Here we are, the first textmode video game art showcase at the new blog location, the interitor of awhoopinggreatbiglonglegacyofsheerexcellencefromyesteryear. And to help make the occasion a little more special, I've decided to explore a new angle: we've seen a great deal of the old PC textmode standards of ANSI and ASCII in great abundance... well, here's Commodore's version, PETSCII, originating on the 1977 PET and being used on Commodore's machines through the VIC-20, C64 and so forth all the way up to the C128! PETSCII (or PET ASCII) is adapted from a 1963 version of the ASCII standard, while the version used on the PC dates to 1967, so there are problems converting text data (especially mixed-case text) back and forth. Fun trivia: one of the designers of the PETSCII character set was the son of Commodore CEO Jack Tramiel, and one oddball stipulation in the design requirements insisted on characters for playing card suits (hearts, spades, diamonds, clubs) to make it easy to program card games for the machines. Etc. You have Wikipedia at your disposal, you can conduct further research yourself if this deeply intrigues you 8)
The high and low of things is that for our purposes, this was the textmode graphical standard used for Commodore 64s, used in its programs and ... perhaps on its BBSes? (I only ever called Crunchy Frog, a C64 board, from my PC, and the memories are slim. I remember it ran off a 2-floppy-drive setup where the BBS software lived on one disk and all user/message/activity data lived on the other, continuously mulching itself FIFO-style. In any case, if I wasn't calling in from a Commodore machine, I wouldn't have seen PETSCII, only unintelligible garble.) I wouldn't be surprised if it saw some use in that context among warez crackers and couriers but I have no idea if that analogous-to-ANSI-on-the-PC situation was actually the case, as I was not part of that scene or community. (I never owned a Commodore machine -- well, not before 2010 -- and all the piracy I witnessed at my elementary school labs was of the sneakernet variety.) To say I may not have a full grasp of all of the details would be an understatement. I'm guessing that PETSCII allows for some XBIN-style character remapping (and possibly assigning custom palettes of foreground and background colours, from the looks of things), but I could be totally off base.
This is not a complete collection, but one mostly gleaned from outstanding C64 "scene" galleries up at The Pixelling Cow ... from which in the future you'll be seeing me sharing further, non-PETSCII, C64 game-related artworks. But let's begin at a beginning, and start with a title screen:
Daniel Bunten Berry's M.U.L.E. didn't rely on textmode graphics (and if it did, it would have initially been using the Atari 800's own proprietary textmode standard of ATASCII), but its graphics were regardless quite rudimentary, so King Durin here can approach an approximation of its title screen without losing a great deal of fidelity. (To compare and contrast, here's a link to the original C64 title screen.) ... Kind of makes me wish that after all those years, I'd waited just a little longer to share that arrangement of MULE's theme song!
Daimansion here reproduces a scene from one of Al Lowe's more unglamorous gigs at Sierra (and heads up, while on that Leisure Suit Larry tangent, the picture after the one after this one is NSFW if scrutinized closely), the culmination of their early contract with Disney: Donald Duck's Playground. He's taken a few liberties, particularly with the shopkeeper who is clearly no longer Mickey Mouse, but the scene regardless immediately brings the game's actual artwork to mind.
Hi makes a bold gambit, showing us an unmistakable scene from a game that never made it anywhere near the C64 (its authors were more Apple 2 kids, if memory serves correct)... that being iD Software's DooM, of course:
Finally, a depiction by marq of one of the C64's great underground hits, the ridiculous and XXX minimalist sports program Sex Games. (Kim Lemon actually implemented a web version of it if you'd like to try your hand.)
"Ready, Set, Go"? I don't even know if this piece, again by King Durin, represents a real game, but it could well be any one of hundreds. If you don't descend into the software mines it's hard to understand just to what an extent the ecology exploded into eg. maze games in the wake of Pac-Man. This, then, is one of the oodles of platform games that came quick on the heels of Donkey Kong and the game it always secretly wanted to be, Popeye -- Mario Bros., Jumpman, Lode Runner, Hunchback, DROL, Mappy, Impossible Mission... all taking a basic gameplay premise and running with it.
Another piece by daimansion, this depicts an apocalyptic scene from "Save New York". But more famous screens are coming!
