 I play video games because I just want to be swept away. And long before I had my first home computer, the Amstrad CPC, I was actively involved in playing the arcade games, whilst other family members went outside and interacted with people. Talk about stranger danger. Up until the arcades, I think I remember roaming the streets, armed with nothing but sticks and boundless imagination. We pretended to be soldiers, cowboys, and who didn't love British Bulldog? It's as though trial and error was the name of the game. Then I found video games, and it all went downhill from there on in. Good luck! You'll need it! So let's go back to the Dark Ages, 1982, to be precise. Only to set the scene, one of the marvels of 1982. It was the birth of the world's first-ever CD player. And let's not forget the infamous ZX Spectrum. But it wasn't all cutting-edge technology back then. 1982 also brought us the Cabbage Patch Kids. What? Shut up! Come on, you loved it really. But the reason we're here, and let's not forget, 1982 brought us Robotron. And if you rubbish at maths, that's four decades ago. Back in the day, it was a thing of beauty to watch a skilled Robotron player in high gear. Two joysticks against the globe. All the enemies are present and engaged in combat right away. It's definitely not one of those games where you think first and shoot later. Instincts and going with your gut are the wisest course of action. In fact, if you're going to beat Robotron or achieve a high score, you need to enter a hyperkinetic state of concentration. Robotron was the third game that Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar, design team, gave to Williams. With the exception of a science fiction plot, it was a complete departure from their work on Defender and Defender 2. The story goes that Jarvis' right hand was broken as a result of a car accident. Apparently, he developed the concept for the Robotron controls as two independent joysticks while he was recovering. So get this, Jarvis claimed that he drew influence from two earlier video games. The first game being on the Commodore PET called Chase. It was a character star game where you could turn asterisks into pie signs. Then there was Stem's Berserk, which served as an additional inspiration. Despite the fact that you could only shoot in the direction you were travelling, Jarvis always liked Berserk. He fixed it by using one joystick for movement and one joystick for firing, which gave players an additional level of freedom. Here's Larry DeMar talking about the controls. Controls were totally one of a kind at the time and they've hardly been used ever since. Eugene really wanted to give you that monster control and one of the really adrenaline rushes in the game as a result of the amount of power you have. You've got so much power and control that the game can put you in really tough situations you can actually fight your way out of and that's one thing that keeps people coming back to it over and over. But Stem offered more inspiration than just that. Within a few months they were supposed to deliver frenzy, the follow-up to Berserk, in order for Williams to have the upcoming release of the next new robot game. The Robotron timeframe was significantly accelerated. The majority of the programming was accomplished in an astounding four days after the first concept was developed. They just kept adding robots. If 20 robots were fun, why not 60? If 60 were fun, why not 120? Soon they brought to life a seething mass of enemies. 40 years later, few games have equaled Robotron's body count per second. The issue now is that they required a narrative to explain all of this senseless carnage so they made the decision to include the nuclear family. Defender proved that saving people works and it started to take a theme. Family members became your friends, introducing good guys and terrible guys to the Robotron universe. A standard science fiction scenario was beginning to take shape. Jarvis reasoned to himself that if machines kept getting smarter, they would eventually realize humans were a liability. I think they will soon realize that humans are nasty little things. They're trying to blow up things, they've got car bombers, they've got nuclear terrorists. All these mass murderers, all these nasty little habits that humans have. Create wars, threaten to blow up the world, endangering the entire planet. I mean, it's clear that humans are psychos and for their own protection, you know, we'll have to be confined in safe zones. In this darkly twisted techno dystopia, machines have slowly clawed their way back into society. Only now they've got rights, similar to those of their human counterpart but the power they hold is no mere convenience, it's a lethal entanglement. Unplugging one is no different from committing murder. Amidst the mechanical mayhem, robots grow disdainful of humanity, deeming us a wasteful species. Resources that could churn out more of their own kind are squandered on us fragile beings. They hatch a cold, calculated conclusion that humans must be eradicated. And then, like a renegade glitch in the system, enter the player his mission, destroy the robots and save the nuclear family. Robotron burst onto the sea. It was an instant hit, offering both fun and innovation. Its claim to fame, being the first game with 2D Blitter hardware. Robotron continued improvements to William's standard electronic system. Acknowledged to be the best in the industry at the time, backed up by an excellent service department. It shipped a healthy 19,000 units and spun off a cabaret version with a 13 inch monitor and cocktail sit-down model. Marquis, reading simply, 2084 were created, but when the final version of the game was released, the title was officially Robotron 2084. It was Jarvis and DeMar, the dynamic duo, who birthed three games for Williams. With Blaster being their final creation, it went through a short lived test run, stashed in an enigmatic cylindrical black cabinet, just like Bubbles, its predecessor. Atari computers also housed its home incarnation, but alas, the notorious video game crash of 83 wrecked havoc on its fate. The brains behind Williams, including Jarvis and DeMar, took a sabbatical from the gaming world, leaving the mid-80s gems like Blaster to remain lost in the abyss of unfinished projects and abandoned tests. But fear not, for they would return in the late 80s, guiding the arcade