Back in 1982, director Ridley Scott dropped the audience into the then-future world of 2019 Los Angeles. It’s a seedy environment of perpetual darkness, rain, and urban sprawl. In this sci-fi noir, the police bring Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) back into work after a self-imposed retirement from blade running. A blade runner is a specialized detective whose job is to track down bio-engineered humanoids called replicants. These are not robots, but society does not consider them fully human due to their synthetic creation and lack of emotional maturity. Will Deckard maintain his humanity during this ruthless pursuit, or has his life in this dystopia already stripped him of it? Furthermore, there are deeper puzzles to solve, especially in the 1992 and 2007 cuts.

1982 was a special year for science fiction films. In addition to Blade Runner, the year saw the release of E.T., The Thing, and Star Trek II; The Wrath of Khan, among others. Likely due to the crowded field and possible audience surprise at the film being not a typical heroic Harrison Ford picture, the film was a box office disappointment. It made just near 1.5 times its production budget, and this not including advertising, one can feel Scott’s and the studio’s hurt. Contemporarily, it’s still not a mainstream hit, but it’s developed such a cult following that the studio released a sequel years later. Moreover, Blade Runner’s aesthetic and mood influenced more popular science fiction films since its release than nearly any other property. This is why it’s good to see what makes Blade Runner still a thing.

Even years later, the visuals are still a wonder to observe. The combination of design and in-camera effects put the viewer in a world that is both tangible and strange. For those who have grown up on a diet of CGI, this is all physical and camera trickery. For the cityscape, the team utilized models and matte paintings, but the world is real enough that you can feel you can just drop in and shuffle amongst the crowded representation of the future. Just think of the time needed for the multipass exposures that helped give the film its unique neon-lit against darkness lighting. It gave the audience a different idea of what science fiction could be from the Star Wars and Star Trek properties.

But who are the characters that we’re following in this update of noir cinema? Deckard is the typical film noir detective: burnt-out, possibly alcoholic, and with no future. Really, he’s not much of a hero. Throughout the film, he barely makes it out of his scraps, and when he does, there’s nothing triumphant. It’s not surprising that audience interest fell off the film; word got out that Ford was not playing another Indiana Jones or Han Solo. However, it’s interesting that Ford risked playing a role different from his previous pulp characters. One could say he was reaching back to his brief role as an army officer in Apocalypse Now. Some say the disinterested attitude was due to his dissatisfaction on the movie set. It worked that it matched the listless character he was supposed to portray.

The star of the film is Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer). Despite being artificial, he’s the most sympathetic character, even after some of his brutal actions. Despite being a type of superman, he displays the most human qualities during his quest with his fellow replicants. He often shows this without words; though, his dialogue is memorable as well. The femme fatale Rachel (Sean Young) is probably the weakest of the main characters. Still, her stilted manner and speaking could be considered to be a positive attribute to add to the mystery of who she is revealed to be. Other acting props are for the weirdness of Gaff, the cold detachment of Tyrell, and the playful quirkiness of Pris.

What is most memorable about Blade Runner is the music. The production could’ve gone with traditional orchestration. Vangelis instead composed a melancholy, jazzy synth score. This perfectly sets the mood for the future setting, while paying tribute to the tropes of film noir. In fact, in addition to the synthesizers, the score utilized a saxophonist for the popular “Love Theme.” In addition, you can hear bits of Asian and Middle-Eastern tinges throughout the film. These showcase the multiethnic atmosphere of 2019 Los Angeles.

Does it date the film from being of the eighties? To a certain extent, yes. However, one should distinguish between quality and mediocre synthesizer work. Quality work brings a sense of wonder, charm, or menace depending on the emotional mood of the film. It gives added texture to remind a person that this film is from a never to be repeated era. Vangelis is one of the masters to bring on that nostalgia.

Some have leveled criticisms of dullness, lethargy, and aimless plotting against Blade Runner. Looking at the film from a certain point of view, these thoughts could have some merit. This is not an action film, at least not in the modern sense. It’s a work that emphasizes mood and atmosphere. Often, other films focus on getting the hero from point a to point b. Some will balk at this type of cinema. That’s their right. There’s a reason why the film has been re-released in multiple cuts over the years beyond the Ridley Scott revisions.

But they shouldn’t discount the impact that the film has. People will never widely love it like many of the blockbusters of the time. Even some more critically and popularly derided fare of the time like The Thing have seemed to rise to more public consciousness than Blade Runner. Still, Blade Runner welcomes at least a first view for the uninitiated. We see bits of the future running before us rather than soaring into space through this type of relatively grounded science fiction.

The Thing is an alien invasion film. There are many of those from which to choose. In fact, The Thing is both a remake of Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World and a more faithful adaptation of the source novella, Who Goes There? But what makes the conflict between the Antarctic researchers and the creature terrifying is that not only is the creature a shape-shifter, but every cell of the creature is its own living organism, which can infect and absorb other creatures, whether they are plant, animal, or human. As the researchers realize that their fellows might no longer be human, this is when the paranoia, augmented by the barren icy landscape, truly takes hold.

The principal character is R.J. MacReady, played by the everyman action star Kurt Russell. He’s the reluctant hero, who, due to circumstances and the failings of his crew members, must take leadership to counter the alien threat. There are many fine performances by the supporting cast. The angry skepticism of Childs (Keith David) and the mental descent of Blair (Wilford Brimley) stand out though. The critics initially said that there was poor characterization. It’s true that there’s a large cast for this type of film. Some characters are given more attention than others. Paying close attention to the quirks of the characters, though, it shouldn’t be difficult to realize each’s individuality.

