Joust (video game)

''Joust'' is an action game developed by Williams Electronics and released in arcades in 1982. While not the first two-player cooperative video game, ''Joust''s success and polished implementation popularized the concept. Players assume the role of knights armed with lances and mounted on large birds (an ostrich for Player 1 and a stork for Player 2), who must defeat enemy knights riding buzzards. The characters fly around a single screen filled with floating platforms.

Using the computer hardware from the company's earlier arcade game, John Newcomer led the development team: Bill Pfutzenreuter, Janice Woldenberg-Miller ( Hendricks), Python Anghelo, Tim Murphy, and John Kotlarik. Newcomer aimed to create a flying game, with cooperative two-player gameplay, while avoiding the overdone space theme. After deciding to use birds as characters, he forwent the standard eight-direction joystick control scheme and devised collisions as the means of combat.

The game was well-received by players and critics, and the mechanics influenced other games. It was followed by a more complex and less popular arcade sequel in 1986: '' Joust 2: Survival of the Fittest''. ''Joust'' was ported to numerous home systems and included in several multiplatform retro game anthologies.

Gameplay

''Joust'' is a platforming game where the player controls a yellow knight riding a flying ostrich from a third-person perspective. The player navigates the protagonist around the game world, which consists of rock platforms floating above a flat island surrounded by lava, via two-way joystick and a button. Home console versions, however, use game controllers with directional pads and analog sticks. The joystick controls the horizontal direction that the knight travels, while pressing the button flaps the ostrich’s wings. The rate at which the player repeatedly presses the button directly determines the bird's ascension, allowing the character to fly upward, hover, or slowly descend. When traveling off the screen to either side, the character will continue its path reappearing from the opposite side.

The objective is to defeat groups of enemy knights riding buzzards that populate each level, referred to as a "wave". Upon completing a wave, a subsequent, more challenging one will begin. Players pilot the knight to collide with enemies. The higher of two jousting lances is the winner, whereas a collision of equal height repels the characters apart. A defeated enemy will turn into an egg that falls toward the bottom of the screen, which a player can collect for points. If the player does not collect the egg, it will hatch into a new knight that gains a new mount and must be defeated again. The game features three type of enemy knights—Bounder, Hunter, and Shadow Lord—that are separate colors and are worth different amounts of points. A pterodactyl will appear after a predetermined time frame to hunt the hero. Players can defeat the pterodactyl for bonus points. An indestructible Lava Troll will grab any character flying too low over the lava and drags them into the lava. Losing a clash against an opponent or contact with lava deducts an available game life; the game ends when all game lives are expended. A second player can join the game, controlling a blue knight on a stork. The two players cooperatively complete the waves, optionally attacking each other.

Development

''Joust'' was developed by Williams Electronics, with John Newcomer as the lead designer. The development also included programmer Bill Pfutzenreuter, artists Janice Woldenberg-Miller and Python Anghelo, and audio designers Tim Murphy and John Kotlarik. The game features amplified monaural sound and raster graphics on a 19-inch color CRT monitor. Like other Williams arcade games, ''Joust'' was programmed in assembly language. A pack of three AA batteries provide power to save the game's settings and high scores when the machine is unplugged from an electrical outlet. Anghelo stenciled the cabinet artwork on a wooden frame, and designed artwork for promotional materials. One such flyer features archaic English, which was also incorporated into the game's onscreen instructions and game-over message.

Conception

Following the success of the 1981 game '' Defender'', Williams searched for new creative staff. John Newcomer, believing video games to be the future of entertainment, left his job as a toy designer to work at Williams, who hired him to create game ideas as support for development staff. After a few days, he generated a list of ideas that included ideas for his top two games, ''The War of the Worlds'' and ''Joust''. Technical specifications dictated the selection because his vision of ''The War of the Worlds'' was technologically infeasible, whereas ''Joust'' could be accomplished with hardware already available at Williams. A development team was formed, which decided to create the game using ''Defender''s hardware.

