Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

The original title: "the game egg 26 years ago hides the history of family wealth in Activision's infancy."

"our games celebrate their birthdays, but they are always young and fresh," Activision once said.

For PC players in the late 1990s, there is one game you probably won't miss: Activision's Trap: Maya Adventure (Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure) released in 1994.

Although there are many versions of the game, domestic players are more exposed to the PC version, especially in computer rooms and Internet cafes, or on media such as the "Sutra Pavilion" series or "game collection".

This is an element-rich horizontal platform action adventure game. The player plays the protagonist Harry Jr., in order to find the father who was taken during the expedition and go deep into the dangerous ground, finally fighting a life-and-death duel with the evil Maya lord.

According to the level of the same period in 1994, the game is very beautiful in terms of level background and character animation, which has become one of the important factors to attract players. Activision also hired professional animation company Kroyer Films to draw actions for the characters, and the actual result was comparable to Disney's "Aladin", which was one of the highest peaks of jumping games on the 2D platform at that time.

Because the picture was so good, its PC port was later used by Bill Gates at CES to demonstrate the new feature DirectX-- on Windows 95, even though it didn't actually use DirectX technology. From the control of the finished product of Trap: Maya Adventure, we can see how much Activision attaches to this work. It can be said that by the standards of that era, this was Activision's "mysterious sea" in 1994.

But players who played the game at that time would be confused about some part of the fourth level-because compared to other levels of exquisite painting style, there is a monster that seems to have come out of an eight-bit machine:

And in the nearby hidden level, the whole picture is a huge retro:

In view of the widespread rumors of FC "Contra" and "underwater eight hurdles" at that time, some people thought that this was the "underwater eight hurdles" of "Trap: Maya Adventure".

But it's obviously not the case: if you spend a long time studying the battle with wheels and playing the final BOSS, you will find that the father who the protagonist is trying to save in the ending is also a real "eight-machine villain":

Why did the father make a low-pixel image? Why does the play in the hidden pass look so strange? And the most important question: why do you want to do such a hidden pass?

It took me many years to know that this "hidden pass" is not just a hidden pass. Considering the lack of game information at that time and the strangeness of domestic players to the Atari mainframe, we can be forgiven for not knowing this famous work.

In fact, this hidden pass is an action game released on the Atari 2600 console and one of the best-known works on the Atari console. Now when it comes to Activision's game works, everyone's first impression is the "New year goods" and "call of Duty" series. But in the Atari era, "call of Duty" has not yet been born, can have this honor in the Activision product line, is the "trap!" "(Pitfall!)

Let's go back to the last year of the 1970s. This year, Atari's 2600 mainframe (now known as the Atari VCS) achieved unprecedented success in the market: 1 million units were shipped in the 1979 holiday season alone, and that figure more than tenfold three years later.

In the early days of Atari, the company looked like Google, known for its freest, open, bold and innovative way of working: employees came to the company in their underpants and slippers, clocked in at noon, worked until the middle of the night, drank beer, and opened party in the company day and night. In short, it is very unorthodox.

At that time, it attracted the best programmers from all over Silicon Valley to work for Atari, where games were produced like a stream, and Atari's video game empire was built in just a few years.

However, behind the appearance of the heyday is a surging undercurrent. After Atari was sold to Warner, Ray Kassar, the new CEO, as a former textile mill manager, played the role of a traditional company: adding more restrictions to employees, keeping costs as low as possible, and seeing them as "low-end engineers" rather than "designers".

His policy allows the product to be presented entirely in the face of the company when it comes to the market, while the name of the developer is deliberately hidden-or buried. Some people think that this is to prevent other companies from poaching their employees, but according to the designers of Atari, Kassar is actually almost ignorant in this field: "he doesn't know anything about products, he doesn't understand engineers, and even as a head of marketing." he has no sense of the market. "

Ray Kassar, this is unfair to employees who are dedicated to the company. Some stories are already familiar to us, that is, "the first well-known egg in the history of games" has been talked about for many years. In 1979, Warren Robin Knight documented his work in the form of colored eggs in his lead development, Adventure, to defy Atari's practice of not mentioning the developer's name after the game was released.

