Falae pessoal:
Olha o que eu achei!
Desculpem pela formatacao maluca do texto, mas isso eh um resultado
de um rapido copy and paste
Seeya
---------------------------
Bob Harris And The Secret Of The Killer Bees
Special thanks to Bob Harris for this great game and for answering all
of my questions!
Thanks to Thomas Becker, who discovered some of the cheat codes "in
those days"!
Deutsche Version
The secret of the Killer Bees
Interview with Bob Harris
Killer Bees Flyer
I really don't know where to start, hmm, I think here: Well, on October
21, 1996 I received a letter from
German Thomas Becker, in which he tells me about two cheat codes for
the Philips G7000 game "Killer
Bees". One of these key combinations showed the initials of the
programmer on the screen, the other
allowed to play the game in slow motion, though without counting
scores.
In 1996 there was no CCC website yet, the Classic Consoles Club was a
"normal" club with paper magazine.
As we were constantly looking for contributions of our members,
including tips and tricks, Thomas, a
confirmed G7000 fan (like me ;-), sent us those cheats.
And this was a real sensation for me! At the beginning of the Eighties
there were some hidden features in
some Atari games, so-called "Easter Eggs", for example the second cave
system in Pitfall 2. But it was
somewhat quite new, that there were cheat codes for the "conservative"
G7000!
Thomas, as a big fan of Killer Bees, had found the cheat codes
(probably in 1984) by accident. Right away
he informed the "Commander ROM Club" about his discovery, the official
German G7000 club at that time.
They found it "quite interesting" there, but did not publish anything
in the Commander ROM club magazine.
So the cheats slumbered, hidden from the world of video games, more
than a decade in Thomas' drawer,
until he sent them to me at the end of 1996.
When I got Internet access in March 1997 and the first Classic Consoles
Club website went on-line, I soon
found also other interesting websites engaged in classic video games
generally and in the Odyssey2 or
Philips G7000 particularly. In my opinion the best site is still
www.videopac.com by Carl J. Gade. (Strange
that this site cannot be attained for some time. If you enter this URL,
you reach the website of the provider
Vestfoldnett, and Carl does not answer any eMail ... anyone knows what
happened to this Videopac site?)
Carl was looking for tricks and cheats for Videopac games. So I sent
him an eMail with the two cheat codes,
which he published on his site immediately.
It was the 10th of May 1999, when I received an eMail from a certain
"Bob Harris". Reference was only "Killer
Bees". He had found our cheat codes on Carl's site and found this quite
interesting. "I am the author of Killer
Bees" he wrote ... and I almost fell from my chair!!! Bob wrote that
there are a couple other modes, but he
does not recall the particular key combinations. Well, I hadn't ever
switched on my G7400 so fast!
After approximately an hour I had found out all of the codes and Bob
confirmed and explained them to me.
There are two types of codes:
1.
Some cheats are activated by pressing and holding down a certain
key, additionaly hitting and
releasing the RESET key, and finally releasing the first key.
Thereby the game restarts of course,
but in the respective cheat mode.
1 and RESET
The game is executed in slow motion, but without
counting scores. This mode
was used for debugging while development. But it also
helps the player in
learning the game ;-)
2 and RESET
The player's swarm of bees is prevented from ever
dying, this means that the
enemy swarms cannot harm it. In this mode the game
also doesn't count
scores.
5 and RESET
The same as 1 and RESET.
6 and RESET
The same as 2 and RESET.
? and RESET
"BEES BY ROSHA" is displayed instead of the scoring.
ROSHA is the
nickname of RObert S HArris. This key combination has
no further effect on
the game.
2.
The remaining functions are activated by entering a certain
character as high score identity at the
end of the game. Most of these functions will show a three character
code after that. These are the
initials of the people in the Odyssey2 games group at that time (the
credits so to speak), but they
have no effect on the game. Bob Harris doesn't recall having done
that, but it doesn't surprise him
;-) ... Very interesting in any case is the last of these functions!
+
"RLC" is displayed and stands for Robert Cheezem. He
converted European
"Stone Sling" to "Smithereens", worked on "Type And
Tell".
-
"SRO" is displayed and stands for Sam Overton. He had
been in the first
Odyssey group in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Sam wrote most
of the sports games,
and some others. He was brought back from Milton
Bradley to head the
second Odyssey group. Sam hired Bob HArris from
Milton Bradley.
