For those who have never played Tempest (or other vector display games) in person, the glow of vector graphic is so bright and beautiful, unlike anything I've ever seen. It's as if I'm looking at color laser being drawn on screen.
Saw this comment and thought "You guys need a Vextrex in your life" but it was mentioned already. Sadly the original one (I have a Milton Bradley original) never included a Tempest or clone in the library but the homebrew scene has fixed that.
I had my first paid job the summer I was 13 at a tomato packing plant. It was hot dusty work. Every Friday the owner wrote 1one check and gave it to the foreman with a list of how much went to each one of us. We rode in the truck to the Dairy Queen. Dairy Queen cashed the check and we all got paid. I was 13 years old with a parfait in one hand and a pile of quarters for Tempest in the other. Every time I see or think of that game, I smile. Good times.
Autism doesn't grant any super powers, but it does give restricted interests. Whereas a neurological person could play Tempest a few times and get bored, an autistic person could continually marvel at at subtleties of a game. Little details, patterns, and strategies can be engrossing to focus on. That inclination towards restrictive interests leads some autustic people to be very good at and knowledgeable about specific topics.
A part of me wonders how they got that. I'm thinking they turned out nobs on a lathe some where, such that the stock was fed into the lath, it was knurled, drilled for the shaft of the rotary encoder, then parted off with a form tool that chamfered the user facing edge, and the part rolled down the track to paint. But I could be wrong on that. Now someone would probably measure the size of the knob, make a 3d model of it, then 3d print it with a dense metal filled filament, or if pressed print a 'cup' with the outer shape of the knob, then fill the cup with a mix of lead shot and epoxy. Getting a smooth running rotary encoder today may cost more than the rest of the machine though. Everyone making an encoder for the hobbiest market seems to think we want one that acts a sa button and has hard steps. You can take out the bit that forces the encoder to 'step' but the ones I've tried still have the tactile feel of the encoder step. I'd much rather have an encoder using something like the wheels of the old male computer mice.
It was a great time in the 80s, when there was still some optimism about the future, malls followed a modern architecture trend, and arcades were dark and mysterious. I want my A.C. Clarke future back.
Oh boy...it's been a while sinced I have watched you Dave. Today is the last day of school here in Oregon and my wife and I are waiting for 25 fourth graders to show up, our grandson being one of those. This should prepare my mind!
1:45: I always called it the Cardioid. 2:35: "Yosemite Valley." 14:38: Maybe I was imagining it, but if you look closely at the Tankers as they approach, you'll see that they do actually get slightly brighter as they get closer. It's just hard to see because everything's so bright to begin with (gamma correction? What's that?). (You have the disassembled ROM code; why not poke around and see if/where it's actually used.) This is the game that brought me (back) in to arcade games, because it was so pretty. I was very much in to computer generated imagery and animation and, compared to everything else available at the time, this thing was jaw-droppingly amazing. Somewhere in my hoard I have the owner/service manual for it, including the schematics. Poring over those schematics was actually quite educational -- the logic around the encoder wheel was brilliantly simple (although it does have a bug). Even at my best, I was never able to get past the black levels.
I could never get into Tempest, but I have nothing but respect for your taste in arcade games. That's an amazing run! I was a huge Galaga guy myself, getting to stages in the mid 100's a couple times.
They managed to break galaga with some kind of missile counter overload. Just wait on level 1 with the last enemy alive, keep dodging, eventually it hits a 255 (one byte) missile limit, and bam! No more missiles for the rest of your playthrough. Takes ages though.
Using the cheat method, I was able to break the Galaga machine in the shoppette at the Jr. College I was attending twice, I was banned from playing the game after the second time. Took, as I recall, over 2 hours to get to lever 256. lol No way I could even get to 20 if those bugs were shooting at me. lol :)
Wow, Tempest! I loved that game. I really miss the vector scanning graphics. To all you younger gamers, you have to see this directly with your eyes to really appreciate it, as the full effect of it doesn't come through video. It's magical, requires special hardware, and only existed for a few years.
i used to work as a technician for a vending company. reconditioning Arcade machines was the daily grind. I have enjoyed the fact that Tempest was included in MS Arcade since i first encountered it around 1996 if you tweek the Hue, Tint, Saturation, while watching the output from your camera, you can shift the crt ( and any LCD panel ) to compensate for the color. where Hue or Tint are not available, you can tweek color balance using the Red Drive, Green Drive, Blue Drive, for the crt.