Really, using uniform blocks this way, you could practically crank out any given game mascot even on a typewriter, but the colouration makes all the difference. I really appreciate Leichtfu's Q*Bert (or "Blockbert") here -- the choice of round textmode character playing up the roundness of the avatar hopping around a very Euclidian space -- a pyramid made of cubes!
I'll follow with a similar piece by Moonsweeper ("Bladejunker here, Moonsweeper is a rank on AtariAge which I still haven't figured out lol. I'm not even really that into Duke Nukem, he is just iconic and easy to draw. ;)") from a conversation about trying to use textmode on the ColecoVision... I don't believe that this is actually from a C64 but it is at the least a proof of concept employing PETSCII characters to make a point. That point being? The weird appeal of Duke Nukem transcends all hardware and screen modes!
Next up, a goodie -- Bub from one of my eternal favorites, Namco's Bubble Bobble, rendered by Finchy.
And another piece by Finchy, a rendition of MegaMan shooting a weird weapon -- one which expels textmode characters!
The next two are similar but different. This is the baby Metroid who imprints on Samus at the end of Metroid II on the Game Boy, drawn by 8R0TK4$T3N...
... and this one, by Redcrab (initials in the corner), is structurally quite similar, giving us a Space Invader (the piece actually entitled Oh no! More Invaders) in stark close-up. A nasty critter, plagued with mange and space-mites!
Here the Ghost Leader organizes the masses toward ending the menace of Pac-Man once and for all in this piece by Shine!
King Durin here made a PETSCII rendition of his 11-year-old daughter's drawing of Pikachu the Pokemon.
This character is unmistakable -- the question boxes are a bit small, the coins a bit large, but Goat's rendition is unmistakably Mario in the Mushroom Kingdom of Super Mario Bros. 1.
But what's this? Endurion shows a scene in which the plot thickens... a hand grabs one of Mario's star power-ups, but it doesn't look like a human hand... more like a great big monkey paw!
And here, in Uneksija's "The Day The World Was Not Saved", the logical outcome of such armaments getting into the wrong hands. (OK, so it's not explicitly Super Mario Bros.; all of the details are just a little off, Giana Sisters style, but there are still enough similarities to ensure you have no doubts regarding what is actually being shown.)
A few more nice pieces: this one is by Domspitze and depicts Link from the Legend of Zelda games:
And here we have two takes on what appears to be the C64's favourite game to make fan-art about: The Last Ninja. This is just the tip of the iceberg. First, war64burnout's version of its splash screen...
... and then wile coyote's more textmode-textured take. I think that the former nails the font while the latter achieves greater virtuosity in the portrait.
Well, that may be as elegant a summation as one can achieve with static images, but when you start to animate PETSCII the sky's the limit. Specifically, the Monkey Island bit here is outstanding, starting at 2:09:
Well now, in my introductory post to this blog I said that while posting spoilery game captures I might as well leak the transcript to the Modernism text adventure game -- ignoring the fact that I already did, um, 15 years ago. But hey, where is content more likely to languish in obscurity, unread -- on Blogger or on Everything2? (Trick question: the correct answer is... on LiveJournal!)
The basic gimmick at play here is that a lauded game developer has made two interactive fiction scenarios superficially inspired by, if not necessarily derived from, existentialist works No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre and Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. If you can make a worst-case scenario interpretation of both works' titles, you know what to expect. Still, there's a kick from enjoying a joke by interacting with it rather than simply receiving it -- probably the formal hook that has contributed to the eternal appeal of the "knock knock" joke.
Welcome to Modernism.
This mailware game enables you to experience all the frustration and boredom of modernist drama, without leaving your computer.
Modernism
A Text-Adventure MailWare Game
by Jacob Weinstein
based on the works of Samuel Becket and Jean-Paul Sartre
Copyright (c) 1993 by Jacob Weinstein. All Rights Reserved.
Although choice is an illusion, your options are:
1) See the legal details of MailWare
2) Play “Waiting for Godot”
3) Play “No Exit”
4) Quit
Enter 1, 2, 3, or 4: 3
If you become bored with this setting, and would like an opportunity to revise your decision, type “restart.” Unfortunately, this option is not available in real life.
A Barren Room
You are in an room which you recognize as Hell. Strangely, even your fellow sufferers seem absent.
