Battlezone
Atari 1980 etc. It remains famous today for its visuals, which were technically astonishing in 1980 and remain stylish more than two decades later. Although Battlezone did not originate the stereotypical motion picture 'computer graphic' effect[1], in which computers of centuries hence still present information as green wireframes on a black background, it looms large in the minds of special effects designers. The very first modern 'video game', '
Space Wars', had also been the first vector game, but its commercial incarnation '
Computer Space' was quickly buried under the weight of
Pong, Atari's first product.
Atari went on to popularise the use of vector graphics in arcade machines in 1979, firstly with Howard Delman and Rich Moore's 'Lunar Lander' and latterly with Ed Logg's hugely popular 'Asteroids'. After Battlezone the company would go on to create 'Tempest' and 'Star Wars', twin pinnacles of vector arcade development, before abandoning vector hardware in 1985. By that time vector games were overshadowed by the sprite scaling technology showcased in Sega's 'Space Harrier' and 'OutRun'. With the exception of Atari's own fascination 1983 one-off 'I, Robot', it would not be until the end of the 1980s that arcade hardware had developed enough for real-time filled polygons to be displayed on raster monitors, but that is another story.
Battlezone was created by Ed Rotberg and Jed Margolin, with assistance from Mike Albaugh, Owen Rubin, Howard Delman and Roger Hector under the direction of Morgan Hoff, all employees of Atari. At the time they were also working on 'Red Baron', another vector game which is nowadays forgotten. Red Baron used blue vector lines on a black background, and cast the player as pilot of a biplane. It was more of a technology test than an actual game, the motion of the player's aircraft being slow and queasy, the gameplay a matter of holding down the fire button whilst waving the joystick about. Rotberg himself admits in interviews that Red Baron was overambitious, and ironically the minimalist approach of Battlezone has stood the test of time more effectively than Red Baron's complex overkill. After the collapse of the original Atari both Margolin and Rotberg continued developing 3D software for Atari Games, the former most famously working on 'Hard Drivin'', the latter on 'S.T.U.N. Runner'. Eventually dominance of the 3d arcade world would pass over to Sega, with their 'Virtua' games, but for a while Atari continued to punch over its weight.
Battlezone was an XY game, in that it used a vector display, a technology which is no longer used outside the world of academia; furthermore, its cabinet was quite unusual, both in terms of its controllers and its method of allowing the player to peer into its world. These aspects are explained in greater detail in the writeups above. The vector display was monochrome, albeit with different levels of intensity. A portion of the display - a radar screen and status box at the top of the monitor - was colourised with tinted plastic, an effect familiar from 'Space Invaders'.
As with many of its contemporaries, Battlezone presented the player with a simple task which was repeated indefinitely, the challenge stemming firstly from the gently sloping difficulty level, and secondly from the stress of having to remain a consistent shot whilst under pressure. The Asteroids-esque minimalist sonic landscape - a radar ping, the growl of the player's motor, white noise effects for explosions, the whirr of flying saucers and the jarring buzz of missiles - was much more menacing than the constant explosions and hair metal of games to come, at least in those arcades which did not drown the machines out with Journey and Meatloaf. The player's tank was noticeably ponderous, realistically incapable of jumping or side-stepping, and only planning, forethought and alertness to the radar screen could prevent the player from dying repeatedly.
It is worth noting that neither the player's vehicle nor the enemy 'tanks' had independently-traversing turrets; they were only capable of firing in the direction of travel, and thus they were closer to WW2 assault guns than real-life tanks, such as the tanks in Disney's 1982 'Tron', a film which was in part inspired by Atari's game (a Battlezone cabinet appears in an early scene set in an arcade, and director Stephen Lisberger claimed to have a Battlezone score of over five million points). With the exception of Williams' 'Robotron: 2084' and 'Smash TV' the ability to fire and move in different directions was thereafter ignored in the arcades. It took a wave of 'Mechwarrior'-style games on the PC followed by the rise of the first person shooter to engrave strafing and mouselook into the core of the world's apple.
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Although Battlezone takes place in a single, seamless environment, the game divides roughly into three stages. In the first stage the player is presented with passive enemy tanks which are spawned within the player's field of view. The very first tank is particularly loath to join battle; whilst its descendants immediately turn to face and advance upon the player, the first tank turns away, moves, turns away, moves, and only then attacks. The second stage involves tanks which are more often than not spawned behind or to the sides of the player. To reach this stage the player does not have to engage the first wave of tanks, he can simply drive onwards, leaving them behind. Tanks which leave the playfield - which is slightly larger than the player's radar screen - are assumed by the game to have been destroyed, although the player is awarded no points. For many, the second stage is the meat of the game, the stage which lasts the longest.
After the regular tanks are vanquished, the player is presented with 'super tanks', wedge-shaped machines seemingly patterned on the real-life Swedish Stridsvagn 103. These are faster and more vigorous than the standard tanks, indeed they have a higher top speed than the player's vehicle, and engage the player mercilessly. One player reports[3] that, when the player approaches a million points, the super tanks are retired indefinitely in favour of regular tanks.
