The 8-bit Architects
Sandy White and others reveal the difficulties of creating a bustling metropolis on gaming’s early systems
Gaming worlds used to be stark, empty places. Oblong spaceships would traverse the void with so little to do they’d just shoot one another on sight. Abstract tennis rackets would bounce square balls over pitch-black fields. Then, at whatever pace technology permitted, worlds began to form, and eventually entire cities would become possible. Urban spaces, however, can’t be empty by any stretch of the imagination. They require residences for the congregation of humanity residing in them to sleep, eat and watch TV in, places for them to work at, as well as roads of all sizes to travel between these points. They’re kept alive by a canopies of utility poles and traffic lights while below their streets they’re punctuated by sewer grates and litter. Unlike space, you can’t depict a city with a black void.
Then again, you can still use the darkness as a night sky, and it was this sort of blackness that served as the background for Missile Command’s urban centres. Atari’s widely ported arcade classic tasked players with defending six heavily stylised cities consisting of a couple dozen pixels each from nuclear annihilation. Treating cities as tokens, or simple targets to be shot at, was as straightforward and simple as things got; it’s no wonder that early city depictions never moved much further than this. The fact remains, though, that it was exactly the use of urban centres along with their implied millions of human lives that made the horrors of Missile Command feel relatable, and it gave the game its memorable context.
Rampage, a definitive game of civic demolition, was a fun, pulp-like arcade offering that brought vivid neighbourhoods to 8-bit monitors. It featured procedural buildings, and several cities for radioactive monstrosities George, Lizzie and Ralph to destroy. Each city/level comprised its own skyscrapers, evocative silhouetted backgrounds, tiny people, buses, security forces, and even architectural styles. The illusion wasn’t totally convincing, obviously, but at least every screen felt both different and decidedly urban. The more explorable environments of the superficially similar The Movie Monster Game by Epyx further distinguished individual cities by incorporating famous landmarks. Playing as non-copyright infringing versions of Megatron, Godzilla or even the Blob players could demolish Tokyo Tower, Big Ben and the Statue Of Liberty, while terrorising
residents, chasing cars and avoiding the army. Despite the isometric view, sensible city blocks and larger cities, despite even the provisions for public spaces, the ambitious urbanism of The Movie Monster Game just wasn’t as spatially immersive as that single scene of Saucer Attack!. Granted, this was a simpler game, but its first-person perspective, and its colourful, detailed, lively Washington somehow turned a mere UFO shooting gallery into something strangely believable.
Washington was not the only recognisable city to be rendered in a smattering of garish colours and low resolutions as an intricate but mostly static background. For Saucer Attack! (much like for 1951 classic The
Day The Earth Stood Still) the relatable setting served as a simple way to create a sense of urgency, though there were several other reasons to try and convey the idea of a real-world metropolis, too. International Karate placed its first duel under the Sydney Harbour Bridge, overlooking the iconic Opera House, a choice that not only differentiated it from The Way Of The Exploding
Fist with its tranquil dojos and snow-capped peaks, but also bestowed it with an edginess, an air of urban cool. California Games made sure we saw the Hollywood sign and the Golden Gate Bridge in the background to justify not just its name, but also the entire premise of its activities through a suggestion of geographical proximity.
The problem with these cities was that, lovely as they were to look at, perhaps even eliciting an ingratiating sense of pride that came with having visited or lived in them, they really didn’t amount to anything more than a postcard. The universally acknowledged symbols of Paris (in Bob Winner), Moscow (in Human Killing Machine), and Athens (in Bomb Jack) were there, but you couldn’t explore these cities, understand the ebb and flow of their urban spaces, their energy, the people who lived in them. To attempt something like that, even a grossly oversimplified version, we needed a very specific genre to emerge from the sewers and the alleys, take over the streets, and start stirring up trouble.
Drawing from the urban dystopias portrayed in films like The Warriors and Streets Of Fire, side-scrolling beat-’em-ups became prominent in the late Eighties. A slew of popular coin-op titles such as Dragon Ninja, Renegade, and The Ninja Warriors were ported to home computers, followed closely by a parade of similar games like Silverbird’s Street Warriors and CRL’S Time Fighter as smaller publishers jumped into the fray.
