Dave Theurer's nightmares

A rational nightmare

One video game designer, Dave Theurer consistently had intense nightmares about nuclear war ending the world as we knew it.

I feel that I know his mind somewhat, since I used to have nightmares of nuclear war brought on by the brinkmanship of the Cold War between the US and USSR. At any point in time, both of these ideologically opposed powers had thousands of missiles targeted at the other. This made for an uneasy peace, with lower-intensity wars fought by proxy nations and client states to secure geopolitical dominance. Nukes were effective at keeping the peace because the reality of total world destruction was too much to swallow for anyone in power on either side of the Atlantic. Sanity prevailed in the 20th century. You all know the end result- we survived.

But still, the party leaders at the Kremlin operated in an opaque system of suspicion and intrigue, which left Americans on edge continuously. On the other hand, some Americans were quite unnerved by their own elected leaders' rhetoric of "rollback" for exactly the same reason. It did not necessarily pervade every aspect of American life, but it was to be found in a variety of artistic and cultural outlets. I feel that I somehow understood and empathized with this.

The only problem? I was born in 1988. It turns out that I was a generation too late and I had simply been watching The Day After and Red Dawn too many times. My fears were outdated, but my understanding of politics was immature at the time. In fact, at no self-aware point in my life should I have logically feared armageddon through bombs.

Going back one generation, to those who were young men and women in the late 1970s, the fear of nuclear war seems quite rational.

Missile Command was the product of turning nuclear war into a video game. As a concept goes, that seems quite bold and incisive- one would expect some kind of social or political commentary. Nope- it was at least two video game generations too early for that kind of advanced game element. The backstory is just the minimum necessary to describe the gameplay, and no more.

Did the kids mind? I bet that over 90% of the quarters shoved into Missile Command coin-ops in the 1980s were spent by kids who couldn't grasp the geopolitics behind the war that was being portrayed in the game. They saw it as a simple challenge to get as far as they could before defeat. The same basic goal as almost every game of the era.

Did the parents mind? Even if they were paying attention to such details, the game players were trying to defend the US from incoming Soviet missiles, so it was not controversial. The Cold War had been simmering for long enough by the late 1970s that American popular culture permitted some trivialization of the horrible outcome.

You can't "win"

I'd like to add some backstory to the early arcade game market.

People did not generally own home video game systems in the 1970s, except for the Pong consoles. All of the big money was in arcades, where games were coin-operated. Profit for the arcade operators came in the form of a delicate balancing act between a game that was high-quality enough to be played continuously by patrons, and yet unforgiving enough to kill them off at a high enough rate of attrition to keep unique players coming, and more quarters rolling in.

No doubt many ingenious people throughout the decades have been tasked with researching the effects of certain gameplay mechanics on the outcome of the game's financial success. When applied to arcade games, the only metric of interest is how rapidly the machine earns quarters.

There were three basic tactics to making a successful arcade game.

• High-concept gameplay mechanism (more unique players)
• Gameplay which is progressively harder (more repeat players)
• No end to the game (more repeat players)

The first tactic is obvious: making the game simple and immediately relatable. The gameplay must engage as many unique users as possible, and avoid offending or annoying many players. This meant a few safe routes could be staked out: sports simulations, whatever was "cool" at the time, or taking the Pac-Man route and making a cute mascot and approachable gameplay.

The second and third tactics are complementary: if the game never ends but is easy, then a player can dominate the machine and decrease the number of quarters you get. If the gameplay is progressively harder but an ending point exists, then players would seek to beat the game, and then move on. Both of these outcomes will limit the number of quarters your machine earns, so you must implement both tactics simultaneously.

These tactics work at odds to some extent- if you make the game too hard right off the bat and kill people off too quickly, you'll find a very substantial portion of the total players won't waste quarters on it. This may be considered an acceptable tradeoff if you want to specialize in the diehards. If you make a game so lackadaisical and childish that serious gamers avoid it entirely, you can dial down the difficulty to make it appealing to a different group, since you probably won't have very dominant players in that group.

Games were generally not "winnable" in the sense that they are today. If you set an arbitrary standard for how long a game lasts or how many points exist in a game, you can win a game of tennis. But tennis without rules has no end. Pong doesn't supply you with a limit, so you will never "win" the game no matter how good you are. The challenge is to keep up the progress continuously and get the highest score before you are defeated by the game. The game will always win, but your score is a measure of how well you resisted the inevitable defeat.

