Speaker 1: All right, everybody, welcome back. This is the final episode
of a series on the video games of nineteen eighty one.
If you are just tuning in for the first time, welcome,
Go back and check out our previous four episodes and
enjoy this where we cover Defender and give our final
judgments on the best games of nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 2: All right, everybody, welcome back to the Shirly You Can't
Be Serious podcast. This episode, we're going to continue our
discussion on games of nineteen eighty one. We will spend
time this time discussing the game Defender, Yes, and then
we're going to rank these five games, sort of a
final judgment for us. Yes.
Speaker 1: So before we jump into Defender, there are some other
games that came out in nineteen eighty one that at
least deserve an honorable mention. Yeah, or as you pronounce it, kicks.
Speaker 2: I've always called it kicks.
Speaker 1: Help us out on this one, folks, If you know
the answer to this question the qi X game, how
do you pronounce that name? I loved playing it, but
I don't know that I ever got the pronunciation ring.
Speaker 2: That game was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: It was fantastic. I mean, it was and it was
different than other games, and it was one of the
few games that was big in eighty one that was
designed in the United States as opposed to Japan.
Speaker 2: Okay, another game from that year that was a really
popular is a game called Gorf Dwarf. Yeah, that was
actually five games in one. It had like a Space
Invaders Galaxian type of game, and then every time you
change screen you actually played a different style of games
like five in one, and you could buy extra lives.
That was kind of a cool feature of Gorf.
Speaker 1: Right, and we talked a little bit about tempas Tempess.
We didn't we said, didn't make it into this cut
because there was an addition of Tempest that came out
in eighty Although most people consider an eighty one game,
it's a fantastic vector game, but not one that we
were considered.
Speaker 2: Mentioned prominently in the book Ready Player one, that tennis
game actually plays a very important part of quest.
Speaker 1: Yes, all right.
Speaker 2: And another game that I used to like a game
called mouse Trap. There's Scramble, there's a game called Venture.
There's lots of games from eighty one, but obviously we're
going to stick.
Speaker 1: With the winners, the pick winners.
Speaker 2: We only pick winners. All right, So we're going to
talk about Defender now, right.
Speaker 1: So, as I mentioned, almost all of the games that
we talked about were developed in Japan, right right, So
Frogger developed in Japan, but it was and was it
was doing pretty well over there, and it took the
Elizabeth Foppener standing up to the execs to get it
to come over.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Donkey Kong, we know was developed in Japan. Galaga, Miss
pac Man was developed in the United States, but it
was so heavily based on pac Man it's kind of
a joint effort.
Speaker 2: Sure.
Speaker 1: Now, Defender was developed strictly in the United States by
Williams Electronics.
Speaker 2: Okay, Okay.
Speaker 1: The guy who developed was a guy named Eugene Jarvis. Okay.
And so he was a guy chess player in school,
enjoyed games, but his first encounter with computers was like
a one day four tran programming class that IBM put on.
But it was enough to convince him that when he
went to college, instead of studying biochemistry, he decided to
study computers.
Speaker 2: Let me interject something really quick. Go ahead, you mentioned
four tran. Yeah, that's one of the two classes I
failed in college. I made an F for four tran F.
Speaker 1: For four trans Does this mean I passed? Keep going? Okay?
So he got his first taste of the excitement of
video game type things with a forbidden thing was in
the back of a place called Johnny's Smoke Shop there
in Menlo Park where he grew up, Johnny's Smoke Shop.
If you think you've heard of the name Menlo Park,
people know it today is Silicon Valley. So nice place
to grow up if you decide you want a career
in computers. Yeah, for real. But pinball back then when
he was a kid, had been banned they considered a
gambling game, and so so his parents as they left
he would leave the house, they'd say, don't go to
Johnny's Smoke Shop. So of course they went to johnny
Smoke Shop and in the back they had old men
smoking cigars and a pinball sheep. Nice. So that was
exciting to him and his first taste of actual video gaming.
When he was in high school, he would go over
to Stanford and they had a stand up version of
that game Space War that I talked about with the
exclamation point, the Bad Space War Bad Star Wars musical.