Naturally these games did not paint the most welcoming picture of civic life. Like its cinematic counterpart, the genre exploited that decade’s paranoia surrounding the metropolitan downtown, popularly portrayed as a festering cesspool of lawlessness and deviance, ready to explode into violence at any given moment. Packs of skinheads roamed the parks
at nighttime in Target: Renegade, whip-wielding dominatrices patrolled the streets of Double Dragon, and the alleys of virtually every genre title were infested with hoodlums committing crimes against civic society. In more humorous efforts, such as Street Hassle, you took the role of the neighbourhood menace yourself, terrorising blind seniors and feisty old ladies that could whip up a flurry of handbag strikes. However the roles were distributed though, it was clear that these were battlefields for factions to fight in unto death, or, at least, unto the game over screen.
These exaggerated tensions were reflected not just in the cast of characters populating the seediest of genres, but also in the deliberate choice of environmental visuals. All the instantly recognisable signifiers of urban decay were there: tattered Warholian posters adorned the walls of Shinobi, automobile husks and towers of neatly stacked tires dotted the landscape in Vigilante’s junkyard, while boarded up storefronts, smashed windows, and burning barrels were ubiquitous.
Hollywood’s exploitative dystopianism was not just an indirect influence. Several of that era’s gritty tales of urban implosion were adapted for the medium calling upon our solitary protagonist to deliver justice or revenge against the unruly lords of the city. Robocop’s Detroit, Cobra’s LA, and the New York of Death Wish 3 were among the numerous locations where the blood of innocents stained the pavements and civilisation seemed always on the brink of collapsing downtown.
v iolence aside, the first real taste of urban exploration in a more fleshed out, more believable urban environment was delivered by Sandy White’s Ant Attack, and its city of Antescher. Yet, the “initial creation of city-like structures was purely accidental, and came well before any thoughts of actually building a city, or indeed a game”, Sandy remembers. “I was playing around with an Acorn Atom writing code which printed isometric cubes randomly onto the screen.
Quite often as layers of cubes continuously built up, weird and wonderful buildings and cityscapes would appear by chance.” Adding a bit of code to line the cubes up he noticed those fleeting glimpses of strange places suddenly becoming almost consistent, and their Escher-like qualities coming into view. There was “an ‘atmosphere’ which came with those images, a strong feeling as though I were peering through a window into another place”, as Sandy puts it.
Having a feeling was not enough, and while tackling the mammoth task of fitting all the urbanistic data into 16KB, the city itself had to be designed. “It arose organically, built little by little with no initial plan. As the available ground space of 128x128 squares began to fill up, eventually it became necessary to plan things out on squared paper with a binary number in each square to represent the associated stack of bricks.” Interestingly and “as it was such an effort to do this, and get it into the Spectrum, and saved off to cassette”, once a building was placed, there was no moving it ever again, in a process not wholly dissimilar to the physical environment’s resistance to change. “There is no doubt that there are also influences from my native city of Edinburgh, itself replete with stone buildings ancient and new, along with a good sprinkling of viaducts, graveyards, stone staircases,” Sandy adds. Wisely, what with Ant Attack being all about locating and swiftly escorting your partner out of the city landmarks, paths and navigational aids were top design priorities.
There’s still one question that remains unanswered, though. Was Antescher, the first threedimensional game city many people ever visited, a place stylised to meet technical requirements, or was it the ruins of a long forgotten town? According to Sandy it was, in a way, both. “In the beginning it was an excavation, a discovery of random fragments which had, until 1982, lain waiting to be discovered beneath digital sands, and subsequently a design effort to turn these discovered ruins into something useful to a playable game. Perhaps it wouldn’t stretch the analogy too far to call that an urban environment built on ancient ruins.”
With more realistic environments came the need for different ways of engaging with them. These were places inhabited by living beings whose cycles of activity revolved around more than just work and survival. Our protagonists needed the occasional respite from either exploration or confrontation. How did these urban dwellers have fun? The answer is by organising some friendly competition, of a kind that takes advantage of the metropolitan morphology. 720° offered not only four skateboarding parks but, perhaps even more memorably, a whole city block’s worth of space filled with makeshift ramps and slippery puddles to practice your skills. Other competitive endeavours associated with the inner city also had videogames produced after them; most notably breakdancing in titles like Break Street and Break Fever.
Not that more conventional sports remained confined in the stadiums and courts with which they’re associated. Epyx’s Street Sports series featured some wonderfully atypical settings for its games. Street Sports Basketball, in particular, gave you a choice between a school playground, a pristine suburban yard, a dingy alley, and a garage that wouldn’t look out of place in Renegade, all complementing the variety of decidedly urban character archetypes you could pick for your team.