*
"JMB" is displayed and stands for Jim Butler. He also
worked at Milton
Bradley. He wrote (or converted) "Acrobats", and
wrote "Turtles". Jim became
head of the group when Sam left.
/ (Division sign)
"AWP" is displayed and stands for Alan Pearson. He
was technician of the
team.
.
"REX" is displayed and stands for Rex Battenberg. He
wrote some good
games, but none of them ever got released. Rex is the
only member of the
team who had arcade experience, having written "Space
Dungeon" for Taito.
?
"RSH" is displayed and stand for Robert S Harris.
=
A very interesting function, that shows how Bob was
ahead of his time! After
hitting this key a three character code will be
shown, which is created by an
algorhythm, depending on the score. This was intended
to be a high score
verification feature. Instead of sending in a photo
of the high score (i. e. for a
contest), which could easily be faked, the idea was
that the player would
send in the score and the corresponding code. The
marketing department
never understood the concept, so it was never used.
Bob was so kind to give us an interview!
Bob Harris "in those days"
Bob, this is really an honour for me! After Ralph Baer (btw: do you
know him personally?) who
contacted me some months ago you are the second genius of the classic
home video games scene
who contacted me!
I do not know him. I didn't join the Odyssey group until the end of
'81. This was the second Odyssey games
group, after Magnvox had shut down the first games group a year or so
earlier. I know Ralph Baer was
involved in Odyssey1, but I don't know if he had any involvement in
Odyssey2.
I'm certainly not on a level with him. He was an innovator. I wrote a
couple of games.
We all enjoyed the game 15 years ago and we still enjoy the game!
Killer Bees is a fantastic fast action
game for the Odyssey2 and Philips G7000 and one of the best games for
this system! Congratulations
and thanks for giving us this one!
I think what made the game is that it is faster paced than the other
Odyssey games, and had some features
the others didn't have.
Many of the other games locked the characters into a maze, and I let
the character move around at will.
Other objects in the game had gradual accelaration, rather than only
one or two speeds. Death (of
opponents) was a gradual thing, as opposed to an event (even your own
death is gradual but a lot of people
didn't notice that). Scoring that used kind of a pinball bonus system.
Killer Bees must have been one of the very first video games with cheat
codes, especially on the
Odyssey2 and Philips G7000, where these things didn't exist at all!
Still a sensation for me!
The arcade games had them at this time, I'm pretty sure. Probably some
other home games did, too. The
higher ups frowned upon this sort of thing. The rom space was so small
(I think it was 4 KB) that usually
your were trying hard to cram stuff into the space available. This kind
of stuff was usually seen as a waste of
space.
Do you know if there are cheats in other Odyssey2 or Philips Videopac
games?
Not too much that I know of. The higher ups really frowned on that kind
of thing. I don't know of any in anyone
else's games, but we usually kept that kind of thing secret.
War Room (ColecoVision) has some features turned on if you enter the
right sequence of cities. First you get
to see a breif resume of me. Then all the city names change to puns and
inside jokes. And an extra city
pops up in the ocean, which can provide you with an unlimited supply of
fuel.
By the way: All the codes work with both the US Odyssey2 version and
the European Philips
G7000/G7400 Plus version!
I'm not sure if the two cartridges are the same or not. When a European
game came to the states, there was
often significant reporamming necessary. This was mainly due to the
fact that the vertical retrace interval in
NTSC is much shorter than that in PAL. Most of the changing of screen
objects has to be performed suring
retrace, and when we got a game from Europe we often had to do some
work to get it to work in NTSC.
Usually the American games would work in the PAL system without
modification.
I was not even aware that the game was being sold in Europe until I
visited Eindhoven and a couple of the
people I met contratulated me on the game. The sad thing is that
Philips decided not to pay me royalties for
the European sales, due to their interpratation of my contract.
For me it's a further proof for the speed of this machine. I think the
speed in levels 20 and up wouldn't
be possible on an Atari 2600, Intellivision or Colecovision!?
That's not at all true. The speed is merely a consequence of moving the
objects longer distances in each
frame. Any of the systems is capable of that.
What I think made it work is that, in most games, the speed of objects
was usually a some whole number of
pixels per frame, usually only 1 or 2 ppf. In KB, the objects gradually
speed up, moving at, say 3/16 ppf, then
4/16, 5/16, and so un up to some high speed like 48/16 ppf. The eye
doesn't notice the gradual speed up
(unless your looking for it).
