COLLECTED WORKS
Meet a man from the forefront of gaming’s momentous leap into 3D
BATTLEZONE
Developer/manufacturer Atari Format Arcade Release 1980
BRADLEY TRAINER
Developer/manufacturer Atari Format Bespoke Release 1981
SNAKE PIT
Developer/manufacturer Sente Format Arcade Release 1984
BLASTEROIDS
Developer/manufacturer Atari Games Format Arcade Release 1987
S.T.U.N. RUNNER
Developer/manufacturer Atari Games Format Arcade Release 1989
STEEL TALONS
Developer/manufacturer Atari Games Format Arcade Release 1991
WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP RACING
Developer/publisher 3DO Format 3DO M2 Created 1997 (unreleased)
Designer and programmer Ed Rotberg has some wise words for those planning a career in videogame development. “Panic early and often,” he suggests. “That was always my mantra, and it’s why most of my games were delivered on time and within budget.” The philosophy served him well during his four decades of making games. Rotberg joined Atari in January of 1979 and began work on Baseball, a mod kit for the successful Atari Football cabinet, which featured a very early example of speech synthesis in a coin-op, though that particular feature never made it out of the lab. Following ‘Theurer’s Law’ – named after Missile Command and Tempest creator, Dave Theurer, which states that any coder’s first game will not be a hit – Baseball failed to score a home run, but Rotberg was still having a ball. “It was like I’d died and gone to heaven,” he smiles. “I’d always goofed around on the computers at my old jobs, making little games, and now I was being paid to do it.”
His second production, Battlezone, would more than justify Atari’s faith in him, selling over 15,000 units and becoming one of the company’s most acclaimed titles. But Rotberg was not alone in noticing the discrepancy between the vast revenues arcade games were attracting and the comparatively modest remuneration received by their creators, and in 1982 founded Videa with fellow former Atari employees Howard Delman (now Wendy Smith) and Roger Hector. The company was later acquired by Sente (Atari founder Nolan Bushnell’s follow-up arcade venture), which in turn was bought by Bally when Bushnell’s Pizza Time Theater empire ran out of dough.
Rotberg returned to Atari for another successful stint and stayed in videogames and technology through companies such as 3DO, Apple and Innovative Leisure.
Now retired, he still hangs out with many of his Atari friends, hosting an annual golf tournament that reunites some of the old gang. He is also an outspoken pacifist, which makes us wonder if he appreciates the irony that his best-known work is set in a warzone. “I guess I do, but you were just blowing up tanks,” he shrugs.
“It’s not as visceral as ripping someone’s spine out of their body.”
We start tracing Rotberg’s story with those little green tanks…
BATTLEZONE Developer/manufacturer Atari Format Arcade Release 1980
Atari would have these off-site brainstorming sessions, and a month or so before, everybody in the coin-op group, from those in manufacturing to the people that did the schematics, could suggest game ideas. All these ideas would be presented at the brainstorming session and they’d boil them down and return with ‘The Book Of Blessed Game Ideas’.
One idea in there was ‘firstperson 3D Tank’. Tank had been a really big seller for Atari. There was a one-paragraph description which said it would use the new vector monitor. Well, vectors were pretty new to Atari but they weren’t intimidating to me – in college, I’d taken a class taught by Jim Blinn, and he is a god in the world of computer graphics.
There was a math box inside Battlezone that Mike Albaugh had come up with, working with Jed Margolin, which did the 3D transforms… well, more like, 2.75D. When the tanks blow up, it looks like [the pieces are] tumbling in full 3D, but actually they were pre-transformed in the roll and pitch, which means a lot less math. We had to do a lot of faking.
“I WANTED TO CALL IT DREADNOUGHT, NOT BATTLEZONE. HEY, I DIDN’T SAY I WAS ALWAYS RIGHT”
This was only my second project at Atari, so Morgan Hoff was the project leader. He wanted a periscope viewer, which is great for player immersion, but part of the draw in arcades is watching other people play, and with the original cabinet design no one else could see what was happening on the screen! Eventually they did away with the periscope and had open-face cabinets, which I had lobbied for from the beginning. Morgan and I had a lot of arguments but he was the project lead, so he won. He also won with the name, because I wanted to call it Dreadnought, not Battlezone. Hey, I didn’t say I was always right.
We experimented with a stereoscopic view, which gave Battlezone a VR look. We did it in a primitive fashion – we put two clear plastic discs [in the periscope] which were shuttered, so half was visible through, half was not. They rotated really fast and in sync so that when one of the player’s eyes could see, the other could not, and we put in an optical sensor, so we knew which eye was ‘open’, and then altered the display from that eye’s point of view. We got it working in the lab but some people who tried it got motion sickness, so that never went into production, but it did give a really cool effect.
BRADLEY TRAINER Developer/manufacturer Atari Format Bespoke Release 1981
It was kind of an Obi Wan Kenobi moment: “Help us, Ed Rotberg, you’re our only hope”. The military wanted something to train drivers and gunners for the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, without having to use live ordnance out in the field, [and Atari] thought we shouldn’t miss out on an opportunity to work for the government. It had to be done in three months and, as it was going to be based largely on the technology in Battlezone, it was pretty clear there was only one person in the company who could get it done in that timeframe – me. For those three months, I basically woke up, kissed my wife goodbye, went to work for 16 to 18 hours, went home, slept, and then did the same the next day. That was my life.
