Errata for The Medium of the Video Game, Edited by Mark J. P. Wolf by Zube (zube@stat.colostate.edu) Created: Jul 5, 2003 Updated: Jan 12, 2008 http://www.stat.colostate.edu/~zube/wolf.txt Notes on Errata: Some of the entries below point out factual errors, some point out stylistic or typographical errors, some are nothing more than my own biased opinions and some simply add additional information. YMMV. ************************************************************************** Errata ------ p. 1. -- "And stand-alone arcade-style video games found in malls are also keeping pace with games of increasing speed and complexity ...." Sorry to start off with a nitpick, but here it is. One might be able to argue this in 2003 for Japan, but the US arcade market is, at best, very weak and at worst, nearly dead. With most manufactures targeting the home market, arcade games aren't keeping pace with anything because they aren't being made. Mortal Kombat V, for example, was the first of the series to not have an arcade counterpart. p. 1 -- "... several dozen movies and television shows were adapted into game cartridges for the Atari 2600 system alone." The footnote then proceeds to list the games. Alas, many of the games listed never made it out of the announced stage and others made it only to the prototype stage. To wit: 48 hours, 9 to 5, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Deep Throat, Dragonslayer, Escape from Alcatraz, Jaws, Marathon Man, Poltergeist, Star Trek II, Star Trek III, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Trail of the Pink Panther, $25,000 Pyramid, Emergency!, Family Feud, Flipper, Jeopardy, Joker's Wild, Knight Rider, MASH II, Magnum PI, Mission Impossible, Password, Romper Room, Scooby Doo, The Flintstones, The Incredible Hulk, The Price is Right, Tic-Tac-Dough and Wheel of Fortune were announced for the 2600, but were never released and most of them probably never left the drawing board. [Somebody have a copy of the Aug/Sep 83 issue of Video Games Player hanging around? Some of these names are listed there.] Excalibur was the working title of Dragonstomper, a Supercharger game. It was never released as such. Karateka was a very nice game for several systems including the Atari 7800, but it was never released for the 2600. China Syndrome, E.T., Fantastic Voyage, Ghostbusters, Gremlins, Porky's, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Towering Inferno, Tron Deadly Discs and MASH all were released for the 2600. Ghostbusters II was released, but only in Europe. A Game of Concentration was released, but I sincerely doubt it was based on the TV series; rather, I'd guess that both the game and the TV series were based on a much older game of card matching. The Last Starfighter, Dukes of Hazzard and The A-team all made it to the prototype stage. p. 2 -- "In record stores, alongside compact discs of film soundtracks, there are now CDs like Duke Nukem: Music to Score By and the soundtracks to Myst (1993), Riven (1997) and other games." All true. However, the number of US soundtracks of video games is very small when compared to either film soundtracks or to the number of Japanese soundtracks of video games. p. 6 -- "Its [video games'] growth is most striking when compared with that of other media; for example, film was still largely black and white and silent after its first three decades. In the same span of time, video games advanced from PONG to 64-bit and DVD-ROM based games ...." Striking, perhaps, but not really surprising. I would be much more surprised if any recent technology changed at the same rate or slower than an older one. p. 7 -- This bit talks about how video games are harder to study than traditional media because it is difficult to see the game in its entirety. I'd go a bit further and suggest that it is nearly impossible to see all of a video game. Unlike film, anything generated by a video game is really the manifestation of the underlying code and the underlying code is almost certainly non-linear (with large numbers of loops and branches). Unless one can trace the code and determine all possible paths, one can never be sure that one has seen *all* of a game. p. 16 -- Discussion about educational and diagnostic carts and how they are treated in a similar manner to games. Here would be a good place to talk about the psychology of the collector. One reason that these carts are collected is because many collectors are completests of one stripe or another. Their goal is to collect things (sometimes all things) associated with a console, not simply to collect games. One might also argue that if these non-game carts are a category, perhaps other hardware components (different joysticks, for