(Pictured: Gameplay from Jeff Minter's famed Tempest 2000)
S.T.U.N. Runner (1989)
Long before the age of pixel-perfect arcade ports to home consoles, one of the main reasons to visit the local arcade was to experience the latest, state-of-the-art video games in a setting that could not be replicated by a small cartridge and a couch. For example, one of my fondest arcade memories was riding the fake plastic motorbike while playing Sega's Super Hang-On.
Unfortunately, the mechanics of the video game itself rarely matched the realism or vividness promised by the paratext of the arcade. Super Hang-On was a great bike game for its time, but it was still rather cartoony and its animations were stilted. Interactions consisted of avoiding obstacles and turning. It was Outrun on a plastic bike, essentially.
Atari's S.T.U.N. Runner (Spread Tunnel Underground Network Runner) was a rare exception to the banality of the '80s arcade racer. Fondly remembered by Atari retro-chic fans and collectors, the futuristic S.T.U.N. Runner was in many ways an innovative yet overlooked title that brought high-speed polygonal graphics (based on an advanced Hard Drivin' engine) and genuinely interesting controls to a tired genre.
More importantly, it was arguably the first so-called "tunnel racer," and though its remarkably cheap and ugly ride-style arcade cabinet couldn't physically move or shock the player, it scorched a fluidity and sense of speed into one's mind that is equaled only by rare moments in modern Wipeout and Mario Kart entries. It could be argued that these titles and many other contemporary racing games owe some of their finest moments to S.T.U.N. Runner, a game which very few players know by name, but which features stunts and mechanics so familiar and ubiquitous in today's racing games that it might as well have been the only combat racing game to ever have been released. (Of course, if this Game Changers series is meant to express anything, it's that no game genre exists in a vacuum. Landmark titles take the best of their forerunners and create elements often imitated by their successors.)
The concept is breathtakingly simple: You're not actually racing against anyone; rather, you're simply trying to get to the end of the track before the time limit expires. Unlike "open-air" racing titles like Outrun and Hang-On, there is no exotic landscape floating serenely in the background, distracting the player from the linearity of narrow tracks. Rather, the player is forced quickly down a complex, branching network of tubes, much in the way one imagines sewage shooting down a sewer or the Millennium Falcon powering towards the Death Star's core in Return of the Jedi (the combination of which most likely inspired the notorious FMV Sega CD game Sewer Shark).
Armed with aimable lasers and the ability to rotate a full 360 degrees around the walls of the track, avid S.T.U.N. Runner players sought out the quickest routes and memorized the location of requisite "speed-boost" pads on their quest for record times. But it's not just these elements which can be found in your average combat racer these days, it's the tunnel atmosphere itself.
I'm not sure what it is about the idea of the tunnel that humans find so fascinating--maybe it's sublimated claustrophobia or the heightened feeling of speed--but what S.T.U.N. Runner capitalized upon as its primary gameplay component is now par for the course in a racing title. Seriously, go out and find your favorite arcade-style racing game and start counting the sheer number of appearances of fast-moving tunnel/tube pathways. I can name several off the top of my head with regard to Wipeout HD and Mario Kart Wii... and I can place similar visuals in classic games like Amplitude, Star Fox, and Panzer Dragoon.
Some of the continuing fascination with tunnel-based gameplay can be attributed to our real-life fascination with underground roadways, and some of it can be found in older games like the aforementioned Hard Drivin' and below-mentioned Tempest (or even films like the deliciously cheesy The Running Man). The core mechanic in S.T.U.N. Runner--shooting and avoiding obstacles before a time limit runs out--is itself a warmed-over take on Atari's earlier Road Blasters.
Yet S.T.U.N. Runner, like many of the best games, is not a genre creator, but rather a genre innovator. It takes tried-and-true gameplay and refines it using idiosyncratic imagery that still captivates the imagination of gamers today. The speed with which one traverses these gorgeous polygonal tunnels is conceptually, not just aesthetically, sublime: flying and jumping through the chasm and at last being delivered unto the light before time runs out like a cathartic rebirth. It reinvented the way we see movement in video games. (Insert "tunnel vision" joke here.)
And no matter how few people ever experienced the various console ports (the best of which, a surprisingly accurate conversion for Atari's Lynx, proves that it is the concept of the game, not the graphics, which accounts for its success as an innovator) or picked up Midway's Arcade Treasures Vol. 3, S.T.U.N. Runner stands out as a landmark polygon-based title in long line of remarkable polygonal games.