I did sit in one of these fighting vehicles and held the controller, which we replicated exactly, with palm and thumb switches – in fact, the game I started after this was called
Warp Speed, a space fighting game, and I said I wanted to use this controller. I left Atari before the game was finished and it was taken over by Mike Hally and became
Star Wars. That was the best thing to come out of the Bradley project.
In Battlezone, your shots aren’t affected by gravity. You shoot in a straight line, which is fake but accessible – and fun. The
Bradley Trainer simulated machine-gun fire, incendiary shells, armour-piercing shells, these new wire-guided rockets – and they all had to be affected by gravity. You could tilt the cannon upward and a guide would appear [on the screen] so that you could guesstimate the distance and the angle you’d need. The game also had two helicopters, and it was all about how quickly you could tell the Russian Hind helicopter from the US Cobra – a big part of the game was recognising an enemy from a friendly, just from the silhouette.
We built two prototypes and there was this meeting of top military brass where it was going to be shown. I don’t know why [the project] never went any further. Part of the deal was that if I did this, I’d personally be absolved of ever having to work on government contracts again if Atari went down that road. I washed my hands of it once I’d delivered the ROMs. I didn’t want to see it again.
SNAKE PIT Developer/manufacturer Sente Format Arcade Release 1984
We tried to make Sente feel like Atari Mark II. I was now a manager so part of my task was to create an atmosphere that was as
wonderful to work in as Atari was, hopefully attracting some old Atari buddies – which we did. When I left Atari, I was working on Warp Speed but also a game based on Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders Of Pern books. For the threads falling from the sky [in that game], I’d come up with this ‘snake out’ algorithm on a bitmap display. [Engineer] Peter Lipson was working on it but Atari decided not to pursue the licence.
I really liked the snake algorithm because it was fast and looked so cool, and when we were thinking of game ideas at Sente, this was the time of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, right? And Indiana Jones hates snakes, so we thought we could leverage that. Lee Actor was the lead programmer – I gave him this algorithm and a bunch of link lists to track each of the snakes. You could change how aggressive each snake was, so you could change a dumb snake into a smart snake just by moving lists.
Yeah, we had a whip in the office, mainly to catch the sound. You need that snap! It’s unique. There was no motion capture, though, just the artists modelling it.
On a technical level, I was pleased with how the game turned out, but on a gameplay level I was not. Bally had taken over Sente and we needed a lead game for the new Sente system – I think it was the first game we did [for that system], and it had to be ready fast. Were we happy with it? We wanted a hit game that would sell as much as Pac-Man so, no, of course we weren’t completely happy with it.
BLASTEROIDS Developer/manufacturer Atari Games Format Arcade Release 1987
I’d been away from Atari for five years and it had been broken up after Jack Tramiel has bought it, but not a ton had changed in the coin-op division. We were in the same building, Dan Van Elderen was head of engineering, Rich Moore was head of software, Ed Logg and Dave Theurer were still there, along with a lot of guys I knew.
I was no longer in management at this point, which was a huge relief. I was back to making games, and I had this idea of a rock, paper, scissors mechanic. You’d choose some aspect that might beat one character but wasn’t good against another.
Dan called me into his office and said, “Why don’t you update Asteroids?” Asteroids is a great game, so why wouldn’t I want to do it? And maybe I could work in my concept, too, which is why you have three different ships in Blasteroids.
I wanted players to have the same feel of controlling the ship as in the original Asteroids and I had access to Ed Logg’s source code. I looked at how he’d done the physics and tried to give that same feel. Asteroids was just you against the rocks but we made Blasteroids a twoplayer game because that increases your coin drop.
“GAMES ARE FANTASY. I WANT TO DRIVE FASTER THAN I EVER COULD IN REALITY. I WANT TO GO 900MPH!”
You’re playing with your buddies and you could even join two ships together. Also, Tim Skelly’s Rip Off [one of the first co-op arcade games, released by Cinematronics in 1980] was one of my all-time favourites.
I’m all about graphics and we were just starting to get good polygon hardware, which we would use for Hard Drivin’, but there’s no way I was doing Asteroids in 3D. Players couldn’t handle that. I wanted a 3D look, though, so we set up rigs and lighting to photograph models which we rotated and created the sprites in Blasteroids using photographs taken with digital cameras, which were new at the time. Rob Rowe spent hours digitising lava rocks they use in fireplaces, which he’d paint white so they’d reflect the light properly. Bill George from Lucasfilm actually built physical models of the three ships [in the game] – actually, it was four, as he made one of the two ships when they’re docked. Beautiful models, good enough to be used in a movie.
