Tempest began as a bad dream. When Dave Theurer finished Missile Command for Atari, he set out to make a “first-person Space Invaders”, and it did not work. Gene Lipkin, whom Theurer calls “the head guy at Atari at the time”, played it and said “ho-hum”. Theurer went back to a recurring dream from his childhood, of monsters creeping up out of a deep, dark pit in the ground, and his supervisor, Steve Calfee, told him to build it. The result, released in October 1981, put the player on the rim of a wireframe tube drawn in coloured light, with things climbing up it. Electronic Games called it “not only the most visually striking coin-op around, but one of the most challenging as well.”
Fast facts
- Maker: Atari, coin-op division.
- Design and program: Dave Theurer; project leader Morgan Hoff, hardware engineer Doug Snyder, technician Mary Pepper.
- Released: October 1981. The copyright registration gives May 1981 as the date the game was first shown outside Atari, most likely on field test.
- Display: colour vector, Atari’s first; Electronic Games called it “the first full-color quadrascan coin-op”.
- Controls: a spinner knob and two buttons, fire and Superzapper.
- Levels: 16 tube shapes and 99 levels.
- Sales: about 30,000 machines, according to The Atari Book.
- Home versions: Electric Dreams’ official conversions for the Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum, 1986–87.
From Space Invaders to a tube
Theurer’s first version moved rows of aliens towards the player in 3D. He told Retro Gamer that it had “enough reference points” to look interesting but not to play: players could not judge where an enemy was, so they could not aim. The fix was to glue everything to a surface. The enemies stayed stuck to the walls of a tube and the player’s ship stayed on its rim, so both sides could only move along lines the eye could follow. Every shape was drawn first on squared graph paper, “because there was no appropriate design tool at the time for this type of graphics”.
One early version made people ill. “The first version had the surface moving and the player’s object stationary,” Theurer said. “Personally, I got nauseated after working on it for a period of time. Some others had a similar reaction.” It was dropped long before the game went out on test.
The name took several tries. The team called it Aliens at first, and the source code still uses that name: its modules are ALEXEC, the “aliens executive”, ALDISP, ALSOUN and so on. The prototype cabinet said Vortex, until players joked about what that sounded like. Theurer lobbied for Tempest when the staff voted on a list of names.
Colour on a vector screen
Until 1981 vector games drew in white, and makers laid coloured plastic over the screen to fake colour. Atari’s colour vector display was new hardware, still being developed alongside the game. “It was colour. It was 3D. It was fast. It was new!” Theurer remembered. It was also fragile. Owen Rubin, who had expected the first colour vector board for his own Space Duel, recalled that the prototype “would constantly blow out the deflection amps” and, at first, drew more slowly than the black-and-white version. Theurer’s warning was worse: “if you parked the beam off the screen for too long, it would burn a hole in the phosphor coating”.
The vector graphics entry explains how the display worked and where Tempest sits among Atari’s QuadraScan games.
Playing it
The ship, which Video Games called “horseshoe-shaped”, runs around the rim of a tube that stretches into the distance. Some tubes are closed, like a circle or a heart; others are open, like a V or a flat line. Electronic Games counted “flat-edged (with 15 corridors) and rounded (possessing 16 sectors)”. Enemies appear at the far end and climb towards the player, who spins the knob to reach the right lane and fires down it.
The period guides give the enemies’ order of arrival:
| Enemy | First level | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Flippers | 1 | Flip from lane to lane; one that reaches the rim can carry the ship away |
| Tankers | 3 | Split into two flippers when shot |
| Spikers | 3 | Leave green spikes in the lanes, which can impale the ship between levels |
| Fuseballs | 11 | Zip up and down the lanes; Video Games warned, “Don’t let it climb onto the rim” |
| Pulsars | 17 | Electrify their lane |
From level 33 some tankers carry fuseballs instead of flippers, and from level 40 some carry pulsars. From level 65, The Atari Book says, the tubes turn invisible.
The Superzapper is the emergency button. The first use on each level “obliterates all alien life forms on the screen”, Electronic Games explained; a second use destroys only one enemy, the most dangerous. Video Games Player set its readers a puzzle on exactly that: a fuseball is climbing, the first zap is spent, and the answer is that the second one “will single out the fuseball and vaporize it”.
At the end of a level the ship dives down the tube to the next one, which is why the spikes matter. Theurer’s option to start on a higher level, which paid a bonus for the choice, was his idea: “We wanted to maximise the fun time/total play time ratio.”
