Moonbase Alpha: That time NASA made a meme video game | Hacker News Reader

Moonbase Alpha: That time NASA made a meme video game

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112 pointstodsacerdoti58 comments

Wow, I can see how many people would find this to be a very boring game but it looks amazing to me. Sad that I missed its golden age.

In case anyone wants to play around with DECtalk without downloading the game, there's https://webspeak.terminal.ink/

This took me on a DECTalk rabbithole.

- Here's a web version (with backend): https://webspeak.terminal.ink/

- Steam thread: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=91936...

- "Modern" codebase and builds: https://github.com/dectalk/dectalk/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1B488z1MmaA

The final song in that one is so subtly sophisticated; check out the underlying text. For example, to get it to sing "it doesn't matter now" the user types "tdah zih ntmae trr nnaw"; they're providing the phonetic sounds of every word rather than the words themselves, presumably because it produces better output and it allows them to change tone in the middle of words.

huehuehuehuehuehue john madden john madden

I'm not sure why but that is one of the funniest things I've ever seen on the internet.

My wife and I still say this to each other all the time

Mamma mia

Pappa pia

Baby got a

I got a chance to sit in briefly with Khal and the developers for a few weeks at their company while I was a naive and hapless high-school student going into post-secondary, during the development of this game. Their dev studio was tiny, like 4 or 5 people at the time. It was interesting to get some exposure to professional game development at that time in my life, because I was maybe 17, playing WoW and various RTS titles, which gave them a chance to ask me what I thought of it and what makes good games in general.

I recall probably not seeming so enthusiastic for many of the same reasons I don't understand why people play Star Citizen now, there just didn't seem to be any compelling gameplay loop or reason that it would be more intrinsically interesting than any other game or any other source of media on Space. If you were already a Space enthusiast and looking for Space games, I imagined it might be another thing to play with, but they and Nasa seemed at the time to hope that it was going to spur that interest, almost like if bureaucrats wanted to make a rollerblading game to get people interested in being active, even though it would have taken a miracle to resurrect what had already become unpopular. As in, if you don't have an interest in space, it would take a miracle to make a sufficiently compelling game, especially setting out to build an MMO, especially with a small budget, and relatively dated sdk, to capture the attention of kids who already had endless options. It was a grand vision that seemed unlikely to be captured, and I guess I was hoping I was wrong.

Aside from all that, it looked like a challenging and compelling project from the development perspective, probably a good learning opportunity for the team, it must have pushed them pretty hard. I appreciated being welcomed into their Space despite certainly impairing their productivity, and I hope they've continued on to other ambitious projects since.

Here is my favorite one: https://youtu.be/aFbuSShYKpc

Obligatory John Madden song clip showing off the speech to text engine: https://youtu.be/ovcTKHupdxo?si=Qh_nsYmkGtwcxrMR

John Madden? John Madden!

What do you mean, 'meme video game'? Played this for weeks with friends in Mumble to climb the (time-trial) leader boards. As always lots of fun + lots of being angry on the person who fumbled the third run in a row (me, most of the times).

Id say "a game that became a meme" to be much more of an apt description

Ben Bova wrote a book: "Welcome to Moonbase."

I purchased that as a kid, in a souvenir shop, on our way out of Cape Canaveral. We were there specifically to see the Space Shuttle slow-crawl to it's launchpad destination. I never got to see a shuttle take off first hand.

That book, though, began a life-long love of space and all things unexplainable.

I love space, science, and the unknown. That love all comes down to a childhood fascination with the Space Shuttle program, and Ben Bova opening my childish mind to the idea of life on the moon, and how different everything would be.

Thank you Ben Bova. And thank you NASA for daring to dream big. You've both made a lifelong friend.

Bad TTS is like an inverse uncanny valley where it's so inhuman it's charming.

Spent years playing this game. It is the closest thing I've seen to real time chess. Also excellent soundtrack that sets the mood.

EDIT: whoops I thought this was moonbase commander, another NASA sponsored game from another time.

> real time chess

That would describe Crypt of the NecroDancer.

Another one is the Microsoft Sam (& co) speech synthesis, it can also produce funny results, like someone making copter sounds with it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_vNhLYW_e4

Bah, thought this was related to the classic UK TV series Space:1999.

Moonbase Alpha was the location where the TV show “Space: 1999” was set.

First episode saw the moon permanently leave Earth orbit.

