The Video Game Years 1982 - Full Gaming History Documentary

video games are the latest craze to sweep the country and most of the world too millions of people are eco vision 1982 yo games are taking this country by storm the commodore 64 personal electronic game craze which is not only facet the atari 5200 super system it's only competition it's the video game years and welcome to 1982 the systems the culture the games an orange critter steals gamers hearts he's not speaking in english he's just talking coleco has a vision for a new console it looks like the arcade game it's close and a gaming movie lights up the screen it was mind-blowing i mean it was it changed my life you know plus atari goes big and robots run wild so hop on your ostrich but be sure to phone home this is 1982 [Music] the atari 5200 this was my very first video game system well one of them was i'm sorry the atari 5200 was released in 1982 and it was supposed to be this great replacement for the atari 2600 but of course it wasn't so they thrown a new system jacked the price up so they're larger than better and they come out with this system that at the time was already a little bit obsolete it was packed in with super breakout yippee breakout it's better but for the most part the reason why the 5200 wasn't that great in the grand scheme of things is because it wasn't really just an upgrade i have to say the atari 5200 gets a really bad rap it had some incredible arcade ports of you know they look great you look at pac-man for the 2600 it looks like absolute you look at pac-man for the atari 5200 it looks like pac-man most of the games on the system were not games that were unique to the system like this pac-man pitfall centipede they were better versions or the close ports to the arcade version better than 2600 but they weren't unique so so why bother getting it this is the uh the two-player version the viewport versus the port now i detest the controller with a passion it's the absolute worst video game controller ever made and while the controllers had these these nifty analog sticks they couldn't re-center right the non-centering analog was great for games like centipede super breakout probably while it was packed in with the system and missile command any game that used um spinner or analog control or a trackball sure it was fine because you could move slow or you could zip around but that's not many games no and it's certain certainly not the games that the majority of people played they were these just weird analog controllers i think in theory they would have been great they had a pause button on it it's like they tried to mix the controller with a telephone and something else horrible and it just doesn't work atari 5200 controllers had the reputation of breaking all the time they were notorious for braking this these are by atari 5200 controllers that don't work there's an rf switch that's broken i think that time has treated the 5200 poorly it's not a fondly remembered game system it's easy to make fun of it because of the terrible controller because of the fact it was a commercial failure but in 1982 the thing was cool i love the atari 5200 and i stand by it i will always love that system i mean games like pengo super breakout arcade almost arcade perfect version of pac-man pangos actually probably the most miserable game to play with one of these well there you go pengo don't get the 5200 okay great burger time was released in 1982 by data east for the arcades you play as peter pepper the chef and you walk around on food that people are going to eat the game's horrifying now i've always been a germ freak and i know what goes on in some kitchens and this game did not help my paranoia one bit yeah are you cooking for like giants in the game that's never really explained are you a hobbit chef are you like a little person and giant people are eating the burgers it's it's a really trippy game just don't think about it it also used the the deco tape system uh which data is made to help streamline how some of their arcade releases were mr was it mr pickle mr egg and mr wiener actually used a physical tape and you know make another tape for a totally different game this way you could use the same cabinet for various different games so pretty much the entire point to do is to get all those little creatures in your buns it's an early jama kind of scenario but unfortunately the tape decks really sucked and they would crap out a lot and became unreliable so if you dropped him slapped your meat on mr weiner you could kill him the thing with burger time is i think most people who approach it play it similar to pac-man and they try to avoid the enemies whereas in uh burger time you really want them to line up behind you it's like salt right and you throw salt at people man that game it's really frustrating game it's a fun game really tough and yeah it was kind of kind of original at the time one foot burger please [Music] got leave was a big pinball machine company they decided hey we want to get into this video game craze so they didn't have a lot of games that were well known their biggest hit though a smash hit though was hubert cuber wasn't the original name for this game it was originally snot and boogers how awesome is that man i would have lost my if that was the final name but i guess you know it was a little like juvenile which of course i was a little kid so it would work to me then but now be like yeah so qbert works it's like an isometric a pyramid kind of game where you move up and down trying to turn over each of the different cubes that you land on until you complete the whole puzzle you only had a couple enemies to deal with but they were kind of bouncing around and following you so it always always interesting and there's a couple like discs on either side you can kind of use as a one-time thing to get you back up to the top sometimes get out of a hairy situation sometimes you reset yourself to get going down the other side what what are you in cuba you're some orange muppet looking thing with a big nose you speak in gibberish and you have a four-way directional joystick but on a diagonal and that's how you do you move along on this cube pyramid because the the board was like a pyramid they actually mounted the joystick in a diagonal fashion so you would actually move in diagonals like a cross right instead of you know up down left right which was pretty innovative i don't know how much the arcade controls differ from the atari controls but on atari um it's like ah geez i don't want to say it wrong but if you hit if you hit like down it kind of you kind of you can fall off the side very easily and either you're you're naturally kind of good with the cube or controls or you suck at it i happen