It's just that there's more than one Warren Robin Knight in this company. Also in 1979, four leading programmers formed a secret group. The four were Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller, Bob Whitehead and David Klein, known as the "legendary quartet" of Atari, whose games accounted for more than 60% of Atari's game software sales at the time.

It is estimated that David Klein alone brings more than $20 million to the company, but he earns only $20, 000 a month.

Legendary quartet: from left to right, the legendary quartet of Bob Whitehead, David Klein, Larry Kaplan and Alan Miller are dissatisfied with CEO Ray Kassar's arbitrary behavior, unlike Warren's low-key resistance to growing eggs in the game, they want to confront Kassar face-to-face.

In fact, they did the same. One day in May 1979, the Gang of four walked into Kassar's office and began to bargain with their boss. They think that since Warner is a music company, why only its musicians can print their names on records and get royalties? As game designers, they have contributed huge profits to the company and deserve the same treatment.

Ray Kassar scoffed at these demands. According to Larry Kaplan and David Klein, Kassar called them "towel pattern designers" and thought that "big-road goods like you are everywhere and worthless."you have nothing unique, no more important than the workers on the cassette assembly line." And claimed that "anyone can do cassette development."

The face-to-face humiliated "legendary quartet" soon decided to leave the company and start a new stove. In August, the four left Atari and began to actively plan to set up a new company. At the end of 1979, the four started a new legend, which is Activision.

Activision has been an ambitious company since its inception, and its initial plan was clear: software development for the Atari VCS mainframe.

This is a goal that has never been tried before. Since the advent of Atari VCS in 1977, all VCS game software has been developed by Atari. This is partly because software developers at that time had to be proficient in hardware mechanisms-such talents were already scarce and are now mostly concentrated in Atari or other competing hardware developers. On the other hand, as a company that started with products with copyright disputes, Atari attaches great importance to copyright.

Before Activision was actually established, Jim Levy and the legendary four had consulted lawyers on copyright issues and even split a separate portion of the initial $1 million venture capital as a reserve for a lawsuit against Atari.

Activision's careful and full preparation turned out to be right: in the summer of 1980, Atari had launched various promotional campaigns against them, claiming that Activision had stolen ideas that belonged to Atari; at this time, Activision's game has not even been released yet.

A lengthy legal battle ensued, and a legal dispute over the legality of third-party development lasted until 1982, when Atari settled out of court and Activision was allowed to develop its own game software and sell it.

This precedent has brought earth-shaking changes to the entire industry, resulting in the emergence of the concept of third-party developers, and entered a new era of both opportunities and risks.

The four developers freed from the decadent production system of Atari began to play their part in the Xintiandi they created. Each of them is responsible for the development of a game that is entirely their own. In July 1980, Activision released four games one after another, and created a distinctive style in the packaging design: bright cover colors, iconic color stripes that match the visual elements of the Atari LOGO, and a real-machine display on the back cover of the cassette box.

Of course, they didn't forget to provide separate copyright pages for developers in game brochures or catalogs-people who probably hated Atari's behavior.

You can see that the color stripe visual elements are used on every cover.

Activision also creatively created the "physical achievement system". As long as the player gets a certain score in the game, he can exchange a proof photo for an embroidered badge of achievement. This is basically the same as the achievement system on today's mainframe or PC platform-but it can be pinned to your clothes so that your companions can witness that every day.

From Activision's earliest games to mid-1983, the physical achievement event of "score for badge" has been held and has been widely welcomed by players. In addition, the letter players will automatically join the club, every month will receive introduction to Activision games new developments and high-scoring strategies, and Activision will not forget, with a newsletter introduced by developers. The club has trained a group of loyal players for Activision, which is very important for Activision's initial plans to expand its business footprint.