The spinner was part of the design once the tube arrived. “The controller has a fabulous feel when you spin it,” Theurer said. “Just the right amount of resistance and just the right amount of angular momentum when you stop applying the force.”
The booby trap
Just before production Theurer moved the Atari logo on the start screen because it looked lopsided. He had forgotten his own protection against pirates who replaced “Atari” with their own name: the game would then overwrite a random location in memory a few minutes later. Moving the logo set it off. When the score fell in a certain range, the address it chose was the coin counter, and some players found themselves with 40 free credits. “It took us two months to figure out the cause!”
Home versions
Atari’s own home versions stalled. A version for the Atari 5200 was finished far enough to appear, boxed, in the film Cloak & Dagger, but it stayed unreleased until a prototype surfaced in 1998.
The first official home versions came from Electric Dreams. Computer Gamer reviewed the Amstrad CPC version in December 1986, noting that it had been written for the Amstrad first “because it is the slowest of the big three machines”. The ZX Spectrum version, programmed by David Pridmore, followed early in 1987. CRASH gave it 62%, finding it “a good try at a game not really suited to this Spectrum”; Your Sinclair called it “true to the original, in all its spindly detail”.
Tempest 2000 and after
Jeff Minter had loved Tempest since he found it in a Piccadilly Circus arcade. In 1994 he wrote Tempest 2000 for Atari’s Jaguar. Digital Press expected other magazines to rave “over the techno music”, and its reviewer, who had written the Jaguar off, was won over: “The smartest thing Atari could do right now is pack this game in with every Jaguar.” Minter came back to the tube several times, as his own entry tells; the latest, Tempest 4000, made by his company Llamasoft and published by Atari, came out for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on 17 July 2018.
Source code
The original source code for the arcade game is public. The historicalsource archive published it on GitHub in October 2021, with no licence stated. The programs were written in 6502 assembly language with Atari’s MAC65 assembler, and the files carry Theurer’s name as programmer and dates from August 1980 to December 1981.
Sources
- Electronic Games, vol. 1 no. 2, March 1982, p. 27: Tempest as “the first full-color quadrascan coin-op”.
- Bill Heineman, “Strategy Session: Tempest”, Electronic Games, vol. 1 no. 3, May 1982, pp. 60 and 69: “the most visually striking coin-op around”, flat and rounded platforms, flippers, tankers and spikers from level 3, pulsars, fuseball tankers from level 33, the Superzapper’s first and second use.
- Video Games (Pumpkin Press), vol. 1 no. 1, August 1982, p. 49: Atari’s first colour QuadraScan game, the “horseshoe-shaped” shooter, 99 levels, the spinning dial and two buttons, tankers and spikers at level 3, spikes in every lane at level 9, fuseballs at level 11.
- Video Games Player, vol. 1 no. 1, September 1982, p. 43: the second Superzapper and the fuseball.
- Computer and Video Games issue 5, March 1982, p. 27: hole designs including circles, hearts and crosses; pulsars at level 17.
- Paul Drury, “The Making of Tempest”, The Atari Book (Retro Gamer, 2012), pp. 148–153: the “first-person Space Invaders”, Lipkin’s “ho-hum”, the childhood dream, Steve Calfee, the graph paper, the colour vector hardware and the burnt phosphor, the 16 shapes, the spinner, the nauseating first version, Aliens and Vortex, skill-step, the Superzapper, 30,000 units, the booby trap and the 40 free credits, levels 33, 40 and 65, the 5200 prototype and Cloak & Dagger, Minter in Piccadilly Circus, Marty Goldberg on the release date, the credits for Hoff, Pepper and Snyder; Owen Rubin on Space Duel and the deflection amps.
- Computer Gamer issue 21, December 1986, p. 44: the Amstrad CPC version, written first on the slowest machine.
- CRASH issue 38, March 1987, p. 26: the Spectrum version by David Pridmore, £7.99, 99 levels, 62%.
- Your Sinclair issue 15, March 1987, p. 29: “true to the original, in all its spindly detail”.
- Joe Santulli, Digital Press issue 19, May 1994, pp. 14 and 21: Tempest 2000 on the Jaguar.
- Tempest program listing (Atari, 1980–81), historicalsource/tempest on GitHub, October 2021: module headers, the “aliens executive”, the project documentation dated 17 December 1981. https://github.com/historicalsource/tempest
- Tempest 4000, Steam store page (web, secondary): released 17 July 2018, developer Llamasoft, publisher Atari. https://store.steampowered.com/app/688140/Tempest_4000/ ; “Tempest 4000”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows release. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_4000