As readers may already be aware, my main hobby to distract myself from my day job in the profoundly depressing world of politics is to delve into retro videogaming via my Retropie. It’s an endlessly rewarding fount of discovery and entertainment for many reasons, but sometimes the two spheres collide in extremely unexpected ways.
So let’s talk about GORF.
Midway’s 1981 arcade hit was a pioneering and innovative game. It was the first game to be comprised of multiple highly distinct sub-games, boldly including direct lifts of other people’s coin-ops in the form of Space Invaders and Galaxian. And while it wasn’t the first arcade game to feature synthesised speech – it was beaten to that punch by the likes of Berzerk and Wizard Of Wor the previous year – it was famous for the extensive and iconic vocabulary with which it taunted and goaded the player.
It got numerous conversions of variable quality to various home systems, whether as contemporary licences or later homebrew ports, and that’s where we come in.
Earlier today I happened to pop into to a ZX Spectrum forum I used to frequent to look for a bit of info about an obscure old game, and my eye was caught by a post there.
It regarded an article called “20 Indie Games That You Could Beat in the Time It Would Take You to Watch That Hbomberguy Video”, which is about an almost four-hour-long YouTube video that gamer types are currently talking about on social media, relating to plagiarism by someone or other, but which I’m not going to bother watching or linking to because (a) it’s by a monstrous arsehole, (b) it sounds really really boring and (c) it’s almost four hours long.
Like the forum poster I was disappointed that the headline didn’t mean you could beat ALL of those 20 games in less than the video’s 3h 51m 09s running time, but merely that you could beat any ONE of them, which didn’t seem much of a fun fact.
But it did seem like a bit of a challenge, so to liven up my afternoon while I listened to some lawyers also droning on tediously for hours I thought I’d try to find out how many old Speccy games you could complete, one after the other, in the same timespan.
The Spectrum community is arguably more on top of the machine’s history than any other in the world of gaming, so it’s always quite noteworthy when something and/or someone escapes its notice entirely. And so it is with Lukasz Kur.
The screenshot above is of a game called a_e Adventure, or sometimes a_e in King Chrum’s Gold Mines. (According to Kur the character’s name represents “a portion of a forum member’s user name which inadvertantly looked like an emoticon of sorts – a little face with asymetrical eyes.”)
In the modern world, presentation and packaging is absolutely central to how we experience (and sell) everything. When videogame arcades tried to break that rule, it almost led them to disaster.
If you went to a shop to buy the latest blockbuster videogame, handed over your £50 and were given in return a blank unboxed disc with the name scrawled on it in marker pen, you’d be really unhappy about it – even though the disc would contain the exact same game code and play exactly the way it does when it comes in a pretty case.
It’d be like ordering a cup of tea in a cafe and have them bring you a cup of cold water, a teabag and a kettle – you’ve technically got everything that you need, but it’s not the experience you were hoping for.
And yet, for many years – and to some extent even today – that’s exactly the way we treated arcade games.
Ashby Computers & Graphics Ltd, better known under their trading name of Ultimate Play The Game, were the most reclusive and secretive videogame developers of the 8-bit era. Almost never doing interviews and giving very little away when they did, they preferred to let their stream of smash-hit games do most of the talking for them. The anti-Bitmap Brothers, if you will.
The games themselves were just as enigmatic, never really explaining your goal or even how to play. You'd be told the control keys, given a bit of cryptically florid plot waffle and left to get on with it.
But even now, 37 years after the last new Ultimate release, remarkably little is known about how they managed to arrive full-fledged on the scene, already making games that most other releases of the time paled and quailed beside.
And as I'd given myself the week off writing about politics and there wasn't a poker game on, I decided to spend last night having a bit of a dig.
Galaxy Wars, released by Universal in 1979, is one of the first wave of "proper" arcade videogames (defined here as coded on ROM chips rather than being semi-mechanical or solid-state like Pong).
Running on a hacked Space Invaders board (as most of the first wave did), it actually bears a lot of similarities to Taito's 1978 blockbuster. It's got UFOs running across the top of the screen, above a field of asteroids which move one way across the screen, then drop down a level when they reach the edge and start moving back across in the opposite direction.