I focus on the characterization and the suspense of the scenes. One shouldn’t overlook Rob Bottin’s practical effects. There, however, can’t be much more said about the practical effects than were said at the initial release. Even the harshest critics knew that these were top-notch. They, however, felt that John Carpenter focused too much on them, at the expense of other aspects of The Thing. I disagree. The viewer doesn’t see the first active transformation until around the 30-minute mark. And each eventual transformation, while detailed and graphic, is not wanton and exploitative. It serves the progression of the plot. To some modern viewers, the creature effects in some scenes may seem rubbery or comic-book like. I’ll, however, take it over the majority of CGI effects that are produced now. It’s tangible, and that helps you feel the fear that the characters do.

The score or soundtrack can make or break a film. Fortunately, John Carpenter reached out to renowned traditional composer Ennio Morricone to provide most of the score. He, along with collaborator Alan Howarth, added his usual synthesized touches for further cues. It’s very shocking that The Thing‘s score received a Razzie nomination the following year. The music is not overbearing; it fits the despairing atmosphere. Moreover, it showed American audiences, who likely knew Morricone for spaghetti western and giallo scores, that he could score for any genre of film. Besides the slow, brooding march of the main theme, I recommend paying attention to the aptly named tracks “Despair” and “Humanity I.” The frigid atmosphere of the Antarctic saturates throughout, but the human element, represented by the various instrumental sections, underlies, lamenting the situation.

Once dismissed, now praised—that could be the short quote that encapsulates the reception that The Thing received. However, the film has gone beyond even this in comparison with other film reevaluations. Without a devoted fanbase, there wouldn’t have been a prequel, video game sequel and comic book sequels, or board game adaptations.  Even the winter skeleton crew at the South Pole hosts viewings of not only the 1982 film, but of the 1951 film and the 2011 prequel as well.

Other body-horror films will likely never top The Thing, though a number of films in the wake of the film’s release have tried in imitation. It’s a shame that John Carpenter received such a critical drubbing back in 1982. There’s no doubt that it affected his career. Though he received praise for the later critical hit Starman, Hollywood no longer considered him B-movie royalty. At least he and the fans see what was once trashed raised high as a genre classic.

But not too tame. It’s still pretty bonkers.

ALCATRAZ II

Microdeal, 1982

So there’s no doubt about it… prison sucks. Even without all the darker parts of prison life (which we don’t need to detail; pop culture can and will do that for you), you’re still locked up. You’re not free. One of the worst was Alcatraz, just off the California coast, an island prison fortress that was meant to be nearly impossible to escape.

Well, since people kept attempting (and possibly succeeding, as in the 1962 attempt), Microdeal decided that Alcatraz needed a sequel. A meaner, iron-clad, merciless follow-up.

With a goddamn minotaur in it.

What immediately strikes me as strange is how cool they both seem about the situation. As if they had a conversation beforehand, free of rancour or posturing.

“Okay, so when you bolt down the hallway, I mean, I’m a fucking minotaur, dude. I’m gonna chase you.”

“Yeah yeah. I’m gonna run like hell, so don’t worry too hard about it. I’m not.”

“You know, I’m glad we talked about this. Thanks.”

“Yeah man, oughta be a good show.”

GOODY

Opera Soft, 1987

This is some straight-up Bakshi shit. A lot is loosely implied here, at least to me, and it’s done in that way that creeps in at the seams of the mind and leaks inward. I think this one deserves an itemized list.

• the policeman commands the power of the Moon itself to avoid a very, very “happy” gorilla gazing up at him.
• That bird (buzzard? What fucking kind of bird is that?) looks suicidally depressed. Or maybe I’m wrong and it’s just seen all this shit before. In any case, a city with birds like that flying around in it can’t be a cheerful place for humanity to thrive.
• Goody (is that this dude’s name?) seems to be wearing a coat, but are those his hands gripping it from behind, near the collar? If so, how the fuck do you pull that off, and if not, why isn’t he alarmed by it?
• That woman could be one of two things, going by how tropes work in this kind of media: a newswoman or a hooker.
• Wait, Goody’s an ape too, isn’t he? That woman’s trying to get it on with a gorilla.

Normally I’d go on a quest across Wikipedia and the Internet to find out more about this game, but I’m shook. Too shook to even open Google.

CASH MAN

Microdeal, 1984

This is what the working man’s day is like, represented by symbolism, I guess? Let me try:

You go to such great lengths (or heights) to earn your living. You grab and reach – everyone’s gotta struggle a little when they work for a living, right? Keeps you tough. Keeps you on your toes. The rank and file military man, he knows what it’s about; you have more in common than you might think.

Then the fucking vultures show up: the banker, the bill collector, the loan shark. Just as you’re starting to do well for yourself, you gotta deal with all this.

The title/logo being crafted weirdly out of smiley faces is a slapping contrast to this dark scene of class warfare and defeat. Also, I’m already noticing a theme with birds. The men and women involved in creating these games must have found birds supernaturally terrifying. Or they were just easy to justify as dickheads in any scenario. Because that’s true. Birds are absolute dickheads.

PIMANIA

Automata, 1982

Little preface for this one: there was a period of time in my early to mid 20s when I played around with psychoactives and hallucinogens a lot. I don’t think I did any serious damage to myself (though some people may enthusiastically disagree), but I did experience some… well, interesting things. I remember very clearly the tail-end of one LSD experience, sitting on my back porch and watching the grass visibly grow and recede before my eyes, as the sun was rising. Once it occurred to me that I could see the sun’s light, but not the sun itself, I froze with panic. Then, over the course of another hour or so, I kept carefully positioning myself so that the treeline or other solid objects would obscure the sun’s full disc from my view. I was convinced that a full look at the sun would drive me mad or destroy me.