But he never played it because it cost ten cents
and he didn't have the money to play it in
high school. But he went to school at Berkeley and
they had their own space war game down in the
basement and it was free, and he became obsessed with it,
and so he decided, you know what, I want to
get involved with video game making. Graduates from college, he
gets an interview with Atari. He's all excited and they
don't call him back, and so they he waits and
then Hewlett Packard calls and he's like, okay, Heltt Packard,
that'll do it. Goes to work for Hewltt Packard. After
three days, he quits because it's the most boring job
he's ever had in his life. And he's sitting there
trying to figure out what to do. So the phone
rings and it's Atari and they say, hey, we'd like
to offer you a job. Would you be interested in
making pinball machines? Yes, yes, I would absolutely. You've called
the right place, right, So he goes over there. He
starts working on some of the pinball machines that they have,
but the guy who hired him quits a couple of
days after he starts working there, and then his boss
quits and then the other guy in the department transfers
to a different department. So within two weeks, this early
twenty something guy is now the head of the programming department.
Mister pinball, Mister pinball. Right, So he worked on the Atarians,
which was Atari's one of Atari's big pinball machines, and
the Superman Pinball Machine, which is not from the movie,
it's the comic book characters, right, And those games caught fire,
literally they were not well made and literally caught on fire.
So he's like, okay, I don't really think the Atari
guys no pinball machines. So he goes and gets a
job with Williams Electronics, which is the pinball company back then.
It's one of a few those companies are in Chicago.
He goes out there. He is happy as can be
making pinball machines until nineteen seventy eight when he first
lays eyes on the game Space Invaders game Changer, Game Changer,
and so Williams and he talked and they both agree
he should make their first video game, not a pinball
machine video game, okay, right. What he does is he
spends the first three to four months working on color
versions of Space Invaders and ASTA. Now keep in mind,
this is an industry that is exploding at the time.
They are always under the gun to make something, So
the fact that he spent that much time just recreating
games that he loved is kind of a strange choice. Okay,
So he has several swing and misses trying to get
a Space Invader's type of game, and so they brainstormed.
They liked the asteroid wrap around screen, and so suddenly
somebody somehow got the idea of rotating the screen so
that you are firing to the left or the right
instead of up in the air. That is a game changer, yep.
The other game changer to him was the motivation behind
the game. So in the game Defender, you actually have
like an honorable objective. You're trying to save people. Right,
if you've got to sacrifice yourself to save others, you're
going to make a bigger risk then if you're just
shooting random spaceships that have shown up. There's an altruistic
component to the game which is huge. And he decides
to name it after a TV series that he watched
when he was a kid called The Defenders, which starred E. G. Marshall.
You know that is the little light turned twinkling Clark.
Thanks are yes he is. EG Marshall is a big actor.
Was one of the Grandpa's in Christmas Vacation. Also was
one of the holdouts and twelve Angry Men. Great, great act.
Speaker 2: All right. Here's the other thing about the Defenders. Okay, great.
I'm not super familiar with this show, but in season nine,
episode twenty and twenty one, you had guests of Steve McQueen,
William Shatner, Wow, and Ralph Bellamy what yeah, all right.
Speaker 1: Not Bill Bellamy, No, Ralph Bellamy, who, if you don't remember,
was the other Duke brothers, one of the dukes, one
of the Duke brothers in uh trading places Duke. Okay,
So you have astronauts who you have to save, and
they were called mutants because they're supposed to be your friendlies,
but they're still throwing stuff at you. Right, Okay, do
you know the other all of the characters that they
have in the game, I do go for it.
Speaker 2: You have Lander, Mutant, Bader, bomber Pod, and Swarmer. Yes,
here's one of the things I was gonna throw it cheo. Okay,
one of the knocks on new gaming systems, in particular
the stuff my son's play, yeah is there's too many knobs,
too many buttons, too much stuff to learn. Takes a
PhD to figure it out. Right, Defender had four buttons,
which that was a game changer. Okay, so you had hyperspace,
smart Bomb, thrust fire plus a joystick. Yeah, this game
was incredibly hard.
Speaker 1: Yes, it's it's got a lot of it's got a
lot of buttons and whistles, right, Yeah, and the whistles
were a part of the development. They had been frustrated,
they were falling behind. Jarvis almost quit because there was
so much pressure being put on him to make this game.
And then they hired this guy named Sam Dicker, who
is another pioneer in the video game industry. And Sam
Dicker is the one who added the audios and the
visuals for the explosions, which are possibly the most memorable
component of Defender.
Speaker 2: That it really is you feel the concussion when those
explosions happen.
Speaker 1: And the multicolor lights coming out in the explosion. It
is probably the most memorable thing to me because it's
what happened to me the most.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I was just going to say. I remember
the first time I ever played it, my gaming area
of choice was Showby's Pizza, and I've stepped up to
the game, like, cool, this is a new game. Plug
in a quarter. I don't read the instructions out here.