> i
You are empty-handed.
> n
There is no exit.
> s
There is no exit.
> e
There is no exit.
> w
There is no exit.
> u
There is no exit.
> d
There is no exit.
> in
There is no exit.
> out
There is no exit.
> score
You have not gotten any points. This makes you wonder if you are dead.
> xyzzy
The word “xyzzy” is a meaningless construction that refers only to other words.
> about
By leaving the verb out of that sentence, I assume you are making a statement on the impossibility of action. Bravo.
> restart
Enter 1, 2, 3, or 4:
A Vast Plain
You are on a vast, featureless plain.
> i
You are empty-handed.
> l
A Vast Plain
You are on a vast, featureless plain.
A large, hearty man appears, tugging a thin, sickly man at the end of a rope. “I am Pozzo,” the large man proclaims. Then he leaves you.
> w
Ditch
You are standing in a muddy ditch.
> n
A Vast Plain
You are on a vast, featureless plain.
> e
A Barren Wasteland
You are in a place without hope.
You see a leafless tree here.
> x tree
The barrenness of the leafless tree serves only to heighten the emptiness of your surroundings.
> wait
Time passes...
> wait
Time passes...
> wait
Time passes...
Lucky and Pozzo pass by you, moving swiftly. Within moments, they have vanished into the horizon.
> wait
Time passes...
Nothing happens.
> wait
Time passes...
You are seized with a certainty that Godot will be here at any moment.
> wait
Time passes...
A small boy appears. “Go east twice, and west once, and Godot will meet you there,” he instructs you. He leaves as suddenly as he came.
> e
You do not move.
> e
You do not move.
> w
You do not move.
A small boy appears. “Godot cannot come tonight,” he says apologetically, “but he will be here tomorrow.” He leaves as crypticly as he appeared.
> wait
Time passes...
You think for a moment you spy Godot, but it is only a trick of the fading light. There is no one there.
>help
The word "help" is a meaningless construction that refers only to other words.
>quit
You have not gotten any points. This makes you a Christ symbol.
Do you really want to quit? (YES or NO) > no
Okay.
>quit
You have not gotten any points. This makes you without hope.
Do you really want to quit? (YES or NO) > n
Okay.
>quit
You have not gotten any points. This makes you baffled.
Do you really want to quit? (YES or NO) > n
Okay.
>quit
You have not gotten any points. This makes you impressed by the intellectual superiority of the author.
Do you really want to quit? (YES or NO) > n
Okay.
>quit
You have not gotten any points. This makes you question the existence of God.
Do you really want to quit? (YES or NO) > n
Okay.
>quit
You have not gotten any points. This makes you aware of the meaningless of life.
Do you really want to quit? (YES or NO) > yes
(The game has ended.)
A bit long-winded, perhaps, in terms of the bang for your buck, but as far as parodies of existentialist literature go in gaming, they remain near the top of the heap. Believe it or not, this is not the only time "Waiting For Godot" has been the subject of a video game adaptation:
Perhaps because being featured on YouTube thrusts one to more prominence than does releasing a TADS datafile that requires the download of an interpreter in order to run the program, while Jacob Weinstein got off scot-free, the author of the more recent adaptation featured above was served with a cease and desist notice from attorneys representing the estate of Samuel Beckett, resulting in a series of absurd name changes. Strange but true!
How curious that Waiting for Godot, a narrative in which nothing happens (twice!) has been adapted into two video games, while the similarly action-packed My Dinner With Andre remains untapped. (Though I suppose that if you want that kind of thrilling conversation-tree action, there is no lack of visual novels to fulfil your requirements.)
Modernism was a little impish digression for the author between two relatively substantial and well-regarded works, the 1991 game Save Princeton and 1995's Looney Toons homage Toonesia, which placed 2nd in the 1st annual IF Comp's TADS category -- back when different authoring systems competed separately -- difficult to envision TADS and Inform being segregated when works made with ChoiceScript, StoryNexus and Twine are now integrated into the main thrust of the competition! (Trivia: the top-placing entries in that initial IF Comp were included in Activision's Infocom omnibus CD-ROM "Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces".)
...
Exciting news from the site's launch!