I’m pretty sure this image is a good approximation of what my mind was expecting.

End note on this one: man, I don’t know what you’re up to, but you brought a telescope, a saxophone, a rubber ducky and a live snake, not to mention you are totally nude. Best of luck.

MR. DIG

Microdeal, 1984

Microdeal must have had a stable of depraved and insane artists on lock during this time period. Mr. Dig’s eyes aren’t eyes at all but eyespots; he must have echolocation or sense his way by tremors in the ground. He’s clearly in some hellish system of tunnels, and has just found an apple with more mass than himself. An underground Hadean giant apple. His face betrays no emotion. He’s… he’s thinking this one through. If Eris’s golden fruit wrought the discord so told in legend, what will a bite of this one do?

Also, it’s hot as fuck down here in those footie pajamas. He’s thinking the hardest about that – going back and changing clothes.

Thanks for joining me on another sojourn through the outsider art of the fringes of retro gaming. We may do this again. I’ll leave it on that note. A note of menace. Stay Retro!

I’m talking about “true classics.” While not the earliest examples of their type, these games – ones that existed within the cycle of arcade, 2600, ColecoVision, and other formats – are certainly the earliest “household names” commonly summoned up from the sediment of our collective long term memory. They’re less often examined nowadays because they appear so rudimentary to your average person, but their worth has not changed. This is some serious, actual oldschool shit, and it’s time for the whippersnappers to sit up straight and start taking notes. We’re gonna do a grab bag on the solid gold oldies.

NOTE: In this article, since I’m talking about games that were released when video gaming was still in its formative (even primitive) stage, I won’t spend much time talking about graphics or sound. It’s a safe assumption that these aspects will be very basic in any game from the era, but if one of them is exemplary for its time in a particular case, I’ll mention it.

Pitfall!

Activision/David Crane, 1982

glug glug glug.

Part of what I really like about Pitfall is that it’s not only a great game, it was part of Activision basically saying “fuck you” to Atari for assuming it’d established some kind of imperial monopoly on

game development. Activision grabbed talent from Atari and other sources over time by offering game designers something Atari absolutely refused to: credit for their work. Eventually, the popularity of the titles developed at Activision pressured Atari to start licensing them. A victory against the Eternal Asshole. Hallelujah.

Anyway, Pitfall gives you control of a dude named Harry, and you have 20 minutes to navigate a decidedly unfriendly environment in order to get some sick loot. The game itself is a very early example of an action platformer, and it even gently tugs on the RPG line, at least in my view. At the very least, it’s got one of the common tropes of that genre: you’re risking your entire ass to poke through a terrible place to find something of value.

The action is pretty damn knuckle-biting for its time, and is one of the reasons Pitfall is considered a classic. There is a constant level of tension and sometimes your decisions boil down to “which horrible risk do I want to take?” High adventure at its finest. My personal favorite is the crocodiles. I love how harry just kind of disappears vertically into them, into some pocket dimension in their lower jaw or something. Regardless of that, Pitfall is a lot of fun to play on any of the systems it was licensed for, and proof that a game with a simple premise and good design is timelessly and universally worthwhile.

BurgerTime

Data East/Mattel, 1982

the egg’s not even that into this. Peer pressure at its worst. That pickle though… it’s pissed. It’s really decided to put everything into this conflict. IT WON’T HEAL THE WOUNDS INSIDE PICKLE

It is known to a few sages of the obscure and the forgotten that the word “BurgerTime,” in the language of the Ancients who sailed across the great astral sea of space to seed our world with the components necessary for abiogenesis and new life, means something akin to “Thunderdome.”

In other words, You don’t just exit BurgerTime. You have to fucking fight your way out.

They can smell your fear. Your fear, and the alluring aroma of sizzling ground beef.

In another simple premise typical of the era, in BurgerTime you are a dude named Peter Pepper who has one job to do: knock some fucking burgers together so you can clock out. The problem is, there are anthropomorphic eggs, hot dogs, and pickles all over your burger scaffold doing their best to stop you from achieving your burger-stack goals. Whatever their problem is, they’ve apparently decided that Peter’s the cause. Fortunately, you can fight back by using pepper not unlike pepper spray, as well as smashing the bad guys under a falling burger part or getting them to stand on it just as you make it drop. Not terribly clever are these rogue ingredients, despite their lust for your blood. The game gets harder as you go, requiring more burgers per stage and throwing more pissed off eggs and pickles into the mix.

I have been an enthusiastic fan of this game for a longer time than a lot of other games that came out before I was born, mostly because I have fond memories of playing it on a beat-up cabinet at a local pizzeria during my childhood. More importantly, it stands alongside Circus Charlie as a video game that reinforces an important concept: conflict, despite its unpleasant nature and ultimately harmful effects, is a perpetual and omnipresent phenomenon. There can never truly be total peace.

Not while those pickles and eggs have a fuckin’ attitude, anyway.

Q*bert

Warren Davis/Jeff Lee, 1982

Gottleib’s most successful title, Q*bert is one of those early arcade games that became a readily recognizable property readily seen as a symbol of the video game.” I even remember the younger of my two older sisters, who didn’t give half a shit about video games at all, having a Q*bert button on her backpack in high school. While the little snoot-dude doesn’t even remotely approach Mario or Pac Man in terms of being a household name, during the early 80s he made quite a name for himself. That’s because his game is actually pretty novel for its time, not to mention fairly fun to play.

Already all kinds of fucked.

