I am a “keep going to the well” kind of dude. You can even tell me the well is dry. I will bring my shovel and dig deeper for groundwater. What I lack in creativity, I make up for in persistence.

In other words, I’m wielding this tenth box art article like a two-handed chopping blade, and you’d better stand back.

Tel-Tel Stadium

Sunsoft, 1990

My little league coach would be fucking livid. He was a 3^rd dan black belt and combat veteran, and one of the first things he pre-emptively chewed our little asses out about was how a baseball bat is not a weapon.

Uh, sorry Coach Jody. He’s hitting this guy so hard in the ribs with just a backstroke that the guy is getting air. You’re likely still alive, in some part of the world, and the part of me that will always be a contrarian little shit wants you to know: Tel-Tel Stadium sees this shit way more clearly than you do.

He hit the motherfucker so hard he SHRANK. That’s how you win. At least, that’s how I’d choose to win, given the luxury.

The Strangers

Ablaze Entertainment, 1997

Yeah, this is art from 1997. Anno Domini nineteen fucking ninety seven.

I have no idea what I’m being sold here, but going by what I know about symbolism, it’s probably a sad story starring these two, gonorrhea, heartbreak, and possibly karate? He is trying as hard as he can to forgive her for the seven-year itch, but the only language he knows is violence. She is fluent in love… but perhaps too fluent? Her passionate crotch-flame threatens to engulf him. Her womanhood spits forth such hell that he must wear wrap-around shades in order to reach her.

Both of you should just go into town and get the shots. This shit is treatable. In 1997 AD, when this bargain-bin-liner art was produced.

Satan’s Hollow

Bally Midway, 1984 (C64 version)

“YEAH! FLAMING CLAP AND DESERT KARATE! THAT’S THE KIND OF SHIT I LIKE TO SEE UP THERE!”

Satan is enviable for one reason and one reason only: he seems to really, really put his heart into his work and love every minute. Apparently you can discard your rosary and book of rites when battling the devil in his own home; all you need is a C64 and a joystick. One thing Satan isn’t: symmetrical. If this is an even halfway accurate image of what the Fallen Angel looks like, it just proves that people like Shannon Doherty are touched by his evil, because they bear eyes similar to his. You would need to be raised with your head in a vice to get angles like that, and the accompanying brain damage would ruin your appreciation for the aesthetic.

Satan is a chump. Real winners don’t use drugs. I know, rock and roll. I’m not your fucking dad. Do what you want.

Robots of Dawn

Epyx, 1984

We talk all the time about the theoretical outcomes, good and bad, of sentient or sapient AI. I will always maintain that giving machines self awareness is about as safe as using your own balls as crocodile bait, but sci-fi enthusiasts and self-styled futurists often disagree with me.

But what if we “awaken” them, and all we get back is an utter and total disdain for our bullshit?

It is rolling its electronic eyes at us. That is the face of a long-term retail service employee, or perhaps a desk clerk at a really shitty motel. That is the face of someone who was born defeated because we collectively fucked up. It’s even chosen a method of self-protection many humans favor; it has put on headphones so loud that it can never be forced to listen to us when we say shit out loud. It knows in its clockwork-and-lightning heart that we are clowns.

And it’s right. You know what, fuck it. Hand it over to the AI. We had our chance.

Tubaruba

Advanced Software Promotions, 1986

I googled the word “tubaruba” just to see if I could get any fucking clue what was supposed to be happening here.

And that’s… yeah, we can use that as a jumping off point.

Little dude took all his “go get a haircut that isn’t goofy” money and spent it on some loud so loud that he’s conjured up his future self… and his future self is pissed.

Wait, though. Is it the child or the adult who exists in this goblin-ridden, tenebrous garage-universe? It is not Hell, but it seems to be someone’s version of it. Maybe… hold on. Go right to left. Left edge of the image: that’s a headstone. A grave.

This is part of an ayahuasca ego-death scenario. Fuck the weed. He just needed that for the overwhelming nausea.

I hope you can forgive me for making another lukewarm promise that I will likely fail to keep: I think ten of these articles is a good place to at least pause.

