The Making Of: Dominos
Nokia phones may have brought it to the masses but Snake existed in a different skin way back in the Seventies. Programmer Dennis Koble shares the twisted tale of Dominos
Before Snake there was Blockade. Dennis Koble talks about his arcade alternative
“AT ATARI, IT WAS A REQUIREMENT OF THE JOB TO PLAY THE GAMES BEING MADE. WE HAD EPIC BATTLES ON ALL OUR MULTIPLAYER TITLES” DENNIS KOBLE
“When it comes to Dominos, my memory is spotty,” begins Dennis Koble, who can code as well as he puns. “It was done in 13 weeks, start to finish, which was quite remarkable even in those days. Games typically took six months to develop so that was pretty darn short. Everything about the project was designed to be quick!”
Dennis had joined Atari in 1976 as only its fourth programmer and had been assigned to work with two colleagues who would become lifelong friends: Lyle Rains, vice president of engineering, and technician Dan Van Elderen, who eventually became president of Atari Games. Their first project was Sprint 2, a slick overhead racer that performed well in arcades, so understandably they stuck with this proven hardware for their next game – and with a proven game concept, too.
“Gremlin had come out with Blockade the year before, which was very popular, a really hot game, and Atari wanted their version – and fast,” admits Dennis. “I do recall that was a little unusual for Atari. A few years after this, they became an extremely high-quality coin-op division, the Cadillac of the industry, but in the mid-seventies, they were still a pretty young company and just trying to survive as they made the transition into using microprocessors [in their games]. They didn’t quite have the standards they developed later…”
To be fair, Atari wasn’t the only company copying Gremlin. Ramtek and Meadows Games produced their own clones (see ‘The Year Of The Snake’) soon after Blockade’s release and anyway, Snake had been around on mainframes since at least the early Seventies. “The game was out there,” says Dennis. “I know there were versions of Snake on ARPANET and Compuserve [precursors to our modern internet], which is why I didn’t have too many qualms about doing our version. We didn’t feel like we were stealing Gremlin’s idea. It was in the public domain and they were just the first to bring it to a coin-op machine.”
And Atari did bring its own style and business nous to the established formula.
There is the lovely graphical flourish when you steer your ever-growing line of tiles into a dead end and watch them topple, recalling those domino-fall world record attempts invariably overseen by a grinning Roy Castle. The sound effects follow the ‘quickening heartbeat’ school of tension-building a year before Space Invaders made us all intensely aware of our own pulses, and the cabinet itself is a thing of beauty. “We had a wonderful art department that was set up just after I joined Atari,” recalls Dennis with a smile, “and one of the key guys
was Bob Flemate. He was an outstanding artist and I’m pretty sure the marquee and cabinet art is his work.”
Most significantly, though, Dennis’ game added in the option to play against a computer-controlled opponent. Whereas Blockade and its imitators required two to four players, Dominos did have a single-player option, something still quite novel for a head-to-head game in the mid-seventies. Was the AI a challenge to code, we ask? “I’d love to take the credit,” Dennis laughs. “I’m listed as the programmer and people associate that with designing the game, which largely became true soon after, but Lyle Rains was the brains on this game. He suggested the concept, drew the graphics and he created the AI. He told me his thoughts and I coded them. To be honest, I don’t recall anything too difficult to code with Dominos but then I was young and smart and hadn’t lost half my brain cells at that point.”
Dennis did a decent job of getting your computer rival to lay tiles around the playfield, though it’s hardly the Jungle Book’s Kaa in terms of guile. Besides, a human opponent is always better and there is a lovely rhythm to Dominos when played competitively. It begins with a game of chicken, a question of who will swerve first to avoid a collision, and then there’s a jostling for position, until you each find yourself trapped in your own section of the screen. Then it becomes a battle for survival, as you wriggle to make best use of your ever-decreasing space, desperately hoping your adversary will reach a dead end before you do. Were there hard-fought duels with Atari colleagues during development, we ask?
“Oh yes,” Dennis assures us, “my gosh, that was a tradition at Atari. A requirement for the job was that you spent as much time as needed, which might be a few hours a day, playing the games being made. You’d play other people’s games and if your game needed two players, you’d get other people in the department to play yours. We had epic battles on all these multiplayer titles – Tank 8 was always a favourite. It was a strength of Atari. We truly did playtest our games extensively before they went to market.”
It shows. Despite the simple concept and black-and-white graphics, Dominos stands up to competitive play, its purity and instant appeal is alluring today as it was in 1977. It inspired the Atari 2600 game Surround and reappeared the following decade as the light cycles level in the arcade hit Tron. So next time you come across a Snake clone, remember it has a tail that stretches back to the Seventies.