Atari revives unreleased arcade game that was too hard for 1982 players

https://www.engadget.com/akka-arrh-remake-jeff-minter-atari-200603455.html

by isaacfrond • 4 years ago

103 102 4 years ago

engadget.com

snthpy• 4 years ago

If it was too hard for players in 1982 then there's no way today's players stand a chance.

shadowofneptune• 4 years ago

At least now you don't need to plug in a quarter (nearly a dollar in today's money) to keep practicing.

richrichardsson• 4 years ago

True, but you do need the ~500€ console and ~50€ game.

kristopolous5• 4 years ago

It's not the same game

Here's the original https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2r9Pt01ruF8

I'm thinking the payoff wasn't good enough to be a quarter eater. A hard game people don't want to play that much isn't good profit

TheOtherHobbes• 4 years ago

Looks like a circular Space Invaders, but with less variation and less fun. And a weaker narrative for your imagination to latch onto.

ZiiS• 4 years ago

In 1982 you were playing $/minute for a small local group to learn how to beat it. Today online communities share tactics. Many of the hardest ever games are routinely speed run.

ofrzeta4• 4 years ago

Who's Atari in 2022? Stories like this one seem to suggest that it's somehow the same entity that once was. However there's nothing left besides the name, is it?

Solution: Atari SA is the company formerly known as Infogrames. "As of 2022, the current Atari is pursuing several lines of business outside of video gaming, including cryptocurrency and video-game themed hotels." (WP)

kristopolous5• 4 years ago

Nolan Bushnell is on the board so I'm saying it's not completely just a shell

ekianjo5• 4 years ago

Nolan Bushness is probably on the board just for show. He's almost 80.

ofrzeta4• 4 years ago

I don't know anything about public companies and the related info but according to this he is not: https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/ATARI-S-A-2168735...

(Although Wikipedia says he will be but that info is from 2010)

kennend32• 4 years ago

I think one takeaway from Theranos should be this: People are willing to rent their names for large sums of money to be listed as board members.

What exactly did the Theranos board accomplish? How much did they make?

Much as "Long Term Capital Management" used the fame/prestige of its members as a marketing tool, Theranos did the same with her board of directors.

skeeter2020• 4 years ago

Wayne Gretzky shills online gambling for MGM, so beware of any hero association hinting towards anything more than burlap sacks with dollar signs on them.

morelisp4• 4 years ago

Unlike e.g. Nintendo with its (until recently) clear "succession" line and internal promotion, Atari's always been a Ship of Theseus company. Rapid executive transition from Bushnell to Warner to Kassar to Tramiel, the star developers leaving to form Activision, the separate VCS vs. PC vs. arcade divisions (imo sad how little attention was paid to the post-VCS arcade side in Atari 50!) It's been pieced out and put back together half a dozen times; it's surely dead by 2008 but did it die in spirit in 2001, 1999, 1996, 1993, 1984, or arguably even as early as 1979?

And despite the cryptocurrency and pop culture mess, if it's a Jeff Minter reworking of Mike Hally and Dave Ralston game how could it not be Atari?

Wowfunhappy3• 4 years ago

What changed at Nintendo recently?

Mountain_Skies• 4 years ago

If the current Atari owns the intellectual property of the original Atari, is that all that different than the current EA being able to trace itself to the original Electronic Arts that made Archon, M.U.L.E., and Pinball Construction Kit? How many of those responsible for creating those early games are still with EA?

danuker• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

ofrzeta4• 4 years ago

I don't know. I just wanted to raise that point because it bothered me. What could be a required property for a successor company to be "legitimate"? Some kind of merit that's in the spirit and the culture of the original company? Maybe the revival of unreleased arcade games could be it. Then again there should be more than this single event. Or maybe the even need some hardware of their own.

ido• 4 years ago

A nitpick, but I feel it's worth noting EA didn't "make" any of these, but published them. These were all developed by 3rd party developers

simonebrunozzi• 4 years ago

I remember digging its most recent history after a brief encounter with their latest CEO, a few years back. I vaguely recall that it was essentially a big mess of changes of control, copyrights, name rights, etc.

noobermin• 4 years ago

People don't appreciate how hard old games are. Somehow just because the graphics are "retro" now people assume old games are easy as well but consistently I find old games much more difficult than modern ones.

The fact every gamer now expects a tutorial level just demonstrates how much gamers today expect to be hand held.

dmitriid• 4 years ago

The fact every gamer now expects a tutorial level just demonstrates how much gamers today expect to be hand held.

No, "every gamer" doesn't expect that.

The industry pivoted to these (frankly infuriating) tutorials because the term "gamers" now encompass a much larger number of people. Including those who only play very, very casually.

