"Who's the baddest mofo on the arcade floor?"
"Who makes the games that are (almost) never a bore?"
"Williams!"
"You're daaaamn right."
Originally known for its pinball, Williams made a smooth slide into the video game industry with its 1980 debut, Defender. Defender is the kind of arcade game that immediately comes to mind when you think "arcade games"... obnoxiously loud and colorful, with big explosions, ruthless enemies, and a control panel that's maybe a little too complicated for the player's own good.
Games by the Vid Kidz team (consisting of Larry DeMar and Eugene Jarvis) made up the bulk of the Williams arcade library, and would make frequent appearances in classic game collections by Digital Eclipse, starting with the 16-bit era of home consoles and continuing up to 2011's Midway Arcade Origins. Williams' Arcade's Greatest Hits was a godsend for Saturn-owning arcade nuts who were deprived of Namco's library and didn't yet have easy access to emulation on PCs.
There's a reason these games keep showing up in collections... they're really good! Robotron: 2084 would pioneer the dual stick shooter still popular today, Joust is a grand time for two players, with a sweet science-fiction fantasy aesthetic, and nothing builds tension like the construction of the all-consuming Sinistar.
There are a few "what were they thinking?" moments in the early Williams library, like the good clean not-so-fun of Bubbles and the bold misfire that was Robotron's first-person sequel, Blaster. However, for the most part, Williams arcade games are among the greatest ever made. If there is an arcade on Mount Olympus to amuse the gods, you bet your sweet ambrosia Robotron: 2084, Defender, and Sinistar would be in there.
Williams also dabbled in the localization of Japanese titles, with games like Toaplan's Truxton and Jaleco's Aeroboto. The last arcade game by Williams as an independent brand was NARC. It wasn't a fantastic game, feeling nearly as over-encumbered as Xenophobe, but the digitized graphics and copious violence found its share of fans, and would lead to bigger, better, and bloodier things under the Midway banner.
Blaster
Seen in: A Grand Rapids mall arcade
(I don't know if I actually played this, or ran out of quarters and just stared at the attract mode for five minutes)
Weird swerve, Williams. Robotron: 2084 is a dual stick shooter seen from an overhead view, but its canonical sequel Blaster takes things into the third dimension for what feels like a caveman ancestor to After Burner. As you flee Earth in an escape ship with the last surviving human family, you're accosted by bigger and even blockier GRUNTS from the previous game. Manage to escape orbit and you'll then have to fight through meteors, swarms of flying cats, vampire ships (yes, space ships can apparently be vampires), and anything else the design team could pull out of their (ahem) hats at the last minute. There's no unified artistic vision here; just "let's put a lot of crap on the screen for the player to shoot."
Blaster is a boldly experimental game, you've gotta give it that. Arcade games didn't often attempt a first-person viewpoint in the early 1980s. Unfortunately, playing Blaster makes you realize why such games did not flourish in pre-Mode 7, pre-Super Scaler 1983. It looks rough; generally a whole lot of flashing squares and somewhat convincingly animated sprites, with the occasional starfield to suggest depth. It's harsh, but psychedelic, like a drug trip David Bowie once had while watching the Disney movie Tron.
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| Blaster looks rough, attempting a first-person viewpoint but mostly just throwing a lot of squares and rectangles at the player. There was a planned Atari computer version which pares down the graphics, but not by that much! |
Blaster is an adequate shooter that gets a lot of brownie points for its innovative first person gameplay. Sadly, it never feels like it finds an identity beyond its 3D graphics, and there's no year beyond 1983 where graphics like these were anywhere close to acceptable in an arcade game. If you squint, you can see the DNA of Space Harrier in Blaster, but the game is attempting tomorrow's ideas on yesterday's technology, and the two rarely pair well.
Bubbles
Played: A Chuck E. Cheese in Grand Rapids
It would be easy to take one glance at Bubbles and conclude that it's based on Scrubbing Bubbles, a bathroom cleaner from the 1980s with a memorable animated ad campaign. Bubbles with brushes for feet skate across sinks and tubs to clean stubborn stains, leaving them as clean as they were the day you bought your house.
Bubbles is not officially associated with the bathroom cleaner by S.C. Johnson (a family company!), but you'd have a hard time telling while playing this. Bubbles is basically the Scrubbing Bubbles commercial, in video game form. As a slippery, soapy sphere, you'll need to clear a sink of clutter, while dodging razor blades and the dreaded cockroach. Steal a broom from a tiny cleaning lady (maybe she's the Tydee Bowl man's wife?) and you can use it to slay a single roach for extra points.
