News You Can Bruise

Found some MP3s of a synth-orchestral arrangement of the music to the two coolest-music-having NES games: Kid Icarus and Metroid. This is not some fanboy project; it was an actual cassette tape released in the 80s by Hirokazu Tanaka, who wrote the music for the games, is now president of the company that makes Pokemon, and is a HotEA candidate if ever there was one.

Unfortunately it's hard to arrange for synths music originally written for different synths, so there's some unneccessary ornamentation in the tape tracks. Example: this version of the Metroid intro makes it feel like the opening music to a Jerry Bruckheimer film, rather than the creepy civilization-overrun-by-weeds dirge that fits in with the game. And there's a weird tooty synth patch that I'd only previously heard in actual video games trying to be cute. It's not cute, guys.

Incidentally, in addition to having the coolest NES game music, Kid Icarus and Metroid used the same game engine and were released on the same day. Metroid became a huge hit and remains a Nintendo cash cow; Kid Icarus, like its namesake, plummeted to a watery death. I certainly appreciate the greatness of Metroid, but sometimes I wonder what the world would be like it things had happened the other way around.

Salon has an interview with Eugene Jarvis, creator of Defender and Robotron. He's as cranky as I could hope any HotEA programmer to be, and he loves making up random numbers to prove a point:

[Now] you look at the PlayStation 2 or Xbox controller and there's, like, 27 buttons on the thing and three or four joysticks.

"Madden 2004" is a hell of a lot like "Madden 1004."

There's 3,000 channels of everything out there and there's just a million games where you're running around in tights with a sword and you're playing in 1542.

Really, what it's about is the five people that actually send the 3 million letters to their congressman.

It sounds like he wouldn't approve of Burrell Smith's Defender strategy. Incidentally, how does Smash TV fit into your anti-amoral gaming philosophy? Smash TV fascinated me and my pre-adolescent peers precisely because it presented such an amoral world. Does Defender somehow cancel out Smash TV? Are you going to reach for the 'heavy-handed satire' excuse? Answer me, dammit!

Wait, I'm not the one interviewing him.

Here's 15 minutes of fame for David Bradley, creator of the control-alt-delete key combination. The piece says he "discovered" it, as though it were a naturally occuring phenomenon or an emergent property of the IBM PC hardware. I especially like this piece because, as in many such articles, they give Bradley a soapbox of a couple summarized sentences at the end of the piece, presumably as the price for consenting to the interview.

Bradley says the "strength of the country" is at stake because relatively few students go into science or technology. Further, he says, ordinary citizens need to understand science and technology better to make informed choices in the voting booth.

This is more a VH1 Behind the Music type thing than a proper HotEA entry, but this history of the Commander Keen series of games is very comprehensive, and has lots of quotes and reminiscences by the authors.

Here's a great article on the implementation of VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet), article written by Bob Frankston, one of the original authors of VisiCalc. This article reveals all: as inevitably happens, they shipped the prototype.

The other primary author of Visicalc, Dan Bricklin, has on his website a wealth of VisiCalc reference material, including a less technical history with photos, all with a really cool navigation system that makes it feel like the future. Dan has his own weblog, and he and Bob collaborate with some other folks on the popular SATN.org weblog, where they talk about telecommunications, copyright, and other curmudgeonly topics.

[Note: this entry inaugurates "Heroes of the Elder Age", the new series of Crummy trading cards and weblog entries (trading cards not available). HotEA honors the authors of cool old pieces of software and does a sort of "where are they now" showcasing of their current web sites. There was a previous entry in this series, on Jeff Lee, one of the authors of Q*Bert, but the series hadn't been titled yet, so it doesn't count as inaugural.]

One of my favorite things on the web is the webpages of people who wrote famous pieces of software (usually games, as it turns out) back in the pre-web era. If they humor me by putting up a little page about what it was like to write the software, I'm happy. If they remain obsessed with the software that brought them transient fame, and can talk of nothing else, then I start to worry a little, but so far I don't think that's happened.

I've got several of these websites and I'm thinking of doing one every once in a while as an NYCB mini-feature (suggestions for mini-feature title welcomed). Today's entry is one I just found: Jeff Lee, one of the authors of Q*Bert, has a Q*Bert page. I have never been any good at Q*Bert, but I've always admired its sheer strangeness and eclectivity, and the page demonstrates how this occurred: it looks to have been designed by a committee of geeks with no management pressure to make it coherent and marketable. Other interesting fact: an early version of the Q*Bert code was equivalent to that OpenGL screensaver with the Slinkies.