example) should also be. p. 16 -- Discussion of resolutions. Computers nowadays can display resolutions far in excess of 640x480. In addition, consoles such as the Dreamcast had VGA adapters for playing games on VGA screens and still others such as the XBOX support HDTV and thus resolutions greater than 640x480. p. 17 -- "Some dedicated systems, like the Nintendo Ultra 64 or Playstation 2 ...." The early name for the Nintendo 64 was the Nintendo Ultra 64. The Ultra bit was dropped before release. While the Nintendo 64 is arguably a dedicated console, the Playstation 2 isn't. It can run linux. See http://playstation2-linux.com/. p. 17 -- "Three games for the Philips Videopac system ...." In the US and many other places (but not France), the Videopac was called the Odyssey 2 and (certainly in the US) carried the Magnavox name. p. 22 -- "Nintendo Ultra" again and Playstation now inexplicably receives a registered mark (capital R in a circle). p. 23 -- "The game [Spacewar!] was quite small by today's standards; 4 kilobytes, with 18 bits per byte." This is slightly inaccurate. The PDP-1 was an 18-bit computer, which means that each word was 18 bits. A byte on the PDP-1 was six bits, so three bytes made up a word. p. 26 -- "While cartridges for the Atari 2600 contained 2 or 4 kilobytes and later 8 or 16 kilobytes of ROM ...." Two carts for the 2600 were as large as 64K: The 32-in-1 cart and another called the MegaBoy. See Kevin Horton's sizes.txt file: http://tripoint.org/kevtris/files/sizes.txt. p. 26 -- "... 3 1/4-inch diskettes ...." The small floppy size is 3 1/2-inch. p. 27 -- Playstation gets another registered mark here, but its not consistent. p. 54 -- "MUDs (Multi-User Dimesions)" Part 1 of the MUD FAQ (http://www.mudconnect.com/mudfaq/mudfaq-p1.html#q1) also lists Multiple User Dungeon and Multiple User Dialogue as alternatives. p. 56 -- "... Combat (1977), the cartridge shipped along with all Atari 2600 Systems ...." In the beginning, yes, but both Pac-Man and Centipede were also pack-in carts. p. 58 -- "... it is difficult to imagine what the cinema would be like today if early filmmakers could have patented panning or tracking shots and collected royalties on their usage by others!" Contrast this attitude with the foreword and then explain to me why Ralph Baer was chosen to write it. p. 63 -- "Star Ship (arcade game, 1976; Atari 2600 version 1977)" Sorta. The arcade game was called Starship 1 and while the gameplay is a bit similar, it's different enough that I have a hard time calling it a conversion. p. 64 -- "Likewise in Tempest, the z-axis movement is one-way and does not affect play; the player's point of view moves through the tunnel only between levels (thus no steering is required) .... Incorrect. This is true on the first few levels, but later on "spikers" appear. They move up from the bottom and leave spikes. These spikes must either be destroyed or avoided to reach the next level. Indeed, on the first level that spikers appear and spikes are left, the game not-so-subtly tells the player to "Avoid Spikes." p. 71 -- Discussion of pseudo-3D methods. In here there should be a discussion of Paper Mario, an RPG for the Nintendo 64. It's a very interesting game in that the world itself is 3D, but all the characters are flat, similar to cardboard cutouts. It's a rather odd effect at first, but it soon becomes familiar and works very well. p. 74 -- Daytona U.S.A (1977) Typo. Should be 1994. p. 84 -- Discussion of interludes in video games. Four other interesting "interludes": Robotron is an intense game. It has no cartoony animation at all. However, on the Tank levels, the tanks will stop firing after a while (after 20 non-destroyed shells, if memory serves). So if you are clever, you can take a small, minimal-thinking break on those waves. In other games, such as Defender, one can accumulate so many extra lives that one can literally take a break for many minutes. Then there is Nibbler. (Aside: the only (?) billion-point game was achieved on this machine.) One can accumulate many extra lives on Nibbler, but if you go over 127 extra lives, the game ends. In this case, if you are very good, you *must* take a break (or commit suicide) to continue playing. Finally, we have the hiding spot in Pac-Man. On any board and at any time, park your Pac-Man up and to the right of the starting spot and walk away. The game will continue until the power fails or the machine experiences some kind of hardware failure. p. 87 -- "It is no surprise that text adventures and games like Myst never appeared in the arcade." No text adventures that I recall, but Thayer's Quest may surprise you. p. 87 -- "... Pause and Save functions were often included in computer systems