Joust | Code Like It's 198x

Joust has no fire button. The player rides a flying ostrich, beats its wings with a button and steers left and right with a joystick, and wins a fight by being higher than the enemy when their lances meet. It came from Williams, the Chicago maker of Defender and Robotron: 2084, a company, Video Games remarked, “not known for charming video games”, and its designer had never worked on a video game before. At the operators’ show in Chicago in November 1982, Video Games reported, Joust and Gottlieb’s Q*bert were the two games that impressed nearly everyone. By January 1983 it topped Play Meter’s chart of the most played games in American arcades.

Fast facts

Maker: Williams Electronics, Chicago.
Designer: John Newcomer, leading a team of seven programmers, artists and sound designers; Janice Hendricks drew the animation.
Shown: at the Amusement & Music Operators Association (AMOA) show, Chicago, November 1982.
Controls: a two-way joystick and a flap button, for one or two players at once.
Chart: number one in Play Meter’s arcade chart for 15 January 1983.
Home versions: Atari’s for the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 8-bit computers and Commodore 64, and later the Atari 7800; the Atari ST (1986); the NES; and the Game Boy (1995).
Sequel: Joust 2 (1986).

A flying game from a toy designer

John Newcomer came to Williams from the toy industry in the autumn of 1981. He did not program, draw or make sounds; he was, in Video Games’ words, “a concept person who depends on others to shape his ideas into games”. “I’m fairly good at telling a story,” he said, “and that’s what a video game is all about.”

He worked through the usual kinds of game, a driving game, a shoot-’em-up and a sports game, before he “realized that no one had done a flying game in a long time”. He was tired of space games, and he was an avid comic reader who liked mythology: “the whole Icarus thing and the Conan thing, where guys are on the backs of birds.” One rule shaped the controls. “If you’re going to fly like a bird, you should feel like a bird.” Instead of a joystick that moved the rider up and down, he gave the player a button to flap with.

Williams’ vice-president Ron Crouse described the method as a team with one creative leader. Seven programmers, artists and sound people worked under Newcomer. Janice Hendricks, who designed the game’s animation, had come to computer graphics after seeing the SIGGRAPH show in 1978. “I designed the graphics to appeal to me,” she told Video Games, which noted that other designers praised the game’s “sensitive graphics, ease of movement, and appeal to women”.

How it plays

Each tap of the flap button lifts the ostrich a little. “A couple of taps every second will hold the bird motionless,” Video Games advised in March 1983. “But release it and down you go.” The birds walk, skid and overshoot, and the screen wraps round at the sides. When two riders collide, the higher lance wins; the loser falls, and his buzzard leaves an egg. Collect the egg before it cracks open; leave it, and it hatches into a rider of the next rank up.

The enemies climb a ladder of three ranks. Red Bounders are the easiest; grey Hunters are “smarter and more aggressive”; blue Shadow Lords are “swift and merciless”, in the words of Video Games’ 1984 review of the Atari 2600 version. Newcomer reckoned a Shadow Lord had “at least double the toughness of any other character out there”. Picking up eggs to stop them hatching means breaking off the fight, “and that causes you to take some risks,” he said.

The arena changes as the waves go on. The first wave has a full-length bridge along the bottom of the screen. In later waves the bridge burns away, and the Lava Troll appears: a hand that rises out of the lava and grabs anything flying too low. “He doesn’t care who he grabs,” Newcomer noted. “Everyone is under the same rules—enemies and players alike.” Dawdle too long on a wave and a pterodactyl flies in. It can be killed only by a lance straight into its open mouth, which Video Games called “a nearly impossible achievement”. Electronic Games’ strategy writer Bill Heineman found another way: “if a pterodactyl is coming, bang it on the beak. To make sure of a kill, simply land, and the bird will kill itself for you.”

Two players, friends or rivals

In 1982, as Video Games put it, nearly every video game was “a solo affair”, and Electronic Games called two players at once “a rarity among coin-ops”. Joust put both on the screen together, the second player on a stork. Newcomer brought back cooperative play “specifically because ‘a lot of people have been saying that video games weren’t social enough’”, and then made the players choose. In the “team” wave, “we’re encouraging people to play together; then with the ‘gladiator’ wave, we turn around and bribe people with 3,000 points to knock off their buddy.” There is also a “survival” wave, which pays 3,000 points for getting through it without losing a life, and an egg wave, in which the player has to clear the screen of eggs before they hatch.

Not everyone managed to cooperate. “The idea is to work as a team,” one Video Games writer found, “but instead you end up colliding into each other more often than not.”

Reception

Joust was a hit straight away. Play Meter‘s chart of the most played arcade games for 15 January 1983, reprinted in Video Games, put it at number one, ahead of Satan’s Hollow and Jungle Hunt, and the arcade chart in Vidiot for February and March 1983 also had it first. Video Games’ tips page called it “a game as elegant as the period it depicts”, with controls “easily learned, but difficult to master”. Electronic Games saw it as proof that fantasy themes could work in an arcade game, “a sort of science fictional re-creation of the days of Ivanhoe”. Its readers put Joust among the runners-up for the magazine’s Hall of Fame two years running.

Home versions

Atari held the home rights under a licensing agreement with Williams, and its conversions appeared from the end of 1983. The Atari 2600 version kept the waves and the feel of the flap but dropped the Lava Troll, and its eggs float instead of settling on the platforms. Video Games thought the controls so true “that it’s as if you had actually mastered the physics of flying”, and Electronic Games judged it “as good as it could possibly be”, with fewer enemies on screen than the coin-op. In January 1985 Electronic Games praised the Atari computer and Commodore 64 editions for “top-notch visuals” that “faithfully mimic the look of the coin-op”.

