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Speaker 1: All right, everybody, welcome back. This is the final episode

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of a series on the video games of nineteen eighty one.

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If you are just tuning in for the first time, welcome,

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Go back and check out our previous four episodes and

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enjoy this where we cover Defender and give our final

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judgments on the best games of nineteen eighty one.

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Speaker 2: All right, everybody, welcome back to the Shirly You Can't

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Be Serious podcast. This episode, we're going to continue our

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discussion on games of nineteen eighty one. We will spend

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time this time discussing the game Defender, Yes, and then

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we're going to rank these five games, sort of a

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final judgment for us. Yes.

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Speaker 1: So before we jump into Defender, there are some other

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games that came out in nineteen eighty one that at

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least deserve an honorable mention. Yeah, or as you pronounce it, kicks.

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Speaker 2: I've always called it kicks.

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Speaker 1: Help us out on this one, folks, If you know

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the answer to this question the qi X game, how

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do you pronounce that name? I loved playing it, but

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I don't know that I ever got the pronunciation ring.

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Speaker 2: That game was a lot of fun.

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Speaker 1: It was fantastic. I mean, it was and it was

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different than other games, and it was one of the

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few games that was big in eighty one that was

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designed in the United States as opposed to Japan.

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Speaker 2: Okay, another game from that year that was a really

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popular is a game called Gorf Dwarf. Yeah, that was

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actually five games in one. It had like a Space

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Invaders Galaxian type of game, and then every time you

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change screen you actually played a different style of games

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like five in one, and you could buy extra lives.

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That was kind of a cool feature of Gorf.

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Speaker 1: Right, and we talked a little bit about tempas Tempess.

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We didn't we said, didn't make it into this cut

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because there was an addition of Tempest that came out

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in eighty Although most people consider an eighty one game,

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it's a fantastic vector game, but not one that we

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were considered.

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Speaker 2: Mentioned prominently in the book Ready Player one, that tennis

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game actually plays a very important part of quest.

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Speaker 1: Yes, all right.

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Speaker 2: And another game that I used to like a game

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called mouse Trap. There's Scramble, there's a game called Venture.

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There's lots of games from eighty one, but obviously we're

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going to stick.

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Speaker 1: With the winners, the pick winners.

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Speaker 2: We only pick winners. All right, So we're going to

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talk about Defender now, right.

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Speaker 1: So, as I mentioned, almost all of the games that

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we talked about were developed in Japan, right right, So

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Frogger developed in Japan, but it was and was it

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was doing pretty well over there, and it took the

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Elizabeth Foppener standing up to the execs to get it

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to come over.

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Speaker 2: Right.

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Speaker 1: Donkey Kong, we know was developed in Japan. Galaga, Miss

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pac Man was developed in the United States, but it

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was so heavily based on pac Man it's kind of

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a joint effort.

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Speaker 2: Sure.

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Speaker 1: Now, Defender was developed strictly in the United States by

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Williams Electronics.

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Speaker 2: Okay, Okay.

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Speaker 1: The guy who developed was a guy named Eugene Jarvis. Okay.

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And so he was a guy chess player in school,

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enjoyed games, but his first encounter with computers was like

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a one day four tran programming class that IBM put on.

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But it was enough to convince him that when he

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went to college, instead of studying biochemistry, he decided to

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study computers.

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Speaker 2: Let me interject something really quick. Go ahead, you mentioned

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four tran. Yeah, that's one of the two classes I

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failed in college. I made an F for four tran F.

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Speaker 1: For four trans Does this mean I passed? Keep going? Okay?

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So he got his first taste of the excitement of

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video game type things with a forbidden thing was in

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the back of a place called Johnny's Smoke Shop there

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in Menlo Park where he grew up, Johnny's Smoke Shop.

