Classic Game Postmortem: Gauntlet

[Music] are we live yes we are live thank you everybody for coming I just want to remind everybody to turn check your spam filter when you get home for the evaluation to fill it out otherwise you will probably not be able to send any comments in I will try to leave about 20 minutes at the end for questions and answers in fact I'm going to speed through a lot of things here just so we do have time at the end so this presentation has got a lot of details in it and I'm not going to try to cover all of them in detail so I'm hoping that will inspire your questions all right by the way my title there is a joke there was some it was given to me by somebody else and I didn't care what my title was so I've always kept it just for your information I don't want to preface this by saying that I will try to give you a feel of the Arcadia industry because most you

were not around in the early 1980s to 85 to really know what it was like and I also want to preface this by saying it's been 26 years since I've worked on gauntlet so I've forgotten a lot of things and worst of that when I left Atari I left all my notes behind so I had a hard time trying to resurrect everything here so anything that I say is wrong or I omitted it's probably unintentional and just give you some feedback some history I joined Atari in February of 1978 and after getting in trouble with many of my employers for doing games and other things on the side they shouldn't have been doing but I won't go into all the stories now Atari was located in Sunnyvale right across from where I was working at control data before we moved to Milpitas a few years later and just for your information I listed some of the games I had done including super breakout asteroids centipede video pinball millipede gauntlet gauntlet ooh and steel talons

iPods et cetera I've also done VCS cartridges that wasn't on the side by the way my boss did not know about that when I released it in fact he caught me the day I was making a patch to the roms after they found a bug and he asked me what are you doing getting in trouble again anyway I left Atari in 1992 to go to EA the other evil empire I guess but I was there for about 18 months before I decided you know I went there to do consumer games and I didn't do any consumer games they wanted me to do coin op stuff before they finally just said coin up was not going to work I could have told them that but anyway after that I left to do consumer games as I intended and I included in 64 titles of Wayne Gretzky Sam Sisko rush rush to rush 20 49 which was also on the Dreamcast by the way and doctor meter which was on three different consoles and I was actually the last Atari engineer out the door and Milpitas when they shut us down

so unfortunately had to see it all come and go over the entire many years just give you some interesting information on the coin on mystery this is a really different industry that you're probably used to because you can do a game but and we actually put her on field test and if it doesn't get enough quarters it's as good as dead and its really it consider that is a pure test eager King there's no marketing hype no promotion no nothing and quite honestly I suspect about 60% of our games didn't even make it past field test and even those that did I would probably guess 10% of more probably hits and sufficient sales numbers to actually make it profitable and quite honestly some of mine did not succeed either in fact I even tried to I even killed a few and some I couldn't kill no matter what I tried to do marketing 100 just try this oh just try that doesn't help and I have this motto if you know what you see on your first

field test unless you're something really bad it's pretty much what you're gonna get but nobody never listened to me the industry is really different than consumer industry we sell to distributors and there's usually one or two per general area and the distributor's turn around sell to the operators people that actually the arcades or send the games around to their Street locations and the operators collect all the money and the distributors are there just to finance the operators to fix the games and provide whatever services we don't provide to the operators and for the record neither Atari nor I got any drop of the coin box so all those quarters put in thank you but I didn't get any of them so just think about that the industry had changed dramatically I joined in 78 because a hit game like super breakout was maybe 10,000 units and that was a really good game and then

by 1979 things like space invaders and asteroids came around space invaders I heard numbers like 300,000 I mean it was so bad in Japan there was a national shortage of the end because all the games were basically taken up can you imagine all the quarters in the u.s. being in video games and you couldn't get quarters to do your laundry that's how bad it was in 1981 there was centipede again about 65,000 units asteroids makers about 70,000 pacman and miss pac-man probably sold in the 90 to 100 thousand units each and then 1983 came along and the Atari consumer collapsed and I won't go into the details of that but it did affect the coin op industry we were like three buildings and they were out of 34 at Atari so that shows you the difference between the coin op industry versus the consumer industry at Atari but because of that in 1984 Atari was splitting it to two companies Atari Inc and Atari

games so people have become oh yes I played Ataris they're talking about a VCS I had nothing to do with this folks I'm not even in the same company or the Atari 800 or the ST or whatever but we actually had our first layoffs in 1984 because our industry really hit the skids and what happened here was that basically we oversaturated the market we sold games to every arcade operators you know put games into doctors and dentists office simply because they could and then you know everybody they were games everywhere and there was no place to put new games so we actually the market really collapsed in 84 for us and we had our first layoffs and because of the layoffs and everything else tri was actually sold or 51% of it was sold in an Co in 1985 now in 1978 most of business was our Cades we had Street locations but by 1983 the street

locations were really the majority of the sales you could probably sell 20,000 maybe to an arcade but the rest of it the extra 70 80,000 had to go to street locations and the street locations by 1985 basically you didn't sell anything into him it was all used games and the reason for that is the straight operators actually split the earnings from the game with the location so if you're in 100 dollars a week operator to get 50 and I owned the location we get 50 bucks so it was very hard to get a return on investment for a game that you probably paid $2,500 for just do the math it takes a long time to get return on investment with that a lot of people have asked me how to you know some of these game ideas come about and you know primarily three reason the three ways we had brainstorming sessions you know once a year where we got together and just talked about whatever ideas we could come up with and generally I did not

