Tempest 2000 | Code Like It's 198x

“I’d never done any 3D at that point and never so much as touched a polygon,” Jeff Minter told Edge, looking back on the day he volunteered to remake Tempest. Atari had gathered developers at a hotel near Heathrow to show off its new Jaguar console and read out a list of old games it owned and wanted converting. When Tempest came up, Minter put his hand up. The result was a game in which Dave Theurer’s glowing wireframe tube became a shaded web that swung about the screen, enemies shattered into clouds of particles, and a booming voice announced “Excellent!” over pounding techno. Edge called it “one of the best all-out blasters ever created”. For many owners of Atari’s struggling console, it was the reason they had bought one.

Fast facts

Developer: Llamasoft (Jeff Minter); music and sound by Imagitec Design.
Publisher: Atari.
Released: on sale in America by spring 1994; reviewed in Britain in June 1994.
Format: Atari Jaguar cartridge, 16 megabits; £50 in Edge’s review, £44.99 in ST Format’s.
Levels: 100 webs, plus three kinds of bonus round.
On the cartridge: Tempest 2000, a copy of the 1981 arcade game, Tempest Plus (a two-player mix of the two) and Tempest Duel, a head-to-head game.
Later versions: PC CD-ROM (1996); PlayStation, as Tempest X3 (Interplay, 1996–97); Sega Saturn (High Voltage for Interplay, 1997).

A remake by request

Minter had loved the coin-op for years. “I liked the original game so much I bought one for my home,” he told Edge in 1994, and ST Format, visiting him in Wales, found the machine still there. He had been working for Atari UK and had spent a couple of months on Atari’s Panther, a console that was never released, when the Jaguar developer conference came round. “They had a list of the games they wanted doing,” he told ST Format. “I saw Tempest, and I liked playing it, and because I’d had so much fun doing Llamatron I thought I might do the same kind of thing with Tempest.”

He kept the rules. The player’s ship, the Claw, sits on the rim of a web and snaps from lane to lane, firing down it at Flippers, Tankers, Spikers, Fuseballs and Pulsars climbing towards it. What changed was everything around them. The flat line drawings became, in ST Format’s words, “full-colour Gouraud-shaded models, which drift around the screen to keep your ship central”. Enemies burst into thousands of points of light. Power-ups appeared in huge letters before exploding: a particle laser, the ability to jump clear of the web, a computer-controlled droid that fought alongside you. Minter added new enemies to force a change of style. Mirrors reflected your shots back, and Demon Heads threw horns that could not be destroyed: “you had to shoot, avoid horn, shoot again, avoid horn, then shoot once more to kill”.

Between the main levels came the warps. Collect three warp tokens and the game switched to a calm bonus stage: flying through rings over a texture-mapped landscape that someone at Atari thought looked like bacon, following a green path through a tube of dots, or a stage that fed the screen back through itself until the colours melted. Getting through one sent the player five levels ahead.

What the Jaguar could do

“The Jag hardware was cool to work with,” Minter told Edge in 2005. “You had the 68K, of course, but much of the interesting coding was done on the two RISC coprocessors, Tom and Jerry. Most of my work was on Tom, Jerry being the domain of the audio programmers.” He used the console’s blitter backwards, running address generators meant for reading textures to write to the screen instead, to make the shattering bitmaps. “One of the hardware designers later told me off,” he said. Of the bonus levels he had told Edge in 1994: “I’ve created my own version of SNES Mode 7, but with a wiggle in it. Except there’s no way a SNES or Mega Drive could do what the Jaguar’s doing here: there’s so much going on.” The effects had a name by the time the game reached other machines: Computer and Video Games reported that Minter called the swirling, oily look “Melt-O-Vision”.

The music

The soundtrack was as much a part of the game as the graphics. Minter sent Imagitec Design a videotape of himself playing, dubbed with the kind of music he wanted. Much of it, he remembered, came from a compilation of industrial and techno tracks called Below San Onofre, which a colleague at Atari had given him because his band was on it. “At first they sent me an audio tape and I remember listening to it in my kitchen and thinking that the demo tunes they’d sent must have been made on proper synths,” he said, “but then they sent me the audio code and I dropped it into the game — it sounded every bit as excellent as the demo tapes.” Edge thought it the best Jaguar music yet, and noted that it took up almost one megabit of the cartridge. ST Format called it “vase-damaging techno music”.

Reception

Minter had not expected a hit. A Jaguar designer had told him Atari saw the half-finished game as a “makeweight” next to its own launch titles, and he worried it might not be good enough to release. Then it was shown at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. ST Format reported that it was named “Best Game of the Show”, and Digital Press that it was “many people’s game of the show”. “I was rather relieved,” Minter said.

