Mike Hally and Rich Adam:
  Interview with the designers of Gravitar    

Update: December 30, 2006
Rich Adam sent his responses to the interview and I have added them to the page ~ thanks Rich.

Subject: Gravitar - Atari designers/programers
Date: Tue, 03 Feb 2004 12:28:02 -0700
From: Dan Coogan
Organization: Coogan Photographic
To: Mike Hally
References: 1

Hi Mike,

I got your email address from Joe Magiera and Jed Margolin.

I've recently posted up a web site for Gravitar
http://www.cooganphoto.com/gravitar
- dedicated to the 1982 Atari classic video arcade game Gravitar.
Hints and playing tips with screen captures, etc. included...

Now that the site is complete (with the addition of the final screen captures and hints for all the planets) I wanted to contact you, in case you had not seen the site.

http://arcade.thelittons.net/oberth.htm
After reading an interview that Derek Litton did with Chris Oberth I thought this would be a great idea to interview the principals involved in developing Gravitar.

So I wanted to ask if I could email some questions regarding the game and you
could respond when you have a bit of time.

http://www.playsite.com/t/games/arcade/gravitar/history.html
I read at the link above that "Gravitar was designed by Mike Hally, who went on
to be the designer for Atari's smash arcade hit, Star Wars."

Also I didn't know the procedure for how you worked on the games at Atari -- in
Jan 2002 I emailed Owen Rubin and he said he "thought Gravitar was developed by
Rich Adam." -- it would be great to get responses from any of the principals involved in developing, designing, programing and producing Gravitar.

http://www.cooganphoto.com/gravitar/mueller.html
-- last year I got the blessing for the site from Ray Mueller, world record holder for Gravitar.

I'm also planning on adding a page about Lunar Battle to the site, but I'll probably do that after the interview, if you agree to it. I have permission to use some of Callan Hendricks photos (though he sold the game to Scott at safestuff.com out in California)

Thanks for all the hard work you put in at Atari -- you guys made the best games on the planet.

best,
Dan Coogan

Top

Mike Hally: I was recruited out of college to join Atari Corp. pinball division as a mechanical engineer to work on their new wide body pinball machines.

· I designed various components for Space Riders, Middle Earth, Superman and the massively oversized Hercules machine.

· I received my first patent (4,235,438) on Nov. 25, 1980 for the pinball game spinning target that was used on Superman.

· One year was spent in pinball R&D researching the feasibility of constructing the play field and cabinet out of plastic by using structural foam until efforts to relocate the division were abandoned.

Rich Adam: Sorry I am a bit late; I was caught in career traffic.

I was working as an intern at NASA Ames Research Center in Mt. View. I was lucky enough to work with the group that did world-class astronomy by viewing the heavens from a 16-inch telescope mounted inside a C-141 airplane flying at an altitude of 45,000 feet. It was called the Kuiper Airborne Observatory. They were part of the team that discovered rings around Uranus.

My project there was to help with a microprocessor based telescope control system for a 60-inch telescope on the top of Mt. Lemon in Arizona. My mentor Peter Manley, taught me how to program in assembly language. That knowledge helped me get a job at Atari writing code for pinball games. At that point, I looked at Atari as a job that I would take for a couple of years and then go get a real job.

Before Gravitar, I did a couple of pinball games and I was the junior programmer on Missile Command. Missile Command was Dave Theurer's game, but I wrote some of the graphic primitives like the text output routines (I am certain that Dave reviewed every line of code I wrote and optimized them), and I did all of the sounds on Missile Command. I learned a lot from Dave, he was extremely hard working and totally meticulous.

After Missile Command I tried a 2 player version of Missile Command that didn't work as a game idea. At least I couldn't make it work.

Mike Hally: I think it is human nature to think things are always going to be around forever. Pinball had been around for years so we all figured that these new video games would follow a typical path, changing with technology but keeping core elements the same.