Who do I know in Malta? Oh yes -- hello, Pippin Barr! Glad to see you enjoyed my little bit on your Let's Play: Ancient Greek Punishment! Keep up the good work! (It's just so neat when you can look at anomalous data in a site stats page and be able to peg it down to one unique individual on a planet filled with anonymous surfers.)
Greetings, all, from the onetime proprietor of the retrogaming blog located at videogamecomicads.blogspot.com, entitled "Shilling Epilepsy to Mouth-Breathers". On New Year's Eve I realised that my project there was on the cusp of ticking over to 40 thousand views (not bad for 2.75 years on the hobbyist beat, I think), and I hyped the blog up a bit. By the afternoon of January 1st, we'd ticked over and I was ready to celebrate. Only... there were just two problems: the blog's name and its URL.
Initially the blog had been envisioned as a place for me to post game ads I'd scanned from my comic book collection -- I would transcribe them for Mobygames' "Ad Blurbs" archives, but there was no home for the source material to be hosted! Here at last was such a home! (Also, a good place for such "subjective" remarks regarding the ads as I couldn't resist cracking, with no place in such a serious research project as MG.) It stayed on track for, well, a year, at which point I began spicing it up with posts exploring ads for non-video-game products found in comics, video games found in non-comics sources, depictions of comic book characters playing video games or interacting in video game arcades, book reviews, photodocumentation of extensive game troves repatriated from thrift stores and garage sales, and reports from my biannual retro gaming parties. By the end of 2014 the most frequent and popular series on the blog was galleries of video game characters rendered in ANSI art from back in the BBS days. All these digressions, while related, fell well beyond the mandate of "video game comic ads". (And the epilepsy bit, while intended to dismiss the whole hobby as a preoccupation with pretty (and dangerous, for Japanese Pokemon fans) flashing lights, was found to be problematic by some of the occasional seizure-sufferers in my life.)
So it was time for a change. I put on my thinking cap and, well, came up dry. Then I shook down my social media brain trust:
Hivemind thesaurus crowdsourcing: a cause has an effect. Splashes have ripples. What are words for the effects, the results, the yields of disasters? Shipwrecks have ... flotsam. Is there a technical term for the particular state of disarray following a tornado, or a flood, an earthquake, a nuclear meltdown?
(Looking to rename my gaming blog: the idea is that something big happens, then there are lots of strange traces of its passage left in the wake. Imagine a tidal wave deposits a boat on top of a house, where it lingers on for years afterwards, out of place. I am that house, and video games are that boat.)
We ended up with a lot of grim and gritty words, but none that I could easily (and Google-uniquely) invoke in a punchy, game-related way.
And of course "Games of Future Past". Finally I asked myself, "Isn't there a word for a site like Pompeii, where a horrible disaster befalls a place, then it is widely known as somewhere an ancient culture has been preserved, yielding artefacts for modern people to study and glean wisdom from?" Well, yes: there is a word for a site like Pompeii: that would be, "Pompeii." And so here we are. The Classics theme will very soon be thrown under the bus, but as I was nutso for Ancient Greece and Rome in my school days, I thought it would make for a nice background theme for the blog -- and a nice theme for its first post. (See up there at the top? Altered Beast? Ancient Greece!)
The change we got was somewhat more drastic than the change I intended to implement: first I just took the existing blog, what with its track record of 40 thousand views (a bogus record in reality, only tabulating pilferings of my scans by people who never read a word I wrote!), went into the Blogger settings and issued it the new name and URL. This had the regrettable effect of wiping nearly three years of such rare comments as the blog had been able to accrue. Then I found that none of my hardcoded internal links worked anymore, all still retaining the original site URL. In frustration, in hopes to salvage some vestige of the old site, I put it back the way it had been. Then I thought to myself, "Maybe I should start up the successor site on Tumblr? That's where all the kids are these days." This explains the promenade of animated .GIFs you have awaiting yourself. (Unpaid endorsement: Instagiffer appears to deliver the goods far better than any free website will.) I couldn't bring myself to forego the nice stats and traffic tools Google provide with Blogger, so here we are, same stuff, different pile, with more inclusive names better suiting the kinds of material I'll be sharing here. Such handful of actual video game ads genuinely from comics as I do find myself compelled to blog will still probably end up at the old location, but considering that my most recent posting of one of those was last May, we can consider that blog's growth and expansion basically concluded.)
