Did you ever own an Intellivision video game system?

After our Atari 2600 got stolen out of our home, along with a guitar and camera, my uncle Gary bought our family an Intellivision, along with scads of games. That console makes up my earliest childhood memories of videogame-playing (I barely remember anything at all about the 2600; just a dim memory of playing Basketball with my dad).

Nightstalker was cool enough, and my best friend Laban (still is) and I spent hours discovering neat tricks in Utopia, like how to turn your PT boat invisible or make it travel on land, or sink a harbored fishing boat. But far and away, my most favorite game was Tron® Deadly Discs.

I’d always loved that game, even years and years after I wasn’t playing with my Intellivision any more. I was always fascinated with the concept of porting it to the computer. Back when I was a Mac freak, I did actually write a port, though it lacked the capability to block enemy discs, and there was no Recognizer.

I’ve spent a lot of time pondering different approaches I might take to make the game. I felt that the game mechanics involving unlocking the doors weren’t really that interesting, and that what really made the game so terrific is the combat aspect. The hero, Tron, is armed with only a single throwable projectile weapon which he flings at the enemies, who are also similarly armed (though some have heat-seeking versions, or an instantly deadly stick, instead). When you toss your disc, you are defenseless; but you can press a button to instantly recall it on its flight, sending it back to you. When the game starts to get fast-paced, the effect is something like flinging a deadly yo-yo in various directions, until you “de-rez” your foes, one by one (or sometimes, if you’re a good shot, multiple foes with one well-aimed shot). That’s what really makes the game fun.

I’ve thought of enhancing the game play in various ways: enlarge the playing field so that it’s a scroller, giving the baddies a bigger variety of weapons, power-ups for Tron such as the ability to sling more than one disc at a time, etc. I’ve even thought about just taking the disc-flinging mechanic and making it the action-combat portion of an RPG instead of an arcade game.

Another favorite idea of mine was to generate music carefully synchronized to the gameplay: a separate instrument for each baddy on the string, a musical break when you’ve cleared the screen, more intense music when your health is running low…

Well, all this thinking and no doing… someone’s beat me to the punch! Average Software just released “Intellidiscs” for Windows, Mac and Linux. I hate their guts. 🙂

Actually, though, I’m a bit releived. At least now, there’s a basic clone out, so I can stop worrying about actually writing one just to finally get it done: I can now think exclusively about improvements. If I like, I can even add enhancements to their product directly, since they were enlightened enough to release it as free-as-in-freedom under the GPL.