The Invention of Battlezone (2022)

On my first job, I did some field service work. I was 17 and it was 1979. Asteroids appeared in arcades that year, but I had become unbeatable at Space Wars (released in 1977) by then. The Battlezone video game was released in 1980.

One day I visited a computer lab at the Northrop plant (before the Grumman merger) in Hawthorne, CA to upgrade some hardware. (This location later became the SpaceX headquarters up until they moved to Texas six months ago.) While in the lab, I saw an F18 cockpit mock up connected to a flight simulator with a vector display. The computer running it looked like an HP1000 (2100). While chatting with the nerds in the lab about it, they offered me a chance to fly in it. I got in, took off, and flew around for a while until I flew past the simulation boundary and it crashed. After they reset it, I flew a bit more and then tried a landing on the simulated 10,000 foot runway. I managed to land without crashing into the tank they had placed in the middle of the runway.

I saw a very similar looking tank a few years later when I first played Battlezone. I always wondered if one of the Battlezone developers had "borrowed" the 3D model for it from Northrop.

https://www.retrogamedeconstructionzone.com/2020/04/battlezo...

Here's a much longer interview about the development process with photos of the Army Battlezone cabinet:

https://romchip.org/index.php/romchip-journal/article/view/1...

We take games for granted now, but in the early 80s the anticipation of what might be possible was something else. The War Games scene where the magazine ad for an unannounced game motivates Broderick's character to start wardialing all the phones in Sunnyvale felt pretty reasonable.

If you read sci-fi, it's akin to the imaginative feelings of space travel and futuristic realities. Back then it was reasonable to imagine that an upcoming game might shift your life into a higher gear.

If you liked Battlezone back in the day, you can't miss its more modern incarnation: BZFlag.

https://www.bzflag.org/

Fully Open Source, damn fun, with lots of servers, maps, and different play modes. Unfortunately the community shrank over the years, and it would benefit a lot from more regular players. Want to take a peek? Then don't miss the 1st 2025 event which is due today at 3 pm EST / 20 UTC. You can login as an observer to watch games, but if you want to play you need to register first at bzflag.org.

Related. Others?

The Invention of Battlezone (1982) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30295688 - Feb 2022 (49 comments)

BattleZone original source here:

https://github.com/historicalsource/battlezone/tree/main

A couple years ago I wrote a battlezone clone in C using fixed point math on an rp2040 for a computer security conference badge[1]. Then I noticed I could compile C to webassembly and SDL2 was supported, so I extracted the battlezone code from the badge code, ported it to use SDL2 and made it work (mostly) in the browser[2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWZriUMNpLc

[2] https://github.com/smcameron/browzer-tanx

> If he had the game to do over again with today’s technology, Mr. Rotberg said, he would change it even more: instead of a monochrome display, a color vector display could be used, and newer microprocessors and cheaper memory could add realism and complexity.

Considering this article was published in 2022, this design mindset just feels...well, twenty years outdated (alongside N64 discontinuation circa 2002)?

Hadn't even thought about until now, but the initial distribution pivot from carts to optical media must have really changed how the proverbial game was played on both development and business fronts.

EDIT: Just noticed that the article was originally published in 1982...missed that context cue.

> This article was first published as "Battlezone: war in 3-D." It appeared in the December 1982 issue of IEEE Spectrum as part of a special report, “Video games: The electronic big bang.”

I absolutely loved Battlezone when it hit the arcades/chip shops, and probably spent about $500 on it in my youth .. it was one of those games (alongside Defender and Crazy Climber) that I’d spent money on almost robotically, instead of just saving so I could have bought my own computer. I’d probably have gotten one sooner (1980 instead of 1983) if I’d thought about that, grr..

Anyway, the computer I did end up getting (kicking off a career) was the Oric-1, a relatively obscure and underrated machine that is still getting software written for it. In fact, it got a Battlezone port, which is detailed right here:

https://forum.defence-force.com/viewtopic.php?p=30836

The author of that port abandoned the project because of feeling ‘disgusted’ at the design limit they’d imposed, regarding a short distance of objects - I wonder if, in light of the details revealed in this article about how the vector engine renders object at least a half-screen extra on each side of the physical screen, they’d reconsider the flaw, and return to the project… I’ll suggest it to them, anyway, because I love the Oric and I love Battlezone: its just one of those wonderful bits of immersive software that has so much nostalgia wrapped up in it.