I saw a very good Tempest player, in a Flushing, Queens arcade (decades ago). I was also very good, and we played a couple of two-player games. Perhaps that was Dave? I also played in Nathans, on Central Avenue, in Westchester, NY (if I am remembering the location correctly). I routinely put up high scores when I traveled. One place where my brother played, was in Penn Station (NYC -- Manhattan). As best I can remember from his stories, those games (whether Tempest or any other game) had the highest high scores we had ever seen. I did not play those Penn Station games. It was not in my daily travels. Not mentioned by our host, is that there were different versions of Tempest (three of them, I believe). Version 1, if I am not mistaken, had a bug or a hidden feature, that allowed you to get 40 free credits. That helped me practice, without spending all of my part-time, after school, minimum wage earnings. That "feature" also allowed you to start on any of the levels that you would normally be able to start on, if you had played your way all the way up, level by level by level. So you were able to start on the green circle (which might have been level 81). I liked to start on the invisible circle, because those levels were very challenging. I also liked to start on the green circle -- extremely challenging. Although the game sped up as you climbed the levels, two colors got noticeably faster: When you got to the invisible circle, the game went to a dramatically faster speed. The next serious speed increase was on the green circle. Things were so fast, that if you blinked, you had a good chance of getting killed. I never got to the green circle, without the "feature". I could not conquer the invisible infinity level. It was super fast, with very smart enemies, and made my brain hurt. The green circle (directly after the invisible infinity level), although faster, was easier -- or to be more precise, less difficult. As best that I can remember, when I started a game on the green circle, my best score was after completing 9 or 10 of the green levels. Supposedly, when you complete all of the green levels, you keep getting more green levels at random. One issue with the arcade games is that sometimes the fire button was flaky, and the arcade staff did not take my word for it. They pressed it, and it worked. That was hardly a proper test. When you get to fast levels, you are not just standing there, holding down the fire button. You are often making single presses (or double presses), for precision shots. When one of those shots did not register, you got killed. It was not a matter of having all eight shots already fired. it was a contact issue with the fire button. Really frustrating, especially when you traveled to get to the arcade to play that game. Dave, have you ever played the green levels? Did you make it there through the invisibles?
Had a friend in the '80's who spent a lot of his time programming his Sharp 1450 and reading science fiction, but the _only_ time I saw him really having fun, was once playing Tempest on a neglected machine. I always wondered which game it was, but I recognized it immediately seeing Dave here playing it. Great!
Missile command was an arcade favorite of mine during my school days. That track ball always took a beating. I'm glad that I was able to have a career in software where autism was an advantage.
Dave, that was amazing. Tempest was always one of my favourite arcade games, simply due to the 3D (or some pedantic people would say "pseudo-3D") presentation. (Battlezone was another favourite 3D vector game which I was a LOT better at.) I was never much good at Tempest, but I always enjoyed it. To see you make that world record and for me to get such a rush of nostalgia at the same time was so good. And to think that you also hacked into the ROMs, learned the code, and amended the code to add your own features is the icing on the cake! Thanks for sharing this! 👍
Wow. You have obviously made the “pinball wizard” of Tempest. I cannot even remember the highest score I ever got on that game. Thank you and congratulations. 🎊
man i love tempest. favorite video game of ever. the fact that you had to protect yourself as you were switching levels, was the craziest thing and i loved it. you're a boss!
Congratulations on a fine demonstration and achievement. As someone whose grandparents had recently picked up an Atarii 2600 at a garage sale in the early 90's, I have fond memories of the games I had on there. Later I would receive an NES and other consoles over the years, but this brings me back. I think Tempest was one I played either on the Atari or in an arcade, but it never held that much appeal for me. Instead however, I really loved the game Reactor for the 2600. I could not even remember the name, only "that one game where a pulsating core grows and you fly a ship around the sides, and billiard some kind of star-looking things into the two pens on either side of the arena before the reactor gets to full size." Until looking for it online, just watching one particular youtube video actually, of over a hundred atari games. I probably have that video favorited and may still credit it if anyone is interested What I remember most was the sound effects as well as the feeling the game gave you. Being someone who enjoys a great number of modern games, I honestly cannot say why that one really calls out to me. It's funny to remember the moment when I was hearing about Zelda on the NES and how much i wanted to play that, and how much it represented bold new worlds in interactive media. Though later when I played it, I much preferred Mario, because to me Zelda was a bit too hard and confusing, the levels were too well hidden for my taste, and it meant that I just scoured the entire map endlessly and dreaded the enemies that I would have to avoid along my way. But even still, it was progress, an iteration along a path of balance between challenge and immersion, or something like that. Anyway, just watching this has me wanting to find an atari emulator and play some Reactor.
I never really had access to this game growing up but I did love the vector style so much mainly thanks to the Star Wars sit down cabinet I lived in as a child when visiting the arcades every Saturday. I actually complained and was very grumpy when they started adding texture maps to polygons. I thought it looked terrible but I was shown the error of my ways over the years as 3D got better and my memories of vector games faded. One thing Dave is really spot on with is how you really just can't see in video what you see in real life. There is a brilliance to the light you get from these games that might be comparable to how CRT's had this instant intensity to them that even some of the best monitors today still can't quite match. So if you're familiar with a CRT running a game just dial that up further in your mind and that's how intensely beautiful vector graphics were back then.
I've always had a soft spot in my heart for the Atari vector games. Red Baron, Battle Zone, Space Duel, Asteroids, Lunar Lander, and Tempest. Even the obscure ones like Gravitar and Major Havoc. One of the first purchases I made when I got my first programming gig circa 1990 was to buy an aging Asteroids game from a convenience store for $200. The thing still lives in my garage and my 11 year old pesters me on a regular basis to fix the screen so we can play it. When ebay came along, and once I had replace all of my Battlestar Galactic toys, one of my first finds was a Vectrex system. Like I said. I love me some vector graphics.
