The Making of Darius (1987) | Hacker News Reader

The Making of Darius (1987)

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This is my second favorite arcade game of all time (after Robotron 2084). FYI anyone in the Chicago area should stop by Galloping Ghost Arcade, they have a fully-functioning Darius cabinet (and cabinets of a couple sequels as well)

So few people in the Chicago area are aware that the largest classic arcade in the world by far is in their area (they have ~1000 cabinets)

The game can be completed on a single quarter if you're good (I admittedly never reached this milestone) and the game has a perfect balance of enemy waves and powerups. The musical score is definitely a masterpiece of early custom hardware fm synthesis compositions.

https://www.arcade-history.com/?n=darius&page=detail&id=585

I went fishing to find out why it was named Darius. (Nothing. It's the name of a planet targeted by a galactic empire in the game. lol) It piqued my interest since Japan also has a company named Mazda (both being ancient Persia themes). (Mazda's website says the name pick was a deliberate reference.)

Yeah, Japanese creatives have always (well, for decades) loved naming things random western words they don't really understand. Be glad when you get "Darius" instead of "Bravely Default."

Technically "Darius" is an Asian name, not a Western name, because Persia is in Asia. Persia has been in "Asia" much longer than Japan has!

Practically all of Asia is west of Japan anyway. So Persia is far, far west, and a part of ancient Western history along with Greece.

Persia, some of which is now Iran, is a part of Western history? Oh boy.

Would you say that Kazakhstan was part of the West? What about Volgograd? Was the Chelyabinsk Meteor part of western or eastern history?

Volgograd, née Stalingrad, was a site of a major battle of WWII, which makes it a part of Western history. That same logic makes the Japanese city of Hiroshima a major part of Westetn history, too. But these events are not yet a century old.

Wars between ancient Greece and ancient Persia are 25 or so centuries old. An excited description of the Persian emperor Cyrus by Xenophon, a Greek, is about as old; that book was a bestseller in Europe for several centuries. Persia interacted with the European West a lot.

Ancient Egypt is also a major part of Western history, for a really long list of reasons. (Arabian Egypt, not so much, of course.)

25 centuries - 2500 years - isn't that long ago. That's well into the Iron Age, with signs of early industrial processes - moulds and jigs for making iron tools and weapons - cropping up in some sites.

If you read history the answer is yes. So is Babylon, as a matter of fact. "West" is an offshoot of the Egyptian-Greek-Persian-Jewish cultural matrix, with themselves built on generous helping of Mesopotamian civilization.

Just adding that: That cultural matrix was a point of departure for Rome, and Rome (including the latter Roman Church) was an adaption of the above cultural matrix which then developed independently, distinctly, and now we know it as Western civilization. Western intellectual circles (from beginning) declared themselves from and for the Greeks, but more honestly considered, West is essentially a Roman affair. In any event, until the advent of Islam, there was continual and pervasive mingling of these core cultures and use of the shared language of Aramaic, going back to at least a thousand years before (circa ~500BC).

"West is essentially a Roman affair"? I don't think that's true at all; intellectually, Roman civilization was almost entirely sterile, appropriating the Hellenistic cultural heritage and then totally failing to progress for centuries, even backsliding in many ways. And, despite the importance of Aramaic, Greek was a much more important lingua franca, continuing to be so until the fall of Byzantium.

It's true that the division between the Eastern and Western Roman Empire created a new East/West divide approximately corresponding geographically to the old Greek/Persian divide.

If you read history, the original East/West split was Persia/Greece.

Strange then to find (~Greek) Gnostic writings that have the Pythagores and Zaratustra attending Babylonian seminars, with latter teaching the former 'astronomy'. Archaic, no doubt, but put yourself in the place of the reader (in the "West") at the time of the writing and ask youself: What "divide"? Political order differences? East Asia was and remains far more 'alien' to Iranians that Greeks. Note that the East Asians who do not have a dog in this fight, typically group us all together and don't make the distinction.

I don't think it's strange at all; dividing the world's people into two geographical groups doesn't imply the groups have no contact or interchange! It's well established historically, for example, that Egypt and Mesopotamia developed geometry long before the Greeks, and Pythagoras is said (by nominally historical accounts, intended to be more literaly factual than the Gnostic parables you're speaking of) to have studied in both places. Both Egypt and Mesopotamia were also part of the "East" for the Greeks until Hellenistic times, even though Cairo is geographically further west than Cyprus; maybe Cyprus was also "East"?

Also, to the Chinese, India was "the West". The famous novel Journey to the West is a fictionalized account of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang who traveled from China to India to bring back copies of Buddhist texts that had not yet reached China. And nobody doubts that Buddhism originally reached China from India ("the West").

I don't think "political order differences" makes sense as a distinguishing mark. Over the last 2500 years there's been theocracy, hereditary monarchy, various kinds of democracy, military dictatorship, etc., in both the East and the West, however you define them.

Also check out Parodius, Konami's self-parody "cute-em-up" (a wonderful subgenre that is a rabbit hole of its own):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parodius

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYgYHffJ6aQ

On of the most punishing games I've ever played. If you've lost your upgrades it's basically game over.

Pro tip: It's best not to lose your upgrades

I just give up the game as soon as I die once

I played Darius on an emulator recently and realized that the a particular bit of melody I've been singing in my head for decades came from this game.

That's a great site. Full of articles like this one.

If you are interested in material like this, you might like https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/

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