You may have noticed that none of this has anything to do with the title of this post. I figured, in the spirit of the blog's nominal invocation of Pompeii, that I ought to kick things off with a look at some piece of Greco-Roman video gamery. Well, here is one of my favourites. Unbeknownst to me, it was first released three years ago to the day, so that's basically a sign that my reporting on it here was destined to be, and that failing to do so would defy the will of the Gods themselves. I'm very pleased of the description of the game I put up at MobyGames, so against the boilerplate terms of their user agreement, I'm going to quote, verbatim, the blurb I contributed there:
Don't Look Back is the exception rather than the rule -- as the God of War series so clearly indicates, Ancient Greeks could struggle against the hand that the Fates have cruelly dealt them, but to no avail. No amount of sweat, tears, or (in that case) blood will see you through to a happy ending. And nowhere is the futility of defying the gods spelled out more plainly than here, in a collection of mini-games inspired by Epyx's Summer Games line of computing antiquity, itself inspired by an ancient Greek sporting competition. In this game, the player gets to select one of numerous tragic antiheroes of Greek mythology (plus one bonus philosopher), folks who dared to defy the Gods of Olympus and were consigned in the afterlife to suffer a cruel and ironic punishment into perpetuity.
For instance, one of our options is to play the punishment of Sisyphus, forced eternally to push an enormous boulder up a slippery slope in Tartarus. By hitting keyboard keys at the right tempo, the player can get the rock rolled up the hill, but nothing can keep it from sliding back down again. Camus' existentialist philosophy used this as a model for a meaningless existence in a Godless world, positing that Sisyphus might enjoy a moment of happiness between losing his burden and shouldering it again. Here, it's all just good, clean fun. All of the mini-games are un-winnable, but the game will kindly track failed attempts.
The game is not especially playable as a game; rather, it is five somewhat unfunny jokes, but ones demanding a modicum of user interaction before giving up their punchlines. SPOILER ALERT: here come the punchlines, no interaction needed. (I know, it's as bad as posting a transcript of the "Modernism" text adventure game. Actually, I'll make that my next post, here. Statute of limitations is up -- it's been... what?! 21 years?! Oh, I have wasted my life!)
Sisyphus' torments have already been described above; despite bringing on his doom by irritating the Gods with loopholes and technicalities (all right then, try to use your social engineering on this round rock!), he is regardless viewed as perhaps the cleverest character in the Greek mythological canon (though Odysseus could certainly go a few rounds with him), and there are accounts of his escaping that tightest lockup, the afterlife, on a few occasions. He figures prominently in ACE Team's brilliantly-presented 2011 game Rock of Ages:
Indeed, a few seconds in, we observe our next two subjects, Tantalus and Prometheus, being subjected to their torments. That was a cut scene: now you get to play all the excitement for yourself!
Tantalus' crimes were truly horrifying, consigned to eternal torments down below for the egregious offence of serving his own son Pelops to the Gods as the main course at a banquet. Ironically, he is left parched and starved, surrounded by food and drink that moves just a little too far away when reached for.
Prometheus gets it rough even by Greek mythological standards: for defying Zeus and delivering the Gods' fire to mankind, this immortal is strapped down to a rock to have his regenerating liver eaten by an eagle into perpetuity -- for it keeps growing back. Doesn't mean it ever stops hurting. Clearly grist for a good gag!
The Danaids: instructed by their father to marry, then murder, fifty grooms who courted them, typically their afterlife is framed as needing to fill a tub in which to wash away their sins by passing a full colander along a bucket brigade. This streamlines the story somewhat (staying in line with a Waterhouse painting on the subject) but retains its most important element: irony.
And in the "historical characters" department, Zeno here demonstrates the most well-known of his paradoxes. (A second, his proof that an arrow does not move, might have been suited for this weird collection of Summer Games as well, but it was probably full enough.)
The author of this suite of punishments is one Pippin Barr, and he is one of my favourite game designers. You can play it and check out his other games over here; you can see him further engaging themes of eg. Gods and philosophy with GuruQuest, Let There Be Smite!, and Trolley Problem, all in an engaging AGI-era Sierra aesthetic.
OK, that should do for a first post. Thanks for joining me here at our new location and I hope I get to turn you on to some neat stuff down the line. Cheers!