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If you think you've heard of the name Menlo Park,

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people know it today is Silicon Valley. So nice place

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to grow up if you decide you want a career

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in computers. Yeah, for real. But pinball back then when

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he was a kid, had been banned they considered a

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gambling game, and so so his parents as they left

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he would leave the house, they'd say, don't go to

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Johnny's Smoke Shop. So of course they went to johnny

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Smoke Shop and in the back they had old men

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smoking cigars and a pinball sheep. Nice. So that was

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exciting to him and his first taste of actual video gaming.

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When he was in high school, he would go over

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to Stanford and they had a stand up version of

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that game Space War that I talked about with the

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exclamation point, the Bad Space War Bad Star Wars musical.

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But he never played it because it cost ten cents

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and he didn't have the money to play it in

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high school. But he went to school at Berkeley and

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they had their own space war game down in the

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basement and it was free, and he became obsessed with it,

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and so he decided, you know what, I want to

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get involved with video game making. Graduates from college, he

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gets an interview with Atari. He's all excited and they

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don't call him back, and so they he waits and

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then Hewlett Packard calls and he's like, okay, Heltt Packard,

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that'll do it. Goes to work for Hewltt Packard. After

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three days, he quits because it's the most boring job

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he's ever had in his life. And he's sitting there

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trying to figure out what to do. So the phone

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rings and it's Atari and they say, hey, we'd like

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to offer you a job. Would you be interested in

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making pinball machines? Yes, yes, I would absolutely. You've called

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the right place, right, So he goes over there. He

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starts working on some of the pinball machines that they have,

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but the guy who hired him quits a couple of

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days after he starts working there, and then his boss

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quits and then the other guy in the department transfers

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to a different department. So within two weeks, this early

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twenty something guy is now the head of the programming department.

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Mister pinball, Mister pinball. Right, So he worked on the Atarians,

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which was Atari's one of Atari's big pinball machines, and

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the Superman Pinball Machine, which is not from the movie,

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it's the comic book characters, right, And those games caught fire,

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literally they were not well made and literally caught on fire.

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So he's like, okay, I don't really think the Atari

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guys no pinball machines. So he goes and gets a

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job with Williams Electronics, which is the pinball company back then.

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It's one of a few those companies are in Chicago.

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He goes out there. He is happy as can be

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making pinball machines until nineteen seventy eight when he first

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lays eyes on the game Space Invaders game Changer, Game Changer,

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and so Williams and he talked and they both agree

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he should make their first video game, not a pinball

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machine video game, okay, right. What he does is he

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spends the first three to four months working on color

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versions of Space Invaders and ASTA. Now keep in mind,

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this is an industry that is exploding at the time.

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They are always under the gun to make something, So

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the fact that he spent that much time just recreating

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games that he loved is kind of a strange choice. Okay,

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So he has several swing and misses trying to get

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a Space Invader's type of game, and so they brainstormed.

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They liked the asteroid wrap around screen, and so suddenly

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somebody somehow got the idea of rotating the screen so

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that you are firing to the left or the right

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instead of up in the air. That is a game changer, yep.

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The other game changer to him was the motivation behind

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the game. So in the game Defender, you actually have

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like an honorable objective. You're trying to save people. Right,

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if you've got to sacrifice yourself to save others, you're

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going to make a bigger risk then if you're just

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shooting random spaceships that have shown up. There's an altruistic

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component to the game which is huge. And he decides

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to name it after a TV series that he watched

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when he was a kid called The Defenders, which starred E. G. Marshall.

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You know that is the little light turned twinkling Clark.

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Thanks are yes he is. EG Marshall is a big actor.

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Was one of the Grandpa's in Christmas Vacation. Also was

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one of the holdouts and twelve Angry Men. Great, great act.

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Speaker 2: All right. Here's the other thing about the Defenders. Okay, great.

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I'm not super familiar with this show, but in season nine,

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episode twenty and twenty one, you had guests of Steve McQueen,

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William Shatner, Wow, and Ralph Bellamy what yeah, all right.