As Q*bert, you’re trying to jump all over a set of isometrically drawn cubes, changing the color of them when you land on them. This sounds like a pretty easy thing to pull off, until you consider that snakes, monsters, and all kinds of shit are chasing you around while you do this, trying to preserve what I guess they see as the cube color status quo of the iso-pyramid. Shit can get a little heated, especially since the green monsters can change back the cubes you’ve touched. Things can quickly dissolve into bullshit.

Even cooler than any of that, and something I’ve not been able to personally experience in full since I use emulators for most of this, is the level of effort that went into the Q*bert cabinet. Not only was a speech synthesizer used to create the sound Q*bert makes when he gets caught by a bad guy, but pinball components were even included into the machine to create certain sound effects. The digital sound components use 128 bytes of memory to to their job, which is quite a bit for ’82. I personally find this to be the most impressive part of Q*bert, especially since I’m really shitty at the actual game.

Pitfall! – 7/10 (It’s really fun and involved for a game of its time, and if you can appreciate games this old at all, then it’s even exciting.)

BurgerTime – 8/10 (it can be a real motherfucker, but it’s an early example of Data East not shitting the bed with the lights on while designing a game, so I’m very fond of it.)

Q*bert – 7/10 (A lot of innovation took place when this game was unleashed on the world, and it’s faded from prominence a bit, but it’s not to be overlooked.)

It’s time for us to cross the streams, true believers.

There’s a lot of talk about comics here on NRW, and rightly so. Joey has his own awesome strand of articles wherein he sheds light on the old and exposes us to the retro-new, and we love it, because Joey is to the medium of comics what I am to sitting on my ass in front of a CRT monitor with a controller in my hand: he’s a passionate expert on the subject. It’s worth diving into; when done well, the comic book or graphic novel is an art form capable of deftly transporting the reader to new worlds – some like our own, and some realities away from it.

What can’t be overlooked is how the comic book multiverse has been thrust into the colored-light beams and binary rows of the VG grinder time and time again in the plodding quest to juice franchises for more revenue. Here’s the dolorous stroke, folks: We’re going to take a look at how they’ve done this with one of Marvel’s undisputed icons, their bread-and-butter household name… Spider-Man. Peter Parker, the world’s most beloved wise-cracking web slinger, has been dipped in silicon and code frequently throughout video gaming’s history, with results that I will be kind and describe as “varied.”

I mean, he’s an icon. Some comics fans think he’s a pussy. Honestly, I do too. I’m more of a Punisher guy. No one can deny, however, that Peter Parker is one of the most luminous stars in comic book history. (Artwork by Michael Golden)

Everyone’s pretty familiar with Spidey’s origins and powers. He got bit by a radioactive spider, got some powers, lost his uncle to crime, and got serious about cleaning up the Big Apple (and sometimes beyond). The wall-crawler has made tons of friends and enemies since his appearance in the 60s, from goblins to murderous hunters to symbiotic aliens that abandoned him and sought out his unstable and disgruntled colleagues for revenge (Venom is the man!) Pete’s powers, coupled with his nifty web-shooting devices, make for the possibility of great dynamic gameplay if translated creatively into digital form. Right?

Ah, shit, kids… let’s just do this. I’m not gonna look at every game, but we’ll examine the prominent titles that most of us may have seen or played.

Spider-Man (1982)

Platform: Atari 2600

Culprits: Parker Brothers/Atari

Eh. It’s not great, but everything looked like this in 1982. At least we can tell which one’s Spider-Man.

You’ll probably expect me to be cruel here, because I do lean on the side of bastardry when it comes to the 2600. I mean… eh. Let’s stay in context… this isn’t bad for a 2600 game. Considering the limits of the system graphics- and sound-wise, you get a good representation of the key elements. Gameplay consists of getting up on top of the building and kicking Green Goblin’s ass, which to be fair, ate up a lot of Peter’s logged superhero hours in the 70s/80s either together or as separate activities. Using your web shooters is a little tedious, but once you’ve got the hang of how to do it in a rhythm and pull yourself up, it’s pretty fun. I suppose my only knock on this one is that it’s not enough to do. But then, not every 2600 game can be Burgertime and crush your soul with raw chaos.

The Amazing Spider-Man (1990)

Platforms: Amiga, Atari ST, PC Compatibles

Culprits: Oxford Digital/Paragon Software

Let me start off with something nice before I put my hands under the table and fucking lift. The Amiga has always stood out for its time as a system capable of audiovisual richness, and this game really turns her out. The ST and PC versions are decent in that regard too, although the audio quality varies.

“Shut down all the garbage mashers on the detention level!”  I’m sorry. I couldn’t help myself.

Now, let’s talk about HOW they chose to turn her out. The controls are pretty fucking far from intuitive; while I expect translating Spider-Man’s iconic means of locomotion to be a challenge for a game developer, this shit is just abyss you’ll keep falling into until you start being meticulously careful… which isn’t prudent in 90% of the situations you’ll be navigating. Move fast? Move really carefully? The answer to both is usually no. Again, I can’t knock the graphics, but there’s something inherently wrong about this image, seen during the intro. Something that reminds me of “non-Euclidean shapes,” “lightless gulfs across time and space,” and “red-haired woman being forcibly abducted by a fishbowl-headed mannequin.” Poor Mary Jane.

somebodys_fetish.jpg

Almost as bizarre is the choice to represent your life bar as a picture of Spider-Man that turns skeletal from the feet upward as you move closer to death.

He looks a little embarrassed. I don’t blame him.

Last gripe: the game is, at least to me, unreasonably goddamn long considering the tedium it is to play. You can watch a longplay here, and be sure to listen to the entire intro music, or at least sit through it for as long as you can before reaching for that little red track-bar to skip through it and save your sanity.