to be really really good at it but most people i've ever played that game with hate it they just think the controls are garbage one of the interesting things about kubert is it was one of the more licensed arcade games of the 80s there was toys there was a cartoon there was a board game it had its own incredibly weird and wacky pinball machine later on but it really was gottlieb's only known arcade hit sure best part about qbert of course is the iconic moment when you lose a life and the speech bubble shows up above him with kind of like different symbols to you know obviously they're getting out that he's swearing it kind of had this digitized mumbly jumbled voice that cubert had when he basically swore yeah well originally the plan was to actually have there to be a noise uh like an actual word that that cubert would say but the limitations of the chip prevented it so the programmer just started putting random numbers in and that's how we got hubert's swearing actually my uncle sean is on the twin galaxy's record board in the top five or ten for for qbert and that makes us proud as a family arcade if you're around in 82 83 especially pole position was huge it's a formula one racing game it was actually one of the first driving games that i played that that actually had a steering wheel there were two different types of machines you had a upright and you had a sit-down cabinet the sit-down had a brake and an accelerator i believe the upright only had an accelerator on it it was such an immersive experience because they had those environmental versions of the games where you sat inside and you had high and low gear your greasy fingers slipping from all the pizza doing everything you can to hold on to that steering wheel as you're going around those turns it's really strange playing a driving game with a pedal while you're standing up it feels unnatural pole position was one of the first games to have product placement in the games canon pepsi marlboro was so popular was one of the handful of arcade games that had a cartoon its own standalone cartoon where was like some sort of weird adventure team with kids obviously because it was the 80s so all of your spies were children i guess it's hard to make a cartoon out of you being a single f1 racer going around the same track over and over again so one of the cool things or uncool things about pole position is when you ran into anything your car would explode like a ford pinto horrible flames death cruising usa was the pole position of the 90s no it wasn't january 1982 the commodore 64 was introduced the commodore 64 was once twice three times later the commodore 64 best-selling personal computer of all time the reason it's called commodore 64 is because it had 64 kilobytes of ram one of the most famous sound chips in in retro gaming the games had great sound because the sid chip inside of the commodore 64 that was used for sound could do really incredible things for the time commodore 64. more like the commie door 64. commies played that one it was my first computer system i ever had and i never bought more than three games for the system because my uncle had two disk drives and would copy pretty much every single game for me i know that my dad used to network with a lot of people he used to go to uh meetings that were specifically like they were like commodore meetings where you get together with a bunch of people and they trade software trade video games and stuff so we just had discs crammed with games it was more of a gaming machine than it was a home computing machine maybe 50 50 but there was a lot of game programming out there it retailed for 595 which was a lot of money back then but considering the competitors apple ii for example retail for 1200 it was significantly less than competitors the reason being because you had to pretty much purchase everything separately was it something that you saw regularly in an american household no so if you wanted a floppy drive you wanted a printer if you wanted other devices a cassette player for this you have to buy everything separately it was limited it wasn't like you can get a um an ibm compatible which can do a lot more than a commodore uh not for games for home computing for spreadsheets and word processing which are still infancy but also the apple ii you can do all this nice stuff the commodore it was it was more inexpensive but you can do a lot less on it partially because of that one of the reasons why it was so freaking successful was it had just tons and tons of software for it like there were over 10 000 titles in europe consoles weren't that huge in the 80s you had stuff like the bbc micro the sinclair zx spectrum and you had the conversation before those were your main gaming machines in europe so in europe huge games coming out left and right in the us not a lot of games that were only on the conversation before you have some ports coming on dig dug i got my first experience with dig dug on the commodore 64. it was supported up until 1994 making the longest supported computer of all time congo bongo burger time she's a brick house sorry commodore's jokes school days oh man i love school days well you have stuff like the lemonade game which i played in school that was fun a couple of things of sugar and lemonade mix and hopefully doesn't rain does anybody else out there play school days it's a heavy ass key where you can kill someone you could with a commodore 64. it's all built in right in that freaking keyboard i mean it's just an iconic startup screen you know with that 64k ram that's why it's commodore 64. and then the ready prompt you know it's a lot more inviting far more welcoming than that that cold harsh microsoft uh das sea prompt ready ready to adventure or something okay greg williams joust freaking ostriches john newcomber went out to make a flying game and he didn't want to use spaceships because those were cliche even at that time so he had knights writing ostriches and i actually liked that game and played it more i'd say than any other video game ever so you flap your little ostrich wings and you got to hit the other ostrich knights just a slightly higher level at least and then you hit them off and you collect these sort of like epic eggs for bonus points do you ever wonder where super mario bros 2 got the idea for riding on ostriches no now i feel ostracized that's the entire game one screen ostrich is flying on by it's bizarre it's some sort of like really weird you know like heavy metal animated world or something going on i'm gonna go stick my head in the sand honestly the best part about joust other than the whole ridiculous nature of it is how satisfying it is to just splurt on top of the enemies and turn them into eggs i don't even know if