baw: i was the modeller/animator and created the b-tree occlusion used for cheap hidden surface removal. the prototype hardware was hand-wired by ted michon for atari.
Amazing. TLSF looks like it could've been an inspiration for Namco's Starblade. Shame about it being canned, especially when it cost the same as the $10000 Hard Drivin (which did get released). This probably would've been a 3 token/75 cent game in arcades, but likely worth it.
I heard Namco owned Atari Games (AKA Tengen) for a little while afterward. If so, I wish they'd have ordered a follow through on this one. A Sega 32X or Sony PS1 home version would've been great to see.
The movie could have had better graphics but it would have taken too long to render.
Consider that polygons and the math to calculate light hitting them and bouncing back to the camera/viewer probably hasn't changed much. It's just they didn't have the processing power back then to put in all the detail they wanted with the limited time they had.
On a more serious note though, this is truly impressive for its time and I must agree that this is Far beyond it's time for the tech made back then.
I think that if it had been released it would have started the 3D revolution much faster and games would probably be far more realistic. (given the fact that they would have more experience with 3D and such)
i heard that you can play the last starfighter (somebody actually finished the original arcade game using an emulator) on a emulator site. i think it runs on mame. sad this game looks so cool and yet they did not finish it.
No, it doesn't run on MAME. The only thing that's been released is a replica of the game, made from scratch in Dark BASIC and available from the RogueSynapse website.
i am sorry, i thought it ran on mame, i am not good at this stuff, but anyhow this looks good, if only they made it. i heard that if they make it, it would cost $20,000 to make the game, and judging from the sales of the movie, they would have gone out of bussiness before it would be released. thanks for the clip if only it were real.
Atari Games ought to develop and release this game now for the XBox360, PS3 and Wii. With the technology available today, the in-game real-time graphics would be better than what we saw in the actual movie.
What's wrong with industrial look? That was the look of the spaceships in the original Star Wars trilogy. It was shelved for episode 1, and THEN fans complained.
It was not the ships, it was the bad writing that they were sucked....plus I'm not a Star Wars fan to begin with.
Me, I like sleek, streamlined vessels, like the Enterprise from TMP, Reliant from TWoK, The Gunstars from Last Starfighter, or the ship from Flight of the Navigator. I like seeing something that does NOT look like something slapped togather in a factory we could see today.
This game was after I Robot. I Robot was built with dedicated H/W, it also did not do any kind of lighting calculation, so was a lot simpler. Technically I Robot was the first solid real 3D game Atari did. TLSF was the first solid shaded programmable one, using a 68K CPU and written in C.
Not entirely true. I, Robot did do lighting calculations, just not on every polygon. Polygons could be flagged to be either "shaded" or "fixed color". Most of the polygons in the game were pre-shaded, however some of the polygons use real-time shading. Most notably "big brother", the giant blue balls that come rolling at you on a later level. I also think the tetras were shaded. If you mess around in doodle city mode you can see which objects have real time shading and which dont
wow, makes me wonder where this footage came from, you wouldn't be lucky engough to come across the roms? even if you didn't thanks for the video, i wish there was sound, where did you find this video, plz PM me with the link, again thanks for the video...
there never were any roms for the game as it was a development system. Loaded from an emulator into the memory if I recall. I made the video as I was the developer for the game and made the video just before it was canned.
So Mike Albaugh did the microcoding for the mathbox on this game too. How different was the mathbox used for this game compared to Tempest and Battlezone, each which had four 2901 bitslice processors? Any other tech info you can offer, such as cpu and other hardware info?
So Mike did the microcoding for the mathbox for this game too. How different was the mathbox on this game compared to Tempest and Battlezone? Those two used four each 2901 bitslice processors. How many did this one use?
Nice video. Funny how I just now saw it for the first time.
For those interested, there's a freeware version of this (modified to look more like the one in the movie) that you can find by searching Google. It...is...a blast. Have fun!
I have always wanted to play this game - ever since I saw it in the movie! Remarkable graphics for the day. I guess that made me a natural fan of Starblade when it came out. BTW, not only was Starblade released for Sega CD, but for 3DO and Playstation 1 as well. For anyone who doesn't know, the best version for home is the Playstation 2 version (an unlockable game within Tekken 5). It is stated as being the actual arcade version. Now I will have to seek this rogue thing out...