Spider-Man: Return of the Sinister Six (1992)

Platforms: NES, Game Gear, Master System

Culprits: LJN (OF COURSE), Flying Edge, Bits Studios

This game is mercifully short, but still feels like being hurled into a black hole and somehow kept alive to slowly lose one’s mind via time dilation. Spider-Man, despite being fully human height, has the same general proportions as Wee Man from Jackass. His ability to leap through the air is admirable, and the controls aren’t too bad… until you try to do any of the shit Spider-Man is known for doing in terms of movement. The graphics are candy-colored palettes of pure hell wherein men are depicted universally as shoeless mongoloids and no light seems to penetrate anything (despite the garish coloration of everything).

It’s like Willy Wonka took a massive shit all over everything, and really wasn’t feeling well when he did. I bumble forth, capable of great feats of agility but barely able to keep my goose neck from dropping my pumpkin head onto my barrel chest. As Spider-Man, I am the monster, and I belong here.

A small handful of farty, tooty pieces of music cycle as you penetrate deeper into the Sinister Six’s criminal kingdom, presenting a strange yet totally-LJN mix of jazzy swing and “I ate so many tabs I can’t even tell what genre this is.” The drums punch at the listener’s mind, almost as if they are intended to pummel you into accepting the rest of this musical affront as tolerable. It’s like a rave in a Civil War graveyard, and someone invited Dizzy Gillespie. Actually, fuck that… that’d rule. This doesn’t.

Again, I can’t flush this game completely; it’s a decent effort overall, but LJN had a tendency (with a scant few exceptions) to attach its name to something and then pile drive it into the floor until no amount of reconstructive surgery could fix it.

Spider-Man and Venom: Maximum Carnage (1994)

Platforms: Genesis. SNES

Culprits: LJN, Acclaim, Software Creations

We’re ending on a positive note. We have to. We owe it to ourselves.

I really liked the Maximum Carnage story arc in the comics. It’s held high by some and shit on by others, but there’s something about a villain so terrifying that two bitter enemies (not to mention a wild cross section of Marvel’s 90s line-up) combined forces to defeat him as he rampaged across New York with his own wrecking crew. I love big events, and I LOVE villains. And Carnage… well, he’s one burning hell of a villain.

Really, if anyone deserves this shit, it’s JJ. 

This effort did decent justice to the source material. I’ll keep this simple and just tick off some pros and cons.

PROS

-Venom is a playable character

-Morbius shows up, along with Deathlok, Black Cat, Iron Fist, and a few other underrated Marvel good guys

-it’s a beat-em-up, and not a bad one, either

-comic book style cut scenes, and they’re not done poorly

–pretty damn good music

-LJN didn’t set this one on fire and stand back playing pocket pool while it burned to slag

Really cool audio-visual presentation all around. It keeps true to the comic feel without burning that candle at both ends with a welding torch.

CONS

-The music did not sound as good in the Genesis version

-This game is also long; why the hell does Spider-Man mean “long fucking game” almost uniformly to game designers

-It’s incredibly unfair to put bad-ass characters like Black Cat, Iron Fist and Morbius in here and not have them as full-on playables

-I feel like a lot of the villains get undersold in terms of their powers and badass-ness

-Still, to make an understatement, a bit fucking cumbersome to do the web slinging thing, although it must be acknowledged that it’s better in this than in any predecessor

Overall, Maximum Carnage is fun as hell. I owned the Genesis cart as a kid and got a lot of replay value out of it. It’s a net win due to presentation and the choice of formatting it as a beat-em-up, which makes it approachable on a level far beyond its ancestors in Spidey’s video game library.

That brings us to 1994, folks, so I guess I’ll put the brakes on it here. Thanks for reading, and before I go, I suppose I owe you some number ratings on these hunks of pop media history.

Atari 2600: 6/10

Amiga: 5/10

NES: 3/10

Genesis/SNES: 7/10

See you at the end of the month, RetroFans! Excelsior!!!

To look back wistfully for the hundredth or so time, I’ve written a lot of articles for NRW about a lot of classic games. All these games, with very few exceptions, were ones that originated in the arcade or for one console and were subsequently ported to other systems. The clear intent of this is to maximize the number of potential consumers, since very few households back then were multi-system owners, and there were a crowd of different machines being used to play video games at home across the Western world and beyond. I tend to mention these ports in brief near the end of my articles; one name you may see often, but may not be closely familiar with (depending on your location and age), is the Spectrum.

In the very late 1970s and the early 1980s, Britain was beginning to embrace computers the same way the US was. There was the same acknowledgment of how useful thinking machines could be, and the two nations also shared an optimistic sense of futurism. This futurism was the lifeblood of Sinclair Research in Cambridge, UK. The early 80s were a time of uncertainty and even of some conflict in the United Kingdom, but just like in America, they were also a time of looking forward. Sinclair was a firm focused on looking forward, with ideas from computers to futuristic transportation making up their offering to the modern world.

The Sinclair C5. Envisioned as a revolution in personal transport, it met with marginal initial success before… well to keep a long story short, it didn’t revolutionize shit. It looks cool as hell, though.

The Spectrum was not the only home computer available in England during the 1980s, nor was it the first Sinclair had released. Its predecessor, the ZX80, had broken barriers upon its 1980 release as the first personal computer available for under US $200. The Commodore product line was available in the UK as well, and in 1981 Acorn partnered with the BBC to release the BBC Micro. The Micro’s intent was not only to make home computers the norm, but to make programming more approachable to those interested in learning. Other than the C64, however, one important flaw remained: You couldn’t play many GAMES on these devices! Well at least not any good ones.