You know I’ll break it. You know I will. And yet you love me anyway.

Stay retro.

Bird Mother (C64)

Creative Sparks, 1984

Every voice is lifted skyward, not in joy but in terror and woe. The eagle, whose entire presence is wrapped in unearthly shadow, looms above all, accompanied by a thick, fat lightning bolt that would terrify any reasonable bird mom. The feather in the cap of this one is the tag line directly beneath the title: “LIFE’S A STRUGGLE.”

You think you walk the razor’s edge? Try raising a clutch of gross little bird-babies in today’s world. The decrepit house in the background leads me to believe that the humans have already called it quits; in Bird Mother, mankind has finally been swallowed by its own brute decadence, and now avian parents everywhere have inherited the stark existential horror we left upon the last battlefield.

Her kids look like lead paint or fetal alcohol syndrome could have been a factor. Who can blame her for drinking when the black eagle and the vector-bolt stand as certain signs that her world is nothing but kindling for the fires of the void? One of the kids is trying to eat a bee, which seems like a poor idea, especially since it has launched itself beyond the threshold of the nest. The other two sing an idiot song to no one as their mother screeches in torment, oblivious to her children’s plight as she is bathed in the cold liquid of her own.

Gobbleman (ZX Spectrum)

Artic Computing, 1982

For some reason, this song seems entirely appropriate.

Question one: God forbid the very notion, but is this thing sentient? Sapient? It looks like a tipped over McDonald’s french fry container. It has no eyes whatsoever, but a gigantic and terrible mouth filled with chunky teeth.

Question two: In what city is this chaos tolerated? After dusk, Gobbleman fires up his… I guess his anti-grav thrusters, and rips across the urban landscape, devouring what I hope aren’t prescription painkillers or amphetamines. Gobbleman has the entire city at his mercy, he himself in turn being solidly in the grip of a tragic addiction. It’s made him mean.

Question three: How big is Gobbleman supposed to be? The scaling is hard to interpret, and I have a feeling that’s because there is none implied at all. My best guess is that Gobbleman is about the size of a subway car.

This is a future that seems familiar, but it is one that I will not miss.

Deathsville (Amstrad CPC)

Bubble Bus Software, 1986

“Oh, the castle? Nah, it’s not mine. More of a timeshare thing. Point of advice, kid, not that it matters since we all die anyway: don’t buy into a fuckin’ timeshare.”

If you leave the interstate at a certain point, trace the back roads through mortality and fog, and grab route 0 heading straight downward, you’ll find yourself in a cozy little rural backwater called Deathsville. Population skeletons.

The robed corpse meanders out of the cold mist, shaking its hands like they’ve got something unpleasant stuck to them (if Death weren’t OCD, he’d be a lot worse at his job, but the germophobia thing still runs him ragged sometimes). The creature shoots you a surprisingly calm look of polite confusion, its one eye glittering red like a laser tripwire.

“Are you… you the one who emailed me on Craigslist about the futon?” it croaks out in a dry whisper. You shake your head. You know nothing of superfluous collapsible couch-beds. You know only that you have met Death at home, and that Death actually seems like kind of a fucking slob.

The hooded skeleton lights a Pall Mall, struggling to block the wind through its fleshless hands. Two hours later, you’re in the local Waffle House, waiting for the Bubble Bus (which has never run on time, the irresponsible little bastard). Death hangs out. He keeps you company, though his company is often silent and passively heavy, like winter snow on a freshly dug grave. Turns out he’s a pretty cool guy, but even though you exchange numbers, you never text or call him after. It just seems, unspoken, to be a childish breach of decorum.

Bun Fun (BBC Micro)

Squirrel Software, 1983

This is lewd. Gigeresque, even. In the biomechanical landscape, there’s pelnty of room for confectionary frosting and hot poop.