I wonder... does Namco's Starblade game have anything to do with this game? The gameplay is similar (you are in the gunnery seat of a spaceship flown by someone else), the spaceships have similar looks (thin fuselage/big engines) and names (TLSF has the GunStar, Starblade has the GeoSword) and some of the enemies in Starblade do the Death Blossom!
Some of the animators and dev team of Starblade actually worked on the animations in the film TLSF. At first Starblade was to be called TLSF but marketing "geniuses" decided it had been too long since TLSF was popular it wouldn't catch on with new kids. So here is Starblade, kids liked it but it bombed because of the 1.75 price to play when other games were still a quarter. And TLSF fans saw it as a shameless rip-off. It was also realeased on Sega CD
You mean Starblade was inspired BY this. Starblade was 1991 - long after the Last Starfighte. Obviously, much later than Star Wars, too, but I don't think Starblade owes much to Star Wars.
My bad, I spelled "rogue" wrong, but at least I led you in the right direction. I also was excited when I learned of this game, looks just like the one in the movie. My high score is 2.7 million & change on default settings. Alex Rogan... eat your heart out.
Looks amazing for the time. The framrate is excellent compared to Hard Drvin etc. I'm assuming the lack of road/scenery polygons made it quicker to draw. The slight 'light shading' effect looks awesome, as that sort of thing wasn't realy seen until Virtua Racing.
And they didn't release this why? Even given the videogame slump at the time, this would've rocked the arcades big time.
Hard Drivin used a different graphics engine, and may have been slower. It was not released becuase at the time the cost would have been too high. It wasn't until Hard Drivin that they figured they could sell a $10k+ game.
The first game to ship was Hard Drivin which used a different engine but similar Math (I wrote that engine too, my name is on the credits). The polygon count was around 300, with an update rate of around 15hz, which was good for the time. The lighting model, if you could call it that, was simple flat shading, We couldn't even do Goraud shading back then.
Heh, I remember when Goraud was the height of 3D lighting technology. ("Oooo! It's Gouraud shaded!") Looks like rubbish these days. :P
I'm really impressed by how bright the colors are, though. Most of the early 3D games had such a poor color palette. This game has beautifully bright colors that are easy to see and work well with your lighting model.
Man, you are my hero! (Well, one of them anyway. Since you didn't do the game by yourself. ;)) S.T.U.N. Runner was always one of my favorite arcade games. Zipping around the track at high speeds, avoiding the bad guys while collecting boosts, those were the days!
I never figured out why the game wasn't more popular. Must have been Jack's wonderful marketing acumen.
I can assure you that this is a VHS video taken of the screen of the original Arcade Prototype that I wrote at Atari games in 1984. AtariMuseum you have the original VHS tape, I sent it to you for copying, (when do I get it back BTW :)
Remember this was one of the very first Solid 3D Engines we did.
No its not. RS uses more modern lighting models. Also, the blips at 3:58 and 4:56 demonstrate that this was pulled from VCR footage. Would a hoaxer think to record his capture to VHS before posting?
Given the quality of the video, I could believe that it was a pre-rendering done back in the day. But I sincerely doubt that it's a modern game engine posing as an old engine. Especially with the geometry warping (4:54) and "stepping" of lighting to reduce the color count.
being the one that wrote the game, my understanding was the game was scrubbed because it was just too expensive to manafacture. at the time it was an order of magnitude more than the other games.
Heh, i remember seeing the film in the theatre and hunting down every arcade i could in the nation to try to find one that had it. I wanted to play this bad when i was a kid. Too bad Atari dropped the ball on it. could have bailed them out of their finacial difficulties of the time, but i heard that something happened between the apogee and atari had a misunderstanding and the project was scrubbed.
I'm gonna have to say this game looks fantastic for its age. Even with it's graphics as is, if it were released today with solid gameplay mechanics I have no doubt you'd have a great "budget" title on your hands. Kudos to digging up this footage.
baw: i was the modeller/animator and created the b-tree occlusion used for cheap hidden surface removal. the prototype hardware was hand-wired by ted michon for atari.
slickest1 1 year ago
Wow. I read MAME v0.140 can play this now? Has anyone tried it?
antdude 1 year ago
this has been emulated. Take a look at philwip at mameworld
plukethep 1 year ago
Amazing. TLSF looks like it could've been an inspiration for Namco's Starblade. Shame about it being canned, especially when it cost the same as the $10000 Hard Drivin (which did get released). This probably would've been a 3 token/75 cent game in arcades, but likely worth it.
