Brian Picchi, whose excellent software and hardware videos have graced YouTube, has recently taken a more hands-on approach to the Apple II gaming scene. In addition to commenting on other people's games, he's begun creating his own. The first two entries into his growing portfolio are both Applesoft BASIC games: Applesoft Action and Dogfighters of Mars.
Both titles are action games, which can be significantly harder to program than other genres. Whereas turn-based puzzle and strategy games can take their time accepting input and displaying the result, an action game is a far more immediate experience, as gameplay progresses with or without player interaction. Although I'm proud of my one Apple II game — an Applesoft adaptation of the text-based BBS door game Spaceship of Death — and I did successfully create a few action games for my graphing calculator, I doubt either experience gave me the knowledge, skills, or confidence to create anything like what Picchi has. Well done, sir!
In July 2010, Jason Scott interviewed Christine Love, creator of Digital: A Love Story. This game, available for Mac, Windows, and Linux, emulates meeting people via a dial-up BBS, an experience that predates Love; she used Scott's textfiles.com as a reference by which she recreated this digital environment. I'm sure Scott was honored that his work proved the foundation for a game.
Now he's gotten even closer to that medium by being the direct inspiration for The Jason Scott Adventure. Dezro created this game for Pirate Kart V: The 2012-in-One Glorious Developers Conference, a game-making competition funded by Kickstarter and occurring in conjunction with next month's Game Developers Conference, of which Jason Scott is the digital historian. Pirate Kart V ran February 25–27 and included this… interesting production. With 256-color graphics and two modes of gameplay, The Jason Scott Adventure takes only a few minutes to play and has low replay value — yet it's a bizarrely awesome experience that succinctly encapsulates what it means to be Jason Scott as he fights the evil Yahoo!
To run The Jason Scott Adventure on my Mac, I opened Terminal, navigated to the game's folder, and typed ./JasonScottAdventure.sh
Be forewarned: this game includes photos of many cute kittens but also less welcome images. The resolution is such that you're unlikely to be scarred, but try not to look too closely.
Back in September, I called Martin Haye on Juiced.GS business. In this day of Twitter, Facebook, IM, and IRC, it's unusual for me to make a phone call to an Apple II user, and I'm always cognizant of the likelihood for intrusion when I do. In this case, I knew Martin was soon leaving on a camping trip, and I didn't want to interrupt his packing. Nope! He was playing Wasteland, Interplay's post-apocalyptic spiritual precursor to Fallout. "Oh," I said, "so this is a bad time to be calling." "Well, it's not like it's the kind of game that demands uninterrupted attention," he laughed.
Here's something that does deserve your attention, Martin: having recently developed Choplifter HD, original Wasteland co-designer Brian Fargo of inXile Entertainment is looking to reboot the franchise with a new, Kickstarter-funded game. The possible Wasteland 2 would be faithful to its origins by "focusing on top-down, probably isometric, party based, skill based — where if you'd just finished playing Wasteland and moved onto this you'd feel comfortable." But it'll stray from its roots by being for PC only, though an iOS edition would be considered.
All this for the cool price of one million dollars — that's how much Fargo estimates it'll take to fund the project. That's ambitious but, as of last week, not unprecedented. Still, it's a ton of dough to pony up for a game that's known to modern gamers more by name than by experience. Is Fargo daydreaming? He revealed his intentions after only 48 hours of consideration, after all. Or will we put our money where his mouth is when the Kickstarter campaign supposedly launches next month?
Will you support such a campaign? What's a new Wasteland worth to you?
Like PoP, the original Karateka for the Apple II employed rotoscoping to create fluid graphics and animations. Its one-on-one martial arts bouts could be seen as a precursor to games such as Karate Champ and even Street Fighter. Yet despite being such an archetype, the game is being approached for a remake with a very different lineage than the many PoP sequels have been. As Mechner told Gamasutra:
In the 27 years since its release, it's never had a sequel or an adaptation. And yet it's stayed in people's minds all this time. It seems to hold a special place in many gamers' hearts, as it does in mine. It's the game that started my career — you can't get more indie than the Apple II — and its compact design, simple story and pick-up-and-play philosophy made it perfect for a downloadable game.