True patch

The new Activision created by a priest wearing an Activision badge is terrible, with sales of the first few games reaching $6.5 million just four months later. In July 1981, Activision's first "popular style" appeared, which was called "Ka Bang!" "(Kaboom!) The game can basically be seen as a VCS version of Avalanche (Avalanche, an arcade game released by Atari in 1978), done by Alan Miller and David Klein, and later reached 1 million sales, but in the eyes of several ambitious people, this is still a small step. Activision still relies on the first few people to release six games in a year, which is quite a contract to households, which fully inspires programmers' enthusiasm.

David Klein is probably the most active of them. When he was at Atari, he was an important member of VCS mainframe development, but after Activision was established, he also provided members with the initial office space (his home garage) and a game development kit for the console. In addition to working hard on the playability of the game itself, David Klein also attaches great importance to picture and expression. he always wants to pursue some special means of expression, which are supported by his superb skills.

Back in 1980, David Klein envisioned an image of a "runner" in his development plan. At that time, most of the games on the Atari VCS were represented by monochromatic blocks, and most of them were vehicles such as aircraft, tanks and racing cars, and there were few characters rich in humanoid features.

David Klein used his rich development experience to draw the image of a "running villain": a man with a haircut and wearing a light green jacket and dark green trousers, this is Pitfall Harry.

Then he used five more frames to get Pitfall Harry running. Judging from the average function of VCS, this character can be said to be very exquisite. But David Klein didn't think about how to use the character at this time, so he placed Pitfall Harry and quickly devoted himself to the development of other games.

Character animation unpacked from the game by fan Ultimecia in 1982, he finally decided to use the "running villain", which has been on hold for two years, to make a game. He sat down in front of a blank piece of paper and drew on it a running villain, then a road, then a tree-- which represented the jungle, and a basic prototype was born. He gradually added more things to it: the treasure to be collected by the player, the ponds, underground levels, scorpions, rattlesnakes, and the iconic crocodiles in the pond: players can step over their heads to cross the pond, but once they open their mouths, the player will be eaten.

"it took me about 10 minutes at the most to finish the design document for the game." "We couldn't start directly with design at the time," David Klein said. Designers must first think about what 2600 [the hardware] can do. So most of these design documents stay at this level and will not go any further. "

During development, its development code name is the simplest "jungle runner" (Jungle Runner), but this seems too straightforward. Later, they also considered names like "Zulu Gold", but in the end they decided to call the work "Trap!" With an exclamation point, because that's how trademarks are registered.

In later memories, David Klein said he had two main sources of inspiration: the jungle and the hanging vine came from the controversial film Raiders the previous year, while the design that skipped the head of the crocodile came from the opening of the 1950s animation Huck and Jack.

"Heckle and Jeckle" (Huck and Jack) in any case, the initial design has been basically completed, and the subsequent work is mainly focused on the development of the program. Spend it on the trap! There are more than 1000 hours of development time on, which is a considerable investment for a single game; the average development time of the legendary quartet in 1981 was about 2000 hours, while the Trap! "it alone took up 1000 hours of David Klein's development time.

The full investment turned out to be worthwhile, and the finished product was excellent, with many interesting elements and mechanisms. There are a variety of operations, obstacles that need to be dealt with carefully, and of course there are rich treasures-but players only have 20 minutes to collect them. The most important point is, "trap!" It contributes to the new element of "horizontal layout" for platform jump games.

As early as 1980, the embryonic form of "platform action" has appeared in action games. Space panic (Space Panic) has multiple levels of platforms and climbing and falling mechanisms. Crazy climber (Crazy Climber) has a background scroll setting that scrolls up. Currently recognized as the first real platform jump game is Nintendo's 1982 release of "Donkey Kong". This epoch-making work allows players to jump between discontiguous platforms, which basically defines the rules of "platform jump", but it still does not introduce a "layout" setting. Players play in a fixed screen from beginning to end.