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| This might pair well with Rug Rats if you're the Felix Unger type. |
The more filth your bubble scrubs away, the larger it becomes. Once it's big enough to have freckles and a derpy grin (what, me worry?), it can hit the drain to escape the stage. Be warned! There's a time limit, and eventually your bubble will be flushed down the drain whether it's large enough to survive the trip or not.
It's a functional game design, but you won't last long in Bubbles' later stages, where there's just barely enough crumbs, ants, and grime to bring your bubble to adulthood. Most likely, you'll have to build your bubble up to drain-proof size over the span of two lives, making Bubbles a battle of attrition you're destined to lose. It's amusing, briefly, but at the same time you don't wonder why Bubbles was trimmed from the Super NES and Genesis versions of Arcade's Greatest Hits. Really, you 16-bit holdouts aren't missing a thing.
Defender
Played at: A bowling alley near Portland
Defender was the toughest game you could find in a 1980 arcade, the Dark Souls of its era. Players were given a joystick, along with an unholy number of buttons for control. Instead of pressing left and right to move in those directions as one would expect, the player had to maneuver their ship with taps of thrust and reverse. It takes a lot of practice just to learn to play Defender because of the complicated controls, and mastering the game is an almost Herculean feat. Git gud? You'll have to git exceptional to roll the score on this one.
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| Swarmers! Always with the accursed swarmers! |
Defender has you darting across the surface of a distant planet, which is so massive you'll need a second radar screen to see it all at once. Humanoids dot the surface of the planet, and green Landers hope to kidnap them. Any Lander that succeeds in taking a humanoid off-screen merges with it to become a more hostile Mutant. If all your humanoids die, the game doesn't end, but it might as well be game over for you! The planet explodes, and all Landers become Mutants, leaving you hopelessly overwhelmed.
In case I haven't belabored the point enough, Defender is tough. It's tough to get a handle on the senselessly complicated controls. It's tough to first blast an escaping Lander, then catch the humanoid it was carrying without turning them both into pixel soup. It's tough to resist the temptation to hit the smart bomb when you're faced with a flock of swarmers, and it's extremely tough to survive when the planet has been annihilated and you're surrounded by a dozen of the game's worst enemies.
Despite all that, it's also tough to stop playing. Defender has the raw look of a VidKidz game, with pulsing colors and massive, messy explosions, and your ship's laser blasts look terrific, stretching across the screen as long white trails. You'll stumble over the controls, and you'll swear when a humanoid slips through your grasp and plummets to its death, but you'll keep coming back. I can do better next time, really! I've almost got the hang of it!
Joust
Played: Among other places, a convenience store just outside of town
Arcade games are good. Arcade games that let two players play together are even better, and Joust is the best of them all. It was the king of two player gaming in the 1980s, until Street Fighter II came along a decade later to knock it off its throne.
And what will two players do when they play Joust? As the name suggests, players joust with their enemies... in space, on a flying ostrich. Hey, it's a video game! It doesn't have to make any sense! Players mash the flap button to fly, then collide with evil knights astride green buzzards. The highest knight in a collision wins, with the other either dying outright or turning into a harmless egg. Defeat all the rival knights (and clean up any of their eggs, because they will hatch) and you're whisked off to a new, more dangerous stage.
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| The lava troll exacts a heavy toll on anyone who approaches his domain. Mm, buzzard barbecue! |
Joust is fun and frantic. Keeping an ostrich airborne is exactly as hard as it sounds, with the player hammering flap to maintain altitude, and the gameplay subtly changes from stage to stage, with survival waves challenging you to stay alive for a hefty point bonus, and egg waves that force the player to grab a dozen eggs scattered across the playfield before they hatch into new opponents. You can unite with the second player to defeat the buzzard army, or challenge them to impromptu jousting matches... entertaining, if counterproductive.
Past all that, Joust is a brilliant work of art. The warbirds are all smoothly animated and meticulously detailed, with artist John Newcomer using the book Animals in Motion to make the player's ostrich especially lifelike. (The second player rides a stork, and you can tell the difference between the two birds at a glance, a testament to the game's incredible graphics.) Lava pits on either side of the stage bubble ominously, with the hand of a lava troll bursting out of the magma to drag any nearby warbirds to a fiery doom. Take too long to complete a stage and a shrieking pterodactyl arrives to punish you for loitering. Lose a life and your next one rises out of a spawn pad, flashing a rainbow of colors as it waits for you to take command.
