▲ 49 points
back
25 comments
> we spent four out of the six months of Robotron’s development PLAYING the thing
Wait, what? You didn't create epics and attach story points to all of your JIRA tickets and estimate your development time down to the nearest 15-minute increment before you wrote a single line of code? Preposterous, you could never develop functioning software without pre-planning each and every single hour in a spreadsheet and reporting your status to a project manager in one hour daily standup meetings every morning.
It is a two-people company. Those still happen, you know.
In this particular case, the "viz kids" group was created, released 4 games, and got disbanded 3 years later.
An office where I once worked had an arcade cabinet and we developed a little rivalry to see who could reach 1,000,000 points in Robotron first. I never quite made it -- topped out around 900,000 or so. The game required an intense kind of zen focus, and every time I got close to the goal I could feel that concentration slip ever so slightly, just enough for the game's later screens to sap my remaining lives.
Yep, zen-like.
I never played this one in the arcades because it ate my quarters: only gave me 30 seconds of fun for each one.
When I built a full-size MAME machine with dual joysticks, Robotron quickly became my go to.
I pushed my games out from that 30 seconds to maybe 3 minutes. But what a three minutes! I always feel a kind of release after — like flipping a table or something.
> like flipping a table or something
There's actually an arcade game [0][1] with a plastic table controller where one has to flip the table to cause maximum damage. It's pretty hilarious, though obviously very different from Robotron.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cho_Chabudai_Gaeshi [1] https://youtu.be/O8cTdFqwdwc
This was my game of choice to unwind from classes. I think I played way too much because it was one of the few games I was as good as my brother. In two player mode my brother and I would each take a joy stick and still easily beat who ever was the second player! What fun! And truly to get into the upper levels you needed to enter a zen state.
I love how arcade games were a kind Cambrian explosion in terms of user controls. We had configurations with dual joysticks (Robotron, Battlezone), single stick and buttons (Defender), trackball and buttons (Missile Command), spinner and buttons (Tempest), all buttons (Asteroids) and probably a few more that I don't remember. My only complaint is that makes it really hard to build a cabinet with all of those combinations in the present day.
Eugene Jarvis gave an in-depth Robotron development postmortem talk at GDC 2014.
It covers a lot more than TFA, though I appreciated the scanned photos.
I don't know if he mentions it in this video but one of my favorite parts of Robotron lore is that they had a bug in the movement code for Enforcers, which were supposed to just float towards the player. There was some type of overflow bug which would cause some of them to hug one end of the screen for awhile and then quickly dart to the other side, and it ended up making them more difficult so they left it in.
Hat tip to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llamatron
The greatest homage and tribute to the original.
"It was based in Dresden and employed 68,000 people (1989)."
Wonder if more people think about Robotron-the game vs. Robotron-the company (and all their products).
I certainly did, but that's not surprising given that I live in Dresden.
I just openened the link to read about the company :)
Me too I didn't know there was a game with the same name. My father worked at Robotron which still exists but is a very different company nowadays.
That reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intershop vs https://www.intershop.com; I'm still not sure whether the latter emerged from the ashes of the former. Given the tangled web occasionally woven by privatization of socialist enterprises, I would not be entirely surprised.
This is available on archive.org to play in the browser.
It's the most like riding a bike of any video game I've ever played. One hand chooses shooting direction, other hand independently moves the character in a direction. Even by the 4th level there are too many enemies to track.
I basically got crushed until my independent hand coordination "clicked in," then started progressing to much further levels without any clear strategy.
Maybe that's how most people play video games, but I usually have some mental model of the game, techniques to try to improve, etc. Here it's just getting creamed for awhile, then a sudden change to "aaaaaaaaaaah," for longer and longer periods of time. :)
Edit: clarification
> Even by the 4th level there are too many enemies to track.
I love this game. The flashing colors are very stimulating, but the beauty of this game is that it's about judging tradeoffs in a constantly changing environment.
Yes, starting at the 4th wave there are too many enemies to track. The zen of the game is this: you will lose some lives every wave after a certain point. But the game is generous and you will earn bonus lives every X points.
The wandering humans in the game give you 5000 points each, but only after you save 5 in a row. You can rack up extra lives pretty quickly if you can waver through the robots and obstacles and hit 5+ in a row.
So you have always think - will this path through the changing morass enable me to save a large enough chain of wandering humans to gain more lives than I'll lose? You have to constantly make "business decisions" to keep your profits (total lives) ahead of a fatal loss (your last life).
Not that I can get past wave 14 or 15 though.
Have you seen some master-level playthroughs on YouTube? They do sometimes die, but not every wave. It's still an insanely hard game.
The crazy thing about the lives is that they wrap around modulo 128 (maybe it's 256), (and you can't see the count beyond 3 or 4!) which means that if you are unlucky when it wraps around and you die, then it's game over, even if you have been absolutely killing it wave after wave. Haha. Exciting!
> but the beauty of this game is that it's about judging tradeoffs in a constantly changing environment.
Exactly! It's even dynamic by the standards of early Williams games which typically had a surprising amount happening at once.
> One hand chooses shooting direction, other hand independently moves the character in a direction.
This style of game is called twin-stick shooter.
No discussion of Robotron is complete without Christian Gingras' brilliant reverse engineering. He even submitted patches!
http://www.robotron2084guidebook.com/technical/christianging...
Robotron started the twin stick shooter genre. Games like Geometry Wars, Smash TV, and Nex Machina (which is superb btw) all owe their existence to Robotron.
What I find really interesting is that Robotron holds up against these newer games very well. That doesn't happen too often.
I built a MAME box recently and specifically purchased a dual-joystick (X-Arcade) so I could play Robotron.
It's still fun. Love the graphics, it creates an exciting environment that is claustrophic.
The ad in this is an amusing blend of cool hand drawn sci fi scenes and wayyyyy too much detail about the specifics of the game.
The finger-grain-harvester was cool.
One of the best games at the arcade when I was growing up.