And there are many games that are extremely challenging and brutal.

Natsu3• 4 years ago

Games were brutally hard back then because they wanted you to spend more quarters. And they did have tutorials, either written on the side of the arcade cabinet, or via the main screen showing a little bit of game play to give you the idea of what you were doing.

And those games were simple enough that seeing a few seconds of play was enough to explain pretty much the entire game, whereas now many games have entire wikis (DF, Stardew, etc.) because there are tons of things to keep track of, whether that be how to make soap or when you can catch a squid.

rightbyte2• 4 years ago

Most NES games were silly hard too though. Not just arcade wanting your quarters.

vintermann• 4 years ago

It's ironic that they call it "Nintendo hard". Because Nintendo were early to realize that hey, people aren't actually putting pennies per play into our consoles, we can give players stuff like codes to save their progress, maybe we'll even win over some kids who don't enjoy doing the same thing over and over.

oneoff7863• 4 years ago

A lot of the “brutally hard” games were just bad with crude RNG that created unavoidable or not predictable behaviors though. Most games that are regarded as good were pretty more reasonable.

Modern games want to give you progress at every step, but the reward for high skill tends to be much higher and there are more extreme difficulties.

spacemadness• 4 years ago

Yes, exactly. Do you really want every RPG to be harder than Dark Souls where you die every minute so the non existent cabinet can steal another quarter? It’s a silly argument that ignores context completely. I love the hell out of Robotron, but do I want every game to be that way regardless of genre?

rightbyte2• 4 years ago

Ye the difference is insane ...

Try to finnish Mega Man or Super Mario 3 (without using the cheat pipes). I mean ... did any child actually manage to do it?

As an adult I managed to finnish Sonic 2 after trying like 4 times. I could only pass one level in Mega Man.

The difficulty level were really hard core. And no easy mode either.

sethammons• 4 years ago

I beat SMB3 and MegaMan 2 as a kid several times. I can't make progress in Dark Souls :(

justsomehnguy• 4 years ago

Kids has the benefit of the brain being in active learning phase. They notice the things (often subconsciously) what the adult brain misses or need more repetition or just shown slowly.

philliphaydon• 4 years ago

I sunk many many 10s or 100s of hours into games like Shining Force, Breath of Fire, Chrono Trigger, Illusions of Gaia, etc.

Now I get bored of games after a few hours :(

ekianjo5• 4 years ago

Try to finnish Mega Man or Super Mario 3 (without using the cheat pipes). I mean ... did any child actually manage to do it?

Of course we did. We also didn't have hundreds of games to play at the same time.

mikebenfield• 4 years ago

There are plenty of very difficult old games, but Super Mario 3 is definitely not one of them.

bproven• 4 years ago

I did (mega man), but as others point out it was a diff time. Basically we would rent the game (remember that lol) and play it solid non-stop for 2-3 days trying to beat it.

dole• 4 years ago

As a kid, I played Mega Man for months before I had the patience and muscle memory to beat the yellow cyclops boss, and a few seconds after the first time I beat it, our area got hit with a power brownout. Wily ended up an easier fight.

Now that I think about it, at that point, I’d played countless hours of games on the Fairchild Channel F, Atari 2600 and C64, how were my reflexes back then?

kubb• 4 years ago

Do you always play on the highest difficulty? Do you play challenging single player games or competitive games? If so, and you're not satisfied, then you can always load up Super Mario on your Switch and spend most of your time replaying the same portion of the game before you get to the part that you don't have muscle memory for yet.

Semaphor• 4 years ago

Somehow just because the graphics are "retro" now people assume old games are easy

First I’m hearing of that. I usually see the difficulty chasers complaining that modern games are easy, never the old ones.

ekianjo5• 4 years ago

The fact every gamer now expects a tutorial level just demonstrates how much gamers today expect to be hand held.

nothing even remotely new. That was already the case since the Playstation 1 days. It's just become worse since then, but that has happened as soon as video games went mainstream because you had to make the bunch of uneducated people want to play games.

9dev• 4 years ago

Oh please, that’s just plain old elitism. Let me guess, the internet stopped being cool once it became accessible to ordinary people, uneducated cretins trying to act all lordly, not like the filthy peasants they are? Who don’t have such a highly refined taste just as yours, and skill sharpened through years of serious gaming?

I’m so glad it doesn’t belong to people like you anymore.

Grazester3• 4 years ago

I rather not play a game for hours just to get to a part that I cannot get past because I didn't do something in a previous section of the game(Resident Evil Code Veronica).