I heard Namco owned Atari Games (AKA Tengen) for a little while afterward. If so, I wish they'd have ordered a follow through on this one. A Sega 32X or Sony PS1 home version would've been great to see.
JohnnyMartini 1 year ago
Almost impossible to believe this was developed in 1984. Why is almost everything colored gold, though?
ancalites 1 year ago
The movie could have had better graphics but it would have taken too long to render.
Consider that polygons and the math to calculate light hitting them and bouncing back to the camera/viewer probably hasn't changed much. It's just they didn't have the processing power back then to put in all the detail they wanted with the limited time they had.
MichelleDri 2 years ago
why? why was this never released? if it was, we can say bye-bye to polygons today.
abudzakho 2 years ago
@abudzakho Because of the videogame crash of 84. It brought everything to a hault.
philiptwood 1 year ago
Use the vomit inducing death blossom! xD
On a more serious note though, this is truly impressive for its time and I must agree that this is Far beyond it's time for the tech made back then.
I think that if it had been released it would have started the 3D revolution much faster and games would probably be far more realistic. (given the fact that they would have more experience with 3D and such)
Azzaroth 2 years ago
i heard that you can play the last starfighter (somebody actually finished the original arcade game using an emulator) on a emulator site. i think it runs on mame. sad this game looks so cool and yet they did not finish it.
megaben99 2 years ago
No, it doesn't run on MAME. The only thing that's been released is a replica of the game, made from scratch in Dark BASIC and available from the RogueSynapse website.
DevilMaster 2 years ago
i am sorry, i thought it ran on mame, i am not good at this stuff, but anyhow this looks good, if only they made it. i heard that if they make it, it would cost $20,000 to make the game, and judging from the sales of the movie, they would have gone out of bussiness before it would be released. thanks for the clip if only it were real.
megaben99 2 years ago
I think they said it took 2 years to get all the CG images and sequences to get finished for the film.
TheCastellan 2 years ago
Well the game exists for real:
watch?v=OHleAxYH4Fg
dayw81 3 years ago
Atari Games ought to develop and release this game now for the XBox360, PS3 and Wii. With the technology available today, the in-game real-time graphics would be better than what we saw in the actual movie.
dkim68 3 years ago 2
Still, the visuals in the film were quite nice, I still like them.
If they redid them, I could, unfortunately, see them do some sort of 'industruial' look to them, blech. :P
TheCastellan 2 years ago
What's wrong with industrial look? That was the look of the spaceships in the original Star Wars trilogy. It was shelved for episode 1, and THEN fans complained.
DevilMaster 2 years ago
It was not the ships, it was the bad writing that they were sucked....plus I'm not a Star Wars fan to begin with.
Me, I like sleek, streamlined vessels, like the Enterprise from TMP, Reliant from TWoK, The Gunstars from Last Starfighter, or the ship from Flight of the Navigator. I like seeing something that does NOT look like something slapped togather in a factory we could see today.
Gimme sleek, sexy imports....with turbo handling! :D
TheCastellan 2 years ago
didnt know there was an actual game of it.. too bad never got released. so how was the footage taken?
conradhw 3 years ago
The video was taken by simply pointing a video camera at the CRT
wolfmanjm 3 years ago
@conradhw Never released? your joking right? Of course it was released.
NineTailsDemonFox 1 year ago
@conradhw Actually dude. go to roguesynapse and download it for free. they did a damned good job of recreating the failed atari project.
LordBicen 1 year ago
that actually looks like it would have been fun.
grooveclubhouse 3 years ago 2
wayyy ahead of itss time, in the 90's only things like these came out. awesome!
alcyon2sp 3 years ago
Would this have been released before the 80's game "I-Robot"? I know I-Robot had 3d polygons, but I don't know if they were shaded.
billamu 3 years ago
This game was after I Robot. I Robot was built with dedicated H/W, it also did not do any kind of lighting calculation, so was a lot simpler. Technically I Robot was the first solid real 3D game Atari did. TLSF was the first solid shaded programmable one, using a 68K CPU and written in C.
wolfmanjm 3 years ago
Not entirely true. I, Robot did do lighting calculations, just not on every polygon. Polygons could be flagged to be either "shaded" or "fixed color". Most of the polygons in the game were pre-shaded, however some of the polygons use real-time shading. Most notably "big brother", the giant blue balls that come rolling at you on a later level. I also think the tetras were shaded. If you mess around in doodle city mode you can see which objects have real time shading and which dont
LordFrito 1 year ago
Where is this game?! Not in Mame I m afraid...