The new Karateka will not be a sequel but a fuller realization of Mechner's original characters and plot using modern technology:
The Apple II was a bit limited, in that a game could be acclaimed as a cinematic masterpiece of fluid animation while actually it was struggling to eke out eight frames per second — or even less, if the palace gate happened to be on screen at the same time. The music could only play one note at a time, no chords, and I couldn't animate the characters and play a note at the same time — given the 1KHz [sic] microprocessor it was one or the other.
So I'm especially excited about what we can do with the graphics and animation and sound in the new Karateka, given the power of today's consoles … I wanted to take advantage of XBLA and PSN technology to push this game to its production limits, and use graphics, sound and music to really put players into the world of feudal Japan in a way we couldn't on the Apple II … I've tried to make Karateka the way I would have made it in 1984 had the technology been available, and had the Apple II been able to display more than 280×192 pixels and four colors.
"If you turn both the video game console and your large flat-screen TV upside down, the entire game will play upside down," Mechner joked. "We would have liked to make it do that if you just insert the disk upside down, like the original, but with a downloadable game unfortunately that wasn't possible. See, 1980s technology was actually superior in some ways."
The past three years have provided Apple II users with a bounty of opportunities to revisit their favorite classics as never before seen, with affordable downloads and remakes of games such as Choplifter, Lode Runner, and Prince of Persia. My own history with Mechner's résumé includes more lends itself more to Karateka than PoP, and I'm eager to see how the creative force behind the original will remake such a relatively simple game as Karateka for modern platforms and audiences.
I've written several times about Prince of Persia, Jordan Mechner's seminal platformer that debuted on the Apple II and has since been translated, reimagined, and adapted across video game platforms, comic books, and Hollywood. At its core, the game and its plot are simple yet enduring, having survived across decades and dozens of reinterpretations. Why?
This is not the Prince of Persia you grew up with. What's given him so long a life?
Ryan Lambie at the Den of Geek has an answer. In a thoughtful if occasionally rosy reflection on the original game, he points to Prince of Persia's tension and challenge as its timeless qualities.
It didn't matter that the levels themselves were a comparatively sparse amalgam of grey walls, blue tiles and white spikes — when the Prince hung by his fingertips above a precipice, or leapt through a closing gate with barely a second to spare, the experience was akin to stepping into the shoes of Indiana Jones or Luke Skywalker.
[But] was the game's challenge that made it so addictive. No other game could match its sense of danger, nor the horrendous sense of loss when the Prince was inevitably sliced in two, run through with a sword, impaled by spikes, crushed by falling masonry, or had his bones shattered by a precipitous drop. Even now, it's difficult to think of a game whose animation, control system (which, looking back, was extremely fiddly) and level design merge so seamlessly.
As true as it is that Prince of Persia possessed these traits, I'm not sure they can explain what makes the franchise unique. Many early computer and arcade games possessed their own kind of anxiety and difficulty: who can forget being chased by stormtroopers through the halls of Castle Wolfenstein? That game inspired a 1992 first-person shooter and a series of modern sequels, but I've not witnessed it infusing popular (or at least geek) culture of the degree Prince of Persia has.
Is it just luck of the draw that made Prince of Persia succeed in ways that its contemporaries, such as Choplifter and Lode Runner, have not? Or has Jordan Mechner's genius made his opus into something unquantifiable and irreproducible?
There are plenty of places on the Internet to find people's stories of their introduction to the Apple II: blogs, podcasts, videos, and tweets. Though games are often early computer users' gateway to the platform, I don't expect to find their stories within a game.
Troy Cheek is the exception with his YouTube channel, which features a daily Minecraft video blog. As he explores the sandbox world from a first-person perspective, he records his musings, which meander through both the virtual world and his own history. On day 142, posted on New Year's Eve 2011, Troy tells the story of his first Apple II program and its unexpected longevity. The first mention is at the 2:00 mark, but the below video starts at 3:24 with the crux of the odd juxtaposition of Minecraft and Apple II.
At 3:55, Troy says that his school bought computers "not for computer science geeks, but for the business office — the vocational education people." That reminds me of Mark Simonsen, who said in his KansasFest 2010 keynote speech that he first encountered computers in his college accounting class. I wonder how many people were introduced to the Apple II almost by accident, as a tangent to some other professional endeavor, without anticipating the impact it could have on their lives?