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Speaker 1: Not Bill Bellamy, No, Ralph Bellamy, who, if you don't remember,

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was the other Duke brothers, one of the dukes, one

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of the Duke brothers in uh trading places Duke. Okay,

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So you have astronauts who you have to save, and

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they were called mutants because they're supposed to be your friendlies,

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but they're still throwing stuff at you. Right, Okay, do

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you know the other all of the characters that they

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have in the game, I do go for it.

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Speaker 2: You have Lander, Mutant, Bader, bomber Pod, and Swarmer. Yes,

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here's one of the things I was gonna throw it cheo. Okay,

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one of the knocks on new gaming systems, in particular

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the stuff my son's play, yeah is there's too many knobs,

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too many buttons, too much stuff to learn. Takes a

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PhD to figure it out. Right, Defender had four buttons,

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which that was a game changer. Okay, so you had hyperspace,

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smart Bomb, thrust fire plus a joystick. Yeah, this game

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was incredibly hard.

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Speaker 1: Yes, it's it's got a lot of it's got a

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lot of buttons and whistles, right, Yeah, and the whistles

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were a part of the development. They had been frustrated,

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they were falling behind. Jarvis almost quit because there was

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so much pressure being put on him to make this game.

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And then they hired this guy named Sam Dicker, who

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is another pioneer in the video game industry. And Sam

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Dicker is the one who added the audios and the

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visuals for the explosions, which are possibly the most memorable

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component of Defender.

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Speaker 2: That it really is you feel the concussion when those

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explosions happen.

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Speaker 1: And the multicolor lights coming out in the explosion. It

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is probably the most memorable thing to me because it's

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what happened to me the most.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I was just going to say. I remember

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the first time I ever played it, my gaming area

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of choice was Showby's Pizza, and I've stepped up to

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the game, like, cool, this is a new game. Plug

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in a quarter. I don't read the instructions out here.

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We go, right, player one, Let's do this, and I

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start wasting the humanoids down below, and I get yelled

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at by a kid there. Okay, he tells me, I'm

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doing it wrong.

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Speaker 1: You're doing it wrong.

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Speaker 2: I'm just blowing the humans up, which apparently at the time,

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the fact that you could kill humans, yes, it was

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considered kind of graphic, like how people were upset by that. Yeah,

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you can blow up humans, so anyway, And then the

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other thing I remember about this game, if you hit

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the hyperspace button sometimes you would reappear on an alien

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ship and it would kill you, right, And that was

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that was a major pisser.

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Speaker 1: So I can tell you that this was not a

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game I played very often because it was so hard,

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freaking hard. It was ridiculously hard, and it involved strategy.

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I talked about him being a chess player. This game

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involved more strategy and more tactics than any other game

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that I can think of in nineteen eighty one.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, the average playtime for Defender, yes, thirty seven seconds.

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Speaker 1: That sounds about Yeah, that sounds about seven seconds longer

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than I would want.

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Speaker 2: We mentioned in our Gallaga episode that average game time

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for video games in nineteen eighty one was about four minutes. Yeah,

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so for Defender to be thirty seven seconds.

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Speaker 1: That's pretty tough.

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Speaker 2: That tells you how hard it was.

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Speaker 1: So while they were making the game, they were convinced

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that nobody would make it past the third level, but

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just to be sure, they put in five levels. Jarvis

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had the high score on the game, and nobody could

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top it. And his high score was sixty thousand. So

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the guy who invented the game, I mean, he's he's

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a gamer. I mean, you know, Space Invaders inventor said

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he couldn't get past level two, But this guy's a gamer.

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His top score was sixty thousand. They're like, he can

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get it to the third level, nobody else can get

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past it. We'll put level five and that'll be it.

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I can tell you that at the present moment, the

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high score for Defender thirty three, millions, seven and twenty

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five earned by Billy Joe Kane Billy Joe, Kaine Nice.

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So they're working on this game. They're struggling to get

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it done in time for that AMOA show that I've

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been talking about. But they forgot to create the attract mode.