find them very useful but one game did come out of that I was had a new hire and I wanted to give her a project and so I picked a game called bug shooter and turned into centipede but that's one of the only game ideas ever got out of the brainstorming session managers also had ideas that convey and say you know I had this idea for a game and that's how asteroids came about whose law reigns can be I get this idea for a game and a lot of times we come up with their own ideas and that's how gauntlet came about I'm gonna explain a little bit later where the ideas came about but you know zaibatsu for example it was a game that I was thinking about doom and I said you know we don't have bitmap hardware but I I can do a first-person shooter like that using just stamps and so that's house I bots came in I was just to proof my self I could do a game like that using stamp Hardware so that some idea where the games came from now about gauntlet you know my son had been playing DD for a

long time and he wanted me to do a D&D game for life of me I couldn't figure out how to do it so yeah I've been thinking about it for a year and for how good I do a D&D game and then I played dandy on the Atari 800 and sort of you know the bills went off and said ah I know how I can do it so we actually started a design in September 30th of 1983 so this is when Robin Ziegler and I actually did it design for gauntlet and for those who who absolutely a dandy this is what dandy looked like the players you had up to four players and usually the numbers one two three and four and you'll see on the screen in there it's a one player game and one is sitting right in the middle the nice thing about their the great idea I got out of this game was the monster generators and I thought that was really interesting it had keys and doors and treasure which would happen with any D&D game anyway here was actually the first game design document that we did I won't

pull it out it's actually quite large it has very interesting pictures of all the play fields you know standard D&D pieces that are kids who's used together and build play fields but the thing that important thing to look at this was the date on that we actually did a design in about a couple months later we actually had a marketing review and they sort of said yeah yeah go ahead do what I would do it this was our first proof that we could do characters and this was actually dated January of 1984 just prior to that review this particular that's it was in color but I no longer had access to the original artwork I this was a Xerox copy of a Xerox copy that I had done long ago but it was just our first proof of concept so you can see already what the characters looked like back in basically 83 in early 84 these in particular ones were medium res

and I'll get into that more later because the game was actually a not a medium race game at all one thing you do realize when you look this over is the names of the games changed so if I refer to the Hulk sometime in here it's really the warrior or the same with valkyr II it was the end in the Amazon so I'll probably intertwine those two in the game and I can't tell you why the names changed I can't even for the life of me think why it changed but somehow somewhere along line did they did change now coin up industry itself in 1985 was in a tough boat because everything was 25 cents per play now you expected to play ninety two two minutes three minutes at tops but there was extremely large resistances you put a game out of 50 cent play man that was a kiss of death that would kill a game so fast and the dollar coin of course had been tried and that had failed miserably everybody had

hoped that fell the coin had induce multiple plays and it would work but it did not work so the question came out of how do you get extra earnings out of a game because as a game Hardware got more expensive you need to make more money etc etc so how are we gonna do this well here this game came along and sort of you know Eureka everything works not only that I can get four players to play at the same time so basically they're playing for a dollar for two minutes now that's four times better than any other game out there except games like ripoff and stuff where you get two player simultaneous but this is really revolutional idea that sort of hit hit home for me and there are some other really good parts of it too because players can come and go at any time so you're basically always planning for players playing you don't have this you know one player and then few P was players die off and then you have to wait for everybody die off before you join in that's no longer necessary and there was no dead time at the start of

the game which you usually bring out the game very slowly it sort of saying this is how to do this this is how to do that you don't have to do that anymore people can stop right in and you know if you don't know by now then you'll die soon enough or everybody I'll tell you how to do it misters usually what happens and what really fat was interesting in this game players put in more than one coin at a time and that was really unusual for the time now we had a lot of problems with design issues up front partly because of the differences of opinion between myself and Robin Ziegler we went through of course the horizontal vertical monitor which way do you want to do it and there were a lot of reasons and I won't go into them all the details here whether we should do interlaced video or non interlaced video everything at this point was non interlaced video I have a real problem there analyze video when you're standing this close to a monitor cuz that the flicker just drives me nuts so I really did not want to do

interlaced video but it would make things a little better medium res was coming into vogue at the time and there was really a large push to do it but operators are really sensitive to money and did add a medium where his game your any about $300 to the hardware plus another well at least $300 to the hardware and an additional roms and stuff like that also at this time they were just coming into twenty five inch monitors we was 19 inch was standard and 25 inch monitors 100 bucks and the reliability was yeah and not there yet so all the way through the project right up into the first field test it was supposed to be a 25 inch monitor but the game actually shipped with a 19 inch we had other things coming along like the personal memory device marketing was saying here we want to sell these to every player they can get the customization they can plug it into the game and I took one look at that say no way man first time bubblegum stick it in the