that's a word but that's what it feels like and it feels good and now the other arcade games of 1982. hey guys i'm pixel dan and these are the other arcade games of 1982. nibbler this pacman and snake mashup is the first video game where you can reach 1 billion points pengo the overhead ice maze game where you control a cute little red penguin who crushes the snow bees yeah satan's hollow the shoot-em-up game where you destroy gargoyles in order to build a bridge that leads directly to satan why would you do that star trek the vector game that boldly goes where no man has gone before i just can't do it captain so there you go guys there are the other arcade games of 1982 so grab yourself a fistful of quarters and meet me in the arcade and now it should have been a video game in 1982. oh hello i'm eric and here's the stuff from 1982 that should have been made into a video game from the movie gandhi a game similar to beatum and edom where you played as gandhi during a hunger strike and you had to actually dodge food that was being thrown at you by government officials i guess that would make it beat them and don't eat them which would make more sense this year in music ozzy osbourne bit the head off of a live bat during a show an event so infamous that it should have had its own video game they could have called it batman no they couldn't in television this year the sitcom cheers premieres on nbc and the atari 2600 you might think it'd be the precursor to bali midway's tapper but it's actually a game where you just order drinks and watch your characters waste their lives and their livers away in a bar where everybody knows their name ba pede 1982 all right done 1982 was the year where atari's hubris really started to show through atari decides to announce that they are bringing pac-man to the home market huge news pac-man for the atari 2600 was exactly like pac-man for the arcade but not good it barely resembles the arcade it sounds nothing like the arcade everything flickers all over the place there isn't the right number of ghosts the maze looks wrong you're eating wafers not pellets you only face in one direction they they put on a four kilobyte cartridge i mean eight kilobyte cartridges have just recently come out before kilobytes hey that saves money just you know do what you can and try to squeeze as much as you can into that all the ghosts were the same color in this game how dull is that you know that's awful you play pac-man in the atari 2600 and you see a flicker with the ghosts you couldn't have broken up those lines to make them look like the the pellets of pac-man eats now they're the four ghosts and you're getting epilepsy but it's okay because you're playing pac-man at home they kicked everyone they kicked everyone to love pac-man right in the narg tari actually ended up with five million extra copies oh really five million that they couldn't sell because they half asked the port well you know what i have three of them they think it's gonna be so popular that everybody with an atari 2600 will buy one and millions more people will buy atari 2600 consoles just to get pac-man so we had better make more copies of pac-man then there were atari 2600 game consoles in existence at the time the game sold well but not well enough and many consumers returned their copies to atari it was pac-man that really started the crash of 83. so then we get to e.t do we really need to actually talk about this game a lot of people are aware that e.t has some issues and problems and part of the part of the problem with that was that i really wanted to do a breakthrough game once again the funny thing is et is actually not that bad a game no one had ever done a game in less than five months five or six months and i had five weeks let's just get this out there not the worst video game of all time not by a long shot is it obtuse yes yes it is and even though i only had five weeks i still wanted to do a real contribution i wanted to do a step up into a 3d world where it's a cube you actually run around on that you keep in your head and here we go and maybe that was too much you know maybe i was overly aggressive if you actually learn to play et by its own rules it's not awful but it was not something that anyone was happy with when they got it as as a kid it became the game that destroyed the video game industry so there's a part of me that really is excited about the idea that i was able to single-handedly topple a multi-billion dollar industry they're falling into holes you're trying to collect these things everywhere there's some weird random thing chasing you the sales of the game were horrible people were returning this game they were crying there's stories of kids honestly crying that when i got this game that's how bad this game was it was to them unplayable i think back then you really needed to read the instruction manual and maybe a lot of people didn't uh didn't want to they thought everything would be like space invaders you just shoot everything you try to get a high score et was a game where you actually had to beat it i was presenting the 2600 design and there was a guy from coin up presented presenting a coin out design because there was going to be a coin op et also and we met with spielberg and presented our designs and once i laid this whole design out for him and stuff and he looked at me and he said uh gee howard you know couldn't you do something like pac-man i had this impulse to say well gee stephen couldn't you do something like the day the earth stood still but i didn't say that and i have to say that in retrospect when i look back at that maybe it wouldn't have been such a bad idea to try and knock off pac-man in some way but i couldn't do it i mean that's just not who i was they did print way way way way too many et cartridges similar to pac-man and they eventually just kind of had to eat that loss one of the most famous legends in the history gaming which is apparently true is that some obscene amount of e.t cartridges like two million cartridges or something were buried out in the desert in alamogordo new mexico it's another conspiracy now this is a time where atari was taking a nosedive okay financially they were falling apart and it's expensive to take stuff and ship it out into the middle of the desert and crush it and bury it that's a lot of money so it was always my contention there were two reasons why i felt that probably was not true one is it doesn't make sense for a company that's financially failing to spend all the additional money it would take to go and physically destroy all of these carts when they could cannibalize them and reuse some of the resources in new carts and what are you trying to hide them from so many gamers have dreamed of digging up