Tempest: Geometries of Play by Judd E. Ruggill; Ken S. McAllister

Author:Judd E. Ruggill; Ken S. McAllister
Language: eng
Format: epub

The Power of Ports and Remakes

There have been at least three dozen attempts to rejuvenate Tempest since the game’s release in 1981. None of these has been particularly successful in any conventional sense—financial, aesthetic, pleasurable, or historical—yet each has played a part in the life of the Atari brand, beginning with the authorized versions of the game that were released on the ZX Spectrum for the European market in 1983. The first two of these came from Germany’s EMM Software, the less buggy of which was later released in Britain as G-Force by Euro-Byte.[2] These versions of Tempest used a top-down perspective and looked considerably more primitive than their arcade progenitor. A remake for the ZX Spectrum was also released in the United Kingdom in 1983 by Mikro-Gen. It used a side-view instead of a top-down perspective, and as a result, even though the game was called Tempest, it bore a stronger resemblance to Williams’s 1980 arcade classic Defender.

Within a few years, home computer systems had begun to approximate the audiovisual quality of arcade games, and during the second half of the 1980s, several higher-end licensed home versions of Tempest were brought to market. The versions for the BBC Microcomputer System (1985) and its more affordable cousin the Acorn Electron (1985) were a step up from what home gamers had seen before: the perspective was correct, the vectors and tubes accurately drawn, and the sound was reasonably close. A new version for the ZX Spectrum and its rival the Amstrad Colour Personal Computer was released in 1987, controversially both distributed on the same cassette by a third-party developer, followed by a port for the Atari ST in 1989.[3] Most of these ports appear to have been modestly successful and remain relatively easy to find through online auction houses, a phenomenon that suggests reasonably high unit sales originally.

Tempest also enjoyed a limited extension of its notoriety and iconicity through a variety of “arcade classics” releases, that is, ported versions of popular arcade games bundled together on one disk. In 1993, for example, Microsoft Arcade for both Windows 3.1 and the Apple Macintosh introduced home computer gamers to Tempest, Battlezone, Asteroids, Centipede, and Missile Command.[4] Similarly, Midway’s Arcade’s Greatest Hits: The Atari Collection 1 brought these five games—plus Super Breakout (1979)—to the Sony PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1996 and 1997. In 1999, Hasbro and Digital Eclipse released Atari Arcade Hits: Volume 1, which contained these six games plus PONG, Asteroids Deluxe (1981), Crystal Castles (1983), Gravitar (1982), Millipede (1982), and Warlords (1980). Atari Arcade Hits: Volume 2 was released in 2000, and the 2001 Atari Anniversary Edition effectively combined all the coin-operated titles on the two Atari Arcade Hits volumes and made them accessible to the latest generation of consoles—Sega Dreamcast, PlayStation, PC, and (in 2002) the Nintendo Game Boy Advance.[5] One year later, Hasbro and Digital Eclipse teamed up again to bundle Tempest with a much larger variety of classics—a total of twelve arcade games and sixty-two Atari 2600 titles—for its 2003 Atari Anthology for Windows 98.

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