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You know when you're walking by a video game and

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you like, see the sam will play one. That's the

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attract mode. That's the Hey look how cool this game is.

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Stick your quarter in mode? Right, they forgot to put

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it in. So the night before they are creating in

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a track mode, they finish it, they put it in

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the game and it doesn't work. So literally as they're

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going into the AMA show, they find a way to

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make it work, but it's not a big hit at

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the show. At the arcade, however, it explodes and so

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that turns Williams into a power player in the video

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game industry. Jarvis goes on to create some more complicated things,

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including the first time you put two joysticks together to

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move a character around. He created the game Robotron twenty

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eighty four. Robatron twenty eighty four. You had two joysticks,

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the first time anybody had done that. Now all of

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the you know, your Xbox, your PS five or whatever,

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they all have two joys sticks that you used your

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thumbs to move right, you get a maneuver back and

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forth to the buttons. He literally took two Atari joysticks

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and screwed them together on a piece of wood in

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order to create his double joystick prototype for Robotron twenty

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eighty four. And then he went on and made Cruisin,

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which is the car game, which I thought was fantastic.

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I mean, everybody had played pole Position at that point,

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but Cruising you had the beach, you had this fantastic music,

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You're going up and down hills, so it looks so

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much more realistic. And I'm pretty sure when you would crash.

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Speaker 2: The wheelshirt Yeah yeah, that sounds right.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. So Eugene Jarvis becomes a pioneer in the field,

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all from an almost failure at the AO Masia nice.

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You know else, like this game Sheena Easton.

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Speaker 2: Sheena Easton is out of town.

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Speaker 1: This game is a huge part of the video almost

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over you what Yeah that blows my mind. Yeah I

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did it.

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Speaker 2: Ah, good job, I was gonna say. Steven Spielberg he

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had one of these in his office.

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Speaker 1: Oh nice, uh, next to his Donkey Kong game.

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Speaker 2: Sheen Euston's a lot better looking. Did you ever play

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the game Stargate? No, that was another game.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, that was.

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Speaker 2: Like yeah, so that was the sequel to the Defender. Yeah,

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and they added another button but I can't remember what

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it was, but anyway, it was harder.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. Defender was at the AMA Show in eighty but

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it wasn't actually released to the public until nineteen eighty one,

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so it doesn't surprise me that they were making a

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sequel for it that same year.

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Speaker 2: Wow.

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Speaker 1: So what I remember about the game and this was

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watching other people play because I couldn't do I couldn't

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look at this at the same time that I was

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playing the game because of how bad I was. Yes,

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but this is one of the games, one of the

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first games that you had a little map on the screen.

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I know.

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Speaker 2: That was really cool.

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Speaker 1: So you had you had to maneuver where you were,

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but it also you were kind of keeping track of

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where you were in the larger world of the game,

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which is I mean something that they use in games

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all of the time.

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Speaker 2: Game changer.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, game change, huge game changer.

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Speaker 2: All right, Well, that wraps it up for a Defender.

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We're going to move into Final Judgment.

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Speaker 1: Now, right. Five video games are Galaga, misspac Man, Defender,

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Donkey Kong, and Frogger.

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Speaker 2: Yep go, five brilliant games in nineteen eighty one Game Checker.

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If I had all five of them in front of me,

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I would be so excited I'd wet my pants. Right,

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it's interesting that you say that. All right, you give

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me five quarters. Here's how I'm playing them, right right.

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Number one's Donkey Kong for me, Donkey Kong number one,

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and I probably blow two or three quarters on a

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Donkey Kong. Okay, all right. Second in line for me

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is Misspack Love it have fun speeding around, eating the pellets,

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killing ghosts, all that stuff. Number three is Galagha, the

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double shooter, the ship getting captured by the tractor beam

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and the fact that you can double shoot so much fun.