Joust is just cool, in a way only video games can be cool. It's cool the way Strider Hiryu, a high-tech ninja armed a light saber/police baton and a robot sabertooth tiger, is cool... confident, creative, and way over the top in its presentation. Fans of Balloon Fight will argue all day long that their game plays better, but Balloon Fight feels like Joust with all the edges filed off. In that grand Nintendo tradition, it's harmless, friendly, neutral... and neu-tered, compared to Joust.
Joust 2: Survival of the Fittest
Played: In a Lansing movie theater
This is not the greatest two-player game in the world, and it's a lousy tribute. Joust 2 steps up the quality of the original's already fantastic graphics, but the gameplay is buried under an avalanche of discordant ideas, like so many toppings dumped onto a scoop of Cold Stone ice cream. Really, can I have some ice cream to go with my mountain of gummi bears and Oreo crumbles? No wonder Cold Stone hasn't been a "thing" for at least a decade now.
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| You'll often feel them when playing this game. The low-down, no-damn- place-to-go, smashed-into-a-tin-can blues. |
And that's the problem with Joust 2... too much noise, not enough signal. There are new play mechanics galore, even when they don't add to the experience and don't even make sense. Players can swap their steed from an ostrich to a pegasus and back, but the winged horse weighs a half ton, and pega-sucks at anything other than being a bulky target for buzzards. Hatched eggs now become knights with a fatal lance, and red buzzards apparently made out of a cereal box deposit crystals which hatch into pesky bats. Oh, oh! And if any enemy eggs fall into lava, they re-emerge as mutants, larger and deadlier than the already aggressive garden variety buzzard. Gee, another nuisance designed to chew through my credits! Thanks, you shouldn't have.
And on and on it goes with the new ideas, with the design team blissfully unaware that the new vertically oriented monitor doesn't have the space to contain half of them. It makes Joust 2 a claustrophobic, quarter-sucking experience, doubly so with a second player. You may recall that two player gameplay was a vital component in the first Joust... in its sequel, player two is just another hazard in a congested screen. Even if you did convince a friend to join you, they'd just share your disappointment.
Joust 2 was never ported to any home game consoles, at least not before emulation. Perhaps there wasn't much interest in the license. Perhaps Williams just preferred to pretend it never existed.
NARC
Played: A Lansing arcade
Williams' last game before it merged with Midway, NARC is a blood-smeared sneak preview of Midway's approach to game design throughout the 1990s. As one of two police officers decked out in riot gear, it's your job to clean the slums of drugs, while painting the streets with the blood of dealers. While you can follow police procedure and just arrest them, it's a lot more reliable (and satisfying!) to gun 'em down with your firearm, or launch a rocket into a crowd of addicts and fill the screen with a shower of severed limbs. Say "hi" to William S. Sessions for me when you meet him in HELL! Haw haw haw HAW!!!
NARC's Judge Dredd approach to winning the drug war felt out of step with the games Williams had released in the early 1980s... yet would be right at home among the games it released under the Midway banner. NARC uses the same style of digitized graphics (and even some of the same actors!) as Midway's smash hit Mortal Kombat, and it's every bit as gratuitously violent as either that game or Smash TV.
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| I'm pretty sure this guy was also Kano and Crun-Chi from Mortal Kombat. |
Granted, NARC isn't as good as either of those games, or most of Williams' older ones. The thick crowds of exploding drug dealers leave the game feeling cheap and messy, and when you peel away the controversial content, you won't find much actual game underneath. Walk from left to right, pick up baggies of coke, blast a thousand suspects into dog chow because arresting them almost never works, wonder why the hell you need a duck button, get stabbed with a bunch of syringes you couldn't reasonably avoid or even see, and dump in a couple more coins to keep the blood flowing. Also, there's occasionally a sports car you can ride around in, squishing addicts until it gets blown up. That's it. That's the whole game. Where depth is concerned, it makes Rampage look like Nobunaga's Ambition.
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| He didn't say "no." |
Acclaim had high hopes for NARC as a franchise, hiring Rare to make an NES version (with everything that made NARC entertaining stripped away...) and even including Max Force and Mr. Big in the cast of the Power Team, a segment of the Video Power television series. The Power Team was a low-rent Captain N, with the insufferable Johnny Arcade and a bunch of Acclaim-licensed characters riding around in Bigfoot, the monster truck. They had Quirk the Chilled Tomato as a sidekick. He rapped once, with all the funky flow of Ben Stein at his most boring.
As you might expect, Max Force was less violent in the Power Team cartoon. After meeting Quirk, I imagine he'd consider going back home for his rocket launcher, broadcast standards and practices be damned. Tomato bisque, anyone?