hole PMD is deader than hell besides who's gonna pay 10 bucks for something that not every game in the world has because unless everybody has it there's nobody's gonna do it so that one died and I actually had a large fight with my boss over that because he really wanted to push it now in those days I'd been doing 6502 programming all the way up to late 1984 so this was my first time I'd actually done C programming using a processor other than a 6502 it wasn't new to Atari but it was new to me and we were using a VAX mainframe to do all our compile compiles in our X terminals or a vt100 s for our terminals at that point and that was actually new to me too the strange thing was you know people say oh I got this eight megahertz processor and that's so much better than my one mega 6502 no it's not it's eight

cycles per instruction buddy on a sixty eight or ten so it's basically the same speed as a 65 or two so all you gots bigger registers you don't really have anything much better so this is where I gave with the old megahertz you know syndrome oh I got more megahertz nope sixty-five twos one cycle for a lot of instructions guy like still run circles around if you do stew 8-bit or math there was also we use the Greenhills compiler at that time and I don't think for this project but later on actually wrote a post pot compiler that would take the Greenhills output and basically delete about 20% of the instructions because we were always ran at 60 Hertz and if we didn't run at 60 Hertz boy you know your reputation was shot so we wanted to get everything we could out of it and really a 1 megahertz processor is not a not a lot of horsepower when you want to do things at 60 Hertz basically gives you 16 milliseconds to do everything now godlet was had a lot of

motion objects so I didn't want to spend a lot of time basically moving things around but standard resolution games at that time were 320 by 240 pixels that's not a lot compared to which probably used to now we'd actually graduated up to 56 motion objects that's 56 objects total so if it wasn't on your scanline still counted buddy even though it wasn't being drawn could only draw 56 our alpha we actually had three layers of graphics we had the alpha numerics on top we had a play field on the bottom and sprites that could run in between so those are our sprites or motion objects in between so those are how we did everything in our game up to that time and even for a long time thereafter and all our color was using color palettes we no longer had we did not have a 16-bit or 32-bit color space it was all color palettes well the Syst was too far

system one board was the board of choice about 1984 it was a new system they were putting together and it had 6502 it was running about twice the speed of got with the gauntlet finally showed up with standard resolution the 56 motion obvious same alphanumeric play field scrolling play field color palettes that I just mentioned and everything else it had an extensive audio system that far beyond what I'd been used to before had a separate processor to run it and you had a FM synthesis we had a pokey chip which was the same chip they used the audio for the Atari 800 400 if you're familiar with that and it was primarily there not only for sound effects but it was for security because anybody wanted to copy our game they had to go find our custom chip and so often what they do is they go and get by an 800 tear it apart just pull out the chip just to copy our board that showed you how desperate they were and we actually had a speech chip

for the first time so this is the very first time that I actually had a speech chip and this is again as I said by far the most elaborate hardware that we had again we get the gauntlet Hardware it's pretty much the same but I had to have I wanted to do a thousand motion objects so we added two I wanted to do add a lot more to it which meant we needed to add a lot to the hardware board to give you some idea I'll get into the more of this later the design hardware was huge the system one board is a 18 inch by 18 inch motherboard with a 10 by 18 inch cartridge board where you put all your eeproms and game specific stuff and so it was gonna be huge but our final board actually came out considerably smaller and I'll explain why but this is a system one board so it's about 28 that's almost 28 by 20 inches and we need to

expand that and we needed to actually mount it on the inside of a cabinet which was going to be a real trick we didn't know how to do that but this is the final gauntlet board it's less than 21 inches long and about 11 and a half inches tall and as you see it's completely packed and the way we did that is he went to a four layer board and this is the first time the target even considered it I got a lot of flack for suggesting it because the price for a blank PC board was almost twice what a two layer board was but we didn't have any other way there were other problems to our CAD system couldn't lay it out I mean you were trying to put two traces between pins down and I seen it's like we don't have software to do that so they eventually had to resolve that we also had our manufacturing facility had Auto insertion tools and the insertion wouldn't work in some places on the board cuz we actually had to get smaller

resistors and things to actually fit so there were a lot of manufacturing problems with this too but once we resolved those all our boards after gauntlet were done as for layer boards so we sort of pioneered that as far as manufacturing goes as I mentioned we started this in 1983 but the game didn't actually come out until like October of 1985 so of course what happened well there were layoffs and we lost Robin Ziegler my hardware engineer was supposed to do my hardware got stuck on Temple of Doom and for all of 84 basically they had no hardware engineer and then they asked me to do a game and between of course I couldn't do gauntlet so I ended up doing Road Runner as a video disc game but come late 84 they said well after a mini field test by the way it was not bad enough to kill it not good enough to ship it they said we want you to convert it to system 1 and I said no way get somebody else to do that I have another game in mind and so that's

