robotron 2084

I find it sad that this game has a longer wikipedia entry than what my obituary will probably be…

excerpts of an eugene jarvis, the creator of robotron, interview

Where did the “Robotron” idea come from?

The basic play of “Robotron” was programmed in three days. The game was inspired by the immortal arcade robot game “Berzerk” and the game “Chase” on the Commodore PET. The prototype was a “Defender” game with a “Stargate” board and a couple of Atari 2600 joysticks screwed to the control panel. Originally, “Robotron” was going to be a passive game with no firing. You killed the robots by making them walk into the electrodes.

The grunt robotrons were the first enemy designed. Actually the electrodes were first, but they don’t do anything except kill everything that touches them. The grunt AI was extremely basic: plot the shortest path to the player and seek out the player until either the player or the robot is dead.

It was fun for about fifteen minutes, running the robots into the electrodes. But pacifism has its limits. Gandhi, the video game, would have to wait; it was time for some killing action. We wired up the “fire” joystick and the chaos was unbelievable. Next we dialed up the Robot count on the terminal. 10 was fun. How about 20? 30, 60, 90, 120! The tension of having the world converge on you from all sides simultaneously and the incredible body count created an unparalleled adrenalin rush. Add to it the mental overload of a truly ambidextrous control, and it was insanity at its best.

The basic magic of “Robotron” is the independent movement and firing controls. I was a great fan of the game “Berzerk,” and the frustration of that and all other single joystick games, was that you have to move toward an enemy in order to fire in that direction. “Berzerk” had a mode that alleviated that somewhat in that if you held the fire button down, the character would stand still and then a bullet could be fired with the joystick in any direction. So essentially in that mode the joystick fired the bullet. I just put on a separate joystick to fire bullets.

How did you choose the enemies in “Robotron”? The balance is perfect.

The philosophy of enemy design was to create a handful of AI opponents as unique as possible from one another, with unique properties of creation, motion, projectile firing, and interaction with the player. The enemies would be deployed in a wave related fashion, with distinct themes for each wave. Some of the most interesting and deadly aspects of the enemies were bugs caused by improperly terminated boundary conditions in the algorithms. Often these bugs produced behavior far more interesting and psychotic then anything I conceived of. An interesting bug causes the enforcers to drift in to corners occasionally for a deadly rain of terror.

The recipe for individual wave mixes of enemies was guided by the theme idea, featuring a certain enemy in each wave, as well as the presence of a basic core element of grunts, enforcers, and electrodes.

What was the “Robotron” hardware like? Why was it so fast?

The “Robotron” hardware was a 1MHz 8-bit 6809 processor, with a custom image coprocessor also running at 1MHz. The amazing thing is this slow circuit had more image processing power than PCs until the early 90s. What made it so powerful was that the image coprocessor was one the first examples of what later became known as a bit blitter–popularized by the Amiga computer. In fact, several of the future designers of the Amiga, including RJ Mical, worked at Williams at this time [1982]. The coprocessor wrote two-dimensional objects to the bitmap with transparency, color paletting, color substitution, and other special effects.

full interview
http://www.dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/JARVIS.HTM

It’s 409 W. Martin st. Where the Contemporary Art Museum is now.