Yaroze a Day #04

BETWEEN THE EYES | BILL’S SHOOTING GAME | BLACK WIDOW | BLASTER |
BLITTER BOY | BLOCK BREAK | BLOCKOUT

Welcome back to the fourth installment in our ongoing feature, Yaroze a Day! In this series, we’re attempting to cover the complete catalogue of games compiled in the unofficial “Net Yaroze Collection 2014,” and giving each of them brief explorations and reviews. Each bi-weekly bi-monthly bi-annual occasional update provides seven titles for your viewing pleasure, and additionally attempts to discover any deeper stories behind the games and their respective developers.

Today’s return picks up where we last left off, as we continue to make our way through titles beginning with the letter ‘B,’ and brings us one of the most notable releases to hail from the European Yaroze community. While you certainly don’t have to have read through all the preceding articles and reviews in order to understand the games we’ll be covering today; we would at least recommend reading our primer on the subject of the Net Yaroze hardware and introduction to this series, which you can find here. With all that stated, please to enjoy this update’s assortment of oddities and obscurities!

Between the Eyes (Lewis Evans, 1998)

Between the Eyes is an odd piece of work: A racing game set within psychedelic tunnels, where being able to visually parse the strobing textures is as much a challenge as handling its constant tight turns. Granting you control over the number of other racers on the track (as many as four), the number of laps, and even the ability to play your own preferred music [off of CD] in place of its own repetitive six second background loop; it certainly makes for one of the more fully-featured and customizable racers to have graced the Net Yaroze. It really does seem to strive for as much of a variety of choices as it can possibly cram into its constraints, between 64 selectable racetracks and 7 models of ship. And yet, I could not help but shake the feeling that it all plays out more or less identically — that all vehicles on hand control more or less the same, and that all the tracks are largely indiscernible from one another when it comes time to drive.

As an argument against the latter point: You can actually view all the tracks as rotatable objects from a ‘View The Tracks’ option on the main menu, where you’ll find that all of them are – in fact – quite varied in layout and deliberate in their choices of flashing textures. And yet, it fails to amount to anything of tangible variety as you find yourself bumping into the tunnel walls at the end of every over-long left-or-right / up-or-down turn, or being entirely unable to discern the finish line from any other arbitrary point in the seemingly endless tunnel. And with handling that comes across as painfully inadequate, none of it struck me as particularly fun to challenge. For a game which managed to make it onto the demo disc shortlist, I can’t help but shake the feeling it comes up short [gameplaywise] of most every other racer we’ve covered thus far. Clearly, the appeal / novelty comes down to the sheer number of options made available to players, as well as its ability to allow for simultaneous two-player split-screen racing with no apparent slowdown. And I do reckon that’s commendable, at the very least.

This is scarcely the last we’ll see of Lewis Evans’ contributions to the Yaroze community, between five other games which made it into the collection compilation. Later in this series, we’ll even see an earlier version of Between the Eyes from back when it was tentatively titled ‘Tunnel Racer’ — which also appeared on demo discs prior to its completed release. To tide you over ‘til then, you can watch some footage of Between the Eyes in action on Lewis’ own YouTube channel, if 12 year-old compression on 480p video is palatable enough for you.

Bill’s Shooting Game (Mita, 1997)

Opening on a digitized photo of an adorable kitten, Bill’s Shooting Game gets off to just about the best start I can imagine. Whether this fuzzy little feline is the titular ‘Bill’ in question is never effectively answered, though the game’s boss enemy does seem to bear some cat-like features. You’ll face off against him at the end of every fifth wave of this rather standard top-down space shooter; at which point, the loop will begin again, with no further escalations in difficulty. The big boss and the rest of the game’s enemy roster aren’t much challenging, aside from the fact that their yellow bullets and green homing missiles blend in quite frustratingly with similarly-colored stars scrolling in the background. Circumnavigating the occasional wall of bullets is aided by the ability to travel in all eight directions, at the very least. Aside from that feature, this is about as no-frills as your shmups get: No power-ups, alt-fires, smart bombs or shields to speak of. Hell, you don’t get so much as music or sound effects this time around.