Avshalom• 4 years ago

People expect tutorial levels because nothing has a manual anymore games have a dozen buttons two sticks a d pad and half of them have multiple actions mapped to them.

bigbillheck• 4 years ago

Old arcade games had the tutorials on the idle screens.

evo_95• 4 years ago

True, games like Robotron: 2084 and Space Dungeon are on another level difficulty-wise. Great games, too.

joezydeco3• 4 years ago

It wasn't discovered until recently but Robotron will actually ratchet down the difficulty level, silently, if it sees that the player is struggling on the first wave.

pimlottc• 4 years ago

Actually, Super Mario Bros does have a tutorial - it's baked right into the level design. The opening map was specifically designed to ease the player into the world and expose gameplay elements and mechanics gradually, giving them a chance to learn at their own place. It's not explicitly called as a tutorial - there's not even any text - but it still functions as one.

zzo38computer• 4 years ago

I think many modern computer games are too easy, and I don't like forced tutorial levels (or many of the other forced explanations, sometimes they have). Including good documentation to explain the game rules, is a good idea.

myrandomcomment• 4 years ago

I tried to play this on the Atari 50th on PS5 but the controls were very difficult as it was made for trackballs. I hope this remake takes into account that as it looks promising. Tempest on PS5 is also awful for the same reason.

Grazester3• 4 years ago

I always thought Tempest played fine with controller.

goosedragons• 4 years ago

I'm really glad I picked it up on Steam Deck, the trackpads work pretty well as trackball replacements although it takes a bit to dial in the sensitivity. Can you use the PS5 trackpad as awkward as that may be?

criddell• 4 years ago

Can you plug a mouse or trackball into a PS5?

mistersquid• 4 years ago

Can you plug a mouse or trackball into a PS5?

It'll depend on the software developers to support trackball/mouse inputs.

For example, Code Mystics's Atari Flashback Classics Vol. [0] contains a version of Centipede (1980) by Atari which used a trackball for a controller.

However, users cannot use a trackball or mouse as a controller because Code Mystics did not build support for anything except PlayStation controllers.

As a then-contemporary Centipede high-scorer, the play experience is awful.

I'd like to find more space- and money-affordable ways to play Centipede than a cabinet replica. [1]

[0] https://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/developers/games/5013

[1] https://www.wayfair.com/furniture/pdp/arcade-1up-arcade1up-a...

Wowfunhappy3• 4 years ago

I want to play Tempest using my mouse's scroll wheel. I think it would be quite close to the original. However, I haven't found a version that lets me map it properly.

userbinator• 4 years ago

The name sounds like the grunts of frustration from those who played it.

quickthrower2• 4 years ago

Fed up of the actor model? Wait till you tried this game!

BaseballPhysics• 4 years ago

I assumed it was named after this guy:

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Akaar

Alas it appears to be a coincidence:

https://www.arcade-history.com/?n=akka-arrh&page=detail&id=3...

The name Akka Arrh is an an pseudo acronym for : Also Known As Another Ralston Hally production.

DarknessFalls• 4 years ago

Akka Arrh comes with the Tempest 12-in-1 cabinet produced by Arcade1up. Much to my dismay, the attract mode on this cabinet defaults to a demo of Akka Arrh, instead of Tempest. It seems like Atari wants to push more recognition of it, otherwise - what an arbitrary choice for a cabinet that also has Centipede, Crystal Castles, Missile Command, and other more celebrated titles.

mgkimsal• 4 years ago

I have that machine! Akka is... weird. And slightly ugly as the default attract mode. I normally select millipede and let that run in attract mode.

I thought it was default because it was just alphabetically first...

mwenge• 4 years ago

What makes this special is that the remake is by Jeff Minter, who is famous for, among other things, his multiple trippy remakes of Tempest on multiple platforms.

egypturnash• 4 years ago

Looking videos of the original it honestly looks more like a sketch for a game than an actual game. The giant mandalas filling the screen beg for much trippier themeing than the generic blips and "the Atarian Federation vs the Xablartian Empire". The only reason it's really interesting to anyone is because the three people who ended up with the prototypes refused to let the ROMs get dumped for a while.

Minter is a total wizard, and I hope Atari gave him enough leeway to turn this napkin doodle of a game into something that can reach into your brain and give your visual cortex a really soothing, satisfying massage. He's good at that. Scary good.

morelisp4• 4 years ago

Having played the version on Atari 50 some parts definitely could've spent more time cooking, but on the other hand for 1982 I think the two different scales alone would've made this stand out. (But part of the reason it was cancelled was apparently it was not just too difficult but "too complicated" - I assume primarily because of the scales.)