Rich Adam: At first, it was just a job to me. But after Missile Command, I got caught up in the possibilities of making fun games, not to mention the possibilities of getting bonus money. It was a really fun job. We were doing stuff that nobody had ever done before we understood that. Plus we were operating at the highest level that the industry had. At Atari coin-op we had custom hardware, custom controls which was huge, we were making everything up from scratch, and there were so many game ideas that were possible. Today, designers have trouble coming up with a new game idea that hasn't been done before. That is why I respect games like Katamari Damacy, because they extend the form not just repackage it.

The coin-op engineering department run by Lyle Rains, Dan VanElderen, Steve Calfee, and Dave Stubben, was the best-run engineering group I ever worked with. The talent there was top flight and the management let us have our head. We had an incredible amount of freedom to play games in development (while we were "waiting for a listing"), offer suggestions, and manage our own time. The culture there would not have worked if the staff did not have the professionalism to balance work and play, and many didn't in later years. But the old timers hired in the late 70's had a pretty good track record.

As in all "classic ages" as you called it, we had no idea that we were in the middle of it. If we had, we probably would have screwed it up. We were young people having and making fun together.

Mike Hally: The concept was based on a combination of Lunar Lander and Asteroids. I wanted to travel in the little ship from planet to planet and explore different solar systems.

Rich Adam: There was a process that coin-op had for employees to submit game ideas. The idea submissions were saved in a binder that teams looking for a project could take inspiration from. Lunar Battle was an idea submitted by a guy named Mike Jang I think. The idea was simple. What if you took Lunar Lander and made into a game that you had to fight your way down to the surface? The idea seemed like a natural to me. There was another game idea that Mike was also interested in that had to do with weather and a dam and some railroad bridge or something. But we decided to do Lunar Battle.

Mike Hally: Like many games back in the 80's the biggest challenge was trying to draw as much on the screen as possible and have enough processor power to handle the calculations. We were also confined to memory size vs. cost!

Rich Adam: Technically, the hurdles were learning how to exploit the hardware, adapting it to this particular concept, and balancing difficulty vs. fun. There was a lot of talk in the lab about the game being too hard. I was very hard headed about it. Some of the staff would tell me it was too hard, but I would shoot back that Defender was really hard and that this game had the same control set up as Asteroids. Plus, we did have a game time issue on test. In the end, the game probably was too hard for the masses.

Mike Hally: The project was started in March of 81 and went into production July 82.

Mike Hally: The game name was as difficult to agree upon as it was doing the entire game. This was the era when the marketing and sales staff got involved and determined that it was their job to approve of the game name. As you can see (in the project documents) I went through some procedures and spent money doing searches and still the name changed! The reason you change from Lunar Battle is that it was tested and the results were so-so. Rumors in the field are bad and by changing the name it gives it a new life. Look at the status reports to determine when the name switch was made. I don't recall seeing any official documents in the binder about the name change. Oh well.

The guy they added to the artwork is Gravitar. Atari wanted to have a character in the game, (kind of) since character games were becoming popular! As you can see I had to deal with more than just designing a game that people would put money in to play!

Rich Adam: The name was a marketing driven decision. We couldn't come up with a name that sparked in engineering. I remember leaving Mike a note one night with the name that I was really excited about "Firepower", but he burst my bubble telling me that it was taken by some mechanical shooting game. I was never turned on by the name Gravitar. It just did not talk to me about what the game was.

Mike Hally: I would think of shapes in my head and then just start to draw landscapes that I felt would be fun to fly in. The planets evolved one by one and were created based on the required difficulty needed. I plotted each landscape on paper and then entered in the data. I would take a concept and make it work so that we did not have any wasted layouts. We played the game alot and much of the design evolved from trial and error.

Rich Adam: Mike did all of the planet layouts and base positioning. I probably moved a few bases a little. Each of the bases had an angular range that their shots could fire within. I did not do collision detection between the enemy shots and the land, so I limited their shot trajectory and range to keep the shots from going through the ground. I just randomly selected a shot trajectory from within that range.

Mike Hally: We must of changed the order of planets based on the difficulty of playing each of them in order.