So, there's an illusion that the processor is running faster, but
that's not the case. If anything, the other
systems, especially the ColecoVision, were vastly superior to O2 in
terms of either graphics capability or
processing power, or both.
Where Odyssey had any advantage at all in hardware was in drawing mazes
any putting a few letters or
numbers on the screen. Those turned out not to be overly useful in the
market.
Did you also write other games for the Odyssey2 or Philips G7000?
Nimble Number NED, which I was not too thrilled about. I did the low
level technical work that allowed Type
and Tell to put up so many characters. I think that was about it. My
follow up after KB was to be called
"Clean Up Yer Act", but we moved on to ColeceoVision before that got
very far along.
Did you write other games for other classic systems?
War Room, which NAP released for ColecoVision.
Also, while at Milton Bradley, I was working on some Atari 2600 games.
But I took the job with NAP before
the 2600 project got very far along. I had helped reverse-engineer the
2600 at MB, and developed a few
graphics techniques. At Milton Bradley, I did also two cartridges for
the TI Home Computer. These were
"Hustle" and "Blasto". Both of these were arcade games which we
liscensed. I did not get to do much game
design here, but did add some rule changes for versions we played in
house.
Did you also participate at the European version of the game (Videopac
52+)? Did you draw the
background graphics of the + version?
No. As I mentioned above, I had no knowledge of the European release
until after the fact.
The background graphics were drawn by Ed Hensley. Ed was a graphic
artist in the Knoxville area (where we
were located). He did all the artwork for all the games we produced
(except for War Room, though I think he
did some of it).
The high resolution background graphics for the Philips G7400
(Odyssey3) were really drawn by a
team member in the USA? As the Odyssey3 never was released I thought
that the additional
background graphics for all the G7400 + versions of the games were
drawn by European employees
of Philips!?
We in the states never got to see or hear much about what went on in
Europe. For the most part, these were
two different teams that rarely met. When Magnavox pulled the plug in
the US, we didn't have any further
contact with the European group, at least I don't recall any.
Some of the graphics were done in the US. Killer Bees for certain, and
some others but I don't recall what
games we were preparing for both O2 and O3. FlashPoint would have been
another. If they produced more
games for the O3 in Europe, then they certainly must have done the
graphics for those in Europe.
(Editor's note: The background graphics of the G7400 + version and of
the Odyssey3 prototype of Killer
Bees are completely different. So it is to assume, that the background
graphics for the G7400 version have
been drawn in Europe. Refer to the O2 FAQ of Robert D. Kaiser.)
You mentioned two games that haven't been released, "Clean Up Yer Act"
and "Flash Point". Can you
tell us something about them? What happened with these two games? Have
they ever been finished?
In "Clean Up Yer Act", the player would have been a sweeper, moving
around a room, collecting trash for
points. This was supposed to be kind of a joke since other games had
you pick up nice things for points; in
this game the "treasures" would be things like coffee grounds, banana
peels, etc.
As you picked up the trash, you'd be chased by a broomstick. The
broomstick would get gradually faster,
until eventually you wouldn't be able to escape form it, and you'd have
to throw a dustball at it. The dustball
would temporarily stop it, AND split it into two broomsticks. The two
broomsticks would gradually get faster,
and the cycle continues. This was inspired somewhat by the Sourcerer's
Apprentice cartoon in Fantasia.
The player would progress from one room to another. First maybe the
kitchen (act I), then the living room (act
II), and so on. Might have been difficult to come up with enough
different rooms and trashes.
The only prototype involved a sweeper and some broomsticks running
around. I was working on the
"intelligence" of the broomsticks, and I wanted to see how they'd
behave. The best analogy is that of a flock
of birds or a school of fishes. Though I did accidentally discover an
interesting visual effect as the broomstick
could kind of wiggle left and right similar to a dog wagging its tail.
I think the prototype exists, but I doubt it
would be of much interest.
"Flash Point" was further along, but it required an Odyssey3. No
Odyssey2 version was to be made because
the game elements used the graphic capabilities of the O3. In fact, I
think Flash Point was pretty much fully
playable.