and more recently, in console-based game systems with the ability to write game data onto a computer card." The pause function goes way back. Some games on the Atari 2600 could be paused by the B/W switch; Intellivision games could be paused at will. The first console game with a save function was, I believe, the first Zelda for the NES, circa 1986. The difference was that most computers could be equipped with some kind of writable media (cassette tape, disk, etc.), so "pause and save" was much easier and cheaper to implement there than on a cart-only console. p. 93 -- "Rather than merely watching the actions of the main character, as we would in a film, with every outcome of events predetermined when we enter the theater ...." Usually. IIRC, the Clue movie had 3 different endings. While each ending was predetermined, it wasn't clear which one you were getting when you walked in. There have also been attempts at interactive movies. The March 1998 issue of PC Games containted an ad on page 54 for "Multipath Movies" that were "more fun than computer games" and "more exciting than videos." As the company (Brilliant Digital Entertainment) is now a "leading online distributor of licensed digital content," it's safe to assume that the venture was not terribly successful. p. 93 -- "Although most video games still have a very narrow emotional range and rarely move players to deep emotions or tears ...." Another counterexample is Floyd the Robot from Infocom's Planetfall. See http://web.mit.edu/6.933/www/Fall2000/infocom/infocom-paper.pdf for the full story. p. 94 -> footnote 2 on page 110 -- "The rise of character-based games also meant the decline of abstract games. Today there are far fewer abstract games than there were in the days of Breakout (1976), Tempest (1980), Qix (1981), and other games. True. However, the 80s and 90s saw their share of "abstract" games: Tetris and Klax come to mind. p. 96 -> footnote 4 -- "... arcade games were 'rented' by players for a quarter a game, and so the quicker a game was over, the more often it could be played and the more money could be made." This is a bit simplistic. A game could not be made too difficult, else the player would feel cheated and would not play again. Just ask arcade owners and distributers about Super Cobra and Super Zaxxon. p. 96 -- "In 1978, the first all-graphics adventure game appeared: the home game Adventure for the Atari 2600." Actually, there was a secret room in Adventure that contained the words "Created by Warren Robinett," perhaps the first ever Easter Egg. Whether or not this negates the "all-graphics" bit is up to the author. p. 96 -- "But whereas [Pac-Man's] ghosts' behaviors were all identical ...." No. Each of Pac-Man's ghosts did have a different behavior. Really. For example, Speedy ("Pinky") really was faster than the others. Footnote 5 of the chapter seems to contradict this sentence fragment from the text. p. 97 -- "The game [Pac-Man] moved away from the macho themes of earlier games, attracting both male and female players." Arguably. Centipede, with its pastels and non-space theme, also attracted women but admittedly much less than Pac-Man did. p. 102 -- Discussion of cdroms and how they can hold ~660mb, followed by a discussion of Tekken 3 and Tomb Raider II. It should be made clear that the author is talking about the *home* version of Tekken 3, not the arcade version. The older FMV (Full Motion Video) games in the arcade used LaserDiscs. One version of the American Laser Games hardware did use cdroms, but for non-FMV games, cdroms are far too slow. Most arcade machines that needed a large amount of storage used hard disks. p. 102/103. -- Very good show here! The Super Breakout narrative context presented finally reveals where Arkanoid got its narrative from. p. 105 -- "... games like ... Red Baron (1980) ... allowed a player to select different views of the action of the game ...." Red Baron certainly did not. It was far too early for that. p. 105 -- "... most scoring games are single player." I'm not sure what to make of this one. I'd argue that most puzzle games are scoring games and they can be played two-player. Many vertical shooters are much the same way. p. 107 -- "Pac-Man is always caught by the ghosts in the end ... the player always loses." Pac-Man is perhaps not the best example to use here. On the 256th screen, the internal 8-bit counter rolls over and sets the board number to 0. The machine then presents the famous "split-screen," wherein half the board is normal and half is garbled computer code. In some sense, the machine has lost. p. 118 -- The adapted-from-television-game-shows list is here again. While some of these were adapted for computer platforms