Fortunately for me, archive.org provides a nice little background to the game. Rather than just delve into the game I decided to read a little bit about the game itself. A few interesting Google searches led me to find out that this game was one of the first to use speech synthesis that featured talking robots. The makers of the game spared no expense with a vocabulary of about 30 different words with an estimate cost of $1000 per word. Learning this little factoid helps keep me grounded when it comes to the amazing audio we have today. As an avid Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player, I often find myself complaining about the audio implementations. Talk about taking things for granted.
My first time through the game, I had yet to figure out how to make my stick figure shoot at the robots. I got a measly 300 points. I quickly checked what the high score was. Incredulously, it was over 300,000. My how the early generation gamers took to perfecting their gameplay. When I wonder what it was like for the people playing this game in the arcades, I marvel at how excited they must have been at the innovations that were implemented into the game. I'm playing on an emulator without any sound but they got the full package! They got to hear synthetic robot voices probably for the first time in their lives in a video game. They probably bragged to their friends about their high scores and how amazing the graphics and the sounds were. The original hardware most likely was cutting edge and the amount of pixels that were visible is amazingly low to today's perspective but to them it must have been the smoothest graphics in the world.
My overall experience of getting a taste of playing a game from 1980 makes me appreciate how far games have come today. I also lament at how the complexity of today's games have forced a very low depth of skill that can be displayed.