some of the et games and you know there's stories about they were like steamrolled and they were covered in cement and i've heard all kinds of different things i've heard some people say that there's like a parking lot on top of it or it's underneath a kmart or something it just doesn't make any sense that's one reason the other reason was i was kind of connected at the atari grapevine by and large and i really believe if this would have been happening i would have heard about it back then at some point and if i had what i would have done was i would have hired like a photographer and flown us out and gone and stood on top of this mound of games and got my picture taken because what a great thing that would be et was probably the first time where the consumer had a mass revolt against a game sure and they brought down atari partially because of that arcade jungle king is a lovely lovely arcade game the original version was more tarzan-esque your character is basically tarzan it is tarzan basically the main character tarzan or jungle king looked exactly like tarzan he wore a loincloth and he did the tarzan yell and it was like so this got the attention of the estate of edgar rice burroughs who wrote tarzan series in the first place they became a little lawsuity so they had to change that for the systems and became jungle hunt they took out the tarzan yellow completely and they changed the loincloth guy to what looks like the bad guy from jumanji with the little pith helmet and such each stage varied in type of gameplay you swing from the vine then you're underwater fighting off crocs then you're jumping over boulders and then you're trying to avoid some ethnic stereotypes trying to cook your girlfriend alive in a pot when you think adventure you think guy in a pith helmet swinging on not vines through the jungle that's a jungle hunt it's not the smoothest playing game but yeah for the time it was good he becomes a prisoner in a world of his own making the world of tron [Music] disney released tron in 1982 it had an unbelievable amount of computer graphics to make the film it was visually stunning at the time the movie tron has these special effects that still blow my mind the first sort of like video game movie and the first movie with a huge amount of special effects and cg graphics almost every frame once they're in the computer world oh man they did all these like light effects and i'm not sure how they even did it some ugly ass movie dude don't pretend like you don't like tron everybody likes tron the inspiration for the movie pong luckily they didn't take it too literally i can't imagine a movie based solely on pong the visuals in it are just so different [Music] no johnny no and the movie looks like a video game so what is tron known for the cgfx the cool like tanks that are cg rendered the light cycle sequence is amazing the the graphics were supposedly really really amazing for the time which is incredible considering the computer they used to create these animations only had two megabytes of abraham now it is visually appalling don't hate but in the story uh jeff bridges who rules he is a video game developer not getting credit for any of his games sounds familiar he's getting run out of his company and so he gets sucked into the video game and what ensues is a overrated meandering plot for the next two hours you shut up i remember that one scene where like kurt russell and somebody else was uh they were in like the ship and then one of them was dying and then he had to drink the water or whatever and it was like sparkly as but it was like masked so like all the textures were moving not in the same tron nowadays at least to me it looks more like uh when you go to midnight bowling and they have the ultraviolet lights and it makes your your white shirts glow and it's like oh i'm bowling and it's crazy i can't watch tron but the arcade game i love the tron arcade game the game was unique in that it had a selectable path so basically i could choose any order in which i wanted to suck my favorite thing about the the tron arcade cabinet is it's just like the movie it's just got this really striking visual look to it the black light all in the cabinet great and it's just got that really unique joystick right there on the console that's like glowing blue it's got these bright blue lights in it you had um tanks just like combat you know like where you shoot the tanks combat combat so the two weird mini games is the grid bugs and the weird rainbow snow cone you gotta destroy in the game what the hell is going on here at the end of the movie it's terrible no it's not i don't like that but the light cycle part's fantastic and the button on the bugs are fine i guess yourself along with the movie there were three tron games for the intellivision they were tron deadly discs tron mesotron and tron solar sailor i like to call them the tron in television trilogy or tit for short and i just look at it you know what i laid the groundwork for the journey game the next year that's why i love the tron video game i'm gonna hit you so hard in 1982 evil microsoft not so evil yet released their first version of flight simulator the joy of flying around through beautiful pastel creatures at the time there was not this thing as a flight simulator pretending to actually fly usually you're just pretending to shoot aliens and rescue little guys daniel in the air falling to their death some nice magenta maybe some lime green and you had all sorts of neat little dials and you start out on this uh this this runway and you hit a button and it goes you weren't just shooting aliens or you're trying to do something for real simulate flying this is not a game that any three-year-old should start his video gaming journey out on a flight simulator we're going to be blown up jets or something like that no it's it's about as dry in vanilla of an actual flight simulator as you get you're flying commercial plane [Music] and then all of a sudden there's like crack on your windshield and you can't move anymore which is the nice way of saying uh you did by microsoft it's like the show wings [Music] arcade break popeye by nintendo one of my favorite classic arcade games the interesting thing about popeye is that when nintendo created donkey kong they were originally out to get a license for popeye they suddenly were like oh no we don't want you to be using popeye so shigeru miyamoto had to be like okay we'll come up with something off you know top of my head and it'll be random and there you go donkey kong stupid monkey so it's interesting a year later they acquired the rights to popeye and came out with a completely unique game that looked actually really good i remember the first time i played popeye i was incredibly