Classic Game Postmortem: 'Q*bert' [video] | Hacker News Reader

Classic Game Postmortem: 'Q*bert' [video]

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http://www.gooddealgames.com/interviews/int_David%20Thiel.ht... has a better description of Q*Bert's cussing than minute 35 of the video:

MT: You came up with the idea of using the random phonemes of a speech chip to make Q*Bert speak gibberish. How and why did you arrive at the idea and decision?

David Thiel: Out of frustration. Reactor was my first audio task for Gottlieb. Management insisted that I use the Votrax [phoneme generating chip]. For development there wasn't anything more than a list of Votrax phonemes, a dictionary and assembly code. I spend two days trying to get the Votrax to say "10000 Bonus Points". I would try it out on people as they walked through the lab. After hearing it they would say "What are Bogus Points"? Chris Brewer who was providing tech support for me made the offhand remark about feeding the Votrax random phonemes. I programmed a test and I loved the results. Within that week I saw the Q*Bert character hopping around and I told Warren, "Boy, have I got something for you".

MT: Many players still swear that they occasionally hear Q*Bert say naughty things. Can you finally put to rest the rumor that Q*Bert states nothing specific other than "Hello, I'm turned on" when the coin-op is powered up and "Bye-bye" at the end of a game?

DT: Hello and Bye-bye are the only deterministic phonemes fed to the Votrax in Q*Bert, other than the "ahhhhhhhhh" when Q*Bert goes off the pyramid. There was a Q*Bert in the cafeteria which talked during the attract mode. One day I am sure that I heard it say "Radio Shack". For the record: no profanity is programmed into phoneme stream in the Q*Bert sound program.

He talks a bit about the psuedo-random generator [1] they used, including showing some code, but doesn't mention how the seed is set. Given this is an 8088 and in 1982, I guess there isn't a RTC and they wouldn't use persistent storage for that, so the seed is going to be taken based on startup ticks or something like that -- does anyone know?

If you were to plug in the cabinet and record it, is it going to make the identical sounds every time? (and if not, why not? that implies some external source of randomness)

[1] https://youtu.be/FhkLfz0GKYU?t=1607

Well, the Q*bert Instruction Manual, top of page numbered "17", shows Vbattery powering two "Scratch Pad Memory" RAM chips. This is typically where the "High Scores" are stored in anticipation of your local arcade shutting down for the night; and who knows, maybe the random number seed / state is in there, too.

http://pdf.textfiles.com/manuals/ARCADE/K-R/Q-Bert%20(Scan%2...

A lot of games I worked on kept a running counter in RAM and then seeded the PRNG when a coin was inserted. That was random enough.

Very interesting. Now I want to listen to Q*bert and see what the random phonemes come up with.

Uniformly random phonemes would occasionally "say naughty things". But "Radio Shack"? That's 8 phonemes, and rather unlikely (1 in 44^8 if the chip supported all 44 English phonemes).

All you need to hear is ay + oh + ack in that order, not necessarily together, and your brain will probably do the rest.

We've spent decades explaining this to people that hear messages in records when played backwards and it still needs repeating.

My iPhone acts like I said “hey Siri” sometimes when I just said something else with “ey” followed by “ee”. That's a machine of course, but I don't think humans are much better.

You don't even need to play them backwards! "Excuse me while I kiss this guy!"

Surely it would be that unlikely if the machine was located in a Radio Shack, otherwise it has entire dictionary and encyclopedias worth of phoneme jumbles to potentially arrive at?

True, there are a lot of meaningful 8 phoneme phrases. Maybe a million? Then the odds of hitting any of them would be about (10^6)/(44^8) or about one in fourteen million.

But close matches like "Rahdio Shack", "Radio Shahck", "Adio Shack", etc for all those phrases might occur more often than one in a million.

I use Q*bert for AI Pedagogy! It's very easy for kids to understand that a human player might not be able to make it to level 99, but an agent can. And they grok the concepts of game state space expansion, pathfinding and rewards easily. Even 10 year olds can be introduced to pretty advanced algos: expectimax, gridworld and deep q learning (as far as they can be expected to understand at 10). But, it's really the joy at playing a classic that delivers. No battling with interfaces. Just pure fun ready to dive right in with minimal prompting ;)

https://archive.org/details/arcade_qbert

Speaker references Caveman, the first pinball / video game hybrid:

https://pinside.com/pinball/machine/caveman

Interested to see if this still works … hey the one from https://www.tiktoksworkshop.com/ in Bremerton, WA will be at the pinball convention this weekend so I’ll find out:

https://www.nwpinballshow.com/

c.1984 my older brother worked in a Baskin-Robbins that had an video game standup console clone of Q*bert. I don't recall the publisher, but was the same exact game, except instead of Q*bert, the character controlled was a rabbit that made a hilarious sound when if it fell off the pyramid, sort of like a Popeye laugh, "ug ug ug ug ug."

Just based on the name it was probably Rabbit Transit:

https://www.giantbomb.com/qbert/3030-20782/similar-games/

Rabbit Transit was an Atari 2600 game that is similar in theme to but not really the same as q*bert (I don’t think anything that isn’t an isometric pyramid would be “exactly the same”) - also there are no sounds other than beeps and bloops basically coming out of a 2600.

He mentioned the Q*bert Coloring Book:

http://mirrors.arcadecontrols.com/arcade/qbert_coloringbook....

Not mentioned in the talk, among the onslaught of media and merchandise following the success of the game was "Q*bert's Quazy Questions". It was one of my most treasured books as a kid because of the cute illustrations and heavy cardboard pages. The jokes are only superficially related to the game, of course.

http://mirrors.arcadecontrols.com/arcade/qbert_questions.htm

It is kind of hilarious to have a little story suitable for kids that stars a character whose one defining characteristic is "constantly swears".

"!%##", said Q*Bert. "What a lovely day".

For more vids like this, check out https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/

Warren obviously downplays his work after Gottlieb/Ratslime* because this talk is about Q*Bert but it's worth watching the documentary Insert Coin about the technology he was helping to develop at Williams/Bally/Midway in the years afterward.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1OXgCmOvbQ

The digitization of live actors wasn't completely novel but definitely helped accelerate a generation of iconic arcade titles in the 1990s.

(* I had heard the story about "Mylstar spelled backwards is Ratslym!" from others in the business and nobody could remember who it was but Warren admits it was him and that's awesome.)

I'll plug his book here, then:

https://warrendavisshop.square.site

(scroll down a bit)

It's a fun read and it goes into depth on the later games. I bought an autographed copy for myself before the GDC video was available and was surprised to learn about his impact on the later Williams games. I hadn't made that connection before.

I watched this video yesterday. I laughed at loud at the rat slime part.

Great postmortem.

Also somehow I was never aware of the Q*Bert cartoon. I’m not surprised they tried it, or that it’s… not good. Just that I’d never heard of it before.

That was great to watch.

I felt very nostalgic throughout the whole thing, remembering playing this on my PC. Only qbert himself didn't look exactly familiar. I couldn't find in Wikipedia any mention of the PC port. After some digging, turns out I never played qbert but j-bird. I remembered liking the game sound, I guess the sound of j-bird has nothing to do with the original.

j-bird: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWn-XCx7W6A

There's also a pretty silly but amusing film, "Pixels" that was on Netflix sometime ago, might still be there but this also has Q-Bert hopping about in it. It's a recommended watch even if only once ...

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