A bad port is a home version of a game that keeps the name and loses the point. The complaint is as old as home versions of arcade games. Players paid for the game they had queued for at the arcade, and took home something slower, smaller, uglier or simply different. In Britain in the late 1980s, when the biggest publishers built their release schedules around arcade licences, a poor conversion was the most common way a well-known game could let its buyers down.
The causes were rarely laziness alone. The home machines were far weaker than the arcade boards, the people converting a game usually could not see its program, and the licence came with a release date that would not move.
The pattern: Pac-Man on the VCS
Atari’s Pac-Man for the VCS, in the spring of 1982, set the template. Video Games reviewed it in its first issue that August: “Anyone who buys Pac-Man because they love the arcade game with the same name may wind up disappointed. Other than retaining the basic game concept, it bears few similarities to the ‘real’ Pac-Man.” The dots were dashes, the fruit was a square “vitamin”, and the music had gone. The ghosts flickered because the console could draw only one of them each frame, and by March 1983 the same magazine was calling it “Atari’s ‘Flickerman’”.
The hardware explains most of it. Tod Frye, who wrote it, told Edge in 1998 that “the first Pac-Man was developed with a 4K ROM by just one man in five months. This 4K ROM was the big problem.” It still sold in the millions. The disappointment it left behind fed the doubts that ran through the 1983 crash.
The British arcade-licence years
By the late 1980s British publishers such as US Gold were buying the home rights to arcade hits and releasing them on several formats at once. Some conversions were good. Many were reviewed as the arcade game’s poor relations.
- Out Run (US Gold, 1987). Amstrad Action found the Amstrad version had no engine noise at all, only “the beep of your tyres”, and decided that “as far as arcade conversions go this is probably one of the worst ever”. The second reviewer pointed out that the arcade soundtrack on the cassette in the box was “a poor excuse for shoddy programming”. The Commodore 64 version dropped the junctions where arcade players chose their route, which ACE had called “the heart of the Out Run experience”; instead the player picked one of five fixed routes before starting.
- Capcom’s Street Fighter (GO!, 1988), converted by Tiertex. Zzap!64 gave the Commodore 64 version 36%, complaining of “unnecessary additional loading and poor control response”, and called it “an unfortunately poor conversion of a very well received arcade game”.
- Street Fighter II on the Spectrum (US Gold, 1993). Your Sinclair liked the game but asked: “Twenty minutes of loading for five minutes of play?” Its verdict was that the “unforgivably poor loader has basically ruined a Megagame”.
ACE saw a deeper problem in the whole business. In a March 1988 editorial it argued that “the 10p-a-go design concept of arcade games spills over all too often into computer entertainment”, and that when “the big league companies seem to concentrate so strongly on arcade licenses and game formats we’ve a good reason to start feeling uneasy” (arcade culture).
Why conversions went wrong
The hardware could not do it
An arcade board was built for one game, with whatever chips that game needed. An 8-bit home computer had to do the same job with a general-purpose processor and a fraction of the memory. Amstrad Action’s reviewer said it directly about Out Run: “Eight bit computers just can’t handle this type of game in the same way that the arcade machines can and anyone expecting the excitement of the arcades will be sorely disappointed.” Large levels had to be split into parts and loaded from tape one at a time, which is where many of the complaints about loading came from.
No code to start from
The converters usually worked from the cabinet, not the program. Anthony Ball, who converted Mercs for the Amiga and Atari ST at Tiertex, recalled for a later history of US Gold that “the programmers had no access to the original arcade source code – the game had to be played over and over again in order to make the conversion accurate”. The arcade machine itself sat in the attic of Tiertex’s office, and Ball wrote a map editor that could link to a digitiser “so we could grab graphics from the arcade cabinet RGB signal”. A conversion was a reconstruction from watching and playing, so anything the converters did not notice, they could not copy.
Deadlines measured in months
The licences were bought to sell at a particular time, and the schedules followed. Ball defended his former employer this way: “A lot of people used to complain about Tiertex games, but when you think that virtually every one from Tiertex was coded and published within six months it’s pretty impressive.” In his view the speed was why Tiertex got the work: “Tiertex was very quick at arcade conversions.”
A caution about the reviews
Period scores are the best evidence for how a conversion was received, but they may not describe the game in the shops. Ball remembered that on Mercs “the magazines played easier versions of the game than were released. The game that came out was much harder than the review copy.”
Sources
- Video Games, vol. 1 no. 1, August 1982, pp. 74-75: review of the VCS Pac-Man. Vol. 1 no. 6, March 1983, p. 71: “Atari’s ‘Flickerman’”.
- Edge issue 58, May 1998, “Digital Disasters”, p. 78: Tod Frye on the 4K ROM and the five months.
- Amstrad Action issue 30, March 1988, pp. 46-47: Out Run review and second opinion.
- ACE issue 5, February 1988, p. 38: Commodore 64 Out Run review, the junctions and the five fixed routes.
- Zzap!64 issue 40, August 1988, pp. 28-29: Street Fighter review, 36%.
- Your Sinclair issue 87, March 1993, pp. 12-13: Street Fighter II review.
- ACE issue 6, March 1988, p. 5: editorial on arcade licences.
- Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The Story of US Gold (Fusion Retro Books, 2015), pp. 164-166: Anthony Ball’s account of converting Mercs at Tiertex. A modern book of recollections.