Remember having Tempest at our local swimming baths when I was around 13-14 yr old. Had just started programming on the Atari 800 and after seeing this game I had to do something like it. Never did but 40 years later and I'm tinkering with Unreal Engine. Still got the dream :)
fell in love with this when I was collecting the atari jaguar was just playing it this week on the new documentary/game released on steam about llamasoft and its founder
Did you enjoy the book Ready Player One? We grew up in the same era, and had the same love for computers. We share a lot in common, actually -- more than just the comp sci and programming. :) I really enjoyed the Tempest scene in the book!
@@DavesGarage I had forgotten there was a book. I liked the movie though. Really that feeling of getting some kind of decoder ring out of a cereal box and going on a treasure hunt, I feel, taps into a collective nostalgia we nerds all predictably would have. The virtual reality aspect of it didn't hurt either. It's a book I'd like to read, because books are almost always entirely different from the movie based on them, which isn't to say the movie isn't good too.
I grew up in an era of arcades but never got to play tempest. It was early 90's. I live in a very rural area and we were lucky to have a malt stand next-door to the junior high school. My friend's mom owned and ran it. There was a backroom area, rather large, with a pool table and quite a few arcade games. I remember many days going there to play games, get a burger, hang with friends. Arcade machines were everywhere it seemed. I remember some at the local walmart before the super walmart nearyby was built. We are lacking places like that now. Little areas were kids hung out and socialized. I don't understand why there aren't arcade style games around anymore. People would definitely still play them. I know a girl with a warehouse full of really old arcade and pinball machines. Just sitting there chilling. Probably a hundred or more that her dad left when he passed away. Haven't talked to her in years, though I been thinking about asking for a pinball machine to rebuild.
BC’s Quest for Tires was my Dad’s favorite game on the C-64 - he’s very nostalgic about it. So cool you worked on it. Would you have a recommendation on how to play it nowadays (I have a PC - not a C-64 anymore 😊 )
I was working at RPI in Troy NY (college focused on engineering and science) for all of 1980's, and we had a lot of students who were very good at the video games of the day. Tempest was one of the favorite games. I was pretty good at it, but there were students who were much better than me. IIRC, I could get to the "invisible" levels, and I think I managed to get through the whole set of invisible levels only to lose the game on the first screen of the next color. There were students who could get into the invisible levels without losing a single life. Very cool to see this and to hear all you've done with Tempest. The favorite game for me was Asteroids Deluxe. I wanted to mention that the look of Asteroids Deluxe was also awesome (IMO). I wish I could justify spending the money to have a full-sized pristine-quality version of Asteroids Deluxe at my house. I could go on with many stories of the heyday of these video arcade games at RPI (including some world-records), but that would get pretty long and tedious for everyone but me. 🙂 👋
One story is that a student at RPI was apparently the first one to find out that the original version of Missile Command had a bug in it where the machine would reset if the score got too high. Our games-room reported it to the company, and the company said we were nuts and we probably had a problem with power-flickers or something. They then called back a few days later and said they had checked, and it turned out there was indeed a bug there. There was also a bug in the original version of Asteroids where the game would reset if you earn too many extra lives (I think it was 255). So when the better players at RPI were racking up a lot of points, they'd deliberately kill off a few of their lives just to avoid having the game reset on them. And we did have one student who had the world record in Asteroids for a short time. That game lasted something like 20-24 hours on a single quarter, and it ended just because the guy who owned the games-room decided he wanted to close up and head home. _(I was the guy who kept a running-track for the official score for that game)_
Bought a clean full size upright version of Tempest back in 1984 from a local arcade. I kept it for a few years and eventually sold it and have long since regretted it. Never had any monitor issues but I did have to service the power supply and use some grease on the spinner bearings to keep it from wobbling.
Back in the day all I could do (or knew about) was keep topping the local arcade scores whenever a friend said I was no longer top score somewhere (on a few games, pinball included) - world records were not even on my mind... surreal audio art on the other hand, almost 24/7. Nice flash-back game play, Vector graphics included. :>
If I'd invested all the quarters I dumped into Tempest back when I was a boy, I'd be retired on a Caribbean island drinking pina coladas right now. My big four were Tempest, Joust, Galaga, and Space Harrier. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
I played Tempest lots in the early 80s, as I worked in an Arrcade, and could have the keys of the game console so no quarters needed. Though not shown here, the sound was awesome, specially when moving from one stage to another. Great times indeed.
I had one of these machines in 1985, but it came from an arcade. Sold it to a friend a few years later, it was starting to develop problems at that time. Don't know what happened to it after that. Another friend also had one... Tempest was certainly a super joy bringer!
I spent a "considerable" (all I could get) amount of coins rolling around galaxies. There was only one game more addictive than Tempest: Tetris. Tetris remains the king of addiction: a friend of mine, openly and vehemently against computer games, almost turned in her thesis (which she was writing on my PC) days late. She started to "relax a bit" by playing and continued to "relax" for two days straight. Luckily she didn't get caught by Tempest at the same time.
I LOVE THIS GAME.... I got addicted and spent hours dumping quarters into this arcade game. This game is worse than fly fishing and worse than a drug addiction... Love it...
Whoohoo! I had a coworker who used to work at Atari. One of his jobs wad to play one particular game on the 5200 to completion, then grab the next unit and do it again, all day. You would not believe how fast he could win.
I never really got into playing Tempest much, but I spent quite a bit of time working on one. When the horizontal or vertical deflection amplifiers go out the entire section has a cascade failure. You have to completely rebuild that amplifier because the whole thing is toast.