ThinkBeat• 4 years ago

Jeff is a true eccentric genius and I meant that in the most complimentary way. I remember spending endless hours on his games when I was younger. His sense of humor is great.

He innovates and he squeezes more out of a computer than what should be possible.

At least in the Atari ST days :)

evo_95• 4 years ago

Video of the original arcade game: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_UQ5wpa2eD0

Also you can play it on MAME.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS• 4 years ago

I kinda prefer the simple, focused esthetic of the original. The remake has a lot of distraction going on. But the music is cool.

evo_95• 4 years ago

Agree; sounds like there is a setting to turn that down/off, and hopefully restore the original arcade graphics.

ndiddy• 4 years ago

This game is a great example of how piracy helps rightsholders. Because the original game was cancelled (and the multiple corporate restructurings Atari went through), the only copies of Akka Arrh in existence were in the hands of private collectors. Typically, these collectors act like they own the exclusive rights to a game simply because they got a hold of the board. This often makes it impossible for unreleased games to see a legitimate release, as the collectors will either not cooperate at all, demand far more money for the ROMs than the game is likely to make, or try to place restrictions on the release (must be digital only, the ROM files must be encrypted, etc.) in order to "preserve the value" of their collection. Meanwhile, if the ROMs are freely available online, the rightsholders can just download them and avoid all of this red tape entirely.

In Akka Arrh's case, the ROMs were leaked to a ROM site (supposedly by a vigilante repair tech) against the will of a number of collectors. While this pissed off the collectors who no longer had exclusive access to the game, it also meant that the game could now become a legitimately licensed part of several Atari compilations (such as the excellent Atari 50).

yladiz• 4 years ago

I wonder if there is a strange discrepancy between the perceived and actual value that is being derived for the cartridge from.

In my mind I can think of two main sources for the value: its rarity in ability to play (the rarity of the playable game itself) or rarity in ownership of the physical cartridge. While I think the collectors perceive the value is derived from the former, I’m skeptical that it’s where the actual value is derived because of the value of special editions of Super Mario Bros carts (which can obviously be played easily) and, in a different way, the value of art that appears in museums.

JKCalhoun• 4 years ago

the ROMs were leaked to a ROM site (supposedly by a vigilante repair tech)

Ha ha, a variation on the Neiman Marcus Cookie recipe story.

PhasmaFelis• 4 years ago

This kind of collector is so disappointing. They're very visible in games right now, but I've seen them in toys, and I'm sure you get them in everything from stamps onwards. They don't play the games, they don't play with the toys; they don't really care about the subject except insofar as it lets them feel superior to others with smaller collections or less thorough knowledge.

anigbrowl2• 4 years ago

Pay attention to figure 3 in particular

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451

crtasm2• 4 years ago

When someone won't even help digitally preserve their rare physical game for some reasonable fee for time/disruption I can't bring myself to call them a collector, they're either speculating or as you say just want to feel superior.

fomine3• 4 years ago

Interesting https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/after-a-lost-atari-ro...

anigbrowl2• 4 years ago

I think 'too hard' is not the right way to look at this. It's a qualitative rather than a quantitative issue. My wife is really good at pattern matching (Tetris style) and platform games. I am just adequate at the former, and useless at the latter, I've never completed the first level of Super Mario Bros and though I've enjoyed some other platformers like Little big Planet I'm really just Not Good at them.

Some time back I installed a Jeff Minter game, Space Giraffe I think. I was a fan of both his games and his eccentric personality from my home computer experience in the 1980s (I had a Vic-20 and JMs games were the only thing ones that delivered an exciting game experience on that machine's limited hardware). Well, my wife attempted and couldn't cope with it at all, playing for more than 10 minutes would give her a headache, whereas she play things like Tetris near competitive level. She just found it overstimulating and with way too many audio and visual signals coming in. for me, it was (unexpectedly) a breeze. I could just sit there and play and play and cruise through levels with ease; it's comfortable because that's how the real world living in a city is for me, constant sensory overstimulation from people, cars, billboards, graffiti, messages etc. etc.

So Jeff Minter's new game looks like a relaxing meditative toy rather than some some psychedelic torture device. It's not a question of hard vs easy, as if all games can be ranked along a single dimension. It's something to with how the human brain works. Why do I find Jeff Minter games easy when I'm bad-to-mediocre at many other simple videogames? The other simple games* I am good at are ones that require a lot of attention splits and/or tended to be unpopular with many players because they were 'too frenetic'. So in terms of classic games I was poor at Galaxians but did well on Tempest.

* I mean simple in the sense of being 2d and not elaborate discovery/open world games like RPGs or FPS, which require a whole different set of skills.

Atari revives unreleased arcade game that was too hard for 1982 players

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