'I Robot' - A Retrospective..

A long time ago, a couple of years ago, I had a close encounter with an old friend at the Replay 2011 event in Blackpool. (I meant to get this article down more quickly than I did, but hey, that's the power of laziness for you!)

The pixels and cleanly filled vector polygons resolved themselves into an adapted version of a groundbreaking (for the early eighties) arcade game 'I Robot'.

I mention it as an old friend, as I originally met this game in the mid-eighties with a first contact being made at an arcade in Southport and then at another closer to home in Northampton at that time.

So what was special over other arcade games, over which you spent a lot of time back in the day, eh?

Ah, the harsh questioner again. I Robot was the first solid 3D polygon (flat shaded) game made for anything, anywhere. It was produced in 1983, when people like myself were still being shocked and awed by Star Wars, the vector line 3D game. As such, it was way ahead, many years in front of anything else in that vein.

I, Robot was originally going to be called "Ice Castles", retrogaming pub quiz fans. It was considered (later on) as a stroke of genius by Atari, but was poorly understood and received back in the day, and did not sell very well. It lasted around a couple or so years in those arcades that had them. The cabinets being difficult to maintain and generally in a worsening state of repair as time wore on.

The inevitable plot: (Yes, I must!)

The player must take control of the metallic hero "Unhappy Interface Robot #1984", This is a servant robot who has become self-aware and questions his totalitarian society which is ruled by the sadistic "Big Brother". The object of the game is to destroy the gigantic, blinking eye of Big Brother that watches over each level and in order to do this, the robot must move over the red squares that cover the play-field, which will turn them blue and weaken the shield that protects the eye.

Interface Robot 1984 - Sticking it to The Man!

However, one of the arbitrary laws of "Big Brother" is 'no jumping'; if the eye is fully open while the robot is in the act of jumping, it will fire a laser at the robot and destroy him. Each level has a strict time limit and other enemies such as birds, balls and flying sharks will try to prevent the robot from completing his task. Between levels, the robot flies through outer space and must shoot his way through polygonal tetras and meteors in order to reach the next board.

Player please note, there is no easy auto-fire option!

Unusually, perhaps uniquely for a game of that era, there is a second playable mode, the relaxing and intentionally non-violent 'Doodle City'. This was billed as an "ungame" mode to relax the player. This is at heart really an onscreen drawing tool which presents the player with a selection of polygons from the game. The shapes can be manipulated at the player's leisure, leaving trails as they are moved across the screen. Doodle City lasts three minutes per credit, though the player can switch back to playing the main game at any time. The number of lives the player has depends on how much time was spent in Doodle City. One life is taken away per minute. There are 126 levels in total, with 26 unique levels before they start to repeat with a higher difficulty level. The board also colour changes when a set of levels is completed. There is also the innovation of player controllable camera angles, with a higher score being given for a closer viewpoint with more restricted visibility. One of the later enemies, a 'camera killer' forces the player to change camera angles quickly to avoid being in a direct line of fire to it. According to the documentation (I never got that far!) there is no end game, when all levels are completed, you are thrown back to a random earlier level, doomed to be trapped inside a never-ending quest until you are killed.

So, How rare then? Approximately 750 to 1500 units of the game were created, which is a very small number. The author of this article personally encountered examples of this game at Southport and back home at an arcade in Northampton, so he may count himself lucky to do so. Few have been confirmed to exist today. The arcade cabinets have since become rare collectibles. The cabinets tended to break down in general use, the weak point being the joystick, usually starting to fail on one side after heavy (ab)use.

Some technical stuff:

The game featured amplified stereo and pixel graphics on a 19 inch colour screen. It used a Motorola 6809 CPU and four Atari POKEY audio chips. The display consisted of 256 x 232 pixels, with 96 colours on screen. A custom bit-slice ('Pepperoni') 3D co-processor that allowed for a throughput of around 2000 polygons per second provided the main 'oomph' for the game.

There were no home versions, or were there? Atari attempted a very cut down VCS cartridge version, an early beta of this exists on Atari Age. The game was not completed, let alone released. This game was otherwise way too ahead of its time. When hardware for the home caught up, a decade later, textures were all the rage, so there would be no love for flat polygons anyway. Besides which, this game would have genuinely been forgotten by this time and only remembered again much later.

Is this do-able on later Atari systems? Most of the system seems to be made up of fairly common components. Some major emulation would be needed for the 'Pepperoni' custom 3-D co-processor. The 'four POKEY' sound chip arrangement is intriguing as well. Assuming a purely hypothetical clean sheet, re-using the game logic and new code otherwise. Most of this could be Falcon-able, but it sounds like the poly count needs an 060 to do it justice. Or we could feel really brave and attract the ire of the Atari Jaguar developer community and idly speculate that the Jaguar chipset could do with that game? (Covering arse editor helpfully points out that this is just a momentary indulgence on the part of the writer and is NOT intended as a serious proposal for a new project!)

CiH - Various in 2013 for Mag 2013.

Back to Games.