Great job! Can't quite tell with the RUclips compression, but it doesn't look like it's running on a vector display, as the original Tempest did. Those monitors are hard to come by.
I was also 13 when I ran into this game at my neighborhood arcade; next to Defender, it was one of my favorites. It does not look the way I remember it. lol, it hasn't aged well but then again what does.
@DavesGarage -- Hi Dave. I doubt you remember me, after all these years, and my surname was different back then (Neumann), but I used to call Microsoft every once in awhile with ideas, many of which got used. I did that for a lot of companies actually. I remember talking with you back then, and it has been nice seeing your videos on RUclips, but I did not know that you also had gotten a world record in Tempest. I know how hard that is, because so did I, although I don't recall what the settings were, nor do I recall what my high score was. Seems to me it was something like 672 thousand and something, but Tempest wasn't the only arcade game I got a world record on, so I might have gotten them mixed up after all these years. Anyway, I doubt you'll see this comment but I really just wanted to say thanks for posting that video, and thanks also for being as polite and kind and considerate as you were to me all those years ago. My latest RUclips channel is named Eminent Reflection. I haven't posted on it in a while, mainly because I don't really have space right now in my small apartment to do that properly and I have been very busy now that artificial intelligence like I've been waiting for over half a century is finally evolving at a reasonable pace. Take care of Dave, and keep up the good work.
Dang, give this guy video gamer of the century award! Heh, seriously though I'd live to see a man vs snake or king of kongs documentary about Dave and whomever is 2nd best in the world at this game but they cheat to break Dave's record and so he goes on a year long mission to get his record back, that he never actually lost, :)
Tempest was released on my birthday. I went to Aladdin's Castle that day at Manassas Mall and fell in love with the game. I was never that good at it though. LOL
Tempest had the same affect on me. It was amazing. The great work Jeff Minter did on the Jaguar with Tempest 2000 was also great. Between this and Rolling Thunder (1986) I spent a ton of pocket money
As the world record holder and owner of an actual arcade machine Tempest, have you ever tried the Arcade1UP version and if so, how does it compare to the real thing?
Наука
Just a note, this footage was recorded in 2017, before I even had a channel! But I've never shared it here, so figured I'd narrate and share it!
Never shared it? I've seen this.... or I've had a time-slip.
Same, I swear I've seen this, bathrobe and coffee and all. Still worth a rewatch
So fortuitous that you recorded it. Again, congratulations.
lol yah i was wondering what rabbit hole i fell into with the 2017 link i found referencing ready player one. (edit for grammar bc im dumb sometimes)
Your video from two years ago, "Busted" - isn't that the same footage? Nice job by the way!
For those who have never played Tempest (or other vector display games) in person, the glow of vector graphic is so bright and beautiful, unlike anything I've ever seen. It's as if I'm looking at color laser being drawn on screen.
not to mention how crisp the laser lines are compared to phosphor tube CRT monitors.
I had a childhood friend who had a Vectrex console at his house. I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.
Nothing can match the searing brightness and clarity of a vector display, I miss them
Saw this comment and thought "You guys need a Vextrex in your life" but it was mentioned already. Sadly the original one (I have a Milton Bradley original) never included a Tempest or clone in the library but the homebrew scene has fixed that.
Now... if only digital broadcasting nowadays were just as crisp and not so crappy looking.
I had my first paid job the summer I was 13 at a tomato packing plant. It was hot dusty work. Every Friday the owner wrote 1one check and gave it to the foreman with a list of how much went to each one of us. We rode in the truck to the Dairy Queen. Dairy Queen cashed the check and we all got paid. I was 13 years old with a parfait in one hand and a pile of quarters for Tempest in the other. Every time I see or think of that game, I smile. Good times.
I didn’t know there were entire plants that only packed tomatoes. Pretty cool
Always considered myself a real tomatohead.
"I set the world record on the classic game Tempest. For my book on Autism..."
The sequitur may not be as non as it first seems...
Autism doesn't grant any super powers, but it does give restricted interests. Whereas a neurological person could play Tempest a few times and get bored, an autistic person could continually marvel at at subtleties of a game. Little details, patterns, and strategies can be engrossing to focus on. That inclination towards restrictive interests leads some autustic people to be very good at and knowledgeable about specific topics.
@@bes03c "Autism doesn't grant any super powers..."
"...continually marvel at subtleties..."
That is the superpower.
I'll never forget the inertia of that control, really made a difference.
A part of me wonders how they got that. I'm thinking they turned out nobs on a lathe some where, such that the stock was fed into the lath, it was knurled, drilled for the shaft of the rotary encoder, then parted off with a form tool that chamfered the user facing edge, and the part rolled down the track to paint. But I could be wrong on that. Now someone would probably measure the size of the knob, make a 3d model of it, then 3d print it with a dense metal filled filament, or if pressed print a 'cup' with the outer shape of the knob, then fill the cup with a mix of lead shot and epoxy. Getting a smooth running rotary encoder today may cost more than the rest of the machine though. Everyone making an encoder for the hobbiest market seems to think we want one that acts a sa button and has hard steps. You can take out the bit that forces the encoder to 'step' but the ones I've tried still have the tactile feel of the encoder step. I'd much rather have an encoder using something like the wheels of the old male computer mice.