Mike Hally: I created vectors for the bunkers to fire in so that they would not travel into the land. Each bunker had a max. shot distance and a frequency that we could tweak. Bunkers did not start shooting until the player ship was with-in a certain distance. (I think this is accurate)

Rich Adam: Well, some of that I covered already. But Mike is right about the fact that I would not activate a base to fire unless you were close to it. I think that there might be an advantage going left to right vs. right to left, or I might have ultimately fixed that issue. Some bases were probably harder because their shots had a short range so they reloaded faster. The frequency of fire was based on how far into the game you were if my memory serves. Other than those conditions, the God of Randu (our term for the random number generator) was in control.

Mike Hally: We could not afford the processing time to check ship vs. bunker collision so that was one of those "oh well" sort of realities. Most players would be traveling too fast and explode on the landscape.

Rich Adam: I should fix that.

Mike Hally: Yes, the game had some difficulty with certain adjoining angles that allowed shots and ship to pass through the joints of connecting lines. It made for some interesting game play with the bunkers and traveling as the design never intended for this to be a possibility. I can't remember where it was the easiest to reproduce.

Rich Adam: I think the circular planet had this bug. It had to do with a seam in the landscape being right at 0 on the X axis. I should fix that too.

Mike Hally: George was a great guy and had his hand in everything. I do believe that George had another artist create the art for Gravitar. **I was going to guess his name but since I am not 100% sure I will decline until I find some documents.

Rich Adam: George was a good man. Brad Chaboya did the cabinet art for the game, which is why his initials are in the game.

Mike Hally: I did the game related copy for the manual and was in charge of proofing all print material for the game.

Mike Hally: Yes, I liked the 100,000 mark and loved doing score design. It seems so simple now that it is completed but it was actually alot of hard work to make it turn out the way it did.

Mike Hally: PONTIUS PILATE was my idea.....wow, I was a bit twisted!

Rich Adam: Actually, I remember coming up with Pontius Pilate. But in the fog of history who really knows? The "Gotta-be-Lucky List" was originally the "F$^%*ing Lucky List", but Mike made me change it for obvious reasons. I was not dumb enough to argue.

Mike Hally: We played the game so much and we learned to warp deep into the game so I wanted more at the end of the game. I disliked games that just ended or just repeated so we tried the invisible landscape and it turned out to be pure genius. The elements were spaced to allow your mind the ability to see the land even though it was turned off until you exploded into it. This also helped me sometimes to regain that picture in my head.

Rich Adam: We used to have Friday beer parties that started around 4:00. I was a few beers into the party with some of my colleagues and we were talking about whether changing the color of the landscapes would add anything to the game ala the levels in Missile Command, when a light went on in my head that making the land black would be an awesome difficulty level for very late in the game. I was so excited, that I went straight to the lab and patched the game to make the land black to see how it looked. It was awesome to play, but it became immediately apparent that I should "turn on the lights" when you died. When I put that in, I really believed that nobody would ever max out the game, how naïve.

Mike Hally: The reason that the fuel design / fuel capacity has a limit was that it was our fail safe system to make sure that a player could not somehow stock pile a large amount and then play deep into the game in some sort of unplanned way! ...by having a maximum limit it changed the way in which you play, as you never wanted to "waste" fuel by losing what you could not hold!

Rich Adam: I remember that this is something that Mike really wanted. I resisted, thinking that it was artificial, but he was right.

Mike Hally: As I recall it was what we wanted to do in the game and we had developed this circuitry for another application and had it added to our hardware. It seemed to create a better transition and give you a feeling that the travel you were involved in was real.

Rich Adam: Actually, this started by accident. There was a single value that you could set in the hardware to scale the image being displayed. Very early, when I was just trying to bring up an image, I had a bug where I was incrementing this value causing the landscape to grow from a dot to a full screen image. It looked really cool, so we decided to use it to enter a planet and for the zoom feature too. It is also used in the logo screen.

Mike Hally: The reactor tube planet was so valuable to warp deep into the game and I wanted to make sure that it became impossible at some point in time to achieve. Learning to fly full speed in the tube was very difficult. I had a special mode where I could play it repeatedly and did so for hours on end. Do I shoot the bunkers or use the shield? How fast can I go and just slide by the wall at the best angle? It was a rush screaming for the exit with the timer getting low!

