Love letter to Robotron

Old vs New

Games used to be different. Way back in time, way back in the early 80s, technology was primitive. There was simply not all that much they could do compared with the technology today. Processors were slow and memory contraints were severe. For example, the jpeg screenshot below is about 1/3 the size of the game it came from. You had 50k in which to create a game, program, graphics, sound, all of it. These severe restraints limited what they could do with the game, but they also forced developers to be really efficient with what they had. Every byte of data needed to do its job, and the concept behind the game needed to be solid or it was no fun at all. As a matter of fact, the idea behind a game was often it's distinguishing feature and some of those old games were quite inventive.

Of course, to a modern gamer, old games are all but unplayable. Graphics were crude and brightly coloured, the controls were unforgiving, the only sounds were bleeps and bloops, and the games themselves were usually extremely repetitive. The only reason you played was to see how high you could run the score. Incidentally, when was the last time you played a game that even gave you points? These old games were played because gamers liked the act of playing them. That seems to be a foreign concept to some modern gamers who want to watch a story and unlock things.

Games nowadays of course blow those early games out of the water in every respect. The graphics today are amazing, and the sound is perfect. A good modern game tells a story well and immerses you in a different world, something a game from the 80s could hardly hope to do. Yet there is something old games offer that new games don't. Old games were about getting good at them, not just walking through them. There's nothing like beating your own personal best in a game you love. Old games were about competing with yourself.

Enter Robotron

Although I'm old enough that I could in theory have played Robotron in the arcade, my mommy didn't like arcades because that's where all the big kids hung out and she didn't give me any quarters anyways. I got introduced to Robotron mainly through MAME. I have since bought a copy of Midway Arcade Treasures.

Robotron is perhaps the greatest pure action game ever made, unsurpassed even until this day. The concept behind Robotron is very, very simple. There are enemies. You shoot them. Saving members of THE LAST HUMAN FAMILY gives you bonus points. Where Robotron distinguishes itself is in the frantic pace of its gameplay.

If you can careful, maybe you're survival!

You're the little guy in the middle. You spawn in the middle of a level of enemies and they pretty much swarm you instantly and try to kill you. When you die, you re-spawn again in the middle, only the enemies you've killed remain dead. When you clear every enemy off the screen (except for hulks) you move onto the next wave. There are a variety of enemies. The grunts (red guys pictured above) who just run straight at you, the hulks (green guys pictured above) which just wander around but they're indestructible, brains which shoot guided missiles at you and turn family members into kamikaze zombies, spheroids which spawn legions of little dudes in grey hats that spit out projectiles of varying speeds and trajectories, and tanks which fill the screen with masses of projectiles that bounce off walls. Oh, and littering the field are mines, so watch where you step.

You are not defenceless. You basically shoot like a machine gun. The controls of Robotron were novel for its time. You had two joysticks. The left one moved you around, and the right one controlled the direction of fire. You also get a free life every 25,000 points.

It's not fair!

Robotron may be a lot of things, but fair it ain't. Sometimes the way you spawn guarantees a quick death. Sometimes a spheroid just flies straight into you intead of hiding in the corners like they usually do. Sometimes a hulk takes a random turn and blocks your only avenue of escape. Sometimes you'll swear the game is messing with your mind. The spheroids sometimes fire extremely slow projectiles that behave in effect like mines. You're expecting it to go past you but it doesn't and you end up backing into it or something. Sometimes the game is just going to kill you and that's all there is to it. Aside from all that, the game is just brutally difficult. You're being swarmed by grunts, the hulks are blocking your fire, and spheriods are shooting waves of projectiles at you from the corners. And those are the easy levels. Tank levels will make you wish you were just getting swarmed by an unstoppable horde. I guess that's why the occasional unfair death doesn't really bother me. It doesn't really make the game any harder.

So what's good about it?

If you've never played a game like this, it's hard to describe. You're always about 1/20th of a second away from dying. The demands it makes on your concentration are intense. Most of the time you're just shooting the thing nearest to you just to survive. Every step along your path is carved out of the horde. Sometimes a volley of projectiles will come at you and you have to be able to dodge most of them and shoot a couple that you can't. After a while your conscious mind isn't even playing because it can't keep up. You'll do something and think "Wow! I can't believe I did that!" and then you'll die immediately and probably lose 5 lives because you've broken the spell. If you resist the temptation to think about what you just did, you'll be doing unbelievable stuff on a regular basis. Playing Robotron for me is a meditative experience. It actually puts my mind in a different state, and that's something modern games have not been able to do for me.

I recommend this game

This game is an incredible amount of fun. You might find a game as intense, but you won't find one more intense. It's on the first Midway collection for PS2 and Xbox, and it's cheap. Shouldn't cost more than 29.99 onlay. There's also a version of it for Xbox360 arcade. It may be only 50k, but you'll keep going back to it. It's that good.