And in the trap! When the player manipulates the Pitfall Harry to move to the edge of the screen, the character will step into a new page. This design is undoubtedly a breakthrough, it increases the richness and continuity of the level, and provides a greater possibility for game design. As David Klein said: "when the level is no longer limited by screen space, only the designer's own imagination will be limited."

With the important feature of "layout", "trap!" "then take this as the base to carry on the diversified design. The main goal of the player is to avoid dangerous elements in a limited time and to collect as much treasure as possible scattered throughout the jungle.

The use of permutations and combinations to set up obstacles makes players need to use alternately running, jumping, climbing, flying and other movements to avoid danger in different layout levels. Not only that, David Klein also designed different distances for the above-ground and underground passageways, which can span three pages at once when passing underground, which is not only a necessary way to achieve full collection (the highest score is 114000). It also provides new variables for players to plan their own strategy paths.

As mentioned earlier, Activision has its own "physical achievement system". "A trap! "of course, there is no exception. As long as you score 20000 points in the game, you can get the "Explorer Club" badge and receive a "personal" reply from Pitfall Harry. Players are crazy about it and constantly challenge new goals. Because of the 20-minute time limit, it is undoubtedly very difficult to get a high score. "A trap! Rely on exquisite design to make a significant distinction between ordinary players and advanced players, but also really achieve "easy to use, difficult to master".

Explorers Club certification letters, badges and Activision's official game strategy market prove the success of the game. April 20, 1982, "Trap! "when it came to market, it won the first place in sales as soon as it was launched, and it has been in the first place for 64 weeks. According to statistics, by 2008, "trap!" More than 5 million copies of each version have been sold across the platform, of which 4 million are from the Atari 2600 platform, making it the second best-selling game in history on the Atari 2600 platform.

Although David Klein admits that the idea for jungle exploration came from the Raiders, Atari's Orthodox IP licensed game is far worse than the Trap! "--both in terms of game quality and popularity. "A trap! The popularity of Activision has brought a steady stream of benefits to Activision, and Activision is also working hard to hold a variety of player activities to develop peripheral and derivative products.

The official player event organized by Activision, the Battle of the Jungle (Rumble in Jungle), rewards 3 misfortunes, good fortune lies in misfortune. "A trap! It got the first bucket of gold for Activision, but at the end of 1982, its rival, E.T., went public, which was the prelude to the collapse of Atari.

In the same year, Larry Kaplan, one of the founders, left Activision because he wanted to focus his personal energy on hardware development. Activision was listed on Nasdaq in mid-1983, when the company had revenue of about $50 million a quarter, making it the fastest-growing company in the United States at the same time. But by the end of 1984, that figure had shrunk to $6 billion to $7 million, and layoffs had to be made to maintain spending. That year, two other founders, Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead, also left Activision, leaving only Jim Levy and David Klein.

In 1984, "Trap! The sequel, Trap 2: lost Cave (Pitfall II: Lost Caverns), is still developed by David Klein. This work has been greatly expanded on the basis of the previous work, including vertical layout scrolling mechanism, larger and more complex maps, diverse monsters and better picture effects, and even background music. Trap 2: the lost Cave may be one of the best and most picturesque works in the Atari 2600, but even so, it failed to save itself from fire and water.

Since 1985, Activision has begun a decade-long downturn. Because of the aftermath of the Atari crash, continuing to develop games for the Atari platform can no longer cover the development cost, so Activision decided to do part of the porting work first, transplanting its well-known games to Commodore 64, Apple and other platforms. In addition, a foray into computer software will be the second route, which turns out to be crucial for survival after Activision.

In 1986, Jim Levy brokered Activision's acquisition of Infocom, a computer game company. But Jim Levy himself lost his position as CEO because of the acquisition. Bruce Davis, the newly appointed CEO of the board, is another Ray Kassar figure, and his arrival eventually prompted David Klein to leave Activision. At this point, Activision's initial five founders have all left.