Rich Adam: We did not want this to be a cheat for somebody to max the game. This concept was the heart of a color vector game done by Owen Rubin and Lyle Rains called Major Havoc. Of course, we probably lifted it from the Star Wars Death Star sequence to begin with.

Mike Hally: It was a pretty typical design feature for the time. The game option switches allowed for the operator to adjust many elements in the game. Have you ever played around with any of the options?

Mike Hally: I have played through every planet in every mode but not without cheating. I have gotten close (many years ago) but the reverse gravity in darkness on the planets in the 3rd solar system are rough and it takes a long time to get there.**

Rich Adam: I have never maxed out my own game without cheating. That was for the game playing gods like Mark Cerny, Doug Snyder, and Erik Durfey.

Mike Hally: Mark Cerny and I played the game everyday early in the morning. I then tested it the rest of the day. Playing is one thing but testing is completely different. When testing you are trying things to try and break the game. Fun in a different way. I played the game so much that I got sick of it being so long.

Rich Adam: That depended on the individual. Usually, the guys I mentioned before could be as good at a game as they wished. There are probably a few others that I have forgotten.

Mike Hally: I do not think I did that on purpose. It just happened due to the placement on the particular terrain and the scrolling code.

Rich Adam: We certainly knew about it. We left things in the advanced levels that we knew were diabolically difficult.

Mike Hally: I knew that it was possible but score inflation was a hot topic around Atari. I figured that it would be a rare occurrence if it ever happened.

Rich Adam: As I stated earlier, I did not believe that any mortal would survive negative gravity in a dark universe. We always released a game that we though nobody would ever max, and they always did.

Mike Hally's answer:


1	ACE	009900
2	SDM	009250
3	MEC	008000	Mark Cerny


Only the top three scores were held in eerom so that is why Rich is number 4 and so on.



4	RDA	007500	Rich Adam
5	MLH	007250	Mike Hally
6	JOE	005350	Joe Coddington (tech and hardware designer)
7	ORR	003800	Owen R. Rubin
8	BRD	001350	Brad Chaboya, graphic artist

Mike Hally: How about a picture of the poster and the Gravitar hanging mobile.

Rich Adam: You have gone totally insane in putting this together. I applaud you for the massive amount of work you have put into it. I am genuinely flattered.

Mike Hally: I could send you my project binder** (loan it to you) and you could look through it for additional tid bits.

Rich Adam: We had a lot of fun making it. Thanks for your continued interest in the game.

Mike Hally: Scott Evans bought most of my games. I still have a Relief Pitcher, Centipede, Milipede, Freeze, Gauntlet Legends, Gauntlet Dark Legacy and a Hoop It Up!

Rich Adam: My wife Linda got a Tempest during her Atari tenure, and I have a Gravitar. My prototype Missile Command croaked.

Mike Hally: Retired....may be doing another coin-op game in the near future!

Rich Adam: I am the CEO of a little studio that develops games; Mine Shaft Entertainment, Inc. My partners Ed Rotberg (BattleZone and many other games) and Dennis Koble (Sprint II and many others) are still making games with the help of some very talented people. Our website is www.mineshaft.org.

Mike Hally: Missile Command was my favorite! Developing the sequence of explosions was awesome!

Rich Adam: Asteroids. I remember seeing that game in the lab for the first time and thinking that it is going to earn a hell of a lot of quarters.

Rich Adam "...recalled his own first encounter with Asteroids: "I'll never forget going into the lab and seeing that game for the first time. It was like an adrenaline rush. . . I'm out flying this spaceship and it's the miraculous escape. I've got this situation where I've got tons of these boulders flying around the screen, I have almost nowhere to go. I get to blast my way out of it and cheat death one more time. . . . That's a good fantasy. . . You've got all these things flying around and yet you're able to survive."

"Asteroids fulfilled the fantasy of being out in space, with no gravity, and free floating. The spaceship had a very elegant grace. A lot of motion in the game had grace, even the way the boulders floated around." source

Mike Hally: I could send you my Atari badge from the Gravitar era that you could take a picture of.