later, they never ran on the Atari 2600. p. 124 -- "Fighting -- Games involving characters who fight usually hand-to-hand ... without the use of firearms or projectiles." The Mortal Kombat series is listed here. Alas, many fighters in the Mortal Kombat series used projectiles, Sonya and Johnnie Cage to name two. Also, in Mortal Kombat 3, Stryker is introduced and one of his weapons is a gun. p. 130 -- The Rhythm and Dance category seems a bit narrow, considering they all can trace their roots back to Simon and Touch-Me. p. 131 -- "MUSHs (Multi-User Shared Hallucination)" Shared is replaced by Simulated in one alternative. At any rate, MUSH was a play on words on MUD; the definition came later. p. 131 -- The Shoot 'Em Up category is missing a mention of common games wherein the shooter can traverse the bottom (1/n)th of the screen (gorf, gaplus, centipede too) and those where you can go anywhere on the screen (Raiden, Twinkle Star Sprites, Slither). p. 138 -- "[Asteroids'] evocation of a weightless, frictionless environment ... is a virtual enactment of Newton's first laws of motion." Huh? When I hit the thrust button in Asteroids and my ship moves in a particular direction, I do not continue on forever. Eventually, the ship slows down and stops. Asteroids is not frictionless, eh? Open up MAME and try it. p. 138 -- "... small rocks breaking from exploded asteroids would move more quickly than the original, larger rock." I've played it for a while, and I can't convince myself that this is true in the general case. Many of the smaller rocks move faster; some do not. p. 141 -- "Within the core gaming community, everyone follows the career of John Romero, famous for designing the original Quake." First, it's hyperbole. Second, I sincerely doubt Mr. Romero designed all of Quake. p. 143 -- "Finding quality cabinets was further complicated by the fact that arcade owners would regularly put the chip for a new game into an old cabinet ...." This is slightly inaccurate. "Chips" are usually not changed in arcade conversions (although it does happen); boards are much more frequently swapped. p. 147 -- "Indeed, it is a problem faced by everyday consumers of technology, who, caught on the treadmill of digital planned obsolescence, buy new computers every two years." "Digital planned obsolescence" is mostly a myth or at least is in the same class as fashion obsolescence. If consumers really believe they need a new computer every two years, marketers at Microsoft and Dell must be doing a very good job. p. 149 -- "...Berton pointed out that it was the only game [Missile Command] ever to use a separate sighting device for aiming -- a large trackball." AAAAAARGHHHH!!!!!!! There is no excuse for this. It is simply wrong. It was wrong in the Exhibition, it was wrong when Herz mentioned in Joystick Nation and it's wrong in this chapter. There was a follow-up to Missile Command called Liberator. Someone should really take a look at it sometime. Also, there was an enhancement kit for Missile Command called Super Missile Attack that was released by General Computer Corporation in 1981. Regardless, the assertion is misleading. Most shoot 'em ups have some sort of ship that *moves.* Since it moves, it has to be controlled by something, usually a joystick or trackball. Thus, if these games were to have "a separate sighting device", we'd have one hand on the joystick, one hand on the sighting device and our third hand would hit the fire buttons. Missile Command's "ship" doesn't move. It's just three stationary bases. Of course it's going to have a "separate sighting device." So would any game where the "ship" doesn't move. p. 149 -- "Pole Position's (1982) unique features included its realistic mapping of an actual racetrack in Japan, a fact that would have been lost on even the most avid player." More hyperbole. And completely wrong. I wasn't an avid player but managed somehow to read the word "Fuji" on the opening screen. p. 151 -- "Williams, Midway, Bally, Atari and other game companies are repackaging the early arcade hits for consoles, computers and even Nintendo's Game Boy. Critics have particularly hailed the Game Boy versions, because the format's low-resolution pixellation and relatively low-power hardware approximates the limitations of the early arcade cabinets." First, let us hope that the author isn't talking about the original Game Boy, as that machine could only display grayscale, not color. I sincerely doubt anyone "hailed" a non-color version of a color game, especially when compared to computer and console versions. Second, the author seems to be a bit confused. The best conversions of old games run on emulators, programs that emulate (in software) the hardware of