Re:Retro

The History Of Gaming, Part Seven: What Really Happened To Krypton

by alewing on May 8th, 2007

Thrust was a classy game. Simple, elegant, relying on simulated gravity - which had been around since that early Space War game - to create dazzlingly difficult puzzles that tested your skill and your nerves to the utmost, right up until it ran out of levels and just turned the screen upside down.

It looked like this:

Thanks again to cpmisalive. If you look closely at that video, you might notice some words occasionally popping up saying PLANET DESTROYED BONUS 4000 POINTS.

Thereby hangs a tale. In Thrust, as you can work out by watching, you had a simple ship with some simple controls - the titular thrust button, a gun at the front to shoot things and a combined force-shield/tractor beam with which you could suck up fuel from the fuel tanks or pick up the hostages in the circular pod in the lowest depths of the level. Once you’d picked up the pod, you couldn’t put it down again - if it touched anything or got shot by you or the enemy guns, it blew up and so did you. The aim of the game was to descend into the depths, grab the pod, and haul it up into space without running out of fuel, getting shot or smashing it to smithereens on the hard rocky walls. Sounds simple, is difficult - in many ways, the perfect retro game formula.

There was one additional complication - a Sellafield-style nuclear power plant which chuffed away somewhere in the level. This was the power to the guns. If you shot it, it stopped puffing for a while, depending on how many times you shot it. If it wasn’t puffing, the guns weren’t shooting. That often meant the difference between life and death as the guns were ruthless little bastards. So it was a good idea to pepper it with gunfire, much as cpmisalive does here.

If you shot it too many times, it started flashing, which meant you had ten seconds to evacuate the planet before it blew up. Since this was the enemy planet, murdering the billions of civilians on its surface earned you a nice little bonus, making this THE FIRST GAME TO REWARD ACTS OF GENOCIDE BY THE PLAYER. Unless, of course, you blew it up with the hostages still on it - then you got nothing. MISSION FAILED NO BONUS.

And then you went straight on to the next level, with no other punishment whatsoever.

Now there are two types of gamers in this world - the type who relish getting the highest score and the type who want to succeed so they can see more of the game and explore more of the game world. For the latter type, the score doesn’t matter as long as you get to see the next level. Games these days are generally made for the latter type.

Thrust was evidently made for the former, or they really wouldn’t have put a temptation like that in my way. Starting from level 2, I merrily blew up the entire planet at the beginning of every level, on the reasoning that I wasn’t going to negotiate with any space terrorists. I’d just carpet-bomb the planet from the air. That may have meant MISSION FAILED NO BONUS but it meant a show of strength for the alien scum as far as I was concerned. Things got tougher in later levels as you had to venture deeper and deeper into the complex to find the power plant, presumably to make the final hectic dash for orbit more and more challenging, and eventually blowing up the planet was suicide for everyone involved - not that that stopped me. Sacrifices must be made and my pilots were all volunteers. The ones that didn’t volunteer I simply had shot for desertion, the filthy cowards.

So basically I just found myself playing a slightly easier game with no score - how many planets could I destroy before my lives ran out? How many billions of sentient lives could I snuff out like candles before my hideous genocide spree was brought mercifully to a close? I’d usually get up to about six or seven before nausea overtook me and I had to wash the electronic blood off my hands.

Still, that’s war for you.

And now, the thrlling conclusion to cpmisalive’s lonely battle against the machine:

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POSTED IN: BBC Micro, Blowing people up, General, Murder, Space