We go, right, player one, Let's do this, and I
start wasting the humanoids down below, and I get yelled
at by a kid there. Okay, he tells me, I'm
doing it wrong.
Speaker 1: You're doing it wrong.
Speaker 2: I'm just blowing the humans up, which apparently at the time,
the fact that you could kill humans, yes, it was
considered kind of graphic, like how people were upset by that. Yeah,
you can blow up humans, so anyway, And then the
other thing I remember about this game, if you hit
the hyperspace button sometimes you would reappear on an alien
ship and it would kill you, right, And that was
that was a major pisser.
Speaker 1: So I can tell you that this was not a
game I played very often because it was so hard,
freaking hard. It was ridiculously hard, and it involved strategy.
I talked about him being a chess player. This game
involved more strategy and more tactics than any other game
that I can think of in nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the average playtime for Defender, yes, thirty seven seconds.
Speaker 1: That sounds about Yeah, that sounds about seven seconds longer
than I would want.
Speaker 2: We mentioned in our Gallaga episode that average game time
for video games in nineteen eighty one was about four minutes. Yeah,
so for Defender to be thirty seven seconds.
Speaker 1: That's pretty tough.
Speaker 2: That tells you how hard it was.
Speaker 1: So while they were making the game, they were convinced
that nobody would make it past the third level, but
just to be sure, they put in five levels. Jarvis
had the high score on the game, and nobody could
top it. And his high score was sixty thousand. So
the guy who invented the game, I mean, he's he's
a gamer. I mean, you know, Space Invaders inventor said
he couldn't get past level two, But this guy's a gamer.
His top score was sixty thousand. They're like, he can
get it to the third level, nobody else can get
past it. We'll put level five and that'll be it.
I can tell you that at the present moment, the
high score for Defender thirty three, millions, seven and twenty
five earned by Billy Joe Kane Billy Joe, Kaine Nice.
So they're working on this game. They're struggling to get
it done in time for that AMOA show that I've
been talking about. But they forgot to create the attract mode.
You know when you're walking by a video game and
you like, see the sam will play one. That's the
attract mode. That's the Hey look how cool this game is.
Stick your quarter in mode? Right, they forgot to put
it in. So the night before they are creating in
a track mode, they finish it, they put it in
the game and it doesn't work. So literally as they're
going into the AMA show, they find a way to
make it work, but it's not a big hit at
the show. At the arcade, however, it explodes and so
that turns Williams into a power player in the video
game industry. Jarvis goes on to create some more complicated things,
including the first time you put two joysticks together to
move a character around. He created the game Robotron twenty
eighty four. Robatron twenty eighty four. You had two joysticks,
the first time anybody had done that. Now all of
the you know, your Xbox, your PS five or whatever,
they all have two joys sticks that you used your
thumbs to move right, you get a maneuver back and
forth to the buttons. He literally took two Atari joysticks
and screwed them together on a piece of wood in
order to create his double joystick prototype for Robotron twenty
eighty four. And then he went on and made Cruisin,
which is the car game, which I thought was fantastic.
I mean, everybody had played pole Position at that point,
but Cruising you had the beach, you had this fantastic music,
You're going up and down hills, so it looks so
much more realistic. And I'm pretty sure when you would crash.
Speaker 2: The wheelshirt Yeah yeah, that sounds right.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So Eugene Jarvis becomes a pioneer in the field,
all from an almost failure at the AO Masia nice.
You know else, like this game Sheena Easton.
Speaker 2: Sheena Easton is out of town.
Speaker 1: This game is a huge part of the video almost
over you what Yeah that blows my mind. Yeah I
did it.
Speaker 2: Ah, good job, I was gonna say. Steven Spielberg he
had one of these in his office.
Speaker 1: Oh nice, uh, next to his Donkey Kong game.
Speaker 2: Sheen Euston's a lot better looking. Did you ever play
the game Stargate? No, that was another game.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was.
Speaker 2: Like yeah, so that was the sequel to the Defender. Yeah,
and they added another button but I can't remember what
it was, but anyway, it was harder.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Defender was at the AMA Show in eighty but
it wasn't actually released to the public until nineteen eighty one,
so it doesn't surprise me that they were making a
sequel for it that same year.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: So what I remember about the game and this was
watching other people play because I couldn't do I couldn't
look at this at the same time that I was
playing the game because of how bad I was. Yes,
but this is one of the games, one of the
first games that you had a little map on the screen.