Congratulations Dave! ❤
Didn't plan on seeing you here lol
@@EF.BE.I
I love Trains, Bass and Task Manager! :)
@@Bassotronics One of my people 🔥
@@EF.BE.I
😁✌
It was a great time in the 80s, when there was still some optimism about the future, malls followed a modern architecture trend, and arcades were dark and mysterious.
I want my A.C. Clarke future back.
Epic Run. Getting a world record in anything is already an accomplishment. But Tempest? My hat's off to you sir.
Oh boy...it's been a while sinced I have watched you Dave. Today is the last day of school here in Oregon and my wife and I are waiting for 25 fourth graders to show up, our grandson being one of those. This should prepare my mind!
Impressive! I could never work out how to play it as a kid, but always loved the vivid graphics.
My favorite arcade game of all time.
1:45: I always called it the Cardioid.
2:35: "Yosemite Valley."
14:38: Maybe I was imagining it, but if you look closely at the Tankers as they approach, you'll see that they do actually get slightly brighter as they get closer. It's just hard to see because everything's so bright to begin with (gamma correction? What's that?). (You have the disassembled ROM code; why not poke around and see if/where it's actually used.)
This is the game that brought me (back) in to arcade games, because it was so pretty. I was very much in to computer generated imagery and animation and, compared to everything else available at the time, this thing was jaw-droppingly amazing. Somewhere in my hoard I have the owner/service manual for it, including the schematics. Poring over those schematics was actually quite educational -- the logic around the encoder wheel was brilliantly simple (although it does have a bug).
Even at my best, I was never able to get past the black levels.
I could never get into Tempest, but I have nothing but respect for your taste in arcade games. That's an amazing run!
I was a huge Galaga guy myself, getting to stages in the mid 100's a couple times.
They managed to break galaga with some kind of missile counter overload. Just wait on level 1 with the last enemy alive, keep dodging, eventually it hits a 255 (one byte) missile limit, and bam! No more missiles for the rest of your playthrough. Takes ages though.
Using the cheat method, I was able to break the Galaga machine in the shoppette at the Jr. College I was attending twice, I was banned from playing the game after the second time. Took, as I recall, over 2 hours to get to lever 256. lol
No way I could even get to 20 if those bugs were shooting at me. lol
:)
Wow, Tempest! I loved that game. I really miss the vector scanning graphics. To all you younger gamers, you have to see this directly with your eyes to really appreciate it, as the full effect of it doesn't come through video. It's magical, requires special hardware, and only existed for a few years.
Yes Tempest !!! Love it Dave.
i used to work as a technician for a vending company.
reconditioning Arcade machines was the daily grind.
I have enjoyed the fact that Tempest was included in
MS Arcade since i first encountered it around 1996
if you tweek the Hue, Tint, Saturation,
while watching the output from your camera,
you can shift the crt ( and any LCD panel )
to compensate for the color.
where Hue or Tint are not available,
you can tweek color balance using the Red Drive,
Green Drive, Blue Drive, for the crt.
I saw a very good Tempest player, in a Flushing, Queens arcade (decades ago). I was also very good, and we played a couple of two-player games.
Perhaps that was Dave?
I also played in Nathans, on Central Avenue, in Westchester, NY (if I am remembering the location correctly).
I routinely put up high scores when I traveled.
One place where my brother played, was in Penn Station (NYC -- Manhattan). As best I can remember from his stories, those games (whether Tempest or any other game) had the highest high scores we had ever seen. I did not play those Penn Station games. It was not in my daily travels.
Not mentioned by our host, is that there were different versions of Tempest (three of them, I believe).
Version 1, if I am not mistaken, had a bug or a hidden feature, that allowed you to get 40 free credits. That helped me practice, without spending all of my part-time, after school, minimum wage earnings.
That "feature" also allowed you to start on any of the levels that you would normally be able to start on, if you had played your way all the way up, level by level by level.
So you were able to start on the green circle (which might have been level 81). I liked to start on the invisible circle, because those levels were very challenging. I also liked to start on the green circle -- extremely challenging.
Although the game sped up as you climbed the levels, two colors got noticeably faster:
When you got to the invisible circle, the game went to a dramatically faster speed. The next serious speed increase was on the green circle. Things were so fast, that if you blinked, you had a good chance of getting killed.
I never got to the green circle, without the "feature". I could not conquer the invisible infinity level. It was super fast, with very smart enemies, and made my brain hurt. The green circle (directly after the invisible infinity level), although faster, was easier -- or to be more precise, less difficult.
As best that I can remember, when I started a game on the green circle, my best score was after completing 9 or 10 of the green levels.
Supposedly, when you complete all of the green levels, you keep getting more green levels at random.
One issue with the arcade games is that sometimes the fire button was flaky, and the arcade staff did not take my word for it. They pressed it, and it worked. That was hardly a proper test.
When you get to fast levels, you are not just standing there, holding down the fire button. You are often making single presses (or double presses), for precision shots. When one of those shots did not register, you got killed. It was not a matter of having all eight shots already fired. it was a contact issue with the fire button. Really frustrating, especially when you traveled to get to the arcade to play that game.
Dave, have you ever played the green levels? Did you make it there through the invisibles?
Had a friend in the '80's who spent a lot of his time programming his Sharp 1450 and reading science fiction, but the _only_ time I saw him really having fun, was once playing Tempest on a neglected machine. I always wondered which game it was, but I recognized it immediately seeing Dave here playing it. Great!