Newcomer conceived ''Joust'' as a "flying game" with cooperative two-player gameplay, but he did not wish to emulate the popular space theme of previous successful flying games like ''Asteroids'' and ''Defender''. To that end, he made a list of things that could fly: machines, animals, and fictional characters. After evaluating the positive and negative of each idea, Newcomer chose birds for their wide appeal and his familiarity with fantasy and science fiction media featuring birds. To further increase his understanding, Newcomer went to the library to study mythology. He believed that the primary protagonist should ride a majestic bird. The first choice was an eagle, but the lack of graceful land mobility dissuaded him. Instead, he decided that a flying ostrich was more believable than a running eagle. To differentiate between the first and second player characters, the developers picked a stork, believing the proportions were similar to an ostrich while the color difference would avoid confusion among players. Newcomer chose vultures as the main enemies, believing that they would be recognizably evil. Anghelo created concept art of the characters as guidance for further design.

Design

The decision to use birds prompted Newcomer to deviate from the standard eight-direction joystick. He implemented a flapping mechanism to allow players to control the character's ascent and descent. With the vertical direction controlled via the arcade cabinet's button, a two-way joystick was added to dictate horizontal direction. Though other Williams employees were concerned about the design, Newcomer believed that a direct control scheme for flight would strengthen the connection between the player and the character. The combat was devised to allow for higher levels of strategy than traditional shooting games. Because flying became an integral gameplay element, he chose to have characters collide as a means of combat, with victory decided by onscreen elevation.

The developers created the game using 96K of ROM chip storage, which limited the data size of individual graphics and sound effects they could use. The ROM size limits also prohibited Newcomer from creating more characters. The graphics are hand-animated pixel art. To animate the birds, Woldenberg-Miller referenced Eadweard Muybridge's book ''Animals In Motion''. Given the limited memory, she had to balance the number of frames (to minimize file size) while maintaining realistic animation. Woldenberg-Miller initially chose gray for the buzzards' appearance but changed it to green to optimize the color palette as the developers had only 16 colors to create the entire display. Once the colors were decided for the character sprites, Newcomer finalized the look of the platforms. The hardware had limited audio capabilities, and sounds typically require larger amounts of memory than graphics. Working with these restrictions, Newcomer instructed Murphy and Kotlarik to focus on select sounds he deemed important to reinforcing gameplay. He reasoned that the audio would serve as conspicuous hints that players could use to adjust their strategy. Newcomer prioritized the crucial wing-flap sound above others related to the pterodactyl, collisions, and hatching eggs.

In designing the levels, Newcomer added platforms to the environment after the combat was devised. A static game world was chosen, instead of a scrolling world, to focus on detailed visual textures applied to the platforms; the hardware could not easily display the textures while scrolling, and the team believed that displaying the whole environment would aid players. The final game world element designed was a lava pit and a hand reaching out of it to destroy characters too close to the bottom of the screen. Newcomer placed the platforms to optimize Pfutzenreuter's enemy artificial intelligence (AI), which was programmed for attack patterns based partly on platform placements. The knight enemies were designed to exhibit progressively more aggressive behavior. Bounders flew around the environment randomly, occasionally reacting to the protagonist. Hunters sought the player's character in an effort to collide. Shadow Lords flew quickly and closer to the top of the screen; Pfutzenreuter designed them to fly higher when close to the protagonist to increase the Shadow Lord's chances of victory against players. The pterodactyl was designed to prevent players from idling and to be difficult to defeat. The enemy's only vulnerability is its open mouth during a specific animation frame, and it quickly flies upward at the last moment when approaching a player waiting at the edge of a platform. The game prioritizes its graphics processing to favor the player characters over the enemies, so enemies begin to react more slowly when the number of on-screen sprites increases.