I know.
Speaker 2: That was really cool.
Speaker 1: So you had you had to maneuver where you were,
but it also you were kind of keeping track of
where you were in the larger world of the game,
which is I mean something that they use in games
all of the time.
Speaker 2: Game changer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, game change, huge game changer.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, that wraps it up for a Defender.
We're going to move into Final Judgment.
Speaker 1: Now, right. Five video games are Galaga, misspac Man, Defender,
Donkey Kong, and Frogger.
Speaker 2: Yep go, five brilliant games in nineteen eighty one Game Checker.
If I had all five of them in front of me,
I would be so excited I'd wet my pants. Right,
it's interesting that you say that. All right, you give
me five quarters. Here's how I'm playing them, right right.
Number one's Donkey Kong for me, Donkey Kong number one,
and I probably blow two or three quarters on a
Donkey Kong. Okay, all right. Second in line for me
is Misspack Love it have fun speeding around, eating the pellets,
killing ghosts, all that stuff. Number three is Galagha, the
double shooter, the ship getting captured by the tractor beam
and the fact that you can double shoot so much fun.
Love Galagha. Number four is Frogger. I still love Froger. Yeah,
tons of fun hopping on logs, jumping the purple frogs,
bones on the log right, dodging cars. Love Froger me
it drops off pretty significantly. Defender is not one of
my favorite games. It's still a game changer, and I
appreciate what it did, but it's definitely dead last by
a pretty significant amount. Yeah, where are you?
Speaker 1: So I'll start where you left off. Okay, I've got
five quarters. Yeah, I'm not putting a quarter in Defender.
Not because it's not a great game, but just because
I never got good at it. I was too young
to get good at such a hard game at the time.
I know that my older brother loved that game. I
know that there were kids that were playing that game
all of the time. And it's a fantastic game, there's
no question. But it's just too darn hard. It's just
too darn hard.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now that means that I've still got five quarters for
four games, right, Okay, So Donkey Kong would be the
fourth game that I would choose, like it is, fourth
finishes fourth for me. Okay, I love it. I would
watch you stick money in it and play it over
and over. It's fantastic to watch. It's so good. But
it is also really really hard, and I want to
get my money's worth it. It's tough, and so I
would put I put one quarter in Donkey Kong to
finish things out. Okay, for number three and two, I've
got a tie. I've got a tie between Galiga and Frogger.
I can tell you that I love Gallaghat and I'm
really good at it, and I can play it a
long time, which is we talked about. That was one
of the benefits is that you can last a long
time on one quarter. And I love the double shooter
part of the game. I can't wait to try it
again to figure out that cheat in the first level
so that none of it nobody shoots at me, to
see how far I can get. I love I can.
I just getting from challenging stage to challenging stage was
it was like cake because it's like I had to
get every ship, and if I didn't get every ship,
I went into the next level depressed.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: But then oh I got another challenging stage coming. I'm
gonna do it on this one. And when those freaking
like dragonfly looking ones came and started spinning around, I
was like, what the heck. So it's a tie for
Froger for me. I can tell you that I know
that I would play Frogger again because when crossy Road
came out for the phones, I spent a long time
playing that game. It's fascinating, it is not too hard,
it's got great music. I love from it. But number
one for sure for me, Miss pack.
Speaker 2: Man, I can't fallow you.
Speaker 1: Great music, great storyline. I am better at it than
any of these other games I work toward. I mean,
I'm not I'm not setting any records right, but I
will get every ghost, every blue ghost, every level, every time,
every fruit, every dot. I will get the extra life
before I die. I love misspac Man top of the list.
Speaker 2: That's fantastic. That's fantastic.
Speaker 1: Okay, guys, tell us what you think. Where where do
these games fall for you? Would you shove all five
quarters into one game? Who's going to play Donkey Kong
the entire time?
Speaker 2: Hiss up on Facebook? His up on Twitter? Check out
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Speaker 1: You can reach us at Shirleypodcast at gmail dot com,
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executive producer in one of our episodes.
Speaker 2: Right you sure and send us your high score when
you tell us what your favorite game is.
Speaker 1: All right, everybody, thanks for being here.
Speaker 2: Join us next week. We're gonna jump into Flash Gordon
versus Highlander. It's gonna be amazing, talk about things being
inspired by Star Wars, things inspired by Star Wars and
the Queens soundtrack on both of these.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's gonna be fantastic.
Speaker 2: Come back next week