I need to give props to Mike Hally. He was the force behind the whole multiple routes [aspect of the game]. We wanted a deep game that would take a long time to get through but with a way that experienced players didn’t have to slog through the early levels, so they could jump ahead to a place where they would be more challenged and maybe get to fight Mukor – and Mukor controls all galaxies! And if you look at pictures of the coronavirus, there’s a scary resemblance to Mukor. I’ve already been blamed for Polybius, so why not the coronavirus, too?
S.T.U.N. RUNNER Developer/manufacturer Atari Games Format Arcade Release 1989
This was another one out of The Book Of Blessed Game Ideas. My concept was, we had Hard Drivin’, where you could drive around a course with real physics and that’s great, but games are fantasy. I want to drive faster than I ever could in reality. I want to go 900mph! We had the basic 3D engine from the Hard Drivin’ group and I’d worked with them, doing the music driver for that game, so using that hardware was not a big challenge for me. Of course, I modded the 3D engine to suit my needs but I had all the code, so why not?
Weapons were not there from the start. If I can borrow a phrase from Tolkien, ‘the tale grows in the telling’. As you’re working on a game, you think, ‘You know what would really be fun? Blowing up traffic! I can’t do that on the freeway…’ You want that fantasy element. And shooting that shockwave and clearing everything in front of you – there’s such a rush from that. I wanted that adrenaline.
I loved the S.T.U.N. Runner cabinet – and I hated it, too. It was the right way to play
the game – it really made you feel like you were driving that vehicle. The only thing that would have made it better is having a hand throttle – that would’ve completed the illusion. The reason I hated it was that it limited the locations the game could go into. It wasn’t going to fit in a convenience store or most movie theatres. We knew that cabinet meant it would be a ‘special’ game and a limited market – you’d charge more but sell fewer.
Just like there were many riffs on Battlezone, the same is true of S.T.U.N. Runner. I realise they’re not straight updates but when I see a game like Wipeout, it does make me smile. It’s nice to know maybe I inspired some of that.
STEEL TALONS Developer/manufacturer Atari Games Format Arcade Release 1991
This was Ed Logg’s idea. He knew he could use the Hard Drivin’ hardware but he had no exposure to that system and knew that I had. At this point in time, most games had more than one programmer, so they asked me if I wanted to join the project. I said, “I’ll work with Ed Logg on any project – sign me up!” We were friends, we hung out together, and working with someone who you know is going be seen, historically, as a singular figure in the games industry – it’s a head rush.
Ed was doing lots of research on helicopter physics. He really wanted to do a simulation, so early on we went to an Air Force base near Atari and talked to this guy who was known as a Top Stick – in the helicopter world, the equivalent of Top Gun – and he came on the project as a consultant. They had a Black Hawk simulator on the base and we had a threehour session on it. You’re in this big box sitting on a big rig, it can rotate, and it has these three monitors with infinity optics. It was way beyond what we could do in the game – and flying a helicopter is not as easy as it looks. Ed really wanted to make Steel Talons like flying a real helicopter, which is why the game is so hard.
The cabinet was pretty cool – you had two seats next to each other, and two screens. If you blew up your opponent with a heat-seeking missile, you can just look over and grin at him. That was great but again, we knew it was going to be a ‘special’, as the size meant the game wasn’t going to get into every location.
Steel Talons won some awards for innovation, which is nice, but I was a support programmer and wasn’t driving design. I’d chip in here and there but I was not going to go against any of Ed’s design choices. It was his baby but I’m glad it’s on my resume, too.
WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP RACING Developer/publisher 3DO Format 3DO M2 Created 1997 (unreleased)
I joined 3DO in 1993, and it was completely different from Atari. Trip Hawkins interviewed me, but then he interviewed everyone. And I mean everyone, from secretaries to programmers.
World Championship Racing was always going to be an M2 title, though we were trying to get the IMSA licence. It was going to be the game the new console shipped with. I hired Stephanie Mott and Matt Behensky, the main programmers for Hard Drivin’, as consultants because I wanted some real physics. Mark Cerny, who I knew from Atari, did this ultra-cool 3D engine kernel for the M2, and our game was one of the first to use his engine.
We wanted it to stand out in a number of ways. It needed to look beautiful and show what the M2 hardware could do. That’s why we put the showroom in at the beginning: all these beautiful cars which you could customise, these glorious graphics and all the lighting. We brought this composer in and the music did this cool thing so that the better you did, the more intense the music became, like the drums would go from an easy 4-4 to this driving 4-4 beat, and you’d get more riffs from the guitars. You’d leave skidmarks on the track and it was the first driving game that didn’t have pop-up scenery – you could race around the New Orleans Superdome and nothing popped up! And it’s the first game I’m aware of that had volumetric shadows. I know it’s techy and no one cares about it, but it looked so cool.
The game had a lot of firsts, but the M2 platform never made it into production, and that killed me. A couple of years’ work and no one is going to see it. We make our mark in this industry by the games we do. I’ve had a couple of good games but I really wanted to do a console game that was rip-roaringly good. To my mind, this was going to be that game. It did a lot of things others of the time didn’t, and when the hardware died I was just heartbroken.
“IT HAD A LOT OF FIRSTS, BUT THE M2 NEVER MADE IT INTO PRODUCTION, AND THAT KILLED ME”