It's full steam ahead with my latest ColecoVision release, Operation Hibernation. Well, not full STEAM, exactly, but full Itch.IO and a full licensing contract with CollectorVision ahead. The hope is that Operation Hibernation becomes one of the headlining titles on the ColecoVision and its kin... machines like the SG-1000 (essentially a ColecoVision with the serial numbers filed off) and the MSX (which is the same thing as a ColecoVision, but a buttload more K and a different sound processor).
Yeah, K, as in kilobytes. Would you believe that used to be a significant amount? There was even a song from Doctor Demento called "I Just Need a Little More K," about the trials of a man from the early 1980s who went to a software store to buy a memory upgrade... a memory upgrade rated in kilobytes, which cost in excess of a hundred dollars.
Think about that. A kilobyte is just that, a thousand bytes. We've been measuring data in gigabytes and terabytes for years, which is exponentially larger, and this fantastic unit of measure seemingly pulled from science-fiction dystopia has become mundane to us.
(Then again, we live in our own science-fiction dystopia in 2025... the dumb timeline from Back to the Future. How could the maker of Tattoo Assassins have been so prescient?)
Anyway! I was going for something with this, for serious. Oh yes! CVBasic, the frankly terrific BASIC compiler that's compatible with over a dozen different ancient computers and game systems (the very machines which measured their RAM in kilobytes), has trapped one more fly in its vast retro-tech web... the motherfucking NES.
Look, I'm entitled to a swear once in a while. This deserves it. NES support is a big deal. I can't count the number of kids in high school who wanted to make their own NES games. There was literally a contest held by Nintendo Power to find the Nintendo fan with their best video game design. One teenager at the time, J. Scott Campbell, knocked it out of the park with his submission, featuring page after page of gorgeous art and intimate details about its play mechanics.
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| Whatever I would have submitted for this contest, this kid would have beaten it. Admit it, he would have beaten your submission, too. (image from Nintendo Power) |
Mr. Campbell has gone on to become the celebrated author of the comic Danger Girl, but I'm sure deep down inside, his inner child still wants that game to be made, just as much as he did when he first crafted it on paper. I want to stress this: he is not the only kid to do this in the 1980s, nor are the kids who participated in that contest! "Game design but not really" was a passion of mine as a teenager, drafting dozens of game concepts on lined school paper that would never realistically find a home on a home console.
The advent of NES support for CVBasic changes everything. All those ideas I had bouncing around in my head for years can, after years of lonely captivity, be set free from their lined paper prisons and become digital reality on history's greatest consoles! It's exciting, in a way making games for the ColecoVision and even the Master System isn't. Holy shit. I made an NES game. I made an NES game. I could walk into a grocery store or a video rental outlet, be it all-consuming Blockbuster or just Frank's Video, the hole in the wall down the street, and rent my own video game, if it weren't for the laws of time and space.
There are two problems, actually: the first is ripping a hole in the fabric of time-space for the sake of your own ego. The second is actually learning how to make NES games. If you think you can jump into NES game design with a pair of waders because graduating from the ColecoVision to the Master System was such a cinch, brother are you in for some disappointment!
Here's what I understand about how the NES is designed. The tech nerds at Nintendo gave the ColecoVision the eyeball in 1982, recognized the (many, cough) flaws of the graphics chip, and resolved to fix them. In 1983, for a home console. This is like trying to complete all twelve trials of mighty Hercules in an afternoon. To Gumpei Yokoi's credit, the NES/Famicom is indeed better than the ColecoVision, with a wide array of selectable colors, rump-thumping sound in its best releases, and adaptability courtesy of memory mapper chips. But it's still very much a transitional game system, one constrained by the technology of the time. Colors are still dull, sprite flicker is still an aggravation, and standard cartridge sizes are barely larger at 40K than the ColecoVision's at 32K.
Beyond that, Yokoi used some quirky hardware design tricks to get a higher standard of performance from the NES. Nintendo graphics subscribe to the rule of fours... no tile can hold more than a palette of four colors, and there can be no more than four of these palettes available for the tiles. Likewise, a sprite can hold just four colors (three actual colors and a transparency), and it must be selected from four sprite palettes.
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| Here's Byron from Operation Hibernation, as he would appear on ColecoVision (with sprite patches), the Master System, and the NES. At first glance, the latter two look similar, but there's more color in the Master System version. Byron's orange on the NES leans a bit hard on the yellow, but as an NES owner that palid orange is very familiar to me. |
It's a lot of square thinking, in contrast to the relative simplicity of the ColecoVision ("Okay, no more than two colors in a line, got it. Annoying, but got it.") and the jaw-dropping freedom of the Master System ("Here, have some colors! Have all the colors, anywhere you want them! It's Mardi Gras over here at the Master System house!"). It also throws back the curtain on how the NES worked... gee, no wonder so many of these games were so brown and orange heavy. What else did the designers have to USE?
I wanted to launch out the starting gate and make an NES port of Operation Hibernation as soon as possible, but honestly, I don't think "as soon as possible" is going to be very soon at all. There's a lot of book learnin' ahead of me before I try to tackle this... it won't be the straight port to a superior system that Whack 'Em Smack 'Em Byrons Remarked was.
However, feel free to check out the box art I made for the Nintendo version of Operation Hibernation, which may never exist...
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| It's just like something you'd see hanging from a Velcro wall on Video Power! |
