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ATARI LASERDISC HARDWARE
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Battlestar Galactica
1984 (Prototype) |
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Game Trivia : Information from The Dragons Lair Project.
Planned to be a conversion kit for FireFox, test footage exists that uses modified Firefox code, again Atari dropped the project before any serious development started when they halted laserdisc game development.
(From Owen Rubin) : On Battlestar Galactica, it was my idea originally as I was a Galactica fan obviously, (those are Cylon ships in Major Havoc, and the graphics displays in the tactical display were drawn like in Galactica as well), the guys who did Star Wars and Firefox started the project. I did a small amount of work as well. All that was really done was some footage on the LD that let you land a fighter ship into one of the landing bays on either side of the large ship.
The video on the disk is recorded in such a way that playing it back would look like garbage. It is a bunch of still frames that you play out of order so that you can change what you are playing seamlessly. For example, the landing footage is one of 9 to 16 or so frames from different positions as you approach the landing bay. Imaging a 3x3 of 4x4 grid of possible positions you can approach from, with the center being straight on. If you fly straight, the program would display every 9th frame which was the video of flying straight. If you moved right, you would select the proper "frame view" and it would look like you moved in the video to the right, and now play every 9th "right position 1" video frame in order. With this scheme, you could fly in 2 dimensions with the joystick while the game pushed you forward in the third as well, controlled by a throttle. |
Golf Trainer
1984 (Prototype) |
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Game Trivia : Information from The Dragons Lair Project.
(From Owen Rubin) : I also did a Golf Simulator game where you actually hit real golf balls at a projection screen and the ball was projected the rest of the way. We recorded thousands of pictures of the Los Gatos golf course on a LD. When you started, we would project the view from the tee. You would hit a real ball with a real club, we had sensors that measured your swing, your weight balance, and where the ball hit the screen, and we would calculate and project the ball on the screen onto the real course. After each shot, you could get a lesson from a Pro on something the system analyzed you might have done wrong, we measured so many things, and had about 200 lessons from golf pros. A graphic top down view would display where your shot went, and then we would display the next view. It had silly things like going into water hazard footage as well. |
Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom
1983 (Prototype) |
| No images available | | Documentation : Indy Game Proposal Document
| | Game Trivia : Potentially never got past the design stage before Atari stopped using laserdisc hardware. |
Knight Rider
1984 (Prototype) |
| No images available | Game Trivia : Information from The Dragons Lair Project.
(From Owen Rubin) : We went to Universal and got to look through a LOT of footage (some aired some not) of shots from the shows. On Knight Rider, the game was going to be a driving game where you had to use KITT's special features to catch the bad guys. Jumping, speed, guns, electronic jamming, etc. It would be a combination graphics and video game (NOT like Firefox) with graphics better than most driving games and live video mixed in, and the voice of KITT helping you along in the game. When you did a stunt with KITT, you would see an instant replay of the stunt in live video from the show. We also had some great footage that was never seen. Like what REALLY happened to the cars after they made a jump. It really crumpled the front of the cars a lot, but that was edited out. If you missed a jump timing in the game for example, you would see the car land and crumple and you lose a life (or whatever). There were lots of outtakes that would have made great game play error footage. We never got much further than that as we killed all laserdisc games shortly after Road Runner. |
Malibu Grand Prix
1984 (Prototype) |
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Game Trivia : Information from The Dragons Lair Project.
A driving laserdisc game that was filmed at the hugely popular Malibu Grand Prix driving center in Redwood City, California, which used miniature indy race cars.
A laserdisc exists and there is about 20 minutes of game footage, plus some rare, behind the scenes action of the crew, and other Atari Employees.
This game was cancelled too, when Atari realized that laserdisc players were not reliable enough for use in an arcade game environment. |
Playland
198? (Prototype) |
| No images available | | Game Trivia : A prototype "virtual reality" roller coaster simulator that Atari was working on. Used laserdisc hardware and referenced in the Indiana Jones laserdisc design document. |
Road Runner
1983 (Prototype) |
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| PCB : Road Runner Laserdisk Version PCB
| Game Trivia : Information from The Dragons Lair Project.
This unique laserdisc game used footage from the Road Runner Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoon series. The Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote and other objects and obstacles in the game were computer graphics, while the road and background images were streamed from the laserdisc.
When you or the coyote died, the game would cut to a scene from the cartoon series of the Coyote getting killed in one the many humorous death scenes.
Before the game was released Atari decided that laserdisc technology was no longer viable for arcades due to reliability so Road Runner was shelved. A year later the game was released as a conversion kit for their popular System 1 cabinets, but as a computer graphics only version, with the road and background images now rendered by the PCB and all of the cut scenes removed.
(From Owen Rubin) : Road Runner was similar. It used video game graphics for the game play almost identical to the game that was released except that it used LD video instead of graphics for the background. Very cool to have the game graphics go in and out of cartoon footage. When the Road Runner would "get" the coyote (like making him fall off a cliff or hit a truck) the game would pause and a LD "video replay" would show a real cartoon segment with that same thing that just happened. For example, in the game where the coyote has to avoid stepping on the land mines, when he does, the game shows him getting blown-up in graphics, and then (not always) a video would show a real cartoon excerpt from a Road Runner cartoon of the coyote getting blown up. It was very cool. |
Spook
198? (Prototype) |
| No images available | Game Trivia : Prototype, must have mixed laserdisc hardware with videogame hardware like other Atari laserdisc games.
From Steve Englehart : I designed Spook - at least, the original version - with a guy I liked a lot at the time but whose name escapes me now (the down side of moving into and out of the industry). If he's reading this: please get in touch.
It was going to be an arcade game; its transition to a computer game must have come post-Tramiel. My buddy and I spent several days cruising Silicon Valley, exploring "spooky" houses pointed out to us by local realtors, and of course we visited the Winchester Mystery House on Atari's dime. If you're not familiar with this place, Sarah Winchester, wife of the man who invented the Winchester rifle, was warned by a psychic that she was haunted by the ghosts of everyone the rifles killed, and she could only survive by building a mansion that would never be finished. So the house is filled with projects that are essentially busy work: stairways that go nowhere, windows in the floor, and a door opening onto an 8-foot drop into a kitchen sink. |
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