when I went and started work on gauntlet so if you see the roadrunner just visited this game that's a real rare thing there's probably somebody with a copy of the disc it actually had real Chuck Jones cartoons by the way so in February of 1985 we actually started gauntlet again at that point Pat McCarthy was the engineer and he actually started designing the board and Bob Flanagan joined me as the other software engineer and I took over as project leader from Chris down'n in March of 85 so here's the development team so you'll notice is about two programmers like at four artists for five artists one engineer one technician part-time and I had three audio of people working on the game also part-time so this would be a fairly large project for coin up at that time and as you mentioned the so I may have

mentioned the game or if you've noticed on that first slide I showed you the game name actually has changed quite a bit it was originally called dungeons and if you actually go and look at the source code you'll find it's in a folder called DND and unfortunately in April of 85 we did the name search and lawyers came back and said can't use dungeons so for a few weeks I merely pulled out game ideas but I don't remember who suggested gauntlet but that was finally decided on May of night of 85 and I don't have the lists of the game names that we actually looked at at that time but golly really stuck out to me because you can run the gauntlet etcetera etcetera so it seemed like a really good choice of game since pretty much that's what the gameplay was you're doing the whole times running the gauntlet of course marketing had their problems I always have fun dealing with marketing first thing things come up and say can you get four players to play together I said sure no problem of course you

never sure but you know it certainly worked for the engineers and so I don't see why not they had other problems too you know if they said well you know finally wondered one or two players play if there was you know if you don't have enough for four you know they come up lots of things to worry about one thing did to worry about was quite legit was we have coin mechs and claim xgm often they're often problematic and I have we actually stuck to coin doors on the game to have four coin mechs one per player because that was the only way we could figure out it too equitably distribute the coins cuz we talked about you know inserting coins and then deciding who gets the coins and it's like no let's keep it simple you stick it in your coin slot it's yours if your coin slots broken while you play a three player game but it took me a long time to get that through now the actual game itself is actually laid out in a thousand 1024 by 1024 pixel world and

that's actually the size of the scrolling play field that's the RAM for underneath so the scrolling registers who we had to I could scroll through that whole universe and actually I could even wrap around so I could you could see part of the top and the bottom and left and right and so on the game was set up so that I would force the players that they couldn't walk off screen and that's for obvious reasons you walk up screen you're going to get lost and you can't get back on and that's not fair to the player so I'd always stopped the players at the edge of the screen and I'd always make sure the scrolling was such that you'd try to be as fair as possible depending where the players are so if one guy wants to run off then you know he Scrolls everybody over and everybody says no no no stop screwing with this come over here so it's part of the competitive cooperative aspect of the game the collision algorithm is rather problematic again I couldn't do collision on a thousand objects moving basically I only moved the objects that

were visible on that were visible that everybody could see I do not move magics that were off the screen but I didn't have the compute power to do all those at sixty Hertz so I came up with this elaborate and not so elaborate this simple method to break the world into sixteen by sixteen grids now all the characters are really 24 by 24 pixels large so there's always some overlap so shoulders overlapping or weapons overlapping that's fine but basically it's a 16 by 16 grid and everybody belongs to one of the grids so that if you want to move you only need to check lest you want to move right or diagonally upper upper right you only need to check a couple neighbors you'd only need to worry about a few things the the walls were also part of the object - so you part of the grid so that you could check against walls as well I also had a method in there for sliding so if you wanted to move you know diagonal left but there was something in

the way you would just turn around and it would sexually slide up there so whether it's a wall or another player you'll see everything slide in that direction shots were a little different and yeah you can check with that but once object moved you no more than eight or so pixels you to reassign it to the you know off the center of the grid you'd sign it to the next grid if it were available now if we're not available then I you wouldn't move so every now and then you see gaps where things do this and that's the reason for that there are times in the game where shots could actually go through diagonals slots in the wall now some tracks are wider than others so you couldn't shoot through them so that was quite intentional and I made it such that differentiate the players that way the real problem with the hardware was the fact that I only had 56 motion objects API display per line so need to

figure out how to make sure I got the right 56 and the the idea was to come up with we call starting link pointers and so here was for every eight scan lines I had a pointer that say here's the first object I want you to look at and every all the objects were linked together and it was through this grid process that I'd link everything together we also did something very different with this particular hardware and I don't go ahead and mention it now because as I mentioned earlier from motion object was not visible or portion was not visible it still counted as a motion I would draw and I wanted to better that and the engineer came with an idea to sort of do a look ahead look and say that objects a little low he's not being drawn counted as a half cycle go to the next object so you could actually do more than 56 motion objects per scanline using that method and that was one of the the nice features of gauntlet because if you've ever seen her ever now and you'll see things twinkle when there's full of

ghosts or something on the screen and that's the reason why this is I can't display more than 56 but there are times when it does happen and so the starting link pointer in this grid collision grid are all totally linked so I had exactly the objects that would be visible and that set of things for that particular set of eight scan lines and also the slips were linked to the scrolling play field so if I scroll to play fill up and down you know they'd be tied to the real play field normal starting link pointers you'd have to redo this every scan lines link pointers and I did not have to do that Gollum so saving it seemed very easy to do and hard reduced out of the scroll counter to the position but for for the processor side you know it was a real saving for me now enemy movement was kind of very simplistic basically walked to the closest player next to him