annoyed because i was wondering why i couldn't punch brutus olive oil is throwing things for popeye to catch beat hearts or let her spelling help you punch this spinach can but then once you are energized you don't use the punch button to hit brutus you just run into them which i always thought was really weird that was kind of like kind of like what do you want to punch them yeah there's this renaissance of popeye in the early 80s and all i started with the popeye spinach it's the only time i like the character actually is that game well blow me down [Music] next level so in 1982 we still have companies just these random companies putting out systems and testing the waters we have connecticut leather company coleco putting out the colecovision which is actually a really wonderful system the pack in game was nintendo's donkey kong which was huge for kaliko to get that game because that game was so popular at the time and it's just that game because of that game this console sold very well the main thing that coleco did which was what a lot of the third-party games did was they just opened up the checkbook and started buying um buying licenses so they had donkey kong and uh and the mouse trap and they had a lot of arcade machines of course atari had a lot of those sewing up already because a lot of them were atari games now at the time you could play donkey kong on the intellivision which can barely make out the gorilla on it or you can play it on the 2600 maybe and it's maybe slightly better looking like a gorilla but it's still not the colicovision port of nintendo's groundbreaking title it looks like the arcade game it's close it's not exact but it's damn close and compared to the other versions it's so much a step above the first level unfortunately is backwards the the way the uh the building is made it's just reversed um like twilight princess for the wii yeah unlike other systems at the time like the 5200 there was a lot of good standalone games that were only on the colecovision you had games like mousetrap that were really good ports from the arcade version the zaxxon port was probably the best one saxon was a great arcade game that came out in 82 and almost everyone who had a collective vision had to get zackson he had the smurf game i love that smurf game so it's great and it's another it's an early early platformer so it's not the first of its kind but it is kind of at the time it was still very unique to play a game of this variety they came out with a uh 2600 converter that you would pop in right into the system and play 2600 games yeah the expansion module right calico vision said you know what we understand you already have atari games probably how about you buy our expansion module so on the clickavision you can play your 2600 game library on our system atari sued them lost because collegial vision wasn't stealing any atari technology no they were just getting stuff that was already existing and putting this this thing together you can play atari 2600 cartridges on colecovision but you can't play colecovision on atari and they also had a steering wheel that was the packing with a turbo another arcade head and they also had the action joystick yeah the yeah it was like a trigger super action joystick yeah yeah and it had like twirl to it on the actual stick i've never seen a controller like that since it's pretty yeah it's pretty innovative for the time love the clickavision it's my favorite pre-nintendo system by far and yeah colecovision it did extremely well in sales until the video game crash and that's a shame because yeah clickavision good coleco way to come back from your handhelds and blips and tabletops click a vision buy it today and now the gaming innovation of 1982 oh hello in 1982 what new innovation graced the world and changed the face of gaming for the d-pad designed by gunpei yokoi for the donkey kong game and watch there have been many ways to control up down left and right and video games before either with discrete buttons or joysticks but this was the first time that all four functions were available in one control easily identifiable by touch this is an innovation that we use to this day in all sorts of video game consoles and we owe mr yokoi a great debt of gratitude that does it for the video game innovation of 1982 and don't forget it's not just nostalgia it's science [Music] [Applause] nailed it and now the popular pinball games of 1982. ian here with the popular pinball games of 1982. haunted house by gottlieb three playfields tons of rules and lightning in the back box make this one of gottlieb's most memorable vector by bally a futuristic sports team and a really cool playfield tried to get eyes off of monitors and back on the silver ball mr mrs pac-man by bailly a really popular theme and a mini maze in the center of the playfield made this one a real attention-getter and those are the popular pinball games of 1982 because there's more to life than video games arcade break in 82 donkey kong jr was a pretty big hit but it was actually eclipsed by another game donkey kong even though the first donkey kong came out in 81 it was 82 was when it became a really really big hit nintendo thought it'd be a great idea to release donkey kong jr in 1982 it was an awesome breakfast cereal there's a donkey kong a donkey kong junior and a donkey kong 3. but no donkey kong 2. well donkey kong jr was a really fun game because it took the idea donkey kong and just changed around now um mario is the bad guy right that's kind of weird isn't it well donkey kong jr was kind of like a kind of a different game than the original donkey kong you played as obviously donkey kong son donkey kong jr and your goal was to save your father in the game and you went through various obstacles kind of like mario did that's where the similarities are where it was an obstacle course but you were like climbing up vines you know climbing up chains you weren't climbing ladders too much it's pretty crazy to think that our hero plumber's second outing was as the villain in donkey kong jr sure you could blame mario for mistreating donkey kong in the first game but he went full on bad guy this time now mario's the bad guy and he captured big daddy donkey kong and he's like i'm whipping i'm whipping and i'm throwing out these clap traps and they're going to get you they're going to get your little donkey kong jr luckily he stopped abusing animals after this game unless you count the yoshis and the 3d rabbits and the animal enemies and the animal suits actually someone should call peta now where'd this kid come from you mean the whole time instead of watching over your baby you out kidnapping ladies like why you kidnapping ladies junior should have been like off pops you're in