the old games. These are the best because the original arcade code, not converted or ported code, is running. However, to emulate old hardware faithfully, one needs a fair amount of processing power. An original Game Boy isn't powerful enough to emulate even an Atari 2600 faithfully, so any "emulation" the Game Boy attempts is bound to fail. Let's be very clear and careful here. Assume I want to play a faithful reproduction of Dig Dig. If the platform I choose can emulate the Dig Dug hardware, I'm happy. However, if the platform cannot (say, oh, the platform has "low-power hardware"), then I'm less happy. Under no circumstances will I prefer the "low-power hardware" version just because the *hardware itself* has the same kind of limitations that *the original Dig Dug hardware had*. The metric is very simple: can the platform faithfully emulate the game of my choice? If yes, gold star; if not, frowny face. Note that this doesn't mean that the Game Boy can't do a very nice port of Dig Dug. I'm sure it can and if the programmers are careful, they can almost make me forget I'm not playing an emulator. But I would never praise a machine due to its limitations just because they happen to coincide with older arcade game limitations and I'm not sure who would. So, I'll bite. Which critics "hailed" the Game Boy versions? p. 153 -- "Arcade games were among the first completely digital media" I guess we have to define digital media. Some arcade games, yes, were probably all digital. But Pong, for example, employed a knob (a potentiometer, an analog device) to position the paddle. p. 153 -- "... their widespread use gave rise to the very computer literacy -- and digital-media literacy -- that created the Internet." While I agree that video games were a gentle training tool and useful introduction to the digital world, the Internet comment is a bit of a stretch. The Internet started as the ARPANET back in the late 60s and its origins go back even further. Its creation had precious little to do with video games, directly or otherwise. p. 159 -- Here is this odd essay. Dragon's Lair is a maze game? Donkey Kong is a maze game? Words fail me. p. 159 -- "... Donkey Kong's Mario trying to save his beloved from a family of gorillas ...." There was only one gorilla in Donkey Kong. p. 160 -- "... Space Invaders (squadrons of alien craft swoop in from outer space while the player fights it out with one lone spacecraft that is locked in a fixed position) ...." Has the author every played Space Invaders? I'm very skeptical. "swoop" is not a verb I would use with the game, one gets 3 "spacecraft" to start and the base is not locked in a fixed position. p. 160 -- "... Battlezone (which so accurately simulated tank warfare, so the press kit says, that the Army used it for training) ..." Whether the press kit stated it or not, the Army used a *modified* version of Battlezone, not the original. p. 161 -- "Indeed, a video game is a computer that is set up (dedicated) to play only one program." Not really. It can play many games, but the number and ease of changing varies. A Neo-Geo arcade system can be playing another game in the time it takes to open the cabinet and switch carts; more "dedicated" systems can play other games with chip changes, board changes, etc. The definition presented is far too simplistic. p. 162 -- "Computers are either on or off, you're plugged in or you're out of the loop." Right. Now what happens when I tell my computer to do N things at midnight and then log out. The N things will run at midnight, but I won't be there. Am I plugged in or out of the loop? p. 163 -- Author presents a list of DOS error messages such as "sector not found" and "general failure" and then suggests that this paranoia and anxiety is inscribed in PC operating systems. He then compares this with video game genres that also highlight paranoia, such as escaping from a maze. This is at least an interesting insight, even though the paranoia PC bit is silly. What does the author expect instead of "sector not found" ? "Sorry, I can't find your document, but don't worry, it's probably under the couch so go look there." p. 165 -- "With a video game, if you do the same thing in the same way it will always produce the same results." How on earth can a thinking person write stuff like this? Any video game that has the smallest sliver of randomness is a counterexample. Go on. Try the same patterns board after board in Ms. Pac-Man. p. 166 -- "The first video game is generally considered to be Spacewar! ...." Except by us revisionists that tip our cap to Willy Higinbotham (_Tennis for Two_), A. S. Douglas (_OXO_) and Goldsmith et. al (_Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device_).