We have the wonderful recent project of [Throaty Mumbo] to recreate and reimagine the forgotten world of VHS tape-based video games. Wait, what? Yes, back when computer graphics were more primitive, there were attempts to blend the gameplay of video games with the graphics of a video cassette. Take the Action Max System. It worked with a light gun that pointed at the screen while the video played, and you tried to shoot at things as they flew by. thinking Duck Huntbut in gorgeous VHS video quality with cheesy acting, and the same game loop every time, because it’s on tape.
The unauthorized Control-Vision VHS game system, developed with none other than Steve Wozniak, took the idea a bit further and simultaneously output sub-videos, and your actions would choose which of the sub-tracks were playing at any given time. This lets them do things like switch between videos depending on whether you caught the bad guys or missed them entirely, for example.
However, these games came in the late 1980s, and they were all derivatives of the seminal Dragon’s Lairwhich is probably the least fun video game I’ve ever had the chance to play, but in a strange way among the most entertaining. Instead of a linear VHS tape, Dragon’s Lairand the later but equally unplayable Space Acewere based on the then new video disc technology, which could be exchanged almost seamlessly between completely different tracks.
“Almost” is the key word here. Although the animations were absolutely wonderfully cartoony, and looked impressive in an arcade versus video games of the time, there was a significant fraction of a second delay between commanding an action with the joystick and the machine switching to the correct track. There were several sections where back-to-back actions were required, and the challenge was to work around the game’s exact track-swapping glitch time. As good as they looked, the gameplay was no fun.
But the game was influential, as evidenced by its VHS-based clones. If you want to try it, you will not be surprised to hear that there is an emulator for Dragon’s Lair and his spin-started games.
What do all these have to do with each other? We love how these games took a current technology – in this case video discs or video tapes – and tried to make it something different: these games were all hacks. If you look at them in that light, maybe you can look past the horrible action Night stairs or the frustrating glitches and Dragon’s Lair. (Or maybe not. Give me Robotron: 2084 every day.)