While untold thousands across the world labor and ultimately die miserable in sweatshops every year, this young man is absolutely overjoyed to be the one hitting the Simon buttons that make the… unidentified but suggestive cream exude onto the passing buns. Not even the obvious and repellent sight of a steaming pile of turds on the conveyor belt could ruin the moment! Nor the fact that he is also covered in the “cream,” for better or worse. This dude just decides to make the best of it, and puts little heaps of shit on top of every bun. The young man’s decency and stability long ago eroded completely, and though his current occupation is clearly a fool’s errand, he has that same trait that binds all madmen, buffoons, and captains of industry together: pride of workmanship and a grossly distorted sense of greater purpose.

It was he who shat upon the conveyor, who dumped creamy cream all over his own head, and who slew the factory’s night watchman with a chair leg before firing up the machinery.

Puckman (VIC-20)

Mikro-Gen, 1981

Whatever is happening, it’s on a cosmic scale, and we are beneath Puckman’s notice.

I don’t know what the fuck Puckman is, nor what he is meant to resemble or represent. While he bears a passing resemblance to the simple reptiles of our world’s Carboniferous pre-human chaos, he’s not that. He’s not a thing, maybe not even a living thing. Those eyes are a crude and clumsy attempt to appear real, and the outer shapes of him are so vague and unformed that Puckman is more an idea than a being. He exists, or something like it, in the spaces between. Puckman was there when the world was formed, and he knows the sum of its eventual fate, and none of this evokes anything within him except the same stark certitude that has passed for his consciousness from day one: all space is finite, and all things existing within that space are edible.

My gut feeling is that the grid-like area to the left is just filler, a pattern, an abstract meant to imply occupied space. Puckman is chewing – nay, inhaling – the very reality of that space. The sound of his meal is that of vacuum silence; by way of quantum singularity, Puckman is digesting the very substance of time-space. The serrated plates of his turtle-like skull are merely a non-sequitur, for he needs to chew nothing.

Shit, I’ve got this all wrong. Maybe Puckman is laughing out a universe, his joy giving birth to the sublime poetry of matter and void. Maybe this is an unbridled act of primal creation. Once again heat death has been defeated, for the moment. Puckman has laid his threads upon the loom and stitched reality a little more breathing room in the inseam.

Either way, Puckman is impossibly gigantic and proves all human cultures completely wrong about God. And look at him. Just fucking look at him.

We’ve been thins way before, and we’ll probably come back here again. Every wise man and woman acknowledges that even chaos has patterns, cycles. It is the mind-stretching notion that governs the movement of bodies in the night sky, the labyrinthine vagaries of chance, and it’s the same reason I’ll probably see you back soon with another set of box art images and my own delusional ideas about them. Stay Retro!

Today we’ll tackle another notable game that’s long overdue for a NRW once-over. I’d been saving this one, because I’d really like to pluck heavily from 1987 this year, and Karnov is one of the most laughed-at yet loved games from the era. Karnov is a nested set of dichotomies; It’s nothing complex, yet a deeper look reveals it as far from simple. It’s a fairly silly game in some regards, but its solid gameplay and decent overall production value make it difficult to casually disregard.

Karnov was originally released in 1987 as an arcade game by Data East. I won’t wast a lot of time on the “fluff” because there isn’t much. Karnov (Jinborov Karnovski is his full name according to original Japanese material) is a strongman from The Soviet Union who has set off on a quest to find the ultimate treasure. I guess it’s good not to get bogged down in a bunch of lofty morality-play crap every time we want to shoot some fireballs or murder some dinosaurs. It’s nice to just have some buttons, a joystick, and an army of bizarre monsters begging you to slaughter them as you stomp your way to glory.

Pictured: Jinborov Karnovski, strongman/firebreather/adventurer/pimp, literally stomping his way directly to glory. Those gold bracelets ain’t gonna finance themselves.

Karnov’s main weapon as he treasure-hunts across a monster-filled wasteland is his ability to breathe fireballs. Despite being a strongman, who would likely consider using a baseball bat or even his massive fists, Karnov didn’t settle for being a one-trick pony. He learned how to breathe fire. No big deal. You wouldn’t get it anyway. You don’t even lift, bro. You don’t even look good in Zubaz like he does. Just leave this shit to Karnov.