Bearing in mind that this was likely a very early effort by an amateur programmer in ‘Mita,’ there’s certainly some potential on display here. The wireframe designs make for a novel enough aesthetic choice, and the variety of enemy patterns demonstrates an attempt at providing some level of challenge and surprise. Unfortunately, we won’t be seeing any follow-up entries by Mita throughout the rest of the collection: This marks their sole preserved contribution to the Net Yaroze, under a presumed alias that I couldn’t connect to anyone outside the scene. Their singular effort at least managed to make it onto a demo disc feature, which I do hope they took some measure of pride in at the least.

Black Widow (George Bain, 1998)

We move on from a game which opens with an image of an precocious kitty cat, and to a game which opens on a photograph of a venomous spider. Welcome to the aptly-named Black Widow! What follows is a quite crude little piece of software which entails navigating said spider (who appears rather red in-game) through a “web” of colored circles, which must all be walked across in order to activate them / change their color. Manage to reach every spot within the web, and a second round will immediately begin with the same objective; followed quickly by a third, and a final fourth. Obstacles to avoid include a yellow-colored counterpart to your intrepid arachnid, and an occasional tarantula dressed in black who can revert the color of already-turned circles. But with their boasting the bare minimum of artificial intelligence, both are practically a non-factor. And I reckon that’s your whole lot as far as content — save for completely unnecessary (though still appreciated) prologue and epilogue cards, and an admittedly rocking theme song for our crimson heroine.

So, what gives with this little game? Does it simply represent the most rudimentary of experimental efforts for the Yaroze platform? Well, actually; it turns out that author George Bain was a proper salaried Sony staffer – Sony Europe’s developer relations manager, no less – and that this little game was meant to serve as part of a tutorial of sorts for interested community members! I can imagine it serving as a simple demonstration of the basics of movement, collision, pathfinding, and variable tracking; and probably illustrating all those points effectively enough for prospective programmers. As it stands as a standalone game, of course, is hardly relevant at that point. Still, it’s neat to see it preserved here, and can perhaps be better appreciated knowing the context behind it.

Blaster (Kevin C. Rugman, 1998)

Blaster’s description as written in the compilation’s notes simply reads “Unfinished shooter.” And I’ll be damned if that doesn’t do a fine enough job of summing up the whole shebang. The game consists of one endlessly-looping horizontal corridor, populated by a single variety of enemy who is incapable of damaging your vessel. You can blast them all away for as long as you please, and keep track of how many on-screen sprites the program is able to manage, but that’s just about it. Maybe it could’ve amounted to something more substantive given time? Probably not. And being unable to find any further Yaroze / industry contributions on the part of Mr. Rugman,** I reckon that’s just about all there is to say about that.

** There’s a chance that this ‘Kevin Rugman’ on LinkedIn may be one in the same with our mystery developer here; judging by his United Kingdom origins, familiarity with the ‘C’ programming language, and a career trajectory toward software engineering. That being said, I still couldn’t find any other game development history attached here, or a concrete means of actually connecting the dots between the two names. I’m probably right in identifying the guy, but the only way to know for sure would be to ask him, which I didn’t bother to try — especially after seeing the dude is part of an ‘Elon Musk Fan Club’ on LinkedIn. Call that a red flag.

Blitter Boy: Operation Monster Mall (Chris Chadwick, 1998)

A ‘blitter’ was a hardware configuration somewhat popular in the pre-GPU days, most popularly used to rapidly move bitmap images in games. Software on Amiga platforms would frequently leverage this bit of hardware functionality, which helped games on the system to impress visually / stand out graphically from many of its then-contemporaries. While the PlayStation didn’t actually incorporate this piece of tech underneath its proverbial hood, the Amiga spirit is still strong with Chris Chadwick’s Blitter Boy: Operation Monster Mall — one of the most popular [and well-documented] releases to emerge from within the Net Yaroze scene.**