I dont think such graphics belong to 1984.
Mame has a similar: Star Fire of 1979 with no sound.
TK2008BEST 3 years ago
Those graphics are almost unbelievable for 1984!
peterwilson69 3 years ago
wow, makes me wonder where this footage came from, you wouldn't be lucky engough to come across the roms? even if you didn't thanks for the video, i wish there was sound, where did you find this video, plz PM me with the link, again thanks for the video...
Jshaw71 4 years ago
there never were any roms for the game as it was a development system. Loaded from an emulator into the memory if I recall. I made the video as I was the developer for the game and made the video just before it was canned.
wolfmanjm 4 years ago
hmm, thanks for the video, is nice to see the old footage, too bad there won't be another game :(
Jshaw71 4 years ago
Wolfman, why was it canned though?
ORUPRANKSTAZ 3 years ago
Too expensive to manufacture. Ten thousand dollars per unit were a lot of money in 1984.
DevilMaster 3 years ago
So Mike Albaugh did the microcoding for the mathbox on this game too. How different was the mathbox used for this game compared to Tempest and Battlezone, each which had four 2901 bitslice processors? Any other tech info you can offer, such as cpu and other hardware info?
Great video. Funny how I'm just now seeing it.
atarikee 4 years ago
So Mike did the microcoding for the mathbox for this game too. How different was the mathbox on this game compared to Tempest and Battlezone? Those two used four each 2901 bitslice processors. How many did this one use?
Nice video. Funny how I just now saw it for the first time.
Brian
atarikee 4 years ago
you can download a fanmade version search on google or i'll send you the link if you want
EnterpriseKnight 4 years ago
what's the link?
MonkeySun 4 years ago
For those interested, there's a freeware version of this (modified to look more like the one in the movie) that you can find by searching Google. It...is...a blast. Have fun!
RoguePlanet 4 years ago
I have always wanted to play this game - ever since I saw it in the movie! Remarkable graphics for the day. I guess that made me a natural fan of Starblade when it came out. BTW, not only was Starblade released for Sega CD, but for 3DO and Playstation 1 as well. For anyone who doesn't know, the best version for home is the Playstation 2 version (an unlockable game within Tekken 5). It is stated as being the actual arcade version. Now I will have to seek this rogue thing out...
Starblade22 4 years ago
I wonder... does Namco's Starblade game have anything to do with this game? The gameplay is similar (you are in the gunnery seat of a spaceship flown by someone else), the spaceships have similar looks (thin fuselage/big engines) and names (TLSF has the GunStar, Starblade has the GeoSword) and some of the enemies in Starblade do the Death Blossom!
DevilMaster 4 years ago
I have no idea sorry.
wolfmanjm 4 years ago
Some of the animators and dev team of Starblade actually worked on the animations in the film TLSF. At first Starblade was to be called TLSF but marketing "geniuses" decided it had been too long since TLSF was popular it wouldn't catch on with new kids. So here is Starblade, kids liked it but it bombed because of the 1.75 price to play when other games were still a quarter. And TLSF fans saw it as a shameless rip-off. It was also realeased on Sega CD
captaintripps6969 4 years ago
I'm sure Starblade was an inspiration to The Last Starfighter and Star Wars.
Grooveraider 4 years ago
You mean Starblade was inspired BY this. Starblade was 1991 - long after the Last Starfighte. Obviously, much later than Star Wars, too, but I don't think Starblade owes much to Star Wars.
x6502 4 years ago
Pity there's no sound... I'd love to hear all the *pew pew* effects... and the white noise explosions I'm sure are there. :)
soutarm 4 years ago
LOL! This game looks a bit better than Starfox.
xxashyy 4 years ago
Awesome! This helped me find this full revival game that looks just like the one in the movie! roguesynapse(dot)com/games/last_starfighter.php
Bmud 4 years ago
My bad, I spelled "rogue" wrong, but at least I led you in the right direction. I also was excited when I learned of this game, looks just like the one in the movie. My high score is 2.7 million & change on default settings. Alex Rogan... eat your heart out.
YieArKungFu 4 years ago
I wonder if this game could be revived in some way.....
MasterEiji 4 years ago
It's already been done. Visit rougesynapse(dot)com. I'm surprised that more people don't know about this.
YieArKungFu 4 years ago
Awesome:)
projectcyclopsrpv 4 years ago
Looks amazing for the time. The framrate is excellent compared to Hard Drvin etc. I'm assuming the lack of road/scenery polygons made it quicker to draw. The slight 'light shading' effect looks awesome, as that sort of thing wasn't realy seen until Virtua Racing.
