THE SECRET HISTORY OF GAMES, PART 1 - August 2002
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As far as Emulation Zone is concerned, you can keep your Warcrafts, your Championship Managers and your Arcanum: Of Steamworks And Magick Obscuras – the best reason for owning a PC is for retrogaming. But it’s not just that retrogaming lets you play 50,000 old games from the days when you were just a spotty schoolkid, without cluttering up your home with 100-odd different and frankly often unattractive games machines. The very best thing about retrogaming is that it also gives you the chance to play games that you DIDN’T play when you were just a spotty schoolkid, because they’re the Forgotten Ones, the games that, for one reason and another, never came out. Until recent times, it looked as though those games would simply vanish from human consciousness, all the efforts expended on producing them rendered worthless forever. But thanks to the mighty power of emulation they’re yours to command without having to hunt through the seedy underbelly of eBay, or hitchhike to Bolivia to play the world’s last surviving Granny And The Gators machine. Emulation Zone, whose wordcount was already exceeded some time before writing this intro, shuts up and gets straight on with presenting a small selection of the best, most interesting and just plain weirdest.
FINAL FANTASY 1-6 (NES/SNES) If you’re a Final Fantasy fan, you’re probably a bit simple-minded (being, for example, unable to cope with any kind of game where you have to do much more than press the “X” button a lot to read through bad text for 50 hours). So the last thing you need is any more confusion brought about by the fact that Square adopted a completely random policy towards releasing the earlier Final Fantasies outside of Japan. Some games in the series were simply never released at all, and others were given the titles of entirely different games in different territories. (The Japanese Final Fantasy 6 was released in the US as Final Fantasy 3, for example. Or possibly the other way round, Emulation Zone forgets.) Anyway, the point is, thanks to the magical world of emulation, not only can all you nerdy FF fans finally play the entire series, but a keen bunch of even nerdier devotees have fully translated all the Japan-only games into English as well. Tch. If all that effort and technical wizardry had been directed somewhere useful, we’d probably be able to go to the shops by teleport by now. EMULATE IT WITH: RockNES X (http://rocknes.kinox.org)
TENGEN TETRIS (NES) What have you got if you’ve got a room full of lawyers up to their necks in dogshit? The answer, of course, is “Not enough dogshit”.(*) And if you ever found yourself in court being sued for defamation by a bunch of lawyers for using that old joke, Tengen Tetris is a perfect defence.(**) If you’ve read any of the better books on videogame history, you’ll know about the dizzying mess of rights that surrounded the worldwide licensing of Tetris. Despite your pleas, which Emulation Zone can hear from here, we won’t go into the details – all you need to know is that the biggest casualty of the whole scrog-up was Tengen’s excellent NES port of Tetris, which for many people remains the best version ever (***). Sadly, lawyers ensured that it was banned from sale and Tengen’s entire stock of cartridges smashed up with big tattooed blokes with hammers (****), in favour of forcing consumers to opt for a totally different and markedly inferior (*****) version of the game produced by Nintendo. Now, however, a mere 20 or so years later, you can thumb your noses at them all by playing the good one again. That’ll learn ‘em. (******) (*) Take my wife. Please! (**) Not legally true. (***) After the Game Boy one. (****) Probably. (*****) In Emulation Zone’s strictly personal opinion, your honour. (******) In fact it won’t. EMULATE IT WITH: RockNES X (http://rocknes.kinox.org)
THE INFOCOM COLLECTION (Game Boy) Emulation has done some truly great things in its few short years of existence, preserving a huge wealth of cultural history that, if left to the games industry, would all be buried in concrete in the Arizona desert by now. It’s also culpable, however, for the implementation of what may very well be the world’s all-time worst idea, namely some ultra-dedicated but insanely misguided lunatic converting the entire series of Infocom’s famous text adventures of the early 80s to the Game Boy. You might think that it’d be a hideous chore entering the phrase “GO NORTH AND PUNCH DRAGON UP BRACKET” using only a four-way joypad and two fire buttons, but chances are you’d still be wildly underestimating the sheer hell of it by a good 500%. Astoundingly, though, several mobile-phone-game developers would have us believe that playing stuff like this (and Championship Manager) on our mobiles represents the future of gaming. May God have mercy on all of our souls. EMULATE IT WITH: Visual Boy Advance (http://vboy.emuhq.com)