There are three other gameplay elements. Firstly, the landscape is littered with three-dimensional polygons. These are wireframe representations of cubes, rectangles and pyramids. Most are tall enough to block the player's shots, although one of the objects merely acts as an impediment to progress, and can be shot over. When encountering these blocks the enemy tanks will turn, back away, turn, and move forward so as to clear the obstruction. During this process they are extremely vulnerable. Periodically the landscape is visited by flying saucers. As with their real-life counterparts, Battlezone's flying saucers make a throbbing electronic whirr. They are larger than the player's tank and have no physical substance, in that they can be driven through. When shot, they dematerialise with a satisfying electronic sound, and award the player bonus points. They are almost certainly derived from the periodic 'mothership' of Space Invaders, and the flying saucers from Atari's own Asteroids, although they are not hostile. Enemy tanks can shoot the saucers as well, although only accidentally.
The most problematic gameplay element is the missile assault. This begins at a points threshold set by the cabinet's operator. One problem facing the designers of Battlezone was that, although the super tanks are challenging, a sufficiently skilled player can hold them off indefinitely. As noted above it is not possible for the player to simply drive away from all enemies - doing so triggers the missile attack earlier - the temptation amongst some players to explore the unreachable horizon led to much wasted time, reducing player turnover and thus potential profit. Therefore, the missiles were introduced as a sure-fire way of ending the player's game. These devices - which are larger than the player's tank and appear to be derived from the Zeppelins of Red Baron - are dropped from the sky ahead of the player, whom they proceed to hunt down. The first missile flies directly at the player's location and can be shot easily, but subsequent missiles veer left and right, sometimes to the extent of leaving the player's field of view. Although there are strategies for dealing with the missile threat, all but the most committed fans of the game are eventually attritted away by these flying pests. Those missiles which miss the player, either through having to negotiate obstacles (which they vault, causing skilled players to hide behind the tallest objects) or through the player's evasions, fly off the playfield and are considered destroyed.
There are two other aspects of Battlezone. Firstly, all the tanks fire pyramidal projectiles which travel too quickly to be dodged at anything but long range. In common with many contemporary games the player is only allowed to fire a single projectile at a time, his tank weaponless until the first projectile has left the playfield or struck an object. The enemy tanks abide by the same rule. The projectiles are capable of destroying tanks, missiles and flying saucers with a single shot. They cannot destroy other projectiles; instead, they pass through. When striking objects, the projectiles explode into a small cloud of particles. Protein is the root of all passion.
And finally there is the horizon, perhaps Battlezone's most fondly-remembered element. This is rendered as a set of jagged lines, evoking a mountain range. The horizon appears via parallax to be a great distance away. One of the mountains along the horizon is clearly an active volcano. It constantly projects particles into the sky, each particle fading to black as it falls to the ground. As the oft-retold story puts it, this was added as an afterthought one night by the aforementioned Owen Rubin, inspired by the eruption of Mount St Helens in May of 1980. Above the horizon hangs a crescent moon, although it could just as well be a planet, on the moon of which the game takes place (indeed, one of Battlezone's prototypes was called 'Moon Tank'). The dark side of the crescent world is faintly outlined, as if by light scattered through an atmosphere. Continents are visible.
And that is Battlezone. Although the technology was groundbreaking - the vector graphics were sleek, stylish and generally did not jerk - the gameplay was less complex than that of Asteroids the year before, certainly less so than its contemporary, Defender. Although popular, the game was expensive to manufacture and purchase, whilst the vector screen - although more reliable than most - tended to break after only a few years. Home computer hardware was not up to the task of recreating Battlezone, although many publishers tried (officially, Atari Games produced PC and 16-bit conversions in the mid-1980s, to little effect). Until the advent of arcade emulation and MAME, Battlezone therefore remained out of reach of gamesplayers born after the mid 1970s. It is extremely uncommon in arcades nowadays, indeed it is more valuable as an antique than as a source of revenue.
In 1999 Activision produced a new Battlezone game for the PC. An artistic and critical success, it was a surprising commercial failure. It bore little resemblance to Atari's original, however, and deserves a writeup of its own. As indeed does 'Army Battlezone', a simulation of the M2 Bradley IFV long thought mythical but recently found to actually exist; the ROMs are available to play with MAME. Battlezone itself is etched into the brains of all who played it back in the early 1980s. The game really did appear to come from the future; after playing it, the possibilities seemed endless.
[1] Although there seems to be no definitive source of this cliché, it seems likely that '2001: A Space Odyssey' is to blame. A short sequence in which astronauts diagnosed a faulty piece of their spacecraft's equipment included mocked-up CGI (the effect achieved in real life with a mixture of x-ray and high-contrast photography).
[2] REDACTED
[3] Doug Jefferys, who wrote a short but expertly-crafted strategy guide in 1999:
http://tinyurl.com/2ojne
Selected sources:
http://tinyurl.com/2kvbz
http://tinyurl.com/33tuh
http://tinyurl.com/2bcdc
http://tinyurl.com/25tsz
... and lots.
Thanks also to the BooBooKitty above for some FACTS and also to the late Elisabeth Brooks who took off her clothes in 'The Howling', a cinematic contemporary of Battlezone, and seared herself into my adolescent brain for all eternity.