The Making Of: Atlantis
THE LEGEND OF A SUNKEN CITY INSPIRED ONE OF IMAGIC’S BIGGEST HITS. WE TALK TO PROGRAMMER DENNIS KOBLE, THE MAN FROM ATLANTIS
Dennis Koble reveals the creation of his water-based hit
In the early days of console games, simple was often the key to success – and that went for naming the title, too. “I liked the fact it was a oneword name for the game and yet with that single word, you could evoke all these images associated with the legend of Atlantis,” grins Dennis Koble, designer and coder of Imagic’s second best-selling game after Demon Attack.
“I think we sold two million copies of Atlantis
and they retailed at $30 with the wholesale price about half of that. Do the numbers.
They are staggering!”
The game was a huge money-spinner for Imagic, the company Dennis jointly founded with fellow ex-atari and Mattel employees in 1981, and it even had a documentary made about its creation: Enterprise – All In The Game
is on Youtube and is a fascinating insight into those heady days. “Atlantis was a pleasure to work on and we were a very cohesive team. I was into new wave music and I remember listening to Oingo Boingo, my favourite group at the time, while I was programming it. I have lots of positive memories.” Dennis was only a lad when he started at Atari’s coin-op division in 1976 but he had worked his way up the company ladder and had spent some time in the consumer division in a managerial role, overseeing game development and supporting coders. However, when it came to designing and programming a VCS game at Imagic, this was new territory for Dennis. “My first game, Trick Shot, gave me anxiety attacks because it was so hard to get the physics even remotely acting like they would in the real world,” he recalls. “By the time I got to
Atlantis, I was kind of an old hand. I don’t recall any major programming challenges. It was an original game concept though I’m sure I was influenced by other games.”
Atlantis requires you to defend the eponymous underwater city from attacking gorgon ships, deftly launching missiles from one of your three static bases. If your assailants destroy six key parts of your city, it’s game over, though for every 10,000 points you rack up, a part of your watery home is restored. Hang on, Dennis, this is reminding us of a certain Atari coin-op classic. “I was a huge fan of Missile Command,” he admits, grinning, “I’m sure it inspired me but not consciously. Atlantis was quite a simple game but I used our latest technology and credit to my colleague Bob
“WE SOLD TWO MILLION COPIES OF ATLANTIS AT $30 EACH. THE NUMBERS WERE STAGGERING!”
DENNIS KOBLE
Smith, who was instrumental in developing techniques like the six-sprite kernel.”
The ingenious coding technique Dennis is alluding to allowed for more moving objects to be displayed on-screen than the hardware originally intended and the “latest technology” refers to Imagic’s networked development stations, which cost a whopping $250,000 each and allowed programmers to code in higher level languages, rather than Assembly.
This state-of-the-art development system helped Dennis create a visually impressive, fast-paced shooter, with many clever touches, such as a two-player option where each defender controls a single base and an end sequence which sees the survivors of the devastated city escaping in a spaceship, a thematic link to fellow coder Rob Fulop’s follow up to Demon Attack. “That was supposed to be the Cosmic Ark, which was the title of Rob’s next game, though we did call it ‘Cosmic Bark’ because we thought it was a dog for quite some time,” Dennis giggles.
Dennis credits the success of Atlantis to the ‘easy to learn, hard to master’ game design philosophy he learned making arcade titles at Atari. Yet many dedicated gamers did master the game, spurred on by a competition that promised a trip to Bermuda for the top four high scorers and a $10,000 prize for the overall champion. “I went on that trip and it was incredibly fun,” remembers Dennis. “The players were amazing and could pretty much play indefinitely, so I created a much harder version of the game. We only made about a hundred of those cartridges, so I think they’re pretty collectible now.”
Dennis is right – Atlantis 2 can fetch thousands of dollars today on the rare occasions it surfaces. Sadly, Dennis does not have copies gathering dust in his basement but it does remind him of how he nearly did strike it rich. “We were getting ready to float Imagic [on the stock exchange] and out of spite, Atari tried to bollocks our public offering, which they succeeded in doing. My share would’ve been worth $16 million but of course I never got that. I’ve got no complaints – I did really well from videogames!”
In much the same way as the legendary city of Atlantis succumbed to a cataclysmic event, Imagic was devastated by the infamous videogame crash of 1983 and soon sank without trace. Dennis continued in the industry enjoyed great success with such games as Sonic Spinball and the PGA Tour Golf series but we wondered how he felt about his first big hit?
“It’s funny because whenever I see one of my old games, it’s like someone else made it,” says Dennis. “I look at Atlantis and think
‘Oh that’s a nice touch’ or ‘Oooh that could be better’. I know objectively I made it, but it doesn’t feel like that. It’s like I’m talking about it in the third person. Maybe authors and musicians feel the same way about their old work. It kind of takes on a life of its own. If you’ve had a hit, it goes its way and you go yours…”