a cage well that's what you get for kidnapping ladies instead of raising me the thing that was also cool about it was that you get to slide around on the vines and just the mechanics of that and we we're gamers right and so game play is king and being able to have this new mechanic that was also super sweet and the ability to kind of climb up strategically and then to drop down and slide but then catch yourself it was just a really fun cool mechanic really enjoyed it so here's another crazy thing we would not see donkey kong jr until 1992's super mario kart the super nintendo we wouldn't see him again because in donkey kong country you were not playing as donkey kong he playing as donkey kong jr all grown up and it is in fact cranky kong that is the donkey kong that kidnapped daisy all those years ago in the intro screen donkey kong is captured by mario and is put in a cage and he's pushed off he's pushed off the screen by two marios i'm trying to wonder if this is the genesis of luigi i like to think that at the end of donkey kong jr they had a nice long chat and mario was like hey he kidnapped my girl instead of raising you and they realized on top of being a kidnapping monkey he's also a shitty father so maybe mario and donkey kong were able to bury the hatchet settle their differences and that's why they're friends knowledge bomb this is an ordinary tv video game this is vectrex the only video game system with its own video screen take it anywhere this is the vectrex which was released in 1982 and while it was a commercial failure like the atari 5200 everybody loves the vectrex i love the vectrex why don't i have this i mean it is just of all of the early 80s you know video game tech you know that's out there i think this is by far the most interesting it was an all-in-one vector monitor video game system combo vector quality graphics it was vector graphics vector graphics clean crisp more detail than anything else you could do at the time vector graphics is just something you can't get on your home tv that's all raster that's an electron gun you know sweeping back and forth and and making the the pictures and pretty and blah blah blah vector graphics are like bajam in your face here's the joystick of the deck tracks four buttons most games only used a couple joystick was okay another thing i like about the vectrex is that it has a handle built into the back and it's technically a portable game console as long as you have some ac power nearby you can take the vectrex and play it wherever because it's got its own screen what was really cool they did stuff like they had the light pen you could go to the on the screen and draw you put it up to the screen and it actually attracts the right it attracts the phosphorus yeah they're something they had melody master they had adam action hold up you could animate at the time hell it was only vector graphics it's only one color blazing white but it was cool there's also really good games on the vectrex for starters we've got we've got a built-in game mindstorm so mindstorm is this okay it's an asteroid's knockoff but that's okay because asteroids is awesome light and rip off of asteroids except you had in the middle this little little thing you didn't want to hit they had a couple rip-offs like clean sweep which was like a pac-man clone um but you know majority was where original games made for this system they had a couple of arcade ports only they had scramble and uh pole position the system also had some pretty impressive sound capabilities like in a game spike they used a lot of digital voice in that game and it sounded really good armor attack armor attack was sort of a clone of combat but it was fun and there's even a vibrant homebrew community producing new vectrex games like vectrexians if you have a vectrex or you're lucky enough to pick one up you can buy the the multi-game cartridge now and you can get them all on one if you're willing to pay like 150 bucks all the games in the vectrex library came with an overlay that you put on top of the monitor because you didn't have any color graphics on the system so you had these overlays which were plastic and they gave you the backgrounds on the game you put them on it's like oh it's green and and blue a little bit of blue okay i'm i'm buying this theater of the mind this is this is awesome i need a vectrex pat probably has like 10 of them in his basement i'm going to beat him up okay great the story of dig dug goes like this uh you're just this guy who is digging underground um similar a little bit to mr mr do that you're under underground you know digging tunnels except in this game the objectives just kill all your enemies you beat the level by blowing bad guys up by blowing it back you beat the level by just move on you're like digging underground you inflate enemies and you can make them burst and a little too violent for my tastes or you can just drop rocks on them whatever way you feel is best to just kill these monsters while they're just hanging out in their natural habitat one of the most charming things about dig dug is that when you walk it plays background music and when you stop the music stops i like to make my own little remixes by starting and stopping and it's like dj dig dug or dig duggy fresh they all must die did you know he has a name does he have a name i'm sure you're going to tell us mr namco it's taizo hori wow more people will care about that she had a wife but they're separated and i'm sure he had a son there's a legacy the mystery driller games is the sun susumu that's mr driller oh this is so creepy i'm gonna stop all right the pac-man animated series by namco was not produced by namco believe it was hannah barbera we remember talking about how successful pac-man was right i mean it got merchandising it got its own theme song hit 80s pop song right after in the arcades after we got baby pac-man we got the pac-man cartoon this marks the first time that a video game was so successful that it jumped to saturday morning cartoons it went for two seasons why not a fan of it gonna be honest they went from cute cuddly pac-man to a ralph crammed in look-alike the whole thing kind of centers around pac-man and his whole family so we've got miss pac-man and the baby and they got a dog and a cat and everybody's kind of got like that round look to him they had five ghosts and there was a boss that was named mesmeron who would get the ghosts actually they were called ghost monsters to go get power pellets for did i mention that this was the first cartoon based on a video game peter colen voiced sourpuss optimus prime was pac-man's cat you look at a hanna-barbera cartoon you can tell it's on made on the cheap uh you got the the backgrounds that are reused over and