I worked with Dave Theurer in late 1998 at MetaCreations. Great guy.
Missile command was an arcade favorite of mine during my school days.
That track ball always took a beating.
I'm glad that I was able to have a career in software where autism was an advantage.
You NEVER cease to amaze me!
My favorite classic arcade game from my youth. Brilliant job, Dave!
Wow... brings back memories. Saturday mornings and Sunday evenings, the Rollerdrome and quads, arcade games and Paddle Pops...
Now you're speaking my language. 1974 model.
Never heard of it, will check it out. Congratulations!!!
Very cool Dave. Thanks.
Dave, that was amazing. Tempest was always one of my favourite arcade games, simply due to the 3D (or some pedantic people would say "pseudo-3D") presentation. (Battlezone was another favourite 3D vector game which I was a LOT better at.) I was never much good at Tempest, but I always enjoyed it. To see you make that world record and for me to get such a rush of nostalgia at the same time was so good. And to think that you also hacked into the ROMs, learned the code, and amended the code to add your own features is the icing on the cake!
Thanks for sharing this! 👍
Wow. You have obviously made the “pinball wizard” of Tempest. I cannot even remember the highest score I ever got on that game. Thank you and congratulations. 🎊
man i love tempest. favorite video game of ever. the fact that you had to protect yourself as you were switching levels, was the craziest thing and i loved it.
you're a boss!
Congratulations on a fine demonstration and achievement.
As someone whose grandparents had recently picked up an Atarii 2600 at a garage sale in the early 90's, I have fond memories of the games I had on there. Later I would receive an NES and other consoles over the years, but this brings me back. I think Tempest was one I played either on the Atari or in an arcade, but it never held that much appeal for me. Instead however, I really loved the game Reactor for the 2600. I could not even remember the name, only "that one game where a pulsating core grows and you fly a ship around the sides, and billiard some kind of star-looking things into the two pens on either side of the arena before the reactor gets to full size." Until looking for it online, just watching one particular youtube video actually, of over a hundred atari games. I probably have that video favorited and may still credit it if anyone is interested
What I remember most was the sound effects as well as the feeling the game gave you. Being someone who enjoys a great number of modern games, I honestly cannot say why that one really calls out to me. It's funny to remember the moment when I was hearing about Zelda on the NES and how much i wanted to play that, and how much it represented bold new worlds in interactive media. Though later when I played it, I much preferred Mario, because to me Zelda was a bit too hard and confusing, the levels were too well hidden for my taste, and it meant that I just scoured the entire map endlessly and dreaded the enemies that I would have to avoid along my way. But even still, it was progress, an iteration along a path of balance between challenge and immersion, or something like that.
Anyway, just watching this has me wanting to find an atari emulator and play some Reactor.
I also played Tempest at the Mall in 1981.
Good to see fellow arcaders still alive.
Thanks Dave, this was my first video game addiction.
Tempest? What a blast from the past. That, Joust, Space Invaders, and Defender ate up most of my college spending money.
Nice! I havent seen that game in a LONG time. Great video!
My group of friends was absolutely obsessed with the Atari Jaguar version of Tempest 2000 in around 2006, for whatever reason.
Jeff Minter is a genius. Sad that we don't see any output from him any more.
Never been a game fan, but your presentation of it was good.
I never really had access to this game growing up but I did love the vector style so much mainly thanks to the Star Wars sit down cabinet I lived in as a child when visiting the arcades every Saturday.
I actually complained and was very grumpy when they started adding texture maps to polygons. I thought it looked terrible but I was shown the error of my ways over the years as 3D got better and my memories of vector games faded.
One thing Dave is really spot on with is how you really just can't see in video what you see in real life. There is a brilliance to the light you get from these games that might be comparable to how CRT's had this instant intensity to them that even some of the best monitors today still can't quite match. So if you're familiar with a CRT running a game just dial that up further in your mind and that's how intensely beautiful vector graphics were back then.
one of my favorites back in the day
Wow! This brings back the memories of pumping endless quarters into Tempest at the arcade in the 80's!
Congratulations!
I've always had a soft spot in my heart for the Atari vector games. Red Baron, Battle Zone, Space Duel, Asteroids, Lunar Lander, and Tempest. Even the obscure ones like Gravitar and Major Havoc. One of the first purchases I made when I got my first programming gig circa 1990 was to buy an aging Asteroids game from a convenience store for $200. The thing still lives in my garage and my 11 year old pesters me on a regular basis to fix the screen so we can play it. When ebay came along, and once I had replace all of my Battlestar Galactic toys, one of my first finds was a Vectrex system. Like I said. I love me some vector graphics.
Champion effort with Tempest Dave! I was crap at Tempest back in the day. Battlezone was my favourite (that I was half decent at)
Out of everything you've done, this is probably the greatest thing you've ever done. Congratulation for making the history books.
Remember having Tempest at our local swimming baths when I was around 13-14 yr old. Had just started programming on the Atari 800 and after seeing this game I had to do something like it. Never did but 40 years later and I'm tinkering with Unreal Engine. Still got the dream :)
fell in love with this when I was collecting the atari jaguar was just playing it this week on the new documentary/game released on steam about llamasoft and its founder
Nice! I remember playing that in my local grocery store back in the 70's.