And they didn't release this why? Even given the videogame slump at the time, this would've rocked the arcades big time.
ozskip 4 years ago
Hard Drivin used a different graphics engine, and may have been slower. It was not released becuase at the time the cost would have been too high. It wasn't until Hard Drivin that they figured they could sell a $10k+ game.
wolfmanjm 4 years ago
Ok so this games was never completed then? I would have played it forsure! Is there at least a demo version that could play on MAME or anything?
sinistermoon 4 years ago
The first game to ship was Hard Drivin which used a different engine but similar Math (I wrote that engine too, my name is on the credits). The polygon count was around 300, with an update rate of around 15hz, which was good for the time. The lighting model, if you could call it that, was simple flat shading, We couldn't even do Goraud shading back then.
wolfmanjm 4 years ago
Heh, I remember when Goraud was the height of 3D lighting technology. ("Oooo! It's Gouraud shaded!") Looks like rubbish these days. :P
I'm really impressed by how bright the colors are, though. Most of the early 3D games had such a poor color palette. This game has beautifully bright colors that are easy to see and work well with your lighting model.
Listen, you didn't do S.T.U.N. Runner, did you?
thewiirocks 4 years ago
I did the Math engine for STUN runner, it used the same engine as Hard Drivin and later on I believe Steel Talons also used the same engine.
wolfmanjm 4 years ago
Man, you are my hero! (Well, one of them anyway. Since you didn't do the game by yourself. ;)) S.T.U.N. Runner was always one of my favorite arcade games. Zipping around the track at high speeds, avoiding the bad guys while collecting boosts, those were the days!
I never figured out why the game wasn't more popular. Must have been Jack's wonderful marketing acumen.
thewiirocks 4 years ago
Actually, I take that back. This was Atari Games, not Atari home consoles. Doh! I'm still surprised it wasn't more popular.
Either way, Kudos on your top notch work! :)
thewiirocks 4 years ago
Yea totally different company. Stun runner was the brain child of Ed Rotberg, one of the premier game developers there, I only had a minor role.
wolfmanjm 4 years ago
I can assure you that this is a VHS video taken of the screen of the original Arcade Prototype that I wrote at Atari games in 1984. AtariMuseum you have the original VHS tape, I sent it to you for copying, (when do I get it back BTW :)
Remember this was one of the very first Solid 3D Engines we did.
wolfmanjm 4 years ago
Actually that is video captured from a current remake of the game by Rogue Synapse... Its super-CPU hungry, but on a good box it plays great!!!
roguesynapse com/games/last_starfighter php
More stuff here too:
atarimuseum com
atarimuseum 4 years ago
No its not. RS uses more modern lighting models. Also, the blips at 3:58 and 4:56 demonstrate that this was pulled from VCR footage. Would a hoaxer think to record his capture to VHS before posting?
Given the quality of the video, I could believe that it was a pre-rendering done back in the day. But I sincerely doubt that it's a modern game engine posing as an old engine. Especially with the geometry warping (4:54) and "stepping" of lighting to reduce the color count.
thewiirocks 4 years ago
Actually I just checked with a friend, that is in fact a video sample from the original hardware, I stand corrected...
Curt
atarimuseum 4 years ago
a pototpye game never came out
leslielove 4 years ago
being the one that wrote the game, my understanding was the game was scrubbed because it was just too expensive to manafacture. at the time it was an order of magnitude more than the other games.
wolfmanjm 4 years ago
Heh, i remember seeing the film in the theatre and hunting down every arcade i could in the nation to try to find one that had it. I wanted to play this bad when i was a kid. Too bad Atari dropped the ball on it. could have bailed them out of their finacial difficulties of the time, but i heard that something happened between the apogee and atari had a misunderstanding and the project was scrubbed.
LordBicen 4 years ago
I'm gonna have to say this game looks fantastic for its age. Even with it's graphics as is, if it were released today with solid gameplay mechanics I have no doubt you'd have a great "budget" title on your hands. Kudos to digging up this footage.
milsorgen 4 years ago
Thanks, it looks pretty lame by todays standards, but this was 22 years ago, and it took a Cray to do the graphics for the game in the movie :)
wolfmanjm 4 years ago
Thanks for putting up this video of the game that never came jim. Looked real good.
morroklompen 4 years ago