I'm reluctant to admit it at this stage in life, but I'm actually still pretty big on games. Like many people my age, I discovered video games as the industry went through its golden era in the late seventies and early eighties. Arcade games especially, for me, are particularly fascinating. That flush of excitement that hit me in the first arcade that I ever visited as a small boy has never really subsided. But things have moved on since those early days and I thought I'd write a little about that here, to try to explore why games are not just games any more, but sometimes really important social phenomena and often incredible works of art. Many people think of them as mere toys, until they understand the often super-human effort behind their production ...
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Commonly known as easter eggs, many games have some unusual discoveries in them. It's a way for developers to let off steam in what can otherwise be a high-pressure environment, and to stamp some personal impressions into the game. We did this with GRIP too, perhaps more than most. Many of these discoveries will have gone unnoticed to the casual player I'm sure, but to those that are willing to explore there are a few surprises that await you. Let's take a look. There are a good number of references to popular culture embedded in the game, some obvious, some not so obvious.
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The combat racer. Today, and seemingly for the longest time, an archaic concept consigned to history. Where simulation and the sandbox dominate the motoring scene, where have those heavy weapon racers gone? Where are the guns? Where are the missiles? Where those glorious, refulgent explosions? In the mists of your memories, golden days spent at the pad of the arcing, mellifluous Wipeout, majestic sessions in battle through the frenetic, hardcore classic that is Rollcage. All that is left, fleeting vistas sweeping through your mindscape of a bygone age. The combat racer, in all its grizzled glory, gone. Achingly absent. Lost. Perhaps, forever? Not if we have anything to do with it.
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Although Rollcage was hugely, critically successful, with heart-warming praise in all the games media, it didn't sell anything like as well as our publishers, or ourselves, had hoped. Much as the gaming press loved what we had produced, the gaming public seemed to think it was just too sodding hard. Undaunted, Psygnosis commissioned us to write a sequel, which came to be known as Rollcage Stage II. We had more cars, better tracks, more game modes, specially commissioned music, refined graphics and a slick UI. On paper, it was set to be a much better game than its predecessor. However, the measures we had taken, at our publisher's behest, to make it more playable for a mass audience, somehow seemed to emasculate it.
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A little while back, I was having a conversation with an old friend of mine. We turned to reminiscing about the past, to a time when we used to work together, in an old converted stable somewhere in deepest, darkest Warwickshire. Rollcage, a game we had both worked on, became the conversation's focus. "You said something pretty profound, way back in 1999" he said, "it's something I've never forgotten. Can you remember what that was?" I thought about it for a moment, but of course, I couldn't recall what it might have been. It was so long ago, I hadn't a hope of guessing what it was he was referring to.
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Known as Gradius to the rest of the world, and the game that started the whole 'shmup genre. For me, Nemesis was a real turning point in the development of arcade games. Sure, we had had some scrolling shoot-em-ups (or shmups) before then, but they had no complexity and certainly no real heart. I remember seeing Nemesis for the first time in 1985 in an arcade in a Welsh holiday town. The sort of games that we had seen before then were quite rudimentary (although great at the time) - Space Invaders, Pacman, Asteroids, Tron, Gorf, Defender, Galaxians - you know the sort of thing.
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What you will need So, you want to make that childhood dream come true and you want to know what you need in order to do that. You will need to be PC literate, used to messing around inside of PCs and also used to working "behind-the-scenes" with command prompts and the like. In addition, you will need to know how to install an operating system such as Windows 98 from scratch. If all goes well, you will only need a day of your time. The hardware that you need is as follows: JAMMA compatible arcade cabinet PC, 512MB+ RAM, 1GHz+ processor, 40GB+ hard disk, 120MB+ floppy drive, DVD ROM drive 15KHz compatible video card Old-school sound card JPAC interface PC speaker system The software that you need is as follows: Windows 98 or MSDOS 7 Memory manager AdvanceMAME AdvanceMENU MAME roms The hardware Setting up the hardware is relatively easy, once you've got the right equipment.
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For those people that have lived outside of the Solar System for the past decade, MAME is all about playing old arcade games on modern consumer equipment; equipment such as PCs, Macs or even XBOXs. MAME been developed from its early days back in 1997, and those eight years of heritage clearly show in the complexity and completeness of this miracle in software engineering. As a games programmer myself, I fully understand the difficulties and challenges that those on the MAME team have faced - and I totally salute their achievement knowing full-well the monumental effort that has gone into its production.
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