Atari also made a version for its 7800 console, which Electronic Games previewed in September 1984 as “about as close to coin-op quality as anything you’re going to see presented on a conventional TV set”. On the Atari ST, START magazine found the 1986 conversion by The Rugby Circle “even faster, smoother and more finely detailed than the dedicated arcade machine version”.

The NES version has a longer story. In 1983, while Atari was negotiating to publish games on Nintendo’s Famicom, a young programmer at HAL Laboratory, Satoru Iwata, asked Nintendo for work and wrote a Famicom Joust in about two months. “If you’re even one pixel higher than him when you collide, you win,” he explained, years later. The Atari deal fell through and the game sat unreleased until HAL published it in Japan in 1987 and in North America in 1988. In November 1995 Nintendo released Joust on the Game Boy, paired with Defender.

Other people copied it. On the ZX Spectrum, Softek’s Ostron, reviewed in the first issue of CRASH in February 1984, put the player on an “electronic ostrich” against buzzards; the magazine noted that it had been “formerly named Joust”.

Source code

The arcade game’s source code is public. The historicalsource archive published it on GitHub in January 2021, with no licence stated. It is written in assembly language for the Motorola 6809, with a separate 4K program for the 6800-family sound processor, and its documentation lists the game’s modules: the images, the message strings and font, the attract mode, the diagnostics and the high-score page, and “JOUST.SRC - THE GAME OF JOUST”. The pterodactyl has its own file, PTE.SRC, as do the ostrich, the stork, the buzzard, the eggs and the lava.

Later history

Williams made an arcade sequel, Joust 2: Survival of the Fittest, in 1986. The original kept coming back in the collections that Williams and then Midway put together from their arcade games, starting with Williams Arcade’s Greatest Hits in 1995. Midway’s Greatest Arcade Hits on the Nintendo 64 in 2000 ran the original arcade code, and N64 Magazine called Joust “an absolutely superb single-screen battle game”; the same collection reached the Game Boy Advance in 2001, and Midway Arcade Treasures followed in 2003.

Sources

Neil Tesser, “The Life and Times of Q*bert & Joust”, Video Games (Pumpkin Press), vol. 1 no. 7, April 1983, pp. 25–30: the November 1982 AMOA show, ostrich and buzzards, Newcomer’s background and quotations, Ron Crouse, the team of seven, the flap button, the waves, the Lava Troll and the Shadow Lord.
Video Games (Pumpkin Press), vol. 1 no. 6, March 1983: pp. 39–40, Joust tips (the flap button, “elegant as the period”, the pterodactyl’s open mouth, the stork and the second player); p. 52, Anne Krueger on Janice Hendricks; p. 82, Play Meter’s top ten for 15 January 1983.
Vidiot, vol. 1 no. 2, February/March 1983: the arcade top ten, and the flap button.
Electronic Games, February 1983: “Teamwork counts at Williams”, the lava troll and the burning ledge.
Electronic Games, June 1983, p. 58: Joust and “the days of Ivanhoe”.
Bill Heineman, Electronic Games, July 1983, pp. 113–115: Joust strategy, two players at once as “a rarity among coin-ops”, the pterodactyl.
Video Games (Pumpkin Press), vol. 2 no. 5, February 1984, p. 72: Atari 2600 review; Bounders, Hunters and Shadow Lords, the pterodactyl, the waves, the omissions, Atari’s licensing agreement with Williams.
Tracie Forman, Electronic Games, March 1984, pp. 75–76: Atari 2600 review.
Electronic Games, September 1984, p. 29: the Atari 7800 version.
Electronic Games, January 1985, p. 26 (1985 Arcade Awards: the Atari and C-64 editions) and p. 58 (Hall of Fame runners-up).
START, vol. 1 no. 3, December 1986: the Atari ST version by The Rugby Circle.
CRASH issue 1, February 1984, p. 55: Ostron, “formerly named Joust”.
Nintendo Power issue 62, July 1994, p. 57: Williams timeline, Joust 2 in 1986.
Nintendo Power issue 78, November 1995, pp. 98 and 103: Defender/Joust for the Game Boy, released November 1995.
N64 Magazine issue 43, July 2000: Midway’s Greatest Arcade Hits.
Nintendo Power Advance issue 3, 2001: Midway’s Greatest Arcade Hits for the Game Boy Advance.
Super GamePower issue 32, November 1996: Williams Arcade’s Greatest Hits.
“Joust (video game)”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): Williams Arcade’s Greatest Hits (1995) and Midway Arcade Treasures (2003). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joust_(video_game)
Joust source code (Williams, 1982), historicalsource/joust on GitHub, January 2021: JOUST.DOC and the module files. https://github.com/historicalsource/joust
John Andersen, “A former mentor recalls the early career of Satoru Iwata”, Game Developer, 9 October 2015 (web, secondary): Atari’s 1983 memo on Nintendo programming Atari titles, Iwata’s Famicom Joust, HAL’s releases in 1987 and 1988. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/a-former-mentor-recalls-the-early-career-of-satoru-iwata
Satoru Iwata, interview in Used Games, 1999, translated by shmuplations (web, secondary): writing Joust in about two months, “one pixel higher”. https://shmuplations.com/iwata/