over you know you have the really quickly drawn you know animation on the front of those backgrounds and they're like it was a precursor to like pac land i guess the pac-man series was actually so successful initially that abc's rival cbs was prompted to make their own saturday morning cartoon based on video games which gave us one year later the saturday super cage never liked the pac-man cartoon i'm sorry give me pole position so in 1982 dan gorelin created choplifter for the apple ii computers and it was it would turn out to be one of my favorite games from that era shoplifter is interesting it's it's a slower paced defender you're in a helicopter you take off and you're rescuing uh hostages you know from the bungling empire and then you fly back you know maybe 100 200 feet to where they're safe at their base and the enemy of course can't attack that base because it's 200 feet away you pedal them back and forth and then you just go wash rinse and repeat the process you got some enemies that you got to avoid and you're picking up things and it's kind of like stargate um except not insane if your chopper gets shot down everyone on board dies and yeah that's what really yeah yeah it's a very realistic game and it was extremely popular got it started in the apple too it was ported over everywhere and it's one of the only computer games like i know of that started as a computer game and then was made in arcade game later after the fact sega did a port of it and the little hostages will be like screaming help me help me or thank you when you picked them up there's chop lifter on the second master system which is my favorite version of chop lifter i mean the difficulty is fair it's redone by sega which makes it better just because it was redone by sega if you grew up at any time in the 80s i'd be very surprised if you didn't play this game on something so it's an important game roo eat it and now the forgotten video games of 1982 pat here with the forgotten video games of 1982 baby pac-man the clunky pac-man pinball slash video game disco number one data eats groovy kicks like dancing game bubbles by williams the game where you're a soap bubble cleaning out a sink jack the giant killer by cinematronix the fairy tale multi-screen adventure and communist mutants from space for the 2600 yeah it's space invaders but the cold war twist and those were the forgotten video games of 1982 just because you don't remember them doesn't mean they weren't fun and now the freaking awesome computer games of 1982. greetings and welcome to clint's freaking awesome computer games of 1982 because if they weren't awesome i wouldn't give a crap first up is deadline an infocom text adventure that was not only their first mystery game but also the first to come with feelies it also had the hobbit of course based on jrr tolkien's classic novel in which you play the hobbit doing hobbit things there's also fort apocalypse a four-way arcade scrolling shooter that's not choplifter we also had gangbusters for the commodore 64 game taking place right after the prohibition era where you try to become the godfather of the mob without getting killed by the mob and finally we have paratrooper a game where you play a phallic object trying to shoot down paratroopers before they come down and kill you to death and that's all of my freaking awesome computer games of 1982 and of course there's always plenty to choose from every year but it's nice to know where to start okay cinestar was a really cool open space shooter where you had a any direction you could fly you had enemy ships you had boulders you could knock into you had radar but it's known for the boss of each stage the sinistar and holy hell was that thing scary oh my god sinistar that game scared the out of me i would have can i say on your program sinistar was actually one of those games that always impressed me i sucked at it and it was because that floating head thing when you start the game he's being built so unless you know how the game is you just like playing this game shooting dudes flying around you think this is asteroids and then just this terrifying voice comes on and i don't know what it was but the audio level on cinestar was so loud that across the arcade all you could hear was sinistar yelling beware i live run coward and then this giant pizza comes down run run run i'm running now you have this sinistar freak of nature satan reincarnated i remember going to an arcade in this well to an arcade machine in this pizza place and just seeing that floating head and the voices that's all i remember that game it was so cool it's so cool dude it was like a horror game that thing would come after you chase you and eat you didn't shoot at you it would just eat you oh god the game is terrifying outside of that's not very good i never i never got it but uh it's a weird game when you kill the sinistar it's basically the boss at every freaking level it would just say beware i live and haunt your dreams forever afterwards very creepy sinistar was an important game because it went on to influence a pastry shop called cinnabon [Music] 1982 introduced the very first dedicated video game magazine nerds rejoice in the late 70s early 80s um arnie katz and bill kunkel started doing a column car called arcade alley and it was in a magazine called video basically this was like the first you know regularly published column covering video games video games were becoming a real medium for which to have a critical eye they started electronic games magazine the first monthly magazine devoted to the subject of video games it paved the way for everything leading up to you know the the height of gaming magazines to the fall of gaming magazines to internet journalism today these are guys who had to invent the concept of the preview the review you know scoring video games that magazine continued until 94 but survived the crash the word easter egg they had to come up with that sort of thing in it to invent a lexicon with which to discuss video games in a way that was relevant to the gamers of the time the thing that created all of my sadness 20 years later when everything fell apart and there was no more game magazines no sad electronic games magazine the birth of that hugely important and and very very influential you know lasting effects even today okay great mr do is pretty cool mr doe is an awesome game by universal it's uh got some similarities to dig dug um which was released the same year in that it's kind of a maze game but you know if you don't like the paths that they give you you can just go ahead and make your own mr do what was he doing he was pooing mr do that's what it was about the goal of the game is not just to clear the levels but the high score is really to