Blitter Boy plays as a single-screen, wave-based survival top-down shooter, with the addition of an escort / rescue mechanic for good measure. For story context missing from even the game itself, and seemingly only revealed years later in an interview^[1]: Lightning strikes a multi-story shopping mall, having a particular effect on an arcade contained within. As a result, the ghosts from a Pac-Man arcade machine come to life (in a manner of speaking) and begin to wreak havoc on the galleria, while hapless shoppers flee the premises. Unfortunately, there seem to be a number of negligent parents at the mall on this particular day, as many folk see fit to abandon their babies in the process of escaping. And so it falls on the titular Blitter Boy (“A child mercenary, if you can believe that”) to re-enter the mall, thwart the potentially copyright-infringing ghosts, and rescue the toddlers. All in a day’s work, I reckon.

The style of arcadey gameplay on display is a good fit for the Yaroze, just as it would’ve been had it been written for an Amiga proper. While originally envisioned as a Robotron-esque twin-stick shooter,^[1b] Chris eventually moved away from that design as his ideas for the game continued to expand and evolve — not to mention the fact that analog / DualShock controllers weren’t quite as common on the consumer end as they would eventually become. Instead of freely rotatable aim, you simply fire in the direction you are facing, with the option to hold down R2 to fix your fire in a given direction [while continuing to move freely]. I’d call that just about the best solution possible given the format, as it lends itself well enough to the well-paced run ‘n’ gun gameplay on offer. The enemy ghosts may not be particularly speedy, but they make up for it in sheer numbers and maneuvering — by forcing you cut down and weave paths between them, as well as accounting for however many babies you may have in tow. Catching up to and escorting the infants as they trail behind you in single-line fashion (a mechanic reportedly inspired by Flicky) certainly adds an appreciated layer to the game, and strikes me as a more interesting goal than simple elimination. Of course, if you’re not keen on escort mechanics, you can always toggle the gameplay mode to ‘Survival’ and focus solely on withstanding an infinite supply of enemies.

While that gameplay loop is certainly compelling / novel enough, what really sets Blitter Boy apart (and what likely resulted in its receiving as many accolades as it ultimately did) is the presentation: Slick sprite work stands heads and shoulders above some of the more primitive polygons much of its “competition” would be pushing, and the menus and title screens all feature an array of neat transitions and screen effects. The game even gets its own little production slate intro, crediting Chadwick’s ‘VideoClay Studio’ (as additionally seen on his Net Yaroze creator page) and adding to the sense that this could very well have made for a properly published product. I’m willing to wager it was these qualities that most effectively swayed judges of Net Yaroze Europe’s ‘1st Anniversary Competition,’ and nabbed Chris a top spot and grand prize in ‘98.^[2] At that point, Blitter Boy quickly became a staple of the Official PlayStation Magazine [UK] coverdisk — featuring as an example for the potential of the Net Yaroze environment, in the hopes of luring in more potential purchasers for the SDK. Unfortunately, the version of the game included on at least one of the pressings that went out may not have been the completed project; where Chris would later recall a “cut-down, hacked version with early, unfinished graphics” accidentally making the final cut, chalking it up to “presumably something someone at Sony/OPM had knocked up for whatever reason.”^[1c]

With fresh buzz surrounding him, Chris would soon receive a call from an upstart company by the name ‘Eighth Wonder’ — a Sony Europe second party studio established in early 1997, consisting primarily of headhunted Rare and IGN staffers.^[3] By the time Chris had been scouted and eventually hired, their first work in progress was a game by the tentative titles of ‘Popcorn’ and/or ‘Short Fuses,’ which would ultimately see cancellation some time after E3 ‘98. At this point – and despite an apparent initiative to hire up-and-comers along the lines of Chadwick – the studio more or less languished, and eventually fizzled out come 1999. Chris’ total time with the studio lasted approximately six months, and was apparently negative enough to push him out of the games industry entirely.^[1d] He mentions being tasked almost exclusively with writing a “frontend menu system” for one of their games — understanding that he would have to “start at the bottom and learn the ropes,” but still feeling an acute lack of control and creativity given his role. His testimonies speak to an unfulfilling work environment, and a quick realization that he didn’t much like the prospect of making a full career of game development:

“Burnout. Breakdown. Whatever you want to call it. I’d just run out of juice. It wasn’t until a good while after this that I even wanted to go near a computer, to be honest.” ~ Chris Chadwick^[1e]

The fact of the matter is, the games industry has a nasty habit of chewing up and spitting folk back out, and that not everyone is cut out for the job expectations that come with it. To be clear: That’s a condemnation of the industry itself, and not the genuinely passionate creatives who may find themselves unknowingly lining up for it. It’s hard to blame Chris for burning out after being immediately tossed into a doomed developer supergroup, and getting quickly stuck in one of the most menial of positions. Taking a break from the business was probably a good move on his part. It wasn’t until years later that he’d toy around with ‘Blitz 3D’ — a game programming language with a similar sort of community aspect driving it. With that scene also eventually dissipating between different forks and failed successor projects though, Chris seemed to fall off development once again. As far contributions to properly released software, he’s continued to hover around only on the furthest outskirts of the industry: Reportedly serving as a tester on 2010’s Hydrophobia, and signing off on his fruit sprites from Blitter Boy being re-used in a freeware puzzle game titled Fruitola in 2011.

For as often as Blitter Boy is heralded as one of the greatest successes of the Net Yaroze, actually knowing the full story of its aftermath leaves me to see it as one of the greatest failures of the whole endeavor. The story told here – as I’m left to interpret it – is that of an imaginative bedroom coder being praised for one of their passion projects, before having their enthusiasm quickly consumed / destroyed by the machinations of an uncaring games industry. If this was the pipeline that Sony had in place for the Yaroze community’s stand-out contributors – the sort of trial by fire they were all intended to undergo – that strikes me as pretty dang dismal. What’s maybe worst of all is how empty the whole experience has continued to leave Chris — his exit from game development leaving “a void in [his] life that [he] still hasn’t completely filled.”^[1f] For chrissakes: The only games console he owned in 2015 was a damned OUYA! It saddens me to say that the Blitter Boy story doesn’t exactly paint the Net Yaroze experiment in all that positive a light, especially considering how entertaining the game itself truly was — the potential it demonstrated, before Sony quickly dashed it. But I reckon that’s the industry for ya’.

** Chris Chadwick seems to have a knack for keeping his name and his game in the Net Yaroze news (for as niche a subject that may be). His name turns up in practically every modern retrospective on the platform’s history, typically with new interviews to pair. What I’d attribute this trend to isn’t so much him angling for the spotlight or anything so presumptuous: I reckon it has more to do with journalists looking to write about the history of the Net Yaroze hyper-focusing on the platform’s “most popular” / “almost fit for retail” entries, and winding up calling up the same three or four folk for comment whenever they get the idea to write an article. For his part, Chris seems easily accessible and eager to talk about the larger community whenever he gets the chance, so I’m genuinely not trying to cast any sort of dispersions on him. I just feel like his constant presence / near-oversaturation past a certain point speaks to a repetitive narrative on the part of games writers.

Block Break (Kame, 1997)

We have now reached the prefix “Block” in our alphabetical exploration of the Yaroze catalogue. That may sound like cause for alarm – the prelude to some series of a hundred interchangeable games bearing the word in their titles – but as it turns out, there are only three games we’ll be having to sift through in the queue here. The first comes to us from our good friend Kame, and represents exactly what you’d expect from a game titled ‘Block Break’: A standard Breakout clone with the handful of expected paddle / ball modifiers (larger paddle, multiball, etc.). In what we can begin to qualify now as “typical Kame fashion”; the game premise is a classic standard, the presentation is bare bones as can be, and the gameplay is entirely functional — save for a single occasion of collision detection wonkiness I experienced. Still, I’d rate it as totally playable a take on Breakout as any other, if not otherwise unremarkable.

So far, 4 Othello still stands as my favorite Kame-soft. Perhaps when we’ve eventually covered all eighteen of his collective Net Yaroze contributions, I’ll have to put them in some sort of ranked list? If / when I happen to, I have to imagine that Block Break will probably trend toward the bottom of said sorting.