The reviews were among the best any Jaguar game received. Edge gave it nine out of ten in May 1994 and admitted that the screen looked “horribly confusing” to onlookers, but that the player stopped noticing: “your eyes are fixed on your position on the web and nothing else”. ST Format gave it 97%, the highest score the magazine had ever awarded. Its reviewer, Jonathan Nash, claimed the game demanded “a complete abandonment of traditional critical faculties”, likened playing it to “trying to solve a booby-trapped Rubik’s Cube while hyperventilating in a diving suit”, and ended with advice for Atari: “Bundle this, Atari, or die.” In America Digital Press’s reviewer, who had written the Jaguar off, said much the same: “You cannot own a Jaguar and not own this game.”

A year later Edge still called it “one of the best games of 1994 on any format”, while noting that it was not the Jaguar’s best seller; that was Rebellion’s Alien vs Predator. By 1997 Computer and Video Games was telling readers that the Jaguar was worth buying at £50 or less on one condition, that Tempest 2000 came with it.

Other machines

Atari brought the game to PC CD-ROM in early 1996. Interplay took it to Sony’s and Sega’s consoles. The PlayStation version, renamed Tempest X3, replaced the shaded webs with translucent, warping textures and added enemies; Digital Press found it “even more psychedelic” than the original, but missed the terror of the Pulsars, which had been made much tamer. The Saturn version, converted by High Voltage, kept the Tempest 2000 name and arrived in Britain early in 1997. Computer and Video Games found fewer particles and duller sound, and concluded: “Saturn Tempest 2000 is still a reasonably good game, but Jaguar Tempest 2000 is video game magic.”

After 2000

Minter followed it on the Jaguar with Defender 2000, another old Atari game rebuilt with warps and new modes. He returned to the tube itself with Tempest 3000 for the Nuon DVD system in 2000, a version that reached few players, and with Tempest 4000, made by Llamasoft and published by Atari for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on 17 July 2018. By 2005 the Jaguar cartridge had become a collector’s piece, Minter was glad that the Project Tempest emulator kept the game playable, and Edge looked back on it as “a prismatic whirligig of sound, colour and kinetic destruction” that had “lost none of its mesmeric charms”.

Sources

Edge issue 8, May 1994, pp. 78–80: review (Atari, Llamasoft, £50, 16 megabits, out in the US); Minter on buying a Tempest machine and the developer conference; 100 webs; the warps; Imagitec and the videotape; the music’s size; “Mode 7, but with a wiggle in it”; the games on the cartridge; nine out of ten.
ST Format issue 57, April 1994, pp. 56–58: preview by Andy Nuttall (the CES award; the visit to Minter in Wales; his quotes on the developer conference and Llamatron; Gouraud-shaded webs; the three bonus rounds; Imagitec and the video).
ST Format issue 59, June 1994: contents page (97%, “the highest scoring game ever”) and pp. 64–66, review by Jonathan Nash (£44.99; the quotations).
Digital Press issue 17, March 1994, p. 2: “many people’s game of the show” at the Winter CES.
Joe Santulli, Digital Press issue 19, May 1994, pp. 14 and 21: review.
Edge issue 148, April 2005, “The Making Of… Tempest 2000”: the Heathrow conference and the list of titles; “never so much as touched a polygon”; Atari UK and the Panther; Mirrors, Demon Heads and Pulsars; Tom and Jerry and the blitter; Below San Onofre and the music; the “makeweight” remark and the CES relief; the bonus rounds; Project Tempest; Tempest 3000.
Edge Atari Jaguar supplement, July 1995 (with issue 22): “one of the best games of 1994 on any format”; Alien vs Predator the best seller.
Computer and Video Games issue 170, January 1996, p. 11: news of the PC version from Atari.
PC Gamer issue 28, March 1996, p. 111: mail-order advertisement listing the PC version at £32.99.
Computer and Video Games issue 182, January 1997, pp. 44–45: Saturn preview, and the Jaguar at £50 or less.
Tom Guise, Computer and Video Games issue 183, February 1997, pp. 64–65: Saturn review (High Voltage, Interplay; “Melt-O-Vision”; the quotation).
Zeta (Italy) vol. 3 no. 22, January 1997, p. 39: Tempest X3 from Interplay.
Keita Iida, Digital Press issue 39, January 1999, p. 19: Tempest X3 review on the PlayStation.
Computer and Video Games issue 171, February 1996, p. 29: Defender 2000, “just like Tempest 2000”, adds warps to the old game.
Tempest 4000, Steam store page (web, secondary): released 17 July 2018, developer Llamasoft, publisher Atari. https://store.steampowered.com/app/688140/Tempest_4000/