TOILET KIDS (PC Engine) Since NEC’s superb PC Engine console was never released in Europe at all, you could dub pretty much any of its hundreds of games as “secret”, or indeed just call the machine itself the secret and be done with it. Anyhoo, at first glance this game – from the Media Rings Corporation, no less - seems like a bog-standard (sorry) vertically-scrolling shoot-‘em-up (no, madam, I said “SHOOT-‘em-up!”) of the sort the PCE specialised in, but after a few seconds you’re assaulted by gun emplacements in the shape of toilets and bare-arsed ground troops, all enthusiastically firing round, brown globs of – well, let’s momentarily assume it’s mud, eh? – at you. (Though what they’re doing with a load of mud up their backsides is anyone’s guess.) Shortly you encounter flying beasties quacking out great chuffs of noxious gas, and even enemies with – oh yes – turtle’s heads. It gets even weirder after that, but the most remarkable thing is how much more you care about avoiding a hail of enemy fire when it’s, quite literally, a shitstorm. Urgh. Those wacky Japanese, eh viewers? EMULATE IT WITH: Magic Engine (http://www.magicengine.com)
SUPER 3D NOAH’S ARK (SNES) The games industry’s keen sense of moral probity was put to a severe test by this one back in the mid-90s. Produced by a US company called Wisdom Tree who specialised in Bible-themed games, the game was a straight rip-off of Wolfenstein 3D, using the same code and maze layouts, but with all the soldiers and Nazis replaced by the animals of the Ark, which you (as Noah) had to run around “pacifying” by throwing food at them before they started fighting each other, shagging or crapping all over the place. (Of course, since there were considerably more than two of each enemy in Wolfenstein, Noah’s ark was inexplicably overpopulated this time round.) Inexplicably, Wisdom Tree completely escaped either being sued or being pulverized with thunderbolts for breaking that commandment about stealing, leading to the inescapable conclusion that if you want to pirate games, you’ll probably be all right as long as you do it from a church hall and wear a dog-collar. EMULATE IT WITH: SNES9x (http://www.snes9x.com)
THRILL KILL (PSone) Shock-horror beat-‘em-up Thrill Kill was another unlikely casualty of one of the games industry’s rare outbreaks of taste. After its original would-be publisher encountered some economic difficulties, the gore-splattered game (where leather-clad dominatrixes reached “climax” on performing a fatal finishing move and suchlike) was bought up by EA, who promptly canned it in an attempt to prevent impressionable and vulnerable gamers being sullied by its awful depravity. (And the fact that it was a bit rubbish.) However, what with the games industry’s security being famously leakier than a torpedoed sieve, it was far too late to prevent copies being smuggled out and hastily distributed to the “underground”, from where it’s been sold at market stalls and car-boot sales ever since, like the “video nasties” of days gone yore. Not that you have to get your hands dirty dealing with such people, of course – just find the ROM, boot it up on your Playstation emulator, be gravely appalled, and go off to write a letter to your MP about the shocking decline in quality-control standards at software houses these days. EMULATE IT WITH: FPSe (http://utenti.lycos.it/fpse/main.htm)
DINGO (Arcade) Even today, most veteran UK gamers are only vaguely aware that the company they knew and loved as Ultimate Play The Game, authors of the finest Spectrum software in existence, had a whole other life producing NES games as Rare Ltd. Even less well-known is the firm’s arcade heritage, which stretches right back to the earliest days of the Spectrum with games like 1983’s Dingo. The graphic style (right down to the text font) is instantly identifiable as Ultimate, but the gameplay (collect the fruit and, er, that’s it, on an infinite number of completely identical levels) makes even the simple likes of Cookie and Jet-Pac look like playing IL-2 Sturmovik with the manual in Russian. Rubbish, frankly. They’ll never amount to anything. EMULATE IT WITH: MAME v0.61 (http://www.mame.net)
GRANNY AND THE GATORS (Pinball) Emulation Zone has already brought you news of Baby Pac-Man, the first in Bally’s early-80s series of pinball/videogame hybrids. Now, via the magic of Visual Pinball, you can play, for the first time ever in the UK, the second and last in the ill-fated line, Granny And The Gators. The videogame aspect is a predecessor of Atari’s much later Toobin’, whereby you pedal your inexplicably-located Granny up the Amazon, avoiding crocodiles and angry natives and occasionally steering into little creeks where there are implausibly found some miniature pinball machines where she can while away a few happy minutes before getting back to hunting for treasure in the rainforest. Look, Emulation Zone doesn’t come up with these plots, we’re just telling you about them, okay? EMULATE IT WITH: Visual Pinball (http://www.randydavis.com/vp)