Tempest 2000 (1994)
Another such game is Jeff Minter's reimagining of Atari's 1980 hit arcade title Tempest. Tempest 2000 arrived amidst a dearth of quality games for the oft-maligned Jaguar console (a span which would unfortunately continue until the system's demise roughly a year and a half later) and would quickly prove to be one of the few original Jaguar games to earn widespread critical acclaim (the others being Alien vs. Predator, Iron Soldier, and to a lesser extent, Battlemorph).
Unlike S.T.U.N. Runner, this success had very little to do with the game's polygonal aesthetic. Though lauded for its psychedelic blend of color and surreal polygonal models, Tempest 2000 employed polygonal technology mainly in service to the celebration of its namesake. It's a game that could just has easily been done using sprite scaling; it simply wouldn't be Tempest.
Rather, the impetus for Tempest 2000's success and Jeff Minter's subsequent rise to fame among game geeks was the manner in which it launched a classic game renaissance.
Tempest 2000's cartridge included a version of its inspiration, the original Tempest game, but this was mostly for the sake of comparison: A few hours of play of Minter's remake was enough to erase even the most sparkling memories of the original from a gamer's mind.
The original Tempest's gameplay was extremely simple. You rotated along the outside of a vector-generated polygonal shape and shot various enemies which would travel "up" the 3D tube towards you. That's it. The only strategy involved was the order in which one dealt with approaching adversaries.
Minter's remake added one extremely crucial gameplay mechanic, a mechanic which seemingly changed the way the entire game could be played: the ability to jump. Jumping--earned by catching power-up waves that traveled up the tubes like enemies--allowed the player to escape enemies and traps that had traveled to the outer-most shell of the tube. As the levels progressed, however, the implementation of the jump mechanic became more nuanced and complicated: Certain enemies could only be defeated by jumping "over" them and shooting them, and learning when and where to jump on certain shapes meant the difference between life and death on some of the harder, more cramped stages.
The ability to jump in Tempest may not sound like much, but when you think about it, it's astounding to think how one simple addition to the core gameplay can so thoroughly change the way a player approaches it.
What's more, Tempest 2000 wasn't simply a love-ode to an older game with an added feature and new enemies; it was stylish. Again, it wasn't just the polygonal graphics--sharp as they were--that lent to Tempest 2000's tremendous polish. It simply looked compelling... more compelling than the original game (which looked pretty damn impressive for its time), and had a sense of remarkable fluidity that enhanced the game's responsive controls. It also sounded compelling, accompanied by vibrant digitized sound effects and a catchy, hyperactive techno soundtrack. Everything the player did led to such a resounding visual and aural flourish that the ultimate combination of all the experiential factors--visuals, sounds, and controls--made one think that each level was less an obstacle course than an artistic masterwork in progress. Only through the kaleidoscopic blending of controlled destruction and aesthetic creation could one arrive at the potential for the sublime video game experience at which the original Tempest had merely hinted.
Publishers at the time seemed to realize that Tempest 2000 was a project too big for the dreary confines of the Jaguar, and while subsequent PC and Playstation adaptations failed to catch on with critics in the same way the original had, it was clear that Tempest 2000's retro-gameplay shimmer resonated with a much larger audience than Atari's roughly 125,000 sold Jaguar consoles.
Atari was similarly inspired by Minter's redux, as the success of Tempest 2000 led to a string of less successful remakes for the Jaguar and Lynx based on Breakout, Missile Command, and Defender properties, with the latter being tackled by Minter himself. While these titles aimed for a similar level of visual and aural panache, they were each missing the key mechanic that extended the gameplay's attraction beyond that of the progenitor.
Minter, still notable for his oddball, surreal development style and love of all things llama, has had trouble finding a worthy successor to the jump mechanic. He recently revisited the Tempest template and tried to completely overhaul the core mechanics and colorful effects that made Tempest 2000 a classic. The result was the critical bomb Space Giraffe (Xbox Live Arcade), whose poor sales Minter took rather personally.
Luckily, other developers have had more success trying to recapture the minimalistic, old-school bliss revolutionized by Minter's Tempest. Geometry Wars, Space Invaders Extreme, Galaga Legions, and especially Pac-Man Championship Edition illustrate the point first proven by Tempest 2000: It doesn't take much to build upon the success of past hits... perhaps a single key game mechanic wrapped in an artistic spin on a classic design.
Comments