Before proceeding, I would like to state that none of the text beyond this paragraph is meant to malign the Sinclair ZX Spectrum as an overall computing machine, nor diminish its well deserved place in computing/gaming history.

But I have got to be frank… thank the Machine Gods we’ve come a long way since then.

Black with a bold rainbow down one corner. compact, grey TI-83 style buttons. SIX WHOLE COLORS IN ITS PALETTE!

The ZX Spectrum could read and write data using either of the commonly accepted ways: via tape cassettes (slower, cheaper) or a 3 inch floppy (faster, more costly). With a Zilog z80 CPU forming the core of its nerve system, the machine kept up with most of its sister computers of the time (and in fact that same CPU was used in many gaming consoles throughout the 80s, namely the ColecoVision and the predecessors to the Master System). Throughout the 1980s and early 90s, the system was improved and redesigned, both by Sinclair and by their newly acquired company Amstrad. As time went on, the peripherals improved, with later versions even featuring built-in tape and floppy drives. As far as usability and utility, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum was a wonder.

Graphically and sound-wise, however, the Spectrum was ass. It was pure ass.

Blend, dither and disappear: the overall effect could vary from confusing to depressing.

Let’s start with the graphics. I won’t be that hard on them; I understand that nothing was out-of-this-world graphically in the early 80s, although the C64 was all right and arcade games were on their way. With the Spectrum, you don’t really have much of a spectrum at all. Unless you count black and white, and dimmed tones of the colors, you have exactly six colors. They are bright colors, and if certain ones dominate the screen, you will want your cool 80s shades because your cone and rod receptors will be screaming. This is compounded by the fact that sprites often assume the background’s colors while moving through it; this can add a visual challenge to games that may not need it as both you and other sprites seem to shift into chameleon mode. The Amstrad CPC, a popular later version of the Spectrum, improved on this whole situation somewhat, as shown below.

So… the CPC could almost run the version of MSPaint that came with Windows 3.1!

Now, let’s get to sound. Again, before I get going, I know… it was 1982. But this is the department they seemed to drag the most ass on, for the longest time, with the least real improvement. Below I provide an example; turn your speakers down or anyone you live with might think some kind of nuclear alarm is going off. This is how the Ninja Turtles sound on the Sinclair Spectrum…

Sometimes I share what I find in my travels, and I sent this video to synth-head and gamer Brendon Hicks. Direct quote from Brendon on TMNT’s sound for the Spectrum version:

“It sounds like someone tongue-punching an asshole.”

And he’s not wrong. Here’s another challenge… see if you can handle the whole “theme song” for the Spectrum adaptation of the Stallone hit Cobra:

If you’re a kid who used the family Spectrum to play games, how long do you think you’d have before a parent or other family member came barreling toward you demanding that you turn that shit off? Better get out your stopwatch timer.

All of this said, there’s still a huge community of retro-gamers who love the Spectrum family of computers and still even develop indie software for it. To those of you out there doing that: I do not understand at all, but you are doing something you love, and I can’t speak ill of that.

This examination is done. The patient has a strange set of symptoms, but they seem to be harmless. I don’t think this case is terminal or contagious. You’re free to leave quarantine, Mr. Spectrum.

OW! SHIELDS UP!

On November 25th 1970 the most prominent Japanese novelist, Yukio Mishima, committed ritual seppuku after staging a theatrical protest/coup in favor of restoring the imperial system to power.  That event sent shockwaves throughout Japan and the Western literary world.  How could this writer, who was enthralled by many aspects of Western culture, take leadership in what the majority of the Japanese populace viewed as a farce of restoring the emperor’s authority?  The Japanese, who were trying to reconcile themselves to modernity and the West years after the tragedy of the Pacific War, now had to face the scrutiny resulting from that shocking event.  Is it any wonder that the country’s leading contemporary writer, Haruki Murakami, used that date as the starting point of his first three novels?

When Murakami published A Wild Sheep Chase in 1982, he already had two slim acclaimed novels to his name, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973.  Today, they are known as the “The Rat Trilogy” as all three narratives feature a person nicknamed “The Rat,” who has a friendship with the unnamed protagonist of the novels.  Although the preceding novels received notice by a number of critics, Murakami truly reached critical success with A Wild Sheep Chase.  Still, the road to his now-unrivaled status as the premier writer in Japan and a leading contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature was not without barriers.  Many leading Japanese critics viewed Murakami as inauthentic in regards to his Japanese writing style and his surreal subject matter that hinted at magical realism.  It was a different world from Mishima’s realistic fiction.  This didn’t bother Murakami as he disliked many aspects of Mishima’s character and views.

So why did he choose November 25th 1970 as a focal date for his early novels?  The legacy of Mishima was still lurking in the background.  The question lingered and still lingers for many Japanese thinkers and citizens: what does it mean to be both Japanese and Western?  It’s thus interesting that some critics believe that Murakami used one of Mishimas’s more obscure novels Natsuko’s Adventure (it hasn’t even been translated into English) as the basis for A Wild Sheep Chase.  While in Natsuko’s Adventure, a girl and a man seek to find a deadly bear, in Murakami’s work, the unnamed protagonist and his girlfriend seek to find a strange sheep.

What’s so strange about the sheep is that it has a star-shaped birthmark and it might have connections to the flow of 20th century Japanese history, particularly the rise of Japan as prosperous state post-World War II.  Thus, the protagonist journeys to discover the truth about the mystery, and weird events continue to mount along the way.  Eventually, he even encounters a sheep man, as well as his friend, “The Rat,” who has disappeared at the beginning of the narrative.