Blockout (Robin Asa Mangham, 2000)

Surprise! It’s another Breakout clone! Only this time, with a little more in the way of a visual style to it… and a bit of a game-breaking issue which may arise if you attempt to load the game with NTSC display settings. See, as a program designed with PAL firmly in mind by its Britain-based creator, Blockout leverages some additional lines of vertical resolution afforded to PAL-compatible displays — presenting a game screen a full 576 pixels tall versus the expected 480p. As one of the few Net Yaroze games we’ll find utilizing the PlayStation’s potential hi-resolution output mode (where most software was content to prioritize performance at either 224 ~ 240p), you can lose out on vital portions of the bottom of the screen if your emulation / hardware isn’t configured correctly for PAL. Assuming that your ducks are all in a proper row, what does that leave you with? I reckon it’s another totally serviceable take on Breakout, with little else to be said for it.

The more interesting angle to pursue here [besides that resolution wonkiness] is the future of its developer Robin Mangham; who would quickly find themselves in the employ of one Pixelogic Limited, and contributing in their capacity as a programmer on a 2001 PlayStation re-imagining of the 1969 film The Italian Job (a couple years before its 2003 Hollywood remake). There’s a proper fascinating post-mortem of the game up on Gamasutra, for those interested in the trials and tribulations of its development. But perhaps the most shocking detail in the write-up mentions the fact that Robin got into a near-fatal car collision two weeks before the game went gold, when some “delinquent joy-riders”^[4] crashed into his vehicle head-on. Miraculously, Rob would make a full recovery, avoiding a feared paralyzation prognosis / coming away only with “twitches now and again.” For whatever the hell it matters, the whole ordeal did end up delaying the completion of the game by two weeks, which speaks to the fact that Mr. Mangham was evidently one of the linchpins holding the whole project together.

In any event: SCi Games would publish the disc in its native UK, while no less than Rockstar Games would pick up North American distribution for the driving title. This seemed to present an opportunity for Robin to eventually jump ship to Rockstar Leeds; where he would proceed to contribute to the development of multiple Grand Theft Auto titles, as well as L.A. Noire and most recently Red Dead Redemption II. Needless to say, Rob has lived a storied career in games, and overcame a helluva hurdle along the way. Seeing what may well have been the start of said career here on the humble Net Yaroze is a trip — the sort of story which made me wanna pursue this feature and research these seemingly innocuous little games in the first place. How’s that for a takeaway from a goddamned Breakout clone?

“They Will Try to Kill You at All Costs.”

I reckon that does it for another update in the Yaroze a Day saga! Apologies for the near year and a half delay between posts, but it turns out this sort of format burns me out quicker than I imagined it would. At this point, y’all can pretty well safely drop the “weekly schedule” expectation, as I might try for once a month at the least / most.

It’s also certainly worth noting a major development in Net Yaroze news which occurred in the past couple months: The re-discovery and completion of Magic Castle — a Yaroze roguelite which has finally seen release 23 years after its initial development in 1997. There’s a ton to unpack with regards to the story behind it, and what is apparently a solid game to be played; and so I reckon it might be worth examining in greater detail at some point in the future of this feature. For the time being though, I reckon I’m gonna prioritize knocking out a few more sets of games off the compilation ISO.

Join us again [sooner or later] for more exercises in Net Yaroze zaniness and so forth!

[1] ^{b c d e f} ‘Dan.’ “Net Yaroze Interviews #3: Chris Chadwick.” Super Internet Friends. October 6, 2015. Web. (Archive)
[2] “Net Yaroze Special Offer.” Net Yaroze Europe. 1997. Web. (Archive)
[3] ‘evilisk.’ ‘“Eighth Wonder and 8th Wonder Games.” No Rest For the Wicked. April 15, 2017. Web.
[4] Li, John. “Postmortem: Pixelogic’s The Italian Job.” Gamasutra. August 14, 2002. Web.