and that was for a lot of strategic reasons they wanted some guy to act as a decoy so everybody comes to him well he got wriggles around shoots them and that I think came from dandy and I would thought that was very very nice nice aspect of the game allows for very cooperative play now controls I thought were fairly simple and I don't know where I came up with these of where they came from dandy or if they came from some other game but basically you either move or you can shoot and since I did not want to do a robotronic controls really sticks I want to keep it real simple you if you're shooting you don't move so you can use the joystick to tell you where you're shooting otherwise you take the hand off the shot button you can move away so you either stand and shoot or good to move it's a nice strategic choice because you have to decide to do one or the other and there were certainly reasons for doing so and of course magic was the extra button which was sort of the super zapper as it were if you're familiar with Tempest

we did have a maze editor to deal with all of this stuff and all of the levels were created and I went on a six-week sabbatical right after the first field test Chari had this wonderful plan for sabbatical so I took six weeks off and took off to Alaska where I couldn't be reached so Bob Flanagan took over and dealt with the field tests and as well as getting all these levels together and we actually had a hundred levels built up and I actually had to compress the levels because I didn't have all the extra roms it was very simple algorithm but there was somebody who called himself the orange elf at one point who sent me a bunch of brand new compressed levels so he'd actually disassembled the code figure out the algorithm built his own levels and reprogrammed the eeproms and had his own gauntlet game with his own set of levels it's kind of that that was kind of interesting one of the marketing problems that they had was

that there's no end to this game and I were seeing well you know what are you gonna do just say well I'm not gonna kill their quarters this guy may have put five ten bucks in I'm not gonna sign sorry thank you that's gonna really piss a few people off so I had a real problem do you tell him marketing it well this is the way it's going to be there was an interesting way to recycle levels at first eight first seven levels were just a teaching novel to get you through and after eight and levels and Beyond they were what appeared to be random they were not random I had a prime number of levels I picked some arbitrary starting the level I picked some arbitrary number of random number between that and the number of levels remaining and I increment the level number by that number and that guarantees your you can play all the levels now when you get through them all what I do is start doing then is start horizontal flipping vertical flipping and so they don't like quite look the same it looks similar but not quite the same so it was a good way of doing that there were high scores in this game and

I do not remember how they worked where there was coin because I remember we had large discussions of well people are just going to buy their way under the high score table putting more coins in and doing this and I thought I did it as per you know per coin basis but I don't remember so somebody will certainly correct me I'm sure at some point I don't remember who suggested the dungeon master but I wish I knew I don't even have a list of all the phrases we had together at one point either but I do know roll Vickers actually contracted Ernie's to do all the voice for us now he's apparently well known he's done hardware wars and a bunch of other titles I don't know of them but a lot of people oh yeah yeah I know him he did a lot of stuff but he actually did the voices on gauntlet just for your information we have a security problem and coin up because you publish a game the first time it earns a lot of money people come in and say I'll turn around sell them

for half the price and just copy the board as is and unfortunately that happened they did that on gauntlet even despite our security purposes as I mentioned early they went out and ripped off old 400s and eight hardens and pull out the pokey chip found a way around our slap chick which is our security chip and it's just unfortunate now for your information I've been called into a lot of cases where we actually went and tried to sue these people and it was very interesting story I'm in centipede for example I went to looked at the experts a deposition on some game it was copied of centipede and the guy said well basically the art looked different their effort it's a different game and I dumped the roms for their game in my game and except for a few places the game roms are identical he just changed the art roms I don't even know if he even changed the Atari logo in the bio he probably did probably changed copyright Atari on the bottom of the screen that was in text so that's probably all he did to the game

so I would have loved to gone into court and talk to this guy and a lot of times in the past we'd actually done software security and if you remember tempest there's some something got through that should not have so if you play those get to a certain score it'll give you 20 free credits and that's our software security so it got broken it got shipped with it as I mentioned already we have problems with 19 25 inch monitors there's a real problem of the game because operators had never seen a game before they didn't have an attract Lex or a Plexiglas in front of the monitor and I wrong now what are we gonna do and it's like basically I told him I didn't want it because there was always glare if we can put a track Plex down it was always glare and if you got something that's blocking your corner your player is it's just not fun so I really had to force them not to put in a track Plex and actually operators Leno what later came and said we still want long so we actually sold him a kit with eight screws a piece of plexiglass to sit here go ahead and do it so if

someone did apparently there were actually five patents issued by gauntlet and some of them doing with the cooperative multiplayer cooperative play some with the collision algorithm some with the slips and also with the look ahead dealing with the motion object circuit I won't go into any detail I see I'm running out of time right now we often do focus groups and I really find them almost worthless the first thing the only thing I really take out a focus group is when they ask the gate compare this to your favorite game I look at that or the other thing I look at is if they come in in there oh let me see this okay that's good rest of it I can throw away now here's a sample example as I pull off a focus group the first one here is for asteroids who didn't even spell my name right the game name right shows you what they know and they actually raided asteroids less than lunar lander and excuse me but the same