As in the majority of Murakami’s novels, the protagonist starts out as an unwilling, almost unmotivated figure.  It’s fitting that with the exception of his most-realistic novel, Norwegian Wood, all of his novels for the first decade of his writing career had an unnamed narrator.  The action falls on the character, and he is drawn away from his bored and depressing existence into a journey that he resists slightly at first, but then accepts for one reason or another.  In A Wild Sheep Chase, the protagonist is divorced, in a lackluster job with an even more mediocre partner, and spends his nights smoking and drinking.  He’s obviously in a rut, and the reader is glad that something fantastical has disturbed his “peace,” even if it’s something as strange as a woman with extraordinarily alluring ears.  Yes, his girlfriend who pushes him to accept the strange offer to search for the fantastic sheep has ears that makes people’s jaws drop; they’re that hot!

Why are sheep central to the narrative?  Sheep aren’t usually considered interesting creatures.  However, as brought out in the novel, sheep have an interesting history in Japan.  Sheep weren’t native to the country due to the climate.  However, in the nineteenth century, after the country opened up to the world, the government started importing sheep for farmers to raise as livestock.  The program was a disaster as the farmers didn’t know how to care for them, and the government failed to provide suitable information for the farmers to be successful.  Thus, the program was eventually canceled.  What does that have to do with Murakami’s view of modern Japan?  The special sheep the narrator is searching for is able to give power to even insignificant individuals by incubating in them; however, the individual is not in control, and once the sheep is done, the person is cast aside.  I believe that Murakami feels that there is some measure of incongruence between Western culture and Japanese society.  It’s not that he is anti-Western, as he has stated in interviews that Western literature has influenced him as much if not more so than Japanese literature.  Looking at his corpus of work, it’s apparent that American popular culture influenced his tastes.  However, he seems to hint that there they might be a feeling of uneasiness in the way that Japanese feel they are being viewed by Westerners.

Despite its strange elements, A Wild Sheep Chase is more grounded than his following novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World, which was discussed back in April.  Its narrative is a bit more straightforward, and the length is not as daunting as that of some of his later works.  Even if you don’t want to search for meanings in the symbols Murakami uses, reading this work provides an enjoyable experience.  Honestly, much of contemporary serious literature can be a chore to plow through.  Perhaps, some of the writers feel similarly when writing their books.  Murakami, however, seems to enjoy what he is doing, and I hope he continues while the readers of his continue to see what he puts out next.        

Alternate Title: “Why I’m Glad They Buried E.T. Out In the Desert”

If you asked a ton of people when console gaming really started, they’d reflexively tell you, “When the Nintendo (NES) came out.” While they’d be wrong, they’re less wrong than we’d like to admit. The NES didn’t start console gaming, but what it did do was swoop into Hades on white-feathered wings and pluck it from damnation.

What this article will attempt to do is illustrate a sequence of events that nearly caved in the concept of video games forever in North America. It’s a tawdry tale featuring cutthroat economics, desperation, stagnation, and E.T. The Extraterrestrial.

Too Much of a Good Thing

In 1982-1983, the Atari 2600 was the done thing in console gaming. Homes across the United States were playing Atari. Some weren’t, but they had something… a ColecoVision, a Commodore 64, a Vectrex, or maybe the Odyssey 2 (which was pretty good for its time). In fact, You could say that there were so many choices, the market was flooded.

Since most of us attended school back when they still taught basic economics, we know that if you flood a market with supply, the demand goes down and so does the price point. Well, there were no less than (and probably more than) twelve (12) consoles on the market by 1983, with more planned for ’84 by many of the same companies.

The Magnavox Odyssey2 (that 2 is supposed to be superscript), a pretty good little game machine, but part of a flooded swamp of a market.

Overabundance can lead to rot and stagnation. Guess what? It did.

Home Computers Muscle In

One of the gaming systems I mentioned up there was the Commodore 64. Now, the C64 wasn’t designed just for gaming. It was meant as a home computer. If you were one of many up-and-coming go-getters in the 1980s, you could use this thing to write business reports, organize your finances, send a letter to your mom, or even play a game.

And you could buy all this functionality for about $499, plus a modest investment in some software.

Out Run for the C64. The graphics alone blow the Atari 2600 out of the water. Not to mention that you can use this very same machine to do your taxes or write the great American novel.

Since the first gaming consoles did very little (if any) third-party licensing to start with, the independents of the day would often work with computer platforms. This led to many of them having more diverse game libraries than some consoles did. You know what else these rogue programmers loved about working with platforms like the C64? The graphics capability was miles above anything in console gaming, not to mention overall processing capability.

So why buy a system you can only play games on, that no one else is allowed to write programs for, and doesn’t want to anyway?

Inflation Craps All Over the Dollar

Signs of inflation had started not long after the Bicentennial, with the value of a dollar slowly dropping. While it can be said that the economy improved in some areas in the early 80s, Many amusement and arcade interests lobbied for a smaller dollar coin in 1979 since the spending power of a quarter was a joke by this point. The end result was the Susan B Anthony coin, worth $1 but around the size of a quarter (and thus more manageable for things like vending machines or arcade cabinets). It was this very similarity to the US quarter that made it a flop; some machines would reject the coin, others would simply treat it as a quarter. Neither result was desirable for arcade owners. This hurt video gaming in the States along with everything else happening.

Even Susan looks pissed. “HOW COULD YOU SCREW THIS UP?” Despite failing to solve any of the problems it was meant to solve, the coin was minted again in 1999, when those problems were long gone for various reasons.

