I mean, so many games made so little sense back then. If you could program it, I think they gave it a green light. Qbert? Berserk? Even Pac Man, what the hell is that guy?
I remember a friend dragging me to the arcade to see what he had found there. It was Q-Bert. Now of course it was a wild game, but he said, "no wait, watch this", proceeded to jump off the blocks, and I heard the mechanical clunk at the bottom of the machine. Someone came up with that just for the F of it...brilliant.
I think for a lot of them, they must have come up with some cool looking sprites and then tried to make a game/story around that.
I do miss the spontaneity that existed when games were smaller. It made ideas feel much more organic and flexible, and everything just happened faster with fewer people so you could pivot quickly if you wanted to. Out of curiosity, I looked on Wikipedia and this is the blurb talking about the design of Joust. It's cited as coming from Retro Gamer magazine Issue 63, but sadly it looks like the current publisher has requested it be taken down from the Internet Archive.
John Newcomer conceived Joust as a "flying game" with cooperative two-player gameplay; however, he did not wish to emulate the popular space theme of previous successful flying games like Asteroids and Defender. To that end, he made a list of things that could fly: machines, animals, and fictional characters. After evaluating the positive and negative of each idea, Newcomer chose birds for their wide appeal and his familiarity with fantasy and science fiction media featuring birds. To further increase his understanding, Newcomer went to the library to study mythology. He believed that the primary protagonist should ride a majestic bird. The first choice was an eagle, but the lack of graceful land mobility dissuaded him. Instead, he decided that a flying ostrich was more believable than a running eagle. To differentiate between the first and second player characters, the developers picked a stork, believing the proportions were similar to an ostrich while the color difference would avoid confusion among players. Newcomer chose vultures as the main enemies, believing that they would be recognizably evil. Python Anghelo created concept art of the characters as guidance for further design.
The artwork used on the sides of arcade machines and old school console games was wild. Lots of drugs must have been involved because ultimately the game represented the jousters in like 7 or 8 pixels and yet some artists came up with the image at the top of this thread.
sniff "So my vision for this game is Tron on ostriches, but with a heavy focus on medieval jousting."
Hiro really knocked it out of the park with that painting, though. A real triumph of foreshortening.
It’s foreshortening; there’s nothing “triumph” about it. That being said, hell yeah it’s gorgeous artwork.
I loved Joust back in the day. I wish I could feel that joy for it again.
Right? 1985 was a wild Joustian Dreamland for me.
Time to fire up MAME again. Ok.
Like we needed a reason.
Truly a unique game. The pitch must've been epic.
Back in those days you could solo make it on your lunch break a prototype and go "hey! Game! Make money!" And that was it you'd be giving a 8ball and a weekend to finish it and that was that.
Atari programmers didn't get any 8balls they didn't purchase from their own money and sure as fuck didn't get any bonuses.
Credit and 8balls was Activision.
To anybody that likes this game: check out killer queen.
It is a team vs team competitive arcade game that was inspired by joust. Truly a great game with lots of skill and strategy involved. Only downside is that there are few cabinets and it is relatively unknown.
It is a good game and they used to have a video game version called killer queen black, which has slightly different mechanics. They killed the servers for online match making though 😩
One of my favorite arcade games.
Vintage gaming community.
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