is doing around ER but less than starship I don't even remember starship that shows you where they're going and the results actually came back positive on gauntlet I could have told him that but the one thing that did come out of the focus group is they want something because I I don't think I had the first seven levels in to teach them how all the different things work and so that was the one thing that came out of the focus group for gauntlet I think it's about the only thing that I got out of gauntlet player survey is something we have never done or hardly ever done for games and we actually went out on our first test and we asked the players what do you think of this game and basically and I'll quote this this exists is actually a quote from the response was from the marketing says the player ratings were almost as high as possible so and even players admitted putting up 250 dollars in the game at one session I don't believe that I still don't believe that but it just yeah it was not worth

anything to me but it was interesting I guess he was reassuring the marketing more than anything else field tests are as mentioned are really different now the way they work is we have an agreement with the operator that says you keep our game secret don't tell anybody we get the earn you know you can keep all the earnings but tell us how much the game earned and how much everybody every other game in your arcade earn so we have some idea and I put gauntlet out in June of 85 I went out a few days later to check on it I walk in and here's David Rosen talking to some other executive at Sega and three Japanese engineers photographing the game oops so I this is the only game I've ever pulled from a field test just for security reasons so I had to pull it and so we didn't do any business with that arcade afterwards but there was so much buzz in the industry normal field tests usually steal earnings from other games

in the arcade that did not happen with gauntlet and I'll show you that in a minute but some of the other numbers up here if you were remember me talking earlier in the flash-forward saying this is one of the highest rating games I'd ever seen and I still think that's true but there was we had a field test in San Mateo they had 15 $15,000 in 16 weeks and these guys you know paid about $3,000 for the game so it's pretty good ROI there was actually one arc one guy came up to me in the a MOA and October of 85 and so shake your hand my game made $3500 the first week I was like holy crap I started doing that that means there's four players in game 24 hours a day it's like oh my god you know two minutes per quarter I couldn't believe it I still don't believe it to this day either here's a typical field test report that we get if you notice on

the right hand side this is art this is our primary our test arcade by the way this is the game that we arcade that we almost always put our field test units on if you notice and late September the game was running $4,500 arcade whole arcade was making $4,500 that week when after got was putting in and made fifty seven hundred dollars so it jumped up by twelve hundred dollars and if you like a gauntly was eleven hundred thirty six dollars the first week if you look at the closest game next to it it was like was 186 dollars so that was a typical arcade game earned in those days in 85 now again I said you've probably paid twenty five hundred to three thousand dollars for a game we have very interesting things I know I'm running out of time here so I'm sorry but these are really interesting things we actually have to test our games for FCC regulations we haven't we had an anechoic chamber this is not a picture of ours by the way with a round table in the middle of it so you put a game there and just rotate it but it was really

interesting to go in there you know shut the door you saw no light it was pitch black you stand there for a few seconds may or a few seconds actually and you start hearing sounds like molecules hitting your ear and your heartbeat you can hear your heartbeat it's you know a lot of people really get freaked out but I was really cool but it was really interesting because we have four layer boards our board was pretty quiet because normally have two layer boards every trace on that boards are basically an antenna so if you're sending in a signal down you got this nice broadcast everywhere but a four layer board you have this power and ground planes in which she holding it so it actually came fairly quiet and so that's why everybody went to four layer boards but this gives you some information on the pricing because normally what we do is we or most of our games are like 1995 around that time but there was a big you know all operate distributors came sister oh no no so give it to us at 2000 bucks we'll sell five times as many I didn't believe them for a minute but our final price point was twenty-two ninety-five to the Opera

to the distributors in the US now when it went out of course every operator in the world wanted to have one right away and we only built a hundred a day so the distributors were asking premium so they were I'm sure they were getting big bucks from some operators to get the first few games and that's what I heard anyway I don't know what they actually operators paid for it we did ship games and early October as I said we actually shipped games to Japan and 85 as well and these are our domestic numbers and I look back at him now and look at the earnings and saying god that game should have sold a lot more I still don't know why it's didn't sell more and maybe the handwriting was on the wall and I just didn't want to see it but I point out history was definitely in decline at that point and this gives you some comparison to what some of the other games were selling Temple of Doom we had about 2800 units super sprint 20 250 units that was a medium rise I believe so the prices were a little higher on that and I can go

into the rest of it but we did two different languages for this but I've run out of time so at this point I'd like to open it up for questions and I'd like everybody because this session is being recorded to come to the microphones so that everybody can hear your questions you need ideas I can give you plenty far away go ahead yeah there was at some point somebody figured out how to live forever in gauntlet 1 there was a trick you can pull off and like level 8 and then they release several patches patches to kind of reduce the ability to playing forever were you involved in any of that do you remember anything about oh yes I remember that very well no I I had done asteroids so and I won't go into the lower Kings story but I got for you know leaving a version out of a it could

