I had a great time last week reminiscing about some of the Apple //e games that influenced me at a young age, so what the heck — here are several more that I loved from my gaming formative years.
The game that I constantly heard about back in the early ’80s was this one, Dan Gorlin’s Choplifter from Broderbund. The Apple wasn’t a fast computer, so to finally see and play an arcade-style game that was as smooth and responsive as this was really special. Like many Broderbund games back then, it was all about the details. I thought the design of the helicopter was great. It displayed convincing flight dynamics, and the way it would subtly “bounce” when you touched down created a nice visual marriage that added to the game’s realism.
Controls were easy to learn, and understanding how yaw affected your weaponry was key to success. More nice touches included the perspective/parallax effect on your home base’s barrier and the way rescued hostages would wave in thanks as you dropped them off to safety. A lesser game wouldn’t even bother with such details, but Choplifter was no ordinary game.
Several years later, I would play Choplifter again on the fledgling Sega Master System. It was a good arcade-to-home port in its own right, but I’ve always preferred the Apple original. There’s a purity to its straightforward, distilled design and fun, tight controls, and it still plays brilliantly today, 32 years after its release.
Speaking of helicopters, another game that my friends and I just loved was Sabotage. Its concept was simple: defend your single turret from bombs and falling paratroopers with a stream of artillery. What made this game memorable — for better or for worse — was the violence. Even though the paratroopers were only constructed of a handful of pixels, they would meet their doom in any number of ways, accompanied by “watery” sound effects that were strangely satisfying. My favorite was hitting a parachute with a well-placed bullet, sending the paratrooper falling to and splattering on the ground. If you were lucky, they would fall on someone who already landed, eliminating both of them.
For a game with such simple controls, it was surprisingly deep. You could also select steerable shells, giving you the power to sweep the screen with a spray of bullets. It did nothing to help your score since bullets ate away at your point total, but boy was it fun!
Games like this and the more well-known title The Bilestoad were some of the earliest examples of games where violence was a big part of their gameplay. The Bilestoad in particular was extremely violent for its time, where pools of blood and body parts would be strewn across the game’s arena, accompanied by nasty sound effects and an ominous soundtrack. Sabotage was tame by comparison. It wouldn’t be until Midway’s Mortal Kombat in the early ’90s that videogame violence would become such a controversial issue.
One of my favorite genres is the run & jump platformer, like Super Mario Bros., Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Meat Boy, and Rayman. While I credit early arcade games like the perennial classic Donkey Kong for sparking my love for them, I spent way more time at home with Datasoft’s Conan and Bruce Lee. Both games consisted of challenging screens to conquer, with good controls, nice graphics, and swift gameplay. Bruce Lee was particularly fast, which made it a thrill to play. Having a ninja and sumo wrestler constantly chasing you around added to the tension and pacing, and remains one of my all-time favorite games. It was also unique for boasting a nice 16-color title screen in double high-resolution, a rarity back in 1984. Two-voice music also helped set it apart from the single, linear sounds so common at the time.
Finally, for this installment, one more from Broderbund: Aik Beng’s Drol. Like many kids, I loved cartoons, so games that had cartoon-like graphics really appealed to me. Drol was one of those, possessing superb visuals and nice animation. When we would later get a composite color monitor around 1986, it was one of the first games I played on it, just to see what it looked like in something other than green. Another game had a similar style — Tony & Benny Ngo’s Bandits (Sirius Software) — and looking back, these two games had a notable influence on my art style over the next few years, especially when it came to fonts. They both still look super-clean to me, fueling my belief that good art, no matter what the medium, never gets old.
That’s it for now. Thanks for putting up with the green screenshots, by the way. Although I would soon go on to play all of these games in color, my fondest memories of them are from that old, 12″ monochrome monitor.