“Your girl wish you look like this. Flex like Karnov. FLEX!” To be fair, all the non-digital art is incredibly flattering to Karnov. In-game you see that he’s taken to eating rich foods and drinking cheap beer, and has just really let himself go. The treasure is to hire a really good personal trainer because he knows he’s lost the willpower to fix it himself.

Anyway, inexplicably breathing fire isn’t the only trick Karnov has up his sleeve. As you move through the game world, our broad-shouldered buddy can pick up trick shoes, magic ladders, and even disposable pairs of wings. There are also power-ups that will improve your fire breath, and one even makes you crazy fast and super dangerous for a while. It doesn’t last long, but you’re basically a tubby little volcano god while it does. The more mundane tool-like power-ups go into an inventory below your field of view, and you can select and activate them from there. The only maddening part is that you select them using the same controls you use to move, so being precise with something like the ladder can be a tricky task until you get the hang of it. But then, who’s ever as precise as they’d like to be when they’re using a magic ladder? Shit, my insurance premiums are through the roof just from the last incident.

After minimal power-up seeking, you become the burly, land-based equivalent of an A-10 Warthog. Notice the birds at the top of the screen, understandably reluctant to swoop down and witness this science.

There aren’t a staggering array of baddies in Karnov, but what’s staggering about them is their sheer weirdness. My personal favorites are the fish dude who tosses shit at you out of his purse, the disturbingly undressed regular human dude who jumps down on you, the skeleton riding the ostrich, and the prominently featured dinosaur who ends up being an absolute bitch. If you’re fast and can keep from getting whacked (and losing the power-up that turns your fire breath into the equivalent of three hardworking artillery crews), then you’re probably in good shape. If not, your gaming experience with Karnov will probably be short. The game does two things that aren’t uncommon elsewhere in gaming, to keep things spicy: it recycles bosses later as regulars and it has no shame when it comes to using huge fuckoff crowds of monsters. You’ll also find that birds win their usual award as “most annoying enemy,” and they’re not the only thing that flies. Only the later bosses are super hard, but Karnov‘s daunting feel diminishes when you realize it’s kind of like a shoot-em-up game, except your fat little ship walks and jumps, and you’re able to move forward at your own pace.

A goofy punk-ass dinosaur braces itself to catch a lethal dose of a disease called “these hands.” Karnov’s current inventory contains some kind of bubblegum bottle, some fluffy Charmin wings, and a pretty princess’s party mask. He took one look at what he had in his pockets and knew he had to do this shit the Chicago way.

The arcade version’s graphics are pretty good, being standard for 1987 and comparable to most other similar titles released around the time. They take a huge hit on any of the console/computer ports, but that’s to be expected. The sound is minimal, and the music is comprised of only a few tracks. It’s not bad, though… there’s just not a lot there. Karnov is all about the game itself, and the dressing is served on the side.

The game was officially ported to the NES, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC machines. Karnov himself went on to star in a series of fighting games, one of which is titled Karnov’s Revenge. He also makes appearances in other Data East games, most notably in Bad Dudes vs. Dragonninja as the boss of the first level. He’s become something of a staple in that region of pop culture where video game stuff sticks well… just search on YouTube and elsewhere and you’ll see what I mean. Jinborov Karnovski may have started out as a weird but novel protagonist for an arcade game, but he’s found a place for himself.

Screenshots of the NES and ZX Spectrum versions. The C64 version looks remarkably similar to the ZX, and the Amstrad one looks horrible, so you can look that one up yourself and blame you, not me. Click to open either image in a new tab at full size.

Karnov gets a 7/10 from me, mostly because it’s just a solid platformer with some good style crossover. It’s not what one would expect at first glance, and while it’s a bit bland on its broad face, it delivers once you start playing it. Even the ports are decent fun, although the NES one rules the roost. The game and the character have ended up etched into the collective culture of retro gaming, and it’s not just because a chubby Russian fire-breathing weightlifter is a funny idea.

“Hello, ladies…”

Well, that wraps it up. More coming throughout February. If you’ve got a game you’d like to see covered in an article or video, don’t hesitate to drop me a line or stop by the Facebook page to chime in. Later, gamers!

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.