that Power Glove, though in retrospect it's an incredibly stupid interface.
"Its so bad..." Oh how right he was.
I have a bin of plastic instruments lying around somewhere
Logitech Cyberman is my favourite.
Did you actually play Tempest on the Atari 2600? As far as I know, Atari did a prototype, but never shipped it.
https://www.atariage.com/software_page.php?SoftwareLabelID=8...
Wait. Did you never play Kaboom? Kaboom was awesome!
I had a very limited library. I think it was Pitfall, Combat, Tempest, and Berzerk. Kaboom looks fun though.
Kaboom! and Tempest...a perfect combination!
Worked with Dave Theurer some years ago, nice guy.
Same. Super down to earth. We had our office next to his company that was making a graphics processing tool called Debabelizer. We used it heavily in our games workflow, and would occasionally find bugs... more than once, Dave came over to our office and debugged it on his laptop right in front of us. Truly inspirational dude.
Wow, I loved DeBabelizer Pro. Got a lot of use out of it when porting games.
This doc is great, I love this game. So much so that I built a Tempest-insipred audio visualizer [0] for the EYESY platform as one of my first projects on the platform.
- does anyone know of a book that breaks down how the quake game or counter strike works?
Michael Abrash and Fabien Sanglard have excellent books on Quake.
These are great. Anyone who can interpret Minter deserves our support and praise.
(Would love one about Space Giraffe / NEON but I appreciate they're on much more complex systems than Tempest and Psychedelia.)
Great work and detail. It gets quite technical at times; simplifying a bit would make it more accessible.
Amazing work! Thanks very much for this OP!
gold mine