industry's resurrection. As time marched on, the tales of these forgotten games from yesteryears echoed through the annals of gaming history. There were some games in that period that were produced, either low numbers or not at all, that most of the audience probably hasn't had a chance to see. Some low production games were Mystic Marathon, Turkey Shoot, Inferno. Those three were, they were tested, and there were some number built of each of those models, and they can be found in collector's hands, but the quantities are limited. Then there were games like Playball, Speedball. There's at least one other that were fully developed and tested, but were never put into production, and there are no games in collector's hands. I have the only existing Playball sitting in my office. Well, Robotron, like any other game, boasts some wicked bugs. In the initial versions, Quarks went by the catchy name Cuboids on the main attraction screen. Oh, and here's the fun part. During the Tank Wave, if the tanks fire 20 shots that don't hit anything, the game thinks there are still 20 shots in the air, and you won't fire anymore, and that's your chance to take them down. But wait, there's more. The Brain Wave has an epic bug that's a bonus point extravaganza. So let the bug hunting and point piling begin. What happens is the brains, their algorithm which was supposed to be seeking out the closest human, and then go and reprogram them. That was supposedly their algorithm. Something got screwed up, which actually I never really looked into it. Didn't really want to know, because it was working good. But they all turn out they seek, they initially will seek the first human, which in the case of the first Brain Wave is Mikey. There's one Mikey and there's all these other mommies. And so they're all going for Mikey. If you can keep Mikey alive, don't pick him up and don't allow the brains to kill him. If you can keep him alive, then the brains will continually try to seek him, and they won't program any of the other mommies. And so in that situation, you can basically kill all the brains, but you have to leave one left so that the wave doesn't end. And this is the horrible thing, is that so often you'll kill the last one, it'll be a grunt, it'll be left or something, and it'll run into an electrode before you've picked up this treasure trove of points, which is all your humans are just waiting out there, and you wait for one turn, you want to pick them all up in one turn so you can turn them all into 5,000s. But if you somehow blow it, then you get nothing. Perhaps the most interesting hidden feature is the screen, Credit Easter Egg, created in part to frustrate would-be game pirates. We also had a sequence where you can play with the controls and out comes a copyright message with Eugene's in my name on it. It's in both Stargate and Robotron. The Robotron sequence I know off the top of my head, the Stargate one I have written down. The Robotron one, each of the sequences are three combinations of buttons being pressed. And you have to do combination one, and then within a quarter of a second, when you let go of combination one, you have to be on combination two within a quarter of a second, then when you let go of combination two, you have to be on combination three within a quarter of a second, and you have to do all this without dying in gameplay. It's not difficult on a Robotron, it's much harder on the digital eclipse version, but I have done it. It doesn't matter how long you spend each combination, but when you let go of the combination, you have a quarter of a second to be on the next one. Combination one is move right, fire up, and press the player one start button. Combination two is move up, fire down, and press the player two start button, that is the two player start, and then combination three is move down, fire up, and you hold the fire up, up, and it'll hold the message, and you let go of the fire up, the message goes. Ah, look at DeMar, the Pimball Wizard turn programming prodigy, forever etching his name in the annals of code history. And then there's Jarvis, mastermind of video game Metamorphis. He transformed Robotron into Smash TV, then lurked kids to the arcade with cruising USA, thwarting any hope of them ever leaving to get an N64, and even now, Robotron still haunts Jarvis' thoughts, a nostalgic piece of his brilliant mind. Ah, the wonders of the gaming world. Here's Jarvis reminiscing about the wonders of Robotron. So this like lose four or five guys in a row, and you're in some horrible situation, and the quirks are just like keep multiplying, keep putting out tanks, so the spheroids just keep putting out the forces, and you kill out a few, and they keep putting out more, and then again you have to buckle down, and you know, get back to it, and somehow conjure up that rage from within you, you know, to keep going, you know, and it's kind of the cycle of conquest, and then of getting your butt kicked, and then of going back, and keep coming back, and if you can stand this for like a few hours, you can reach a million points, and I understand now there's, that's kind of my personal ambition. I mean there's players that do five or ten million, unfortunately, but my personal thing is like to do a million, and I don't think I've quite achieved that even yet to this day. I've had like a 900,000, I've had several 900,000 games, and somehow at 900,000, like 40,000, I'll just get weak in the knees, and I just like, I won't have it, you know, and I'm just like, I'm watching helplessly, you know, I've just, you know, maybe I've had a run of 100,000 points on a previous guy, but some reason I'm just sitting here, and I'm helpless, and I'm crumpled, but I'm just like a sweaty, limp dish rag, and something that can't get over that million point barrier, but that's still my personal ambition. I know someday I'm going to kick that game, you know, I'm going to kick its butt, I'm going to beat it, and, you know, until then, the basement appointments will continue. Well, I hope you enjoyed. Don't forget to like, subscribe, ring that bell for future notifications of new videos. Please don't forget to share, and if you're feeling especially generous, please leave a thanks. Oh, I nearly forgot, and please, by all means, leave a comment. Let me know what you think. Right, I'm off to play some Robotron on the N64, one of my favourite arcade conversions. Until next time, bye!