"A trap! The story of Activision and Activision should have come to an end. After all, Activision's failure to transplant Trap 2: lost Cave to NES in 1987 may have exhausted the fan enthusiasm accumulated by the IP. Bruce Davis even changed the name of the company to Mediagenic in 1988, keeping Activision as the name of its subsidiary. Activision seems to be getting farther away from game development.

In 1991, a young man from the West Coast bought Mediagenic, which was already heavily in debt and on the verge of bankruptcy. He was Activision CEO Bobby Cortek, who is now in the midst of great controversy.

Bobby Cortec (Bobby Kotick) "it was 1990, and there was one thing that puzzled me: why would a company that once had the name Activision now be called Mediagenic?" That's what Kotick said of that year's acquisitions.

Kotick almost turned his pocket upside down to buy Mediagenic, but the acquisition was basically a pile of debt. So when Kotick took office, the head of Mediagenic asked him about his takeover plans and wondered why he was so eager to take over such a company. Kotick's answer is "feelings". After all, the company, once called Activision, has so many classic game brands, including his favorite "trap!" ".

After that, feelings are really going to be eaten. After the acquisition of Mediagenic, Kotick immediately began a plan to reproduce Activision classics, and he wanted to restore the classics with the best pictures on the latest models.

In 1993, Activision made public "Trap!" The latest book, Trap: Maya Adventures. After 10 months of development, the game finally hit the market and reached 1 million sales in 1996, making it the second best-selling game in the series.

After knowing this information, all the doubts of the players in the last century can be answered. "Trap: Maya Adventure" is for "Trap! "the most powerful re-salute, it aims to restore the trap of that year!" "the brilliance of.

Therefore, we can see that the protagonist Harry Jr. In the hidden pass of the lost city of Copan, he relived the adventures of his authentic father, and finally rescued the kidnapped father from the danger of kidnapping. The plot looks so familiar-in reality, it is almost a true portrayal of Activision in its rebirth: it inherits the struggle and progress of the company's startup, and once again challenges the unknown in an ambitious spirit.

"A trap! The series has become an important force for the company to take off in the new period and the rebirth period of Activision, and it also leads the forefront of the era with its excellent production level. After that, with the "call of Duty" series, Activision has gradually become the world's top game developer, but "trap!" "the glory of this IP has not been able to continue.

In 1998, the full 3D platform action game "Trap 3D: distant Jungle" (Pitfall 3D: Beyond the Jungle) was released on PS with a mediocre response. In 2004, Trap: the lost Expedition (Pitfall: The Lost Expedition) was released on PS2, XBOX and NGC with mixed reviews, and the IP has not been heard from since.

Until 2012, "Trap! On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the first generation, Activision recalled that it had such a jungle adventure-themed IP at home. At that time, when "Temple Run" was popular all over the world, Activision invited Pitfall Harry to do an endless mobile game of running cool. This time, the new generation of players holding mobile phones may have few people know the glory of the protagonist Pitfall Harry in the old days.

The game uses a bizarre double charging model: you have to pay in advance to buy the game in the store, and there are props in the game. Because the cost of customs renewal is really too expensive, market data open high and low, falling rapidly, it can be seen that IP feelings in the end or can not be eaten is also in 2012, "trap!" Father David Klein launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. He wants to raise 900000 dollars to develop the trap! The spirit of the sequel "Jungle Adventure", but until the end of the project, only raised 31207 US dollars, the whole crowdfunding ended badly. I don't blame players for not buying it, it's really not enough for players to spend so much money on IP. After all, after all, there is only one Bobby Cortec after all these years.

1983, "Trap! On the night of the first anniversary of the sale, the movement was regarded as a trap! "and" bang! A birthday party was held. "our games celebrate their birthdays, but they are always young and fresh." Activision declared, "Why aren't they out of date? because we build everything on original and exquisite design, rather than blindly chasing fashion. This makes our game a classic forever."

I just don't know if Activision, which is now mired in all kinds of storms, will one day think of that night in 1983.

This article is from the official account of Wechat: game Research Society (ID:yysaag), author: White Fox

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