Infinite games had inherent replay value simply for the high score. Any finite quest would be eventually beaten, and from that point, the winner would have nothing left to discover. A high score might also exist, but since the quest was ended, it would be less important.

Since finite games will not generate enough repeat gamers, infinite games (or practically infinite games) dominated this early period. It also produced some heroically gifted gamers who made high scores much higher than the game designers probably intended. However, in the end, even if simply by voluntarily quitting, the best video game player in the world would lose the game and be given a final score.

You would always lose. You cannot win. It was probably not thought of philosophically, but I have sometimes thought it is depressing.

Missile Command- an inimitable product of its time

I cannot get inside the mind of Theurer, but it seems that his fears of nuclear war were certainly not given any sense of closure by the design of Missile Command.

The most hopeful part is that missile defense even exists. The reality is that the totally fake Strategic Defense Initiative would fail to destroy any of the incoming Soviet attack; all the money in the world couldn't have built SDI in the 1980s. Only in the 21st century have we gotten closer to the idea of effective missile defense on even the theater scale, let alone the strategic scale. But in the game, unlike the reality, here you have the power to save a small portion of humanity by shooting down nuclear missiles manually with your wits and guts.

You are the only operator of a local missile defense system for six cities on the California seaboard from north to south: Eureka, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Maybe this is all that remains of the world and the rest is already destroyed. Who knows? No time to think- there is very little respite time between the waves of missiles.

You can regain cities by extra points, but the missiles will never stop coming. The best players in the world have gotten millions of points and played for hours on end, but they have never won. You can't win nuclear war.

In contrast to the usual "Game Over" screen that accompanies defeat in a video game, Missile Command showed a giant flashing fireball slowly creeping over the whole screen, which was then overlaid with "The End." No ego-soothing result here: when you lose, it's the end of the world.

Tempest- an endless onslaught of bad guys

Theurer had another nightmare: an endless succession of monsters creeping out of a hole in the ground from an unknown source. You may choose to call it Hell or anything you wish. While this could be visualized as frightening (and it certainly has been by yours truly), it's also another setting which can create hope by a judicious application of gutsy firepower.

Blast away all the monsters as they climb up the walls. Do so even as they scurry back and forth. When available, use your Superzapper to eliminate all onscreen enemies at once. But, as with Missile Command, you are inevitably doomed to die at some point.

Tempest is one of those games with a visual style that's not really reproduced with modern technology. The QuadraScan vector graphics experience can't be compared to anything else. Every pixel is purposeful. It's mesmerizing when you can just barely see the enemy creeping upwards and you are swiveling the twist-top controller like a madman firing at barely visible foes. Then, when you finally clear the screen, and your ship goes flying toward the center of the screen and you're firing manically away at the green spike that is about to destroy you, and all the vector-generated walls grow in size, you realize you're seeing a depth of field which games of the time didn't have, and wouldn't be common until much later. The "depth" of the graphics, if there is such a term which has any meaning, has somehow always impressed me, even though the graphics are now well over 30 years old. I can't explain it. Tempest vector graphics have a crispness and other-wordly quality that still blow me away every time.

The sound effects were also thrilling and daunting. Firing was satisfying, and the fusillade of blasts from your Superzapper was always a delight.

Controls were simply perfect. Your ship had great precision in firing and motion. It felt much tighter and faster than Asteroids. Although it is a good thing that the controls had no lag whatsoever, you were expected to move faster than in many arcade games of the time to make anything like reasonable progress. You must maneuver accurately over a much wider range of motion than Breakout or Kaboom. Your motion is not linear or circular- you are moving along the surface of a geometric shape of increasing complexity as the levels advance, and you must account for the motion of your projectiles along the walls of this geometric shape. The claustrophobic environment which walls you in (a hallmark of "tube shooters") heightens the tension.

A certain frenzied desperation takes over your actions- some people thrive, some people just fail. Some games like Space Invaders just don't give me that feeling at all, others like Missile Command give it to me somewhat. No game does it as fully as Tempest.

My heart pounds and I beg my hands to move more quickly and precisely, but they don't oblige. I watch myself play, get dazzled by the gameplay, fail to find any opportunities for improvement, and wish that I simply had what it took to play better. These symptoms amount to a unique experience for me which I shall call it the "Tempest panic", which I can only characterize as sincere terror mixed with a bit of delight.

I feel like it's the worthy representation of an intriguing nightmare.