play forever and I found people that could play forever and centipede practically - so you think I'd learned but I didn't yes there was a it was firstly reported in Japan seriously because Japan has a different culture so when one person come up with playing the game and you asked you just walk up drop your coins into play in Japan they could walk up and say yeah me I join you and the guy says no people don't take offense so the guy would play it as a single-player game and he could play forever and he found that if he could played the Hulk or the wizard you could play forever and yes I did create a patch for it by reducing the amount of food for one player and two player games from three and four I kept all the food out there and I eventually dropped the amount of food as the game went on it the guys kept playing and playing and playing you know I'd still start dropping food yes I released the roms but I can't tell you how effective it was or how many people actually got it but I can tell you four asteroids when I released the fix for asteroids are pers put it in immediately took it back out they never used it because they found

out that people couldn't play forever and I couldn't lurk they wouldn't play the game so it's actually incentive for yes oh yes I actually had a question about the effort you put into security to your games and you also mentioned that you've been an expert witness in copyright lawsuits and things like that it's a big challenge for our industry how to deal with that and as a programmer I work with programmers that have to spend so much of their time worrying about patents worrying about you know how to make sure that they're protected and I just wondered if you had any perspective on the current industry as a patent owner and as a programmer well I have mixed feelings about patents you know I can see why they're necessary and you know I think the companies have certainly gotten over bored with them because everybody's creating patents now it's base become a corporate strategy to get patents and sue everybody and I you know really hurts comp you know it really hurts the industry in the long

run I don't like it you know gives the power to the big companies and I don't like that either but you know I see why it's necessary and I don't have a good solution for it copying is a different matter because people will copy stuff leave your name in it they don't you know leave your leave your copyright message they don't care as long as they get the sales for it and that you know that's something really different and that you know I really object to so I'm not sure I answered your question and yes I spend a lot of time dealing with this stuff and there's really no good solution you know I did things for example on dreamcast for rush 20 49 that I could actually tell when people ripped off the cartridge or tripped off the CD and when you played actually you'd go to the sega website and play it i actually recorded the people that had ripped that CD off so I would have actually I could have known who they were

unfortunately the software for the guys who didn't ripped it off my co programmer disabled it to test something and didn't really leave when he when he checked in his codes so it shipped without it otherwise I could have detected everybody who played the game and had a ripped off CD for rush 24 rush 20 49 in the Dreamcast thank you yes yeah I was just wondering if you had any interesting anecdotes about developing centipede something something we'd never heard before or a tidbit thanks oops the antidote about centipede oh man I don't really have many but you know I'll give you one example you can usually tell when you have a hit in engineering when you know five or six o'clock rolls around and people come up say are you going home soon read into it that I'd like to play your game get lost so and that happened at

certainly two asteroids centipede you know and gauntlet but really to the other games that just did so so yes um first of all I just wanted to thank you for making I think one of the greatest games of all time I mean really I I just want to tell you I remember being an 11 year old kid you know my parents had taken me on a trip to Switzerland and I'd seen this gauntlet game it was magical and my parents could not understand why their son didn't want to go skiing or go outside but kept going back indoors to this pizza shop and it's because of you so but my question is um I remember ports for the Commodore 64 I think there was an apple port can you speak a little bit to you know your involvement in porting across various systems alright this slide says that I had nothing to do with consumer versions and some of that is intentional I think by

the other team because I'm a very stickler for details and I give them about anything that's wrong and early on in Atari days you know I would see like an asteroids you know they'd ship asteroids and I go look I said holy crap they ruined my game I'm gonna do this and so you know I gave him and eventually we got to actually review stuff but no I did not have him do a lot of consumer stuff yes how large was the game how much space did it take up what was your audio compression like and so on just a second I have this cheat sheet I have the memory map for garlic eproms Oh at-at 512 byte EEPROM it was non-volatile that was for the operating system I think let's see oh man 176 K

were Wow 32 K bytes for the OS and 16k bytes for slapstick that can't be the program ROM it wasn't that big so I'd have to say I don't know without actually getting in and trying to figure that out I could probably look you know I can probably go up and you know look at the picture well count the eeproms I don't remember they're 27 128 or 256 --is so I can't tell you but I'd look at that picture you know go to the archive and start counting problems and I don't know if there are 250 you know 27 256 or not so it might be about a megabyte well you know some of those are graphics so you know the motion object playfield alphanumeric so there's play field graphics there's also more motion update

graphics there's alphanumeric graph as soon as a program wrong and so oh boy I guess somebody told me I need to I got six minutes okay but basically that if not all of it is program ROM there so I can't tell you how much is the program I'd have to go back and actually take a look at the schematic which I actually do have here and try to figure it out so at this point I'm about to say I'm sorry I don't know yes two questions less than 10% of your games really were successful how many did you make and two why did so many units go to Ireland how I'm sorry what was the second question how come why you said the 7,500 units around worship to the States and there were like 20 there we go he said 7850 units are sent to the u.s. 1,500 kits mostly for Japan in 2251 to Ireland Ireland I can't tell you if