devise very quickly the best route to the level and take it right that's what i think i don't know what makes mr doe fun is the clown can actually throw a ball and the ball will bounce along the paths that you've created which means that you can create little strategies for attacking enemies so you're digging tunnels and picking up food and trying to crush enemies and get the high score and progress through the levels and that pretty much sums up dig dug i'm supposed to be talking about mr dew oh that pretty much sums up mr dew [Music] so in 1982 we get the entex adventure vision and it's really a really cool little system what made the adventure vision so unique it's a very large tabletop gaming console that wasn't portable per se because you really couldn't really take it portable anywhere it had to plug into a wall it was based upon the intex flip the game technology from the year before there was only four games for it came uh packed in with defender which was a port of the arcade game and it plays well it had 40 led red lights where the with a mirror spinning around which would cause kind of a red effect but if you see it in person it's amazing to see how smooth it really is it looks like you have an enormous led display when in reality you're working with just a little bit and which is kind of cool years later in 1995 nintendo released the virtual boy which used very similar technology to the avenger vision oh man are we talking now the emerson arcadia 2001 the radio company emerson we're putting out our own video game system this system was obsolete by the time it came out it had 512 bytes of ram which is really small it looks like a miniature in television to be honest with you gaudy colors mostly one screen games the emerson arcadia had emerson was playing on releasing a lot of arcade ports to the system including pac-man and defender and galaga atari was suing companies doing this they had a few clones they had a breakaway which was a breakout clone they had a berserk clone they had a defender clone and they couldn't get third party support so because of that the arcade 2001 didn't do very well at all emerson stick to radios please this isn't working out arcade break dammit robotron 2084. i love the game doesn't get nearly enough credit you know what's fantastic about robotron 2084 everything robotron was a was the brainchild of a at the time fairly young developer called eugene jarvis the game was partially based on george orwell's 1984 but in 1982 they figured things aren't going to progress that much in two years so they bumped it up 100 years to 2084. so in this game you're in a single room and wow the the robots have turned on humans what a surprise what a shock you have two joysticks one joystick changes which direction you're firing and then the other one actually moves yourself around so it's a really unique control system for that time start of the board and you're surrounded by enemies and your object was just to clear the board there's so many enemies on the screen at once in this game that it's so frenzied and action-packed that the action literally never lets up it's very challenging it's hard eugene jarvis went on to make a number of arcade games and probably my favorite of his was uh the cruise in series so again road trunk 2084. it's a great game didn't have that much of a legacy but back then and now it's still a great arcade game just last night i was lost in the jungle with pitbull harry surrounded by giant scorpions and man-eating crocodiles pitfalls designed by david crane for activision well i was working at atari in the 1970s in fact i started there in 1977 and it was a fun place to work we were working with nolan bushnell you had the gang of four uh programmers uh from atari who wanted you know just a little bit of respect they wanted some royalties they wanted their names on the boxes of these video games that they're designing before uh lead designers at atari at the time demonstrated to the president of atari ray kasar that our games in the previous year had made him 60 million dollars in sales while we were all making 20 000 a year salaries he looked us in the eye and told us that we were no more important to the success of those products than the people on the assembly line who put them together they didn't give their programmers any credit so he's like why should i put up with this i'm just going to go do my own game it didn't take us too long to say you know farewell to atari and we founded activision in 1979 on the premise that a video game is a creative work like that of an author and that we would give credit to the video game designer so they took him to court uh from 1980 1982 several lawsuits none of them worked out very well for atari in the end activision free and clear becomes the first third party video game publisher uh becomes really successful at it and so now they're making games for atari and atari goes you can't do that and the court said yes they can if they if you follow these rules you can do it the gang of four leaves forms activision start pumping out some really great games and 1982 is when pitfall comes out pitfall was a game that came about largely because i wanted to see a human figure as the main figure in a game it's one of those few atari games at the time where it's not single screen it's not a stupid space shooter like a thousand others and you're traveling on an adventure but it's pitfall took a sheet of paper drove drew a little stick figure and said there's my little running man now what's he doing well he's running he has to be running on something so i drew two lines that made a path the path has to be somewhere so i drew the trees and all of a sudden it became a jungle in it you are simply a pitfall harry and you swing on vines jump on alligators heads and trevor's underground caverns dodging scorpions while you try to find a bunch of different treasures when you'd swing on ropes and pitfall it'd make a synthesized tarzan yell like it did in jungle king but i'll bet you they didn't get sued like taito did [Music] and along the way it was pretty clear this was going to be something this was i could put this world in the jungle i could put this character in a city i could you know as long as he's run jumping and climbing on a side view screen it could go anywhere in the world and turned out to be a pretty popular genre i think there were a thousand platform games made after pitfall that opens the floodgates for uh you know third parties on consoles so hey activision you guys are pretty darn good [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Pat the NES Punk

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Length: 60min 54sec (3654 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 27 2021