Did you enjoy the book Ready Player One? We grew up in the same era, and had the same love for computers. We share a lot in common, actually -- more than just the comp sci and programming. :) I really enjoyed the Tempest scene in the book!
Indeed! I should maybe do an episode on the "bug" itself!
@@DavesGarage I had forgotten there was a book. I liked the movie though. Really that feeling of getting some kind of decoder ring out of a cereal box and going on a treasure hunt, I feel, taps into a collective nostalgia we nerds all predictably would have. The virtual reality aspect of it didn't hurt either. It's a book I'd like to read, because books are almost always entirely different from the movie based on them, which isn't to say the movie isn't good too.
There are only two arcades that I would want to have.
Cloak & Dagger that I did a video on or Tempest. But I won’t ever be as good as Dave is! Wow!!!
I was a kid growing up in Big Bear, learning computers on the Apple II and playing Tempest in the ski lodge as a kid. Good times.
That was my favorite game back in the day.
Awesome game play ! my favorite was Defender do you remember that one ? a Williams classic and quite a steep learning curve....cheers.
I got pretty good at Defender; Play all day for single credit! I wasn't at the level of Paul Spriggs, his YT videos are awesome!
@@lordsmeagol3390 :)
I grew up in an era of arcades but never got to play tempest. It was early 90's. I live in a very rural area and we were lucky to have a malt stand next-door to the junior high school. My friend's mom owned and ran it. There was a backroom area, rather large, with a pool table and quite a few arcade games. I remember many days going there to play games, get a burger, hang with friends. Arcade machines were everywhere it seemed. I remember some at the local walmart before the super walmart nearyby was built. We are lacking places like that now. Little areas were kids hung out and socialized. I don't understand why there aren't arcade style games around anymore. People would definitely still play them. I know a girl with a warehouse full of really old arcade and pinball machines. Just sitting there chilling. Probably a hundred or more that her dad left when he passed away. Haven't talked to her in years, though I been thinking about asking for a pinball machine to rebuild.
I fell in love with TEMPEST on the Atari Jaguar. The thumping techno soundtrack really added to the game experience.
BC’s Quest for Tires was my Dad’s favorite game on the C-64 - he’s very nostalgic about it. So cool you worked on it. Would you have a recommendation on how to play it nowadays (I have a PC - not a C-64 anymore 😊 )
never seen this being way younger than the arcade era of gaming, this looks awesome
Dave is quite the story teller
Well done, Sir...
I was working at RPI in Troy NY (college focused on engineering and science) for all of 1980's, and we had a lot of students who were very good at the video games of the day. Tempest was one of the favorite games. I was pretty good at it, but there were students who were much better than me. IIRC, I could get to the "invisible" levels, and I think I managed to get through the whole set of invisible levels only to lose the game on the first screen of the next color. There were students who could get into the invisible levels without losing a single life. Very cool to see this and to hear all you've done with Tempest.
The favorite game for me was Asteroids Deluxe. I wanted to mention that the look of Asteroids Deluxe was also awesome (IMO). I wish I could justify spending the money to have a full-sized pristine-quality version of Asteroids Deluxe at my house. I could go on with many stories of the heyday of these video arcade games at RPI (including some world-records), but that would get pretty long and tedious for everyone but me. 🙂 👋
One story is that a student at RPI was apparently the first one to find out that the original version of Missile Command had a bug in it where the machine would reset if the score got too high. Our games-room reported it to the company, and the company said we were nuts and we probably had a problem with power-flickers or something. They then called back a few days later and said they had checked, and it turned out there was indeed a bug there.
There was also a bug in the original version of Asteroids where the game would reset if you earn too many extra lives (I think it was 255). So when the better players at RPI were racking up a lot of points, they'd deliberately kill off a few of their lives just to avoid having the game reset on them. And we did have one student who had the world record in Asteroids for a short time. That game lasted something like 20-24 hours on a single quarter, and it ended just because the guy who owned the games-room decided he wanted to close up and head home. _(I was the guy who kept a running-track for the official score for that game)_
Bought a clean full size upright version of Tempest back in 1984 from a local arcade. I kept it for a few years and eventually sold it and have long since regretted it. Never had any monitor issues but I did have to service the power supply and use some grease on the spinner bearings to keep it from wobbling.
Back in the day all I could do (or knew about) was keep topping the local arcade scores whenever a friend said I was no longer top score somewhere (on a few games, pinball included) - world records were not even on my mind... surreal audio art on the other hand, almost 24/7. Nice flash-back game play, Vector graphics included. :>
I loved this game and watching you avhiebe the world record. I admit I was never all that great at the gane but love it still the same.
If I'd invested all the quarters I dumped into Tempest back when I was a boy, I'd be retired on a Caribbean island drinking pina coladas right now. My big four were Tempest, Joust, Galaga, and Space Harrier. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
I played Tempest lots in the early 80s, as I worked in an Arrcade, and could have the keys of the game console so no quarters needed. Though not shown here, the sound was awesome, specially when moving from one stage to another. Great times indeed.
original astroids, tempest, and starwars... amazing visuals... and starwars sound,.... "use the force luke".... so cool
Vector Graphics based arcade games were the best. Tempest, Star Wars, and Asteroids were my faves of all time. I used to own and Asteroids cab.