As I remember it, Flash Point was inspired by the activity level of
Rex's favorite arcade game, which was
Defender. I think he used both joysticks just the way Defender did (one
for movement, one for firing), so you
could shoot in one direction while running in another. You had a
variety of different types of enemies, each
with a specific behavior. The pace was frenetic (I loved it!).
I'm not sure why the Dutch group would not have marketed this after the
US group was snuffed out. Perhaps
it was because it was Odyssey3 only (did they ever market Odyssey3-only
games?), or maybe because you
needed something to hold the two joysticks together. Or maybe they
never even knew about it. Or, at the
time, they seemed to be more interested in slower moving games and the
pace of Flash Point may have
been too fast.
(Editor's note: Wow, "Clean Up Yer Act", another undiscovered Odyssey2
prototype!!! Well, referring "Flash
Point": Yes, at the end of the system's livespan Philips released two
games that were G7400-only - Videopac
59+ Helicopter Rescue and Videopac 60+ Transamerican Rally. So this was
probably NOT the reason why
"Flash Point" hasn't been released here in Europe. I think the problem
was that you had to use both
joysticks for the game. The Odyssey3 prototype has a built-in joystick
holder, but the G7400 hasn't!)
Speaking of visual effects: Is the title screen of Killer Bees
(triangle with the pulsating colors) a
company logo of you or does it mean something other?
(Chuckle) Interesting you should ask. One of my projects was to try to
see if there was any way to 'beat the
hardware' to see if we could get more impressive graphics out of it.
The Atari 2600 system was not designed
do to the kind of things people were doing with it, but because it was
a simple architecture, it turned out that
with a lot of work you could reuse objects several times on the screen
to get better graphics.
I did a lot of experiments with the O2 hardware to see what we could
do. The answer was not much. The
8048 was too slow. Plus the CPU instruction cycle was not an integer
divisor of the TV scan rate (at least
not in NTSC, I don't know about PAL). If it had been an integer
divisor, this would mean that we could use the
processor to change the background color on a particular instruction
cycle, and could have done some better
graphics. Since it was not an integer divisor, this meant we could not
hit the same pixel on each frame (it
was a four frame cycle).
Anyway, what I DID discover I could do was that triangle. We thought it
could be an attention grabber, that it
gave the illusion that the O2 could do some better graphics, and
probably would have used it in subsequent
games. But Killer Bees was pretty much the last O2 game our group
produced.
Are you/have you been employee of NAP/Magnavox or did you just write
the game and offer it to
them?
I was hired by Magnavox in '81, and worked for them until '88. They
pulled the plug on video games in '84
(maybe it was '85). Most of us worked on a self-contained word
processor called "The VideoWriter" after that.
You mentioned Milton Bradley before. Was MB related to Magnavox, as
Magnavox hired you from
MB? Did you start your career at MB? And did you work for MB after the
Odyssey project again? Did
Magnavox say "we need some programmers for the Odyssey2 project" to MB
and they sent them?
No connection between MB and Magnavox, except that three of us in the
Odyssey group had worked
together at MB.
I started at MB fresh out of college in '79. I had worked on a couple
other programming jobs during school,
though, so it'd be hard to say that's where my career started. I was
hired at MB to do programming related to
speech synthesis, but I saw (at my interview) they were working on
video games (for the soon to be released
TI home computer) and that was the clincher. I was only there two years
- the second year of which was
video game stuff.
Sam Overton had worked for Magnavox before coming to MB, and when he
returned to Magnavox, myself
and Jim Butler soon followed. It was a great opportunity - plus better
pay in a region where it was cheaper to
live.
You mentioned that Sam Overton wrote most of the Odyssey2 sports games.
I thought that most of the
(earlier) Odyssey2 games were written by Ed Averett? How could then Sam
Overton write most of the
sports games? Or was Ed leader of the first Odyssey2 games group and so
all the games are known to
be written by him? Do you still have contact to Ed?
Sam was a member of the original Odyssey programming group, and did the
lion's share of the early games.
Magnovox pulled the plug around '78, deciding that video games would
not help sell TVs(!).
As I understand it, Ed was the Intel rep that had sold the chips to
Magnavox (the chips for Odyssey). When
Magnavox pulled the plug, Ed began writing games himself, and got
Magnavox to produce them. So Ed wrote
most of the remaining games, and I would guess overall that he wrote
about half of all Odyssey games. If you
count them by sales, he probably did much more than half.
