Tempest (video game)

Tempest is an arcade game released by Atari, Inc. in October 1981 and designed and programmed by Dave Theurer. The player controls a claw-shaped ship that circles the rim of a geometric tube, drawn in perspective on a color vector display, and fires down the tube at enemies that climb up it from the far end. A dial turns the ship, there is a button to fire and a second for the Superzapper, and the game has 99 skill levels.^[1][2] It is one of the two games named in the design brief of the planned game Poop of the Gods by Molecular Reality Corporation.

The playfield is a wireframe figure whose edge is divided into lanes. There are sixteen such shapes, closed rings among them and open planes with ends. On a ring the ship can circle the rim without stopping, and on a plane it is held between the ends. It moves from lane to lane along the near edge, and enemies come up the lanes toward it.^[1]

The game has seven kinds of enemy, introduced in turn. Flippers appear on the first level and turn over and over as they climb, then jump from lane to lane once they reach the rim. Tankers appear on the third level and split into flippers when shot. Spikers, from the fourth, lay spikes along a lane that the ship must avoid when it dives down the tube at the end of the level. Fuseballs, from the eleventh, and pulsars, from the seventeenth, are the others; a pulsar electrifies its lane at intervals, and a ship in that lane when it does so is destroyed.^[1]

The Superzapper is a weapon that can be used twice on each level. The first use destroys every enemy on the playfield. The second destroys one enemy chosen at random. It has no effect on enemy shots, on spikes, or on enemies that have not yet entered the playfield.^[1]

The game was among the first to let a player begin on a level already reached. Atari called the feature SkillStep: a new game may start at a previously reached level if it is begun within thirty seconds.^[1][3]

Theurer, who had just made Missile Command, first meant to build a first-person version of Space Invaders and made something else.^[1] An Atari engineer remembered Theurer showing him a "round tube with these things coming up it" and saying that he did not know what they were; he may have mentioned a dream. In the first prototype the wireframe turned while the gunner stayed still, which made players ill, and the design was changed so that the ship moved. The game was called Aliens and then Vortex before the name Tempest was chosen shortly before production.^[1]

The game ran on a 6502 processor, with a co-processor, the Math Box, to do the arithmetic that drew the tube in perspective, and two POKEY chips for sound. Its monitor drew lines between points that the electronics specified, in color, instead of scanning a picture in rows.^[1][2]

Atari sold the upright cabinet in October 1981 at a list price of $2,295 and built 25,113 of them.^[1] The book Tempest: Geometries of Play (2015) places it among the games whose vector style influenced later films, television and games.^[3]

The memo Early Releases on Maxine's Quest gives the style of Poop of the Gods as "Tempest meets Qbert but with giant alien space-gods who poop".^[4] The company's Maxine's Quest draws a ring of 300 short lines around its arena, and its monsters travel inward from the ring to a pore at the center. No company source says whether Tempest shaped the layout. The company's zapper, a control that sends a brief high-voltage pulse across a pore, appears in its listing for the EDR4 amplifier as "Zapper (membrane break-in)".^[5]

• Q*bert
• Missile Command
• Atari 2600
• Space Invaders