BC’s Quest! I was playing that as a teen in the 80’s.
I had one of these machines in 1985, but it came from an arcade. Sold it to a friend a few years later, it was starting to develop problems at that time. Don't know what happened to it after that. Another friend also had one... Tempest was certainly a super joy bringer!
Congratulations
I’m really confused. I’ve already seen this video. Is this a re-upload?
Think this is the first time he's put the entire video on the channel. He's certainly shown clips from it before.
This was the game I played while waiting for the bus transfer after high school. Ah, memories.
I spent a "considerable" (all I could get) amount of coins rolling around galaxies. There was only one game more addictive than Tempest: Tetris.
Tetris remains the king of addiction: a friend of mine, openly and vehemently against computer games, almost turned in her thesis (which she was writing on my PC) days late.
She started to "relax a bit" by playing and continued to "relax" for two days straight. Luckily she didn't get caught by Tempest at the same time.
As a owner of a 1982 Tempest arcade machine, I love this.
Cool! They're going to become increasingly rare as time goes by, I think, as they can be hard to keep running!
Good lord, the amount of quarters I pumped into that dang machine in the 80’s……thanks for the nostalgic flashback!
ooh vector graphics! ive always wanted to see them in person
I loved playing Tempest in the arcades back in the 80s. :D
I LOVE THIS GAME.... I got addicted and spent hours dumping quarters into this arcade game. This game is worse than fly fishing and worse than a drug addiction... Love it...
Whoohoo!
I had a coworker who used to work at Atari. One of his jobs wad to play one particular game on the 5200 to completion, then grab the next unit and do it again, all day. You would not believe how fast he could win.
I loved this game when I was a kid!
I never really got into playing Tempest much, but I spent quite a bit of time working on one. When the horizontal or vertical deflection amplifiers go out the entire section has a cascade failure. You have to completely rebuild that amplifier because the whole thing is toast.
So glad I found Dave originally through Tempest searches, he got RUclips famous after that :)
I remember "BC's Quest for Tires," that actually brought back old memories. I was never good at Tempest, I don't think I understood the rules.
LOVE TEMPEST! Congratz! ❤👍🏻🎅👍🏻🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
I remember watching someone who was good at this back in the 80s at an arcade and being blown away.
GG. Tempest is a blast
@DaveGarage Have you made any videos about your time working at Sierra On-Line?
Great job! Can't quite tell with the RUclips compression, but it doesn't look like it's running on a vector display, as the original Tempest did. Those monitors are hard to come by.
It's an original. Just doesn't film well at the default framerate of the video record I used...
I'm sure you know about Tempest 2000, originally released on the Atari Jaguar. You'll probably enjoy that one as well.
I was also 13 when I ran into this game at my neighborhood arcade; next to Defender, it was one of my favorites. It does not look the way I remember it. lol, it hasn't aged well but then again what does.
@DavesGarage -- Hi Dave. I doubt you remember me, after all these years, and my surname was different back then (Neumann), but I used to call Microsoft every once in awhile with ideas, many of which got used. I did that for a lot of companies actually. I remember talking with you back then, and it has been nice seeing your videos on RUclips, but I did not know that you also had gotten a world record in Tempest. I know how hard that is, because so did I, although I don't recall what the settings were, nor do I recall what my high score was. Seems to me it was something like 672 thousand and something, but Tempest wasn't the only arcade game I got a world record on, so I might have gotten them mixed up after all these years. Anyway, I doubt you'll see this comment but I really just wanted to say thanks for posting that video, and thanks also for being as polite and kind and considerate as you were to me all those years ago. My latest RUclips channel is named Eminent Reflection. I haven't posted on it in a while, mainly because I don't really have space right now in my small apartment to do that properly and I have been very busy now that artificial intelligence like I've been waiting for over half a century is finally evolving at a reasonable pace. Take care of Dave, and keep up the good work.
Dang, give this guy video gamer of the century award! Heh, seriously though I'd live to see a man vs snake or king of kongs documentary about Dave and whomever is 2nd best in the world at this game but they cheat to break Dave's record and so he goes on a year long mission to get his record back, that he never actually lost, :)
Like you, my career started at Microsoft, I'm autistic, and I love Tempest! But became exceptionally good at Joust.
Indeed! I'm lucky that he's fixed a bunch of my Tempest displays!
I'm totally jealous that you have one of these arcade machines...
Tempest was released on my birthday. I went to Aladdin's Castle that day at Manassas Mall and fell in love with the game. I was never that good at it though. LOL
Tempest had the same affect on me. It was amazing. The great work Jeff Minter did on the Jaguar with Tempest 2000 was also great. Between this and Rolling Thunder (1986) I spent a ton of pocket money
Never seen this game, i'm genX from beyond the iron curtain so yeah. Looks enthralling, as does your gameplay
For an old game it's very in-depth
If I had all the quarters that I spent on that game in the 80's, I would be rich!
My all time favorite arcade game.
As the world record holder and owner of an actual arcade machine Tempest, have you ever tried the Arcade1UP version and if so, how does it compare to the real thing?
Man, That's one machine I wish I had in the garage
Tempest 2000 was my favourite game on the Jaguar.
how do you do so much with just one life you have, you're really amazing.
Wow, thank you! It helps that I'm semi-retired now!