In other words, Ed had the forsight to see that video games could be
lucrative in their own right, while
Magnavox's goal was to use them to sell TVs. For example, when the
original Odyssey console (the
pong-like game) was introduced, I saw one in Sears, and wanted to buy
one. But the literature with the game
hinted that it would only work on a Magnavox TV. We didn't have a
Magnavox TV, so I didn't buy the game
console!
Anyway, Sam returned in '81 (with me soon on his heels). This was
shortly after Philips purchased the
Magnavox TV brand, as well as Sylvania and Philco, and set up a new
facility in Knoxville. They reopened
the games group, and Sam was brought in to head up the group. From '81
til the second plug pulling, we
wrote games, and Ed continued to write games. Sam was the only link
between the two games groups,
though possibly some of the group that designed the hardware might have
been retained.
If I knew where Sam was, I'd get you in touch with him. He'd be able to
fill in a lot more of the early details.
(Editor's note: In any case it is very interesting who did which game
for the Odyssey2 in its livespan. As soon
as my O2 collection is mostly complete, I will create a list, with
author, year, memory size, etc.)
Do you know Ed Averett personally? He programmed most of the O2/G7000
games, as you know.
Ralph Baer told me that he had contact with him shortly.
I met Ed several times during the Odyssey project. He lived in
Chattanooga at the time (I suspect he still
does). But I have not seen him since the end of the project. Ed's a
pretty nice guy, by the way.
Did you have special development kits for the Odyssey2? How did they
look like?
We had an Odyssey2 board set on a piece of plywood. We used HP 64000
devlopement/emulator systems
for most of the project. I think we would have been better off with a
PC and a simpler emulator. The HP
wasn't intended to be a general purpose computer, and it was quite
difficult to write the kind of little tools we
needed. And of course we each had a Magnavox TV in the office.
Maybe you could tell us something about programming video games in the
early 80s!?
Certainly a lot different than it is now!
First off, most games were a one man effort. You came up with an idea,
presented it to the brass, and then
wrote it. You'd get lots of suggestions along the way, but it was
pretty much your baby.
I remember that it was difficult to convince the brass at Odyssey to do
a game unless you were copying a
successfull arcade game. This says a lot about how the KC Munchkin case
came about.
And the hardware was not very sophistocated. Consumer electronics in
those days meant "make it as cheap
as you can".
Are you still writing computer/video games?
No. When Philips got out of the business in '84/'85 I considered other
companies. I discovered at that time
that most other programming jobs considered my game programming
experience as worthless (I'm not sure if
the industry would be any different today). That and the fact that most
of the game jobs were on the west
coast (and I didn't think I could afford to live there) convinced me to
switch to other programming.
Now I do embedded programming related to digital TV.
Do you still own an Odyssey2 system? Do you still play O2 games?
I have an O2 and a ColecoVision sitting in boxes in the closet. I have
not tried either of them out for years.
I'm really more into board games than video games these days. In the
late 80's when all the arcade games
seemed to be kick boxing variants, I stopped visiting the arcades. I
always was more of a strategy/logic fan
than shoot'em up games. My favorite arcade games were Centipede,
Robotron, and Qix. At one point I
purchased several used arcade games (Ropotron and Qix among them), and
played these quite a bit.
I do have a Nintendo system (not Super Nintendo) and a game boy. Even
with these, I got rather disillusioned
because it was hard to find good games. Not that good games weren't
available, just that some many games
were available and it was hard to know which were any good. Often, it
seemed, the controls were poorly
implemented (a good example of this is Tetris for Nintendo, which does
not play as well as Tetris on my
Mac). Mostly I play Dr. Mario while riding an exercise bike. Sometimes
I'll play some logic-type games on
my Mac. But usually I spend more time creating stuff for my own
enjoyment.
Many thanks for answering all these questions, Bob! I hope we didn't
bother you, but it is so
fascinating having contact to the people who wrote our favourite games
in those days!
It's no bother. It's like bringing back a past life.
-- Sincerely, ___ _ _ _ /\ /\/\ /\ \_ \ (_)| `| | / \ / \/ \ / / _ | \ | / ( / \( / /_ ! !| | \____\_/\/\_/___\___)!_!|_|\_| at sum dot desktop dot com dot brRecebida em Tue 30 Nov 1999 - 15:58:49 BRST