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Love Galagha. Number four is Frogger. I still love Froger. Yeah,

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tons of fun hopping on logs, jumping the purple frogs,

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bones on the log right, dodging cars. Love Froger me

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it drops off pretty significantly. Defender is not one of

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my favorite games. It's still a game changer, and I

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appreciate what it did, but it's definitely dead last by

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a pretty significant amount. Yeah, where are you?

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Speaker 1: So I'll start where you left off. Okay, I've got

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five quarters. Yeah, I'm not putting a quarter in Defender.

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Not because it's not a great game, but just because

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I never got good at it. I was too young

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to get good at such a hard game at the time.

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I know that my older brother loved that game. I

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know that there were kids that were playing that game

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all of the time. And it's a fantastic game, there's

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no question. But it's just too darn hard. It's just

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too darn hard.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: Now that means that I've still got five quarters for

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four games, right, Okay, So Donkey Kong would be the

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fourth game that I would choose, like it is, fourth

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finishes fourth for me. Okay, I love it. I would

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watch you stick money in it and play it over

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and over. It's fantastic to watch. It's so good. But

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it is also really really hard, and I want to

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get my money's worth it. It's tough, and so I

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would put I put one quarter in Donkey Kong to

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finish things out. Okay, for number three and two, I've

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got a tie. I've got a tie between Galiga and Frogger.

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I can tell you that I love Gallaghat and I'm

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really good at it, and I can play it a

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long time, which is we talked about. That was one

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of the benefits is that you can last a long

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time on one quarter. And I love the double shooter

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part of the game. I can't wait to try it

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again to figure out that cheat in the first level

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so that none of it nobody shoots at me, to

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see how far I can get. I love I can.

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I just getting from challenging stage to challenging stage was

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it was like cake because it's like I had to

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get every ship, and if I didn't get every ship,

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I went into the next level depressed.

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Speaker 2: That's right.

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Speaker 1: But then oh I got another challenging stage coming. I'm

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gonna do it on this one. And when those freaking

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like dragonfly looking ones came and started spinning around, I

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was like, what the heck. So it's a tie for

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Froger for me. I can tell you that I know

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that I would play Frogger again because when crossy Road

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came out for the phones, I spent a long time

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playing that game. It's fascinating, it is not too hard,

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it's got great music. I love from it. But number

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one for sure for me, Miss pack.

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Speaker 2: Man, I can't fallow you.

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Speaker 1: Great music, great storyline. I am better at it than

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any of these other games I work toward. I mean,

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I'm not I'm not setting any records right, but I

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will get every ghost, every blue ghost, every level, every time,

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every fruit, every dot. I will get the extra life

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before I die. I love misspac Man top of the list.

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Speaker 2: That's fantastic. That's fantastic.

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Speaker 1: Okay, guys, tell us what you think. Where where do

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these games fall for you? Would you shove all five

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quarters into one game? Who's going to play Donkey Kong

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the entire time?

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Speaker 2: Hiss up on Facebook? His up on Twitter? Check out

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our Patreon page. We love hearing from you. Email us

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if you want to.

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Speaker 1: You can reach us at Shirleypodcast at gmail dot com,

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00:20:05,039 --> 00:20:07,480
or if you're checking us out on Facebook, We're at

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00:20:07,480 --> 00:20:10,319
Shirley Podcast. You're checking us out on Twitter. We're also

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00:20:10,640 --> 00:20:13,839
at Shirley Podcast. And if you go to our Patreon

396
00:20:13,920 --> 00:20:16,920
page and you search Shirley Podcast, you will find us

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00:20:16,920 --> 00:20:19,599
there and you will have the opportunity to become an

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executive producer in one of our episodes.

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Speaker 2: Right you sure and send us your high score when

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you tell us what your favorite game is.

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Speaker 1: All right, everybody, thanks for being here.

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Speaker 2: Join us next week. We're gonna jump into Flash Gordon

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versus Highlander. It's gonna be amazing, talk about things being

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inspired by Star Wars, things inspired by Star Wars and

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the Queens soundtrack on both of these.

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Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's gonna be fantastic.

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Speaker 2: Come back next week