Atari Kangaroo Article

Can't wait to read. Love your articles.

You are doing excellent historical preservation work. Please keep it up. (And make sure they get archived for future generations.)
 
i actively follow your blog man. love your content/articles. please keep 'em coming!

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Another well written article.

If I didn't know any better I'd say that greed was the end of the arcade era.
 
Another well written article.

If I didn't know any better I'd say that greed was the end of the arcade era.

yah that was the downfall of Atari on many levels.. just shows the general arrogance that the suits had.

They thought they could put out just about anything and people would buy it, you can only get away with that for so long before people catch on.

Same thing happened with the 2600.. they just kept putting out shovel wear until people stopped buying.
 
Demanding a game within a certain time period would have been unrealistic – there may not be a game close to being finished; a programmer could only work so hard, and a rushed game might ultimately lose money if released without due care and attention. Scheduling releases vs the quality of those games would have been a huge headache for Atari's management.

And yet that's exactly what Kassar did with the home divisions. It went from 'The game will be done when it's done' to 'You have X weeks to make the game, and you need to meet certain milestone dates.' - the result of which only created stress for everyone involved. Tramiel continued that approach with all the companies contracted to make games for the Lynx and Jaguar. I'm sure the industry isn't all that different these days, either, especially now with development budgets that rival tentpole movies.

It's true that you can't rush any creative endeavor, but having the opposite (unlimited development time and money) has been the road to quite a few megabombs. Daikatana immediately comes to mind:

http://www.usgamer.net/articles/gamings-greatest-flops-daikatana

Nobody wants to fund the next "Chinese Democracy" :)
 

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Ditto that.

Somewhat satisfying to learn my feelings toward the game were echoed by some in the mothership! I mean, I had a love/hate relationship with Kangaroo. Played it a bunch as it was new and looked damn fine. The love fell away pretty quickly though.
 
Great read!

One friendly suggestion - You should put the download links for the Rich Adam memo below the first picture of it. I was wanting to look at it, and didn't want to log into Pinterest to download it, but didn't see the download links until further down in the read.


It's painfully ironic how Gravitar is such a well-made game (if you actually get past the learning curve, and get into really playing it, it's really a deep game), but Kangaroo is arguably the one that more of the general public remembers, if you asked the average person on the street who remembers the 80's.


Also, Dan Coogan's Gravitar website is stunning, if any of you have never checked it out. If only we had that much info archived about every game.
 
It's true that you can't rush any creative endeavor, but having the opposite (unlimited development time and money) has been the road to quite a few megabombs. Daikatana immediately comes to mind

For me what immediately came to mind was Duke Nukem Forever, affectionately rechristened only three years into its 12-year slog as Duke Nukem Whenever.
 
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Great article! Thank you. I remember playing Kangaroo a lot back in the 80s and not really noticing the bad graphics and flakey gameplay, but also realizing on some level that it was not of the highest quality. The games I felt the most resentment toward were ones that weren't generous with their gameplay, like Gravitar, Dragon's Lair, and Super Zaxxon. You know, the ones that seemed to just eat your quarters with no remorse whatsoever! The best games had a great balance of everything—fun to play, great to look at, challenging yet generous.
 
Definitely appreciate the article - I have a weird love for Kangaroo, likely because (and despite the fact that) it's so unpolished in many ways, but still playable.

For anyone who has the patience, fire it up in MAME and enable invincibility cheats. Somewhere in the region of level 8 or 9, it becomes fairly clear that the designers never intended for anyone to get that far into the game: from what I recall, the level numbers past that point are represented by various graphics characters, and the gameplay starts getting odd in places.
 
Somewhere in the region of level 8 or 9, it becomes fairly clear that the designers never intended for anyone to get that far into the game: from what I recall, the level numbers past that point are represented by various graphics characters, and the gameplay starts getting odd in places.


See page 4 of this thread:

https://forums.arcade-museum.com/showthread.php?t=409475

Along the way, monkeys and other enemies will throw bananas and other crap in an effort to scupper progress


Monkeys throw apples and apple cores. Gorillas punch you. No other fruits or enemies involved :)
 

Read through the thread. I get what's being referred to in it (especially on page 4), but what I was referencing was behaviour that falls more into the category of, "we never expected anyone to play this game for this long."

This is why I specifically mentioned using MAME cheats to enable invincibility - they just make it easier to get there than if you're trying to do the same thing on the original game. The sprite flicker, etc. is just part of normal play.

FWIW, Arabian (which runs on similar hardware, IIRC) has some of the same in-game artifacts as Kangaroo.
 
Great read!

One friendly suggestion - You should put the download links for the Rich Adam memo below the first picture of it. I was wanting to look at it, and didn't want to log into Pinterest to download it, but didn't see the download links until further down in the read.

Good suggestion - I'll change that now.

I totally agree about Dan Googan's site. It's a treasure trove of info and a true homage to Gravitar. I've lost a few hours trawling through the stuff there.

Really appreciate all the feedback gents. Trying to gauge the nerd meter is always tricky as I'm trying to appeal to a broad audience with the blog, so that there's something for the enthusiast and casual visitor too.

I only want to write about a game if there's an interesting tidbit to wrap the piece around (in this case Rich Adam's memo), rather than just cut and paste stuff from Wikipedia and a YouTube video of gameplay, which I see a lot of.
 
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