Activision Leads the Way to Freedom

We’re going to take a detour for a moment, into the history of Activision. You know that company now as one of the biggest media companies, let alone video game companies, in the world. It’s a well-known name. Activision has its roots in the time period we’re exploring; in 1979, it was founded by programmers who’d left Atari over a lack of credit given – a lack of true meritocracy. You see, programmers of Atari games were never credited, as there WERE no credits in those games. To boot, there was no kickback if a game you developed sold well. You got no cut, just a (rather modest) salary. Activision was the first third-party development firm in video game history, and it DID credit its developers. Atari attempted to sue and do all kinds of other things to block sales, but eventually even they had to eat humble pie and knuckle to the third party wave. Mattel, maker of the Intellivision, stubbornly held out… and never did much in video gaming after the Intellivision.

When Activision made games like Pitfall, Atari pretty much had to bend over and take it. Activision rubbed Atari’s face in it to the tune of 4 million copies worldwide.

My point here is that, because of how they ran their ships, these captains had regular, quiet mutinies as Activision and other new developers soaked up their talent and directed it elsewhere.

E.T. Phones it In / The Mass Grave in Alamogordo

E.T. The Extraterrestrial is frequently cited as the absolute worst game ever created for a console. It was developed in five and a half weeks, left approximately 3 million copies unsold, and was universally panned by video game critics of the era (as well as modern ones who’ve bravely re-examined it). At the exact moment Atari filled trucks with the E.T. Game cartridge, slapped the backs of them, and shut the gate, they had officially shit the bed with the lights on. They just didn’t know it yet. 

The game was so bad that Atari found itself woefully below their bottom line, with three and a half million unsold cartridges out of four million produced. Not only was Atari in serious financial trouble, but flubbing a sure-ticket licensed game like E.T. Made them look like a draft horse with a shattered leg; anyone they did business with was now considering putting them down out of sheer mercy. Atari also had, well, a metric shit-ton of cartridges to offload somehow. They also had no help doing this; Warner Communications had sold them off. Mommy wasn’t around to clean this mess up.

Alamogordo is a very pretty little town in the Chihuahuan Desert in New Mexico. The scenic Sacramento Mountains border the town to its west, and to its east can be found the White Sands National Monument. Its features include a nearby Air Force base, an amazing zoo, and the corpses of some 700,000 Atari cartridges.

The overwhelming majority are copies of E.T. The Extraterrestrial.

Both he and Elliot look suitably sad. Even remorseful.

Throughout September of 1983, Atari dumped approximately 700,000 cartridges into the dump on the town’s south side. On the 29th of that year, to counter scavenging that had been taking place despite an ordinance banning such, the dump poured a layer of concrete over the buried and crushed games.

They were trying really hard to bury the industry’s biggest turd. But that’s not how the world works. A 2014 documentary, Atari: Game Over, shows the excavation of the long-buried games.

The Aftermath and Epilogue

1983 through 1985 were hard times for video gaming in the US, but the market in Japan was still a fertile ground for ideas. Looking west, companies like Nintendo and Sega had seen what too much “MORE” and not enough “NEW” could do. When Nintendo released the American-market version of their popular Famicom system, the NES… they went gently at first. When soft-launches in NYC and other major markets looked good, the NES (and its contemporaries) waded across the sea to change American gaming forever.

Oh, mighty Saviour!

An era was over, and an era had begun.

Vice Squad is a 1982 action/crime thriller, starring Wings Hauser, Season Hubley, and Gary Swanson, directed by Gary Sherman. The original music score was composed by Joe Renzetti and Keith Rubenstein. Wings Hauser sang the vocal track on the film’s opening and closing theme song “Neon Slime”.

Why is Vice Squad the retro movie for November? Well, because I am not reviewing any of those average Thanksgiving herky jerky mish-mash of melodrama. I’d rather keep you in the year 1982.

Vice Squad opens on with the streets of LA; deathbed for the American dream, a reservoir of broken ambitions, the seedy tangible world of escapism and vice. There’s pimps, tricks, street walkers, stick up kids, hustlers, johns, dope pushers, dope takers, lost causes and could have been somebodies. This looks like a dark tale of street life.

 Wings Hauser plays possibly the most quotable film pimp ever, second only to Morgan Freeman’s memorable performance as Fast Black in 1987’s Street Smart. Season Hubley co-stars as Princess; in one of her many roles as a hooker. The rest of the cast is serviceable. Notable performers include Fred “ReRun” Berry (What’s Happning), Beverly Todd (Lean On Me), Pepe Serna (Scarface, Buckaroo Bonzai) and Original MTV VJ Nina Blackwood.

Like I was saying, the movie is set on the streets of Los Angeles and follows the graveyard shift of the City Police’s Vice Squad unit. A hooker named Ginger is hiding out in a seedy motel, probably a Knights Inn, from the pimp she just ripped off. Unfortunately for Ginger (Blackwood) her pimp is the notorious Ramrod; a quick to violence pimp in cowboy boots and the shirt to match.

 Another player and friend of Ginger is Princess; a freelance working girl played by Hubley. Princess finds herself thrown head first into a murder investigation involving the Vice Squad searching for a dangerous criminal and the same criminal sociopath out hunting for Princess.

 Vice Squad is absolutely brilliant. It’s the right measure of comedy and crime thriller. Some of the humor is dated. Trigger warning for you wimps – there are situations in this film that might offend you. Be warned.

 Total score: Wings Hauser rules as Ramrod. The humor is gold. Violence. Stunts. “Five hundred dollars don’t get you no El Dorado”. The Dialogue.

Three out of Four switchblades.

 Take a trip down the strip. It’s so easy when you think about it, tie it off, cook it up, smack it up and pop in the mainline, Jack. This ain’t no CSI B.S. This is 1982. This is Vice Squad. So go find Coco and keep that loving finger on the rewind button.