There was another Simcity-like game called Moonbase for DOS: https://www.mobygames.com/game/25993/moonbase/

my ri-tuh pony my ri-tuh pony la la la

johnmaddenjohnmaddenjohnmadden

kick it in the front seat

here comes another chinese earthquake ebrrrbrbrrbrrbr

somewhere, deep in my soul, I heard:

"JohnMaddenJohnMaddenJohnMaddenJohnMaddenJohnMaddenJohnMaddenJohnMaddenJohnMadden"

"uuuuuUuuuuUuuuuuuUuuuuuuUuu"

aeiou

uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

> which tasked the company with working on updates for "America's Army," the 2002 first-person shooter

30 seconds

Ahhh so they're the ones who made that game less realistic and more modern shooter-y. Which I have no doubt is exactly what they were asked to do, because the original AA game was slow and a lot of people hated it compared to ut or cs1.6

Shame though, it was the only game that kinda had that level of realism, with "rifle from prone while waiting can hit you at 400+ yards, but if you're running around you struggle making hits under 100 yards" that encouraged very methodical play with teamwork and spotting.

I still remember sitting through a legitimate field medic first aid course before unlocking the medic class. That game was something else!

It was finances by the army as a recruitment tool and to save on training costs, that's why

If you want realistic they should have put IEDs and PTSS in it.

The Netherlands now has to spend 5% of GDP on the military which is doable- recruiting fools is the hard part in a country with free university and a functioning welfare system.

IIRC the sniper course in AA had IED disposal (via anti material rifle) in it as one of the major components for passing.

But yea it was very much a rah-rah-go-Army game, nothing about the aftermath.

Glad to know I was a fool for ever joining the military...

I remember sitting in the prison...

I felt so cool after passing Sniper School, then you could pick that role in matches.

The training course to sneak past behind enemy lines for the SF role was the hardest, lol.

> Shame though, it was the only game that kinda had that level of realism, with "rifle from prone while waiting can hit you at 400+ yards, but if you're running around you struggle making hits under 100 yards" that encouraged very methodical play with teamwork and spotting.

The original Ghost Recon came out the year before, and the Delta Force series was already well underway. I recall enduring the interminable mandatory training of America's Army, just to discover that it was a flashier, gamey-er version of games I was already playing.

In fairness, I think you can definitely see AA's impact on the design of e.g. Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter on the PC, but hilariously (and true to form) when ArmA came out in 2006, its clear they took not one cue about how to build a playable game.

Fair, I guess I never played Ghost Recon

I do remember winning a lot of AA games without ever even taking out my rifle, and just using binoculars and telling all my teammates (who were lying in bushes for minutes not moving) where people were moving.

Wasn’t ArmA the successor to Operation Flashpoint?

Yes. Operation Flashpoint was made by Bohemia Interactive and published by Codemasters, with BI owning the code but Codemasters owning the trademark. When the companies went their separate ways (iirc there was some drama, but can't remember about what), BI had to rename the next installment of the game series.

Operation Flashpoint having also been spun off into “VBS” (Virtual Battlespace Systems) a military combat simulator whose first client/user was incedentally the USMC. So AA’s was probably arguably the first mainstream (from the heavy promotion and the fact it was free, something out of the ordinary for an “AAA Game” at the time) “realistic shooter”, but certainly not the first.

OF was great, i'd spend hours in the editor just making custom scenarios.

Doesn't the ARMA series at least support that level of realism?

Could snipe people at 2km+ in arma 2.

Which is also (arguably not easily) doable IRL. The most realistic part of it surely being the pacing and “tactical” aspects of it.

At those distances there's a lot more involved in shots than just bullet drop/gravity, which AFAIK is all that ARMA models.

AA3 was my first shooter, and it was slowed down a lot compared to AA2 (then AA4 sped things back up) and I haven't been able to find anything quite like it since. Some of those maps were incredible

That team also did a helicopter flight simulator at the Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville (IIRC the devs were at Redstone Arsenal?) that I saw once and was surprisingly in depth. Required 2 players, one of whom would be the gunner and the other would be the pilot, complete with stick, collective, and pedals. A far different experience than helicopters in video games at the time

I loved how slow that game was, my favourite map was the bridge one, before they added the ridge so you could circumvent the bridge as a chokepoint.

aeiou aeiou

brbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbr

-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv6RbEOlqRo

This video (on top of stuff like YouTube Poops) did an insane amount of damage to my sense of humor growing up.

John Madden

football

I hope Elon or someone creates a moon base called aeiou

anyone tried putting his kids name into the DecTalk?

Elon? That trust fund oligarch who bought twitter and was throwing around Sieg Heils on stage at donalds's inauguration?

The one teaching his nazi AI to lie about "wHiTe GeNoCiDe? That dickhead elon?

That was what it was like

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