SUPER COBRA (Adventurevision) In the long dark days before the Game Boy, miniaturised videogaming was still something of a fanciful dream. Producing displays more complex than a Game And Watch still required screen technology the size of the Space Shuttle, so hardware firms tried all sorts of trickery to achieve useable displays. The Vectrex was one such attempt, but much less known was Entex’s Adventurevision, a bizarre little console that used a set of fast-spinning mirrors to produce a two-colour red-and-black display that looked not unlike that of Nintendo’s mid-90s flop the Virtual Boy. The Adventurevision had an incredibly limited release, and about six survive today, along with a tiny handful of copies of the only four known games ever produced for the machine. All four, ambitiously, were coin-op conversions, including Defender and Turtles, but the most successful was the port of Stern’s helicopter-based Scramble sequel Super Cobra, rendered as a stupendously addictive cavern-negotiating mini-epic so colossally demanding that most Adventurevision owners probably smashed their fragile little mirrors into a million pieces while giving the machine a savage Super Cobra-inspired pounding. No wonder there’s only six left. EMULATE IT WITH: MESS (http://mess.emuverse.com)
SINISTAR (BBC Micro) When Atarisoft took the big leap into the home-computer software market in the mid-80s, it was the sort of leap you make from a burning building, in more than one respect. Partly, of course, because by that point in time (the home console market having recently imploded) Atari was pretty much a burning building anyway, and partly because Atarisoft just grabbed the nearest things to hand and stuffed them in a pillowcase. Hence the company’s release schedule for the wide variety of platforms it supported seemed to comprise titles chosen by chucking a dart into a list of intellectual properties. Though Atarisoft brought out games for all the major platforms of the day, it elected for some reason to release the cult Williams space blaster Sinistar on only one format anywhere in the world – the genteel, academic BBC Micro. Bereft of both of Sinistar’s unique selling points (the booming, terrifying voice of the Sinistar itself, and the strange omni-directional joystick), the port was nevertheless a pretty impressive recreation of the coin-op, a judgement that was heartily agreed with by both of the BBC owners who bought it. EMULATE IT WITH: BeebEm (http://www.rickynet.net/beebem) or MESS.
ROBOTRON (Spectrum) As with Sinistar on the BBC Micro, Atarisoft’s behavior with regard to the Spectrum resembled a drunk man trying to cross a waltzer. The company released some fairly stinky titles, intimidated a few unofficial clone games into becoming licensed Atarisoft releases, and simply never bothered trying to sell by far its two best Speccy conversions, Moon Patrol and Robotron. Robotron in particular was a superb feat of Spectrum coding, retaining practically every feature of the frenzied coin-op right down to the double-joystick control option. Emulation Zone is particularly proud to note that even the author of Speccy Robotron didn’t own a copy of his work after Atarisoft binned the project before release, and the game would have been lost to history forever had Emulation Zone not had the foresight to, er, “borrow” a leaked copy from a sinister contact in Atarisoft back in 1987 and keep it safely in Emulation Zone’s loft so that it could be returned to the author over a decade later and enjoyed by keen emulation fans for the rest of time. EMULATE IT WITH: Spectaculator (http://www.spectaculator.com) |
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MISSING IN ACTION We’ve barely scratched the surface here, but these are just the games that once were lost but now are found. There are still many of the Holy Grails of gaming’s history lost out there somewhere. The Spectrum version of Super Mario Brothers rip-off Great Giana Sisters, reviewed by Crash magazine but killed before release by some more pesky lawyers. But someone must still have the tape, eh? Rare/Ultimate reportedly had a completed Spectrum version of Solar Jetman, the last game in the Jetman trilogy, but have never let it see the light of day. Ultra-rare coin-op sequel Marble Madness 2 still waits for one of its few owners to let the ROMs be dumped for MAME, and ethical wranglings surround the emulation of Bradley Trainer, the famous military version of Battle Zone. (The MAME team supposedly uncomfortable about the fact that Bradley Trainer never saw an arcade, and is hence inappropriate for their arcade emulator.) If we’ve learned one thing, though, it’s that emulation is as dogged as a Terminator in its pursuit of videogaming posterity. Marble Madness 2, Bradley Trainer and the rest may be lost to us now. But they’ll be back. |
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