Imagine pitching Joust when nobody had heard of it before.
(startrek.website)
from Datas_Cat_Spot@startrek.website to retrogaming@lemmy.world on 05 Aug 2023 21:01 +0000
https://startrek.website/post/689733
from Datas_Cat_Spot@startrek.website to retrogaming@lemmy.world on 05 Aug 2023 21:01 +0000
https://startrek.website/post/689733
#retrogaming
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 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 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.
They must’ve had some good drugs back in the 80s.
We need some of that now. I want crazy games again.
Fentanyl brought us Gollum
Fentanyl makes you Gollum
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.
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.
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.
Time to fire up MAME again. Ok.
Like we needed a reason.
One of my favorite arcade games.
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.
Truly a unique game. The pitch must’ve been epic.
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 😩