Sunday, March 05, 2006
Mysterious Lost Arcade Game Revealed
In 1981, I had a brief tour of the Air Force Academy, where my stepbrother was attending at the time. I had just barely gotten hooked on videogames like THAT WEEK - an obsession that lasted for twenty-five years and counting. We briefly passed by a game room there where I caught little more than a glimps of a highly psychedelic (was that even allowed at the AF Academy?) arcade game called "Tunnel.." something-or-another. It looked like there were Star Wars TIE-Fighters involved. I wanted to jump in and check it out, but it was currently being played, and my tour apparently didn't involve the game room.
I filed it away and hunted around for that game for years. And of course, it built itself up in my imagination to be some extraordinary (if primitive) and cool 3D branch of videogames that was unfortunately skipped over and unpursued by the evolution of our industry. At one point, I thought perhaps I had only imagined the game. I had numerous dreams of videogames in those teenaged years, when the whole industry was catching fire and argued hotly by pop scholars as to whether it constituted a new entertainment medium or simply a passing fad.
Well, I am pleased to announce that the mystery has been solved. My enigmatic dream-game was known by the title, "Tunnel Hunt." Through the miracle of MAME, I was able to discover what, as far as I know, only the priviledged students of the Air Force Academy in 1981 were able to experience. Sometimes these little virtual time-travelling expeditions reveal some true nuggets of gold.Alas, this is not really one of those times. Tunnel Hunt is one of those games which can really only be appreciated in the era in which it was released. A series of multicolored boxes kinda-sorta resemble a tunnel which you steer through, simultaneously steering rip-off sprites of George Lucas's Magnum Opus into your waiting crosshair. Firing lasers in the general vicinity of these ships rewards you with an explosion, in increase in score, and an increase in speed of both the tunnel's movement and the enemy ships' movement. Your lasers overheat quickly, so you can't just hold down on the fire button the whole time. The enemy ships also periodically shoot fireballs of some kind at you.
As far as I can tell, that's pretty much it.
Part of me wishes this game still remained a mystery, because my imagination had created something SO MUCH COOLER. But I'm glad to know what I was missing all these years, and to know that my phantom game really existed, and that it wasn't anything too earth-shakingly ahead of its time. Like a prototype for Doom or something.
But hey, it was kinda fun to play for a few minutes. Even in 2006.
Labels: retro
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:17 PM (Permalink)
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I had a similar experience with a game that I played in an arcade (just one time) in my youth. I was out of town with some friends and we went to an arcade. One game that caught my eye was a two-player overhead-view vector sword fighting game. I remember it being really cool at the time. The next time I went back to that arcade (which was many months later as it wasn't in my home town), it was gone, and I never saw that game again in any arcade I visted. I couldn't remember the name of the game, and it remained a mystery until two years ago, when I happened across the game on the KLOV site (Killer List of Videogames - www.klov.com - cool site BTW). Turns out my game was called Warrior (http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?letter=W&game_id=10408). Then, through the magic of MAME, I was able to play it again after all these years. The game wasn't as cool as I remembered, but what could after 15+ years of "mental hype". It's amazing how the internet and emulators like MAME, have been for discovery and re-discovery of these older games. I'm grateful for those individuals that have kept these things "alive" for future generations to experience.
Man, I remember that one too. I played it a couple of times, but as I recall you could ONLY play it with another player. What fascinated me for YEARS afterwards was the thought that MAYBE there could have been more to the game than I saw in the 2 or 3 games I played (which was basically two knights with 2-handed swords fighting around two pits). But over the years - considering the age of the game - I pretty much convinced myself that there wasn't anything more to it than that.
But that was part of the appeal of those arcade games - back in the days before the Internet, kids would always talk about the "secrets" those machines were hiding if you did the right things. Like the designers deliberately hid the coolest parts of the games from players to reward those who dropped in enough quarters. I heard tales of secret rooms in Pac-Man if you moved JUST right as Pac-Man transitioned between sides of the screen in the escape tunnel. I heard stories of travelling all the way to the Volcano in Battlezone, and then driving inside to find a castle there...
And we kept getting rewarded by just enough cool new surprises from level to level (and the rare Easter Egg) that we totally believed it.
And then enter Miyamoto's "Super Mario Brothers" for the NES, where it seemed half the game WAS hidden off-screen for the dedicated player to discover only with much playing.
Cool stuff.
But that was part of the appeal of those arcade games - back in the days before the Internet, kids would always talk about the "secrets" those machines were hiding if you did the right things. Like the designers deliberately hid the coolest parts of the games from players to reward those who dropped in enough quarters. I heard tales of secret rooms in Pac-Man if you moved JUST right as Pac-Man transitioned between sides of the screen in the escape tunnel. I heard stories of travelling all the way to the Volcano in Battlezone, and then driving inside to find a castle there...
And we kept getting rewarded by just enough cool new surprises from level to level (and the rare Easter Egg) that we totally believed it.
And then enter Miyamoto's "Super Mario Brothers" for the NES, where it seemed half the game WAS hidden off-screen for the dedicated player to discover only with much playing.
Cool stuff.
I immediately noticed the similatity of that kind of "tunnel" flying to the flying through wormholes of this old game: http://www.synthetic-reality.com/warpath32.htm
Quite interesting though :)
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Quite interesting though :)
# posted by 
: March 19, 2006 4:46 AM
: March 19, 2006 4:46 AMLinks to this post:
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