The screen was a monochrome reflector – sometimes supplemented by sheets of coloured cellophane to mimic a colour display – and all the sound effects are ripped straight from Invaders.
It was a pretty dull game, and other than an inexplicable Japan-only SNES port in 1995 (which seems to have been the only ever licenced home version on any format) it made very little impact on posterity.
Until this week, when it suddenly threatened to become mildly interesting.
"Those who have been angry about all this – don’t investigate the people, investigate the system." (Robert Florence, writing on John Walker's blog last week.)
Well, that was exciting. The entire English-speaking world of videogames journalism just about convulsed itself into a coma yesterday because someone did that rarest of things in the English-speaking world of videogames journalism – spoke openly, frankly and truthfully about something. If you've been having trouble keeping up with the dizzying pace of developments, allow us to lead you gently through the most concise and accurate timeline we can manage.
Below is the originally-published version of an article entitled "A Table Of Doritos", which appeared on Eurogamer this week, before being censored by the site following a complaint from Lauren Wainwright, who was mentioned in the piece. Lauren Wainwright is a journalist whose entry on Journalisted includes Tomb Raider publisher Square-Enix in the roster of her "current" employers.
WoSland republishes the article here, without the permission or knowledge of either Eurogamer or the article's author Robert Florence, in the interests of news reporting. It is unedited save for the fact that we've highlighted in bold the passage that Eurogamer removed. If it's libellous, as Lauren Wainwright claims, we invite her to sue us.
As regular readers will know, we've always been keen admirers of Bruce Everiss's almost-unparallelled videogames-industry knowledge and expertise. So we've been thrilled to recently see him storming back to the cutting-edge as chief of marketing for David Darling's new company Kwalee, which has hit on the genius idea of making it big in the ultra-competitive App Store market by employing a vast team of staff to come up with two-player-only knockoffs of ancient board games.
The well-documented problem with the App Store, of course, is visibility. To have a chance of getting your game noticed you need it to get lots of great reviews, and when your games are extremely mediocre and competing against hundreds and hundreds of existing clones of the same thing which DO offer single-player play as well as online, the chances of that happening are slim.
Unless you cut out the middleman and write the reviews yourself, of course.
As the sun made its first appearance of the summer at the weekend, Wings over Sealand wasn’t slow off the mark. On the “B” of the “BANG!”, we leapt onto a train for a scenic two-hour journey to the seaside, specifically the lovely south-coast town of Weymouth. It’s a remarkable place, changing character every time you turn a corner.
The front is a traditional resort promenade, with beaches and ice-cream stands and arcades. Just behind it is a picturesque working harbour town, tatty fishing boats mingling with some extremely fancy millionaires’ yachts. (Don’t miss the tasty and gigantic battered faggots at Bennett’s On The Waterfront fish and chip shop, by the way, the closest thing you’ll find to haggis in an English chippy and heavenly with a splash of onion vinegar.) Adjacent to both is a scruffy but bustling town centre, almost entirely free of the empty shops littering every other urban conurbation in Britain.
And if you embark on about five minutes’ leisurely stroll from the western end of the prom or the busy, noisy harbour and marina, you’ll find the town’s only sizeable area of public green space, in the form of the beautiful and peaceful oasis that is The Nothe.
For the thousands of readers who slightly startlingly visited yesterday's piece on Bath's retail economy (you never know which are going to be the popular stories in this business), here's the December 2009 WoS feature on Newport referenced in it, which I've unlocked from the WoS subscriber section. (I tried to just copy it over into this blog, but it was a hideous technical nightmare.)
If I can find the time one day next week, I'm going to try to go back to Newport and see how it's getting along two years on. Stand by for upbeat feelgood action!