Driving through cities, though not much of a sport, is one of the predominant ways in which we get to experience contemporary urbanism, and doing so in a super-fast car seems to have been a widespread fantasy during the Eighties. It’s no wonder, then, that racers such as Cisco Heat proved popular across 8-bit micros. Unlike the majority of genre offerings that had you race through
graphically less demanding countrysides in the tradition of Out Run, Cisco Heat attempted to convey the intensely urban atmosphere of San Francisco. Having the Golden Gate Bridge on the screen border, including hills to traverse, and even allowing the occasional building to scroll by just wasn’t convincing enough though, despite admittedly evoking a hint of the city.
Mike Richardson’s 1986 Turbo Esprit, on the other hand, really did place gamers inside an unexpectedly realistic, open world city that shined on the Spectrum. The game that’s believed to have an influence on
Grand Theft Auto series had gamers chasing drug lords in four complex cities that were always in motion. Said expansive urban centres came with ranked road networks, and were convincingly functional places. Traffic lights regulated traffic, Ai-driven cars obeyed laws while overtaking each other, pedestrians used zebra crossings, road-works added a touch of danger, and reckless parking manoeuvres could lead to traffic jams.
Several RPGS strived to achieve vivid urban centres, but it was innovative adventure games that came close to achieving a sense of actual spatial immersion. Based on the definitive cyberpunk works of William Gibson, Interplay’s Neuromancer offered versions of both physical and cyber urbanism, with the former, according to Troy Miles, serving mostly as a gateway to the latter. Troy particularly loves the in-game PAX machines as “they combined the web as we know it now with an ATM”. Of course, the book was widely read by the development team, and influenced all design decisions, though Troy admits that getting most of Neuromancer’s iconic locations into the game demanded several technical tricks, including breaking it up into levels. Finally the illusion of a world much bigger than the C64 should allow for was achieved. As for Chiba City’s civic life, it was enhanced by giving “dialogue a techno-slag feel to keep it interesting and humorous, [and] providing each NPC with their own backstory”.
BAT by Ubisoft, originally designed for the Atari ST, was more ambitious. Hervé Lange wanted to create a non-linear world in which players could freely evolve. The “idea that the plot takes place in a city imposed itself quickly” as the foundation for a setting teeming with life, and Terrapolis on planet Selenia was born. Hervé describes Terrapolis “as a dense patchwork of contemporary, modern and futuristic styles, with a pinch of grotesque elements”, that was treated as a dynamic actor itself. “The place regenerated NPCS such as policemen, merchants or thieves depending on the aggressiveness of player actions.”
Terrapolis had a world crafted around it. A setting of “capitalist expansionism compelling eccentric billionaires to extricate themselves from Earth, build space exploration machines based on black holes, and thus colonise entire planets”. Thus was inhospitable planet Selenia able to support the dome of a dystopian, overpopulated megacity, which allowed Hervé to create a rich place filled with exotic creatures and possibilities.
“From a visual point of view, we were influenced by Blade Runner, Metropolis, and Enki Bilal,” he mentions, pointing out the horizons of skyscrapers forcefully towering over more conventional, humbler cities. “Indirectly, the influence of Paris with its typical neighbourhoods, railway stations, botanical gardens, bars, nightclubs, and Haussmannian boulevards leading to smaller alleys of street vendors and shops” is also evident. An important goal of the design was to create a comparable “sense of richness through different neighbourhoods offering varying gameplay opportunities, and thus reinforce the idea that a complete world had been recreated”.
BAT was followed up by BAT 2, which swapped its Parisian inspirations for Roman ones, but didn’t offer a radical change of direction. For that we have to go back to Ant Attack and look at its sequel, Zombie Zombie, which “biggest innovation was the addition of a rudimentary editor to aid city construction, construction itself becoming part of the gameplay” as Sandy White remembers. In this way, the man who laid the foundations for the urban environments of the late Eighties, also paved the way for Simcity, a game emerging at the tail end of the 8-bit era heralding a new paradigm of interaction with urban environments. Exploring or fighting your way through them, could be replaced by actively shaping and watching them evolve. But that is another story about another generation of interactive cities.
From a visual point of view, we were influenced by Blade Runner, Metropolis, and Enki Bilal Hervé lange