Robotron: 2084
Played: A bowling alley not far from Portland. The Michigan one, not the important one
Legend has it that Robotron: 2084 was created by Eugene Jarvis after he broke his hand in a car accident. He couldn't manage a handful of fire buttons, but he could play test a game using two joysticks. Little did Jarvis realize, he stumbled into one of the most intuitive and enduring control schemes in the history of video games.
Dual sticks have become standard equipment for video games in the 21st century, letting the player move with one stick while adjusting their view of the environment with the right. With Robotron and other twin stick shooters, one stick moves your character, while the other aims and fires. It's a brilliant design, because no matter where you're going, you can always defend yourself from any angle, at any moment.
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| Things start getting hairy when the Brain Robotrons come out to play. |
Shooting that versatile could make the average game easy, but Robotron: 2084 isn't easy. The screen is absolutely choked with robots at the start of each wave... mostly mindless GRUNT soldiers, but also Indestructible Hulk robots (in green, heh heh), cunning brain robots, and Spheroids that cower in the corners while pumping out an endless supply of bullet-spitting Enforcers. Hidden in the chaos are the members of the last surviving human family... catch them before the robots do and you'll get up to 5000 points for each rescue.
Robotron is a very flashy game, with tons of onscreen activity and a kaleidoscope of strobing colors. It's also a very mechanically sound game... its various enemy types and their behaviors make it feel like you're playing chess in real time. With lasers. And robots. And a damn good attract mode, explaining the gameplay while throwing in enough exciting science-fiction buzzwords to tickle the neurons of young nerds like myself. You tend to notice references to genetic engineering when you watched The Secret of NIMH the week before.
Sinistar
Played: In a bus stop (train stop?) right next to Elevator Action
Here's Williams' answer to the free-roaming space shooter, just in time to nick some quarters from Namco's Bosconian and distract players from Konami's forthcoming Time Pilot. And it's a nice effort... not quite up to the standards of Williams hall of famers Robotron, Defender, and Joust, but unforgettable all the same.
Your mission is to use a laser to strip minerals from stray chunks of space rock, then process the ore into Sinibombs. Don't worry about collisions... just bury your ship's nose deep into a meteor, and fire away until it's dust! While you're mining for Sinibombs, worker drones will be using the same ore to build their master, the ferocious Sinistar! Once he's complete, this metallic monster will chase you to the ends of the galaxy, sucking you into his fang-filled mouth if you get too close. Give him a taste of Sinibombs instead... that'll curb his appetite! Nail Sinistar with thirteen Sinibombs and he's finished... at least until the worker drones build another one.
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| They put this guy front and center in the advertising, and for good reason. He looks like Hordak from She-Ra tried to turn into a UFO and got stuck that way. (image from Strategy Wiki) |
Sinistar is a pretty good game with one of history's all-time best video game villains. When he awakens, Sinistar will let you know with growling voice synthesis. (At minimum, you will be startled by the news... at worst, you'll need new underpants.) If you're not already headed in the opposite direction when Sinistar is brought to life, he'll quickly swoop in to make you a Sini-snack. The deck is perhaps stacked too high in Sinistar's favor, but the sense of doom that washes over you when you realize you're a couple bombs short of victory and he just woke up is one hell of an experience, and one you won't find anywhere else.
Stargate
Played at: An arcade tent at the Potato Festival in central MI
(yes, I said "potato festival." I don't know, they just think they're neat.)
Making a follow-up to an arcade hit is risky business. Maybe you'll get a classic like Ms. Pac-Man, or maybe it'll miss what made the original so compelling, and wind up like Donkey Kong Jr., or maybe it'll be a cynical rehash that mistakes annoyance for challenge. (Looking at you, Exciting New Pac-Man Plus.)
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| Even more things to blast! And be blasted BY! |
Stargate takes the Millipede approach, with the same core gameplay but a whole lot of new elements sprinkled into the mix. Ship-cloaking "inviso" has been added to your auxiliary weapons, alongside the smart bombs and hyperspace from the first game. A stargate in the center of the map takes you directly to the humanoid most in need of your help. Classic enemies like the Lander, Swarmer, and Baiter have been joined by Fireballs, Phred and the Munchies, and Yllabian Space Guppies, thin ships that are infuriatingly good at slipping between your laser blasts.
If you couldn't learn to play Defender, forget about Stargate... it will crush you flat. However, fans of the original might enjoy the added nuance this sort-of sequel provides. One highlight is the ability to hold multiple humanoids, which not only awards more points but lets the player jump ahead several waves... you just need to know the trick. Players love hidden Easter Eggs like this, and Stargate was one of the first arcade games to offer them.
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