Effijy on The Aims Of Justice: “Blind eye to telescope for further investigation. If investigated and Swinney carried the can and had to step down who…” Jun 5, 05:50
twathater on For Me, But Not For Thee: “Robert I don’t believe for a minute that that course of action would be acceptable to genuine independence supporters who…” Jun 5, 01:45
Mark Beggan on The Aims Of Justice: “Rackateering is such a 1920’s word. Let’s bring it forward a hundred years. It’s now called Ringfencing.” Jun 5, 01:42
Mark Beggan on The Aims Of Justice: ““what she owns and what the taxpayer owns”. Funny you should say that.” Jun 5, 00:16
Cynicus on The Aims Of Justice: “I don’t know about that but, according to Robin McAlpine, “ in Scotland the victims of crime have a right…” Jun 4, 23:50
Run the Border on The Aims Of Justice: “We will see. A huge thankyou.” Jun 4, 23:46
crazycat on The Aims Of Justice: “There seem to have been several shop-fronts for this. You encountered one in 2016. I (a non-member) donated to one…” Jun 4, 23:37
Al-Stuart on The Aims Of Justice: “. Well done Stuart, There is severely reduced respect for the current chief constable incumbent at Police Scotland. She has…” Jun 4, 23:27
Andrea on The Aims Of Justice: “Yes, I saw your tweet shortly after posting my comment. Let’s see what they say. Slightly OT, assuming that the…” Jun 4, 23:19
Mark Beggan on The Aims Of Justice: ““In the United States, the Organized Crime Control Act (1970) defines organized crime as “the unlawful activities of a highly…” Jun 4, 23:15
Kate L on The Aims Of Justice: “These are quite disheartening times to live through but it brings joy to see good people fighting nevertheless. Get ’em…” Jun 4, 23:05
Alan McMahon on The Aims Of Justice: ““Swinney says £660,000 independence fund used on SNP ‘objectives’” Really? Is this possible? Consider if these funds had never been…” Jun 4, 23:03
Donald Macleod on The Aims Of Justice: “Can we appoint Joanna Cherry or Fergus Ewing as the new Lord Advocate to take hold of this complaint and…” Jun 4, 22:48
DebzoHighland on The Aims Of Justice: “I just checked back through my old cheque books & my first payment to the “SNP Referendum Campaign” as noted,…” Jun 4, 22:39
Ian Smith on The Aims Of Justice: “If the polis don’t follow through, could there be a crowd funded private prosecution/” Jun 4, 22:37
Martin on The Aims Of Justice: “Great. Will be kicked out quickly by the polis and the crown. If we could have an independent police force…” Jun 4, 22:33
BroughtyBoy on The Aims Of Justice: “Correct. COPFS is completely captured by SNP. Stu has zero chance of success. More’s the pity.” Jun 4, 22:26
Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh on The Aims Of Justice: “LIB DEMS ‘BETRAYING WOMEN’ BY OPPOSING SINGLE-SEX SPACES GUIDANCE The Liberal Democrats have come under fire for calling on the…” Jun 4, 22:24
Bob Johnston on The Aims Of Justice: “John Swinney – Let me run your comments by the Lord Advocate. – What do you think, Dot? Lord Advocate…” Jun 4, 22:23
Andy Wiltshire on The Aims Of Justice: “I expect the recipients would now be in urgent need of some of those stolen toilet rolls.” Jun 4, 22:19
gm on The Aims Of Justice: “Sturgeon is being protected. COPFS and by Swinney seem to be seeing things her way regardless of the reputational damage…” Jun 4, 22:16
AliB on The Aims Of Justice: “It would beggar belief that Police Scotland after nearly five years have not already investigated your complaints and reported all…” Jun 4, 21:55
alan scott on The Aims Of Justice: “Excellent submission laying out the case for the prosecution. I think the weakness is in this point. “This admission post-dates…” Jun 4, 21:52
Rev. Stuart Campbell on The Aims Of Justice: “That was a request to reopen Branchform. This is a new complaint on new evidence.” Jun 4, 21:52
Andrew Ingram on The Aims Of Justice: “Sincerely I wish you the very best in this. I don’t want to rain on your parade but I can…” Jun 4, 21:44
Mac K on The Aims Of Justice: “On BBC Debate night programme 27/5/26 SNP MP Alyn Smith “ the questions that were asked initially were about a…” Jun 4, 21:32
findlay on The Aims Of Justice: “Kevin, you’re right to be concerned about Scottish corruption, any sensible person would be, but it’s better to sort it…” Jun 4, 21:29
Colin Dawson on For Me, But Not For Thee: “The SNP significantly changed its constitution and rules during Sturgeon’s reign, possibly in 2017 or 2018? I don’t have a…” Jun 4, 21:28