though all those you know we should ship to Europe so we do have games sold to Europe and I cannot tell you those Ireland game she got shipped to the US I cannot also tell you if the games were built in Ireland because our Milpitas Factory was maxed out at a hundred games and we needed another 50 or 100 you know 25 or whatever and I to be shipped back to the East Coast simply to get all the orders in and I can tell you that the initial US released was to 10,000 and I think Ireland was supposed to be 500 to a thousand but if you add the two numbers together it doesn't look like you know they did try to ramp both of them up just to get all the production in how many games did I do I think I did twelve coin-op games in my years from 78 to 92 or so how many of those who were really hits I'd say three of them were really monster hits would be asteroid centipede and gauntlet all the others were you know good for the time some of them or

so so didn't do as well as I'd like yes so thanks forgot what so gauntlet to my knowledge is one of the first if not the first digital game to have differentiated gameplay in which the multiple players couldn't do all of the same things can you speak about both the process by which who determined what the balance would be between the four different classes and separately do you have any data as to which classes were played more or less because not every game had four players at all times yeah I'll answer the second question I I thought the Hulk and the wizard were the most powerful characters but other people said that the elf can also be used to play the whole thing no one and I cannot tell you I have not seen

anybody do with the elf but I've seen people do the Hulk and the wizard and play for as long as they need to as far as the balance goes I can tell you the Valkyrie was supposed to be an equal balance I know the wizard was supposed to be all magic and basically took lots of damage if he got hit so he was supposed to be the guy in reserve you know who sort of hung in the back and the elf was the greedy bastard who run around grabbed all the food and treasure yeah so if you wanted a high score you grab the elf and the Hulk was you know could sit there and take the damage and he was a guy he shoved out in front to take care of all this stuff so that was pretty much how the four characters came about I cannot tell you why I picked those particular for others but I did balance tried to balance it as such from that and I'd like to preface it somewhat else that you can thank me all you want for these games but guys I was doing this because I I like doing games I was doing this for me too and

there was another reason too and I don't didn't get to that slide that is Atari had the bonus program and this is something that unfortunately I wish all companies had done so what they did is actually rewarded us for games that actually sold and made profit for the company so we actually have a piece of the profits and the company actually distributed it to the team and they actually allowed the team to distribute which people got what so first students that are claiming wait a minute hold one sec do we have time for more questions okay excellent good way for students that are trying to come into this industry what do you think is the biggest takeaway or the most important thing that they shall learn from the early era the Golden Age of arcade and early video games oops there it is I ran off the screen how do you do that so PowerPoint has a

wraparound screen of death well anyway I'm not sure I can answer the question because the industry has certainly changed a lot since 78 days because we had a lot of phrases sort of covered up the summary you know people would say you could play the game with one beer in your hand you know that kind of stuff for you know easy the easy to learn hard to master you know that was the classic one and for me it was a you know what you wanted to do is create a game where people walked up looked at it and said I know what to do you don't have to read the rules figured you know give them instructions out and for arcade game that's absolutely necessary because there is no instruction booklet folk there's no manual it says here's a help men you'll read it off you just put it up put your quarter in if you didn't figure it out and you couldn't didn't think you could figure it out you just walked away but most using all great games people would walk up take one look and say I know what to do it's a shooter

whack the out anything that moves or that so it works and and if you didn't get that initial thing then you know you really didn't get their money it didn't get their interested so you couldn't get their money of it the other part of it was you got to made it sure that it had strategic my games I always want to make sure that it appeared to be lots of strategies whether it's asteroid centipede or got there would be many different things like how can I do this should I you know do this or should I do that and so you want to put in coins to try different strategies find out ones that work and those are the tamiya have the great games that have different strategies so I hope I answered their question that one yes all right thanks for the the great talk and the great game can you say a little bit about the the process of designing the game and then because you know we test all the time and I don't know if you were able to even do that back then like how often did you play the game to

see how it worked and change it and test it or did you just make a whole design document and then go from there what was it like well let me give you a little story when I my first game in Atari was super breakout and I remember going home falling asleep at night and playing progressive breakout in my sleep so yes I played the game a lot and I remarried oh yeah it's like oh god damn I died and after a few years of this I no longer played the games in my sleep but yes we did play a lot of the games a lot of times it's you know testing this particular feature that I snuck into work you know let's making sure I didn't break anything and yes we do have play it in the lab just before we send it out in the field test and by the way yes we still had bugs and in coin up games you basically that's sorry that's it you chipped it's got the bugs it's too late and that's the way it is one more

question I'm sorry far away you mentioned that you believe that the Hulk and the wizard were the most powerful classes I did you ever consider or wish you had considered nerfing them I'm sorry doing what with it nerf I didn't hear the question so I didn't know what the joke was I did you consider like making the Hulk in the wizard weaker you know I don't have any regrets over that you know it's okay to have different characters to do things especially on gauntlet to where you could pick whatever character you wanted to be in any position and that was one of the great parts about gauntlet 2 and I wish I had done that and call it is to let you pick your character okay so thank you very much folks I appreciate it