While playtesting the game, the team discovered an animation bug they described as a "belly flop". The flaw allowed players to force the ostrich or stork sprite through an otherwise impassable small gap between two adjacent platforms of very close elevation. Because it provided an interesting method to perform a sneak attack on an opponent below the gap, and because of limited time available, the developers decided to keep the defect as an undocumented feature rather than fix it. A second bug, which allows the pterodactyl to be easily defeated, was discovered after the game was first distributed. Newcomer designed the game and its AI with each sprite's dimension in mind. A day before the game was finished, however, the pterodactyl's sprite was altered to improve the appearance. The new sprite allowed the pterodactyl to be easily defeated by waiting at a ledge. Upon learning of the flaw, Williams shipped a new ROM for the arcade cabinets to assuage distributors' complaints.

Release

A cocktail table version was later released, engineered by Leo Ludzia. It is unique among cocktail games with its side-by-side seating rather than opposing sides, which allowed Williams to reuse the same ROM chip from the upright cabinets. With substantially fewer units manufactured (between 250-500 units) than the upright arcade machine, the cocktail version is a rare collector's item.

Soon after its arcade release, Atari, Inc. acquired the licensing rights to release home ports of ''Joust''. The company published ports on its own systems (the Atari 2600 and Atari 5200 home consoles), and under its Atarisoft label, on the Apple II and personal computers. While Atari was brokering a deal with Nintendo in 1983 to distribute the soon-to-be released Famicom console and games outside Japan, Satoru Iwata from HAL Laboratory approached Nintendo about developing for its new console. After meeting with Nintendo, Iwata was assigned the task of converting ''Joust'' for the Famicom, a project he completed in two months. However, the deal between Atari and Nintendo collapsed, and the Famicom port was shelved until 1987, when HAL Laboratory was able to published it in Japan. A North American version for the Nintendo Entertainment System followed the next year.

A BBC Micro version was in development in 1984, programmed by Delos Harriman. However, it was unfinished when the Atarisoft label was discontinued.Warner Communications, Atari's parent company, sold parts of the video game company, including the Atarisoft division, to Jack Tramiel in 1984. Aardvark Software picked up development and finished the game in 1985, but after the company appeared to disappear, the port remained unreleased until Harriman began selling it the next year. A new company, Go-Dax, later released a clone titled ''Skirmish'' in 1988 for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron home computers. Harriman was credited as the creator of ''Skirmish'' in ''Acorn User'' magazine's coverage of other Go-Dax games. A port for the ColecoVision was also in production under the Atarisoft label; however, development ceased after a prototype was created. It was unavailable until CGE Services reproduced the prototype cartridges for release at the 2001 Classic Gaming Expo in Las Vegas.

Williams EntertainmentWilliams Electronics went public in 1987 as WMS Industries, and after acquiring Tradewest in 1994, WMS Industries renamed the new subsidiary Williams Entertainment to release home ports of its arcade games. would later include ''Joust'' in several of its multiplatform arcade compilations over a decade after its initial release: the 1995 '' Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits'', the 2000 ''Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits'', the 2003 '' Midway Arcade Treasures'', and the 2012 '' Midway Arcade Origins''. Additional compilations are the 1995 ''Arcade Classic 4'' for the Game Boy, the 2005 '' Midway Arcade Treasures: Extended Play'' for the PlayStation Portable, and the 2022 Midway Legacy Edition Arcade1Up cabinet. Many of the anthologies were created by Digital Eclipse, who used emulation to run the original source code. The company included ''Joust'' because of its high recognizability. In 2000, a web-based version of ''Bubbles'', along with nine other classic arcade games, was published on Shockwave.com. Four years later, Midway GamesWMS Industries purchased Midway in 1988 and later transferred its games to the Midway Games subsidiary. launched a website featuring the Shockwave versions. A mobile phone version was released in 2005, but omitted the flapping control scheme. ''Joust'' was released via digital distribution in 2007 on GameTap, Xbox Live Arcade, and the PlayStation Network.

Reception

Given the peculiar control scheme, Williams was concerned that the game would be unsuccessful, and arcades were hesitant to purchase the game. Williams eventually shipped 26,000 units, and ''Electronic Games'' in 1983 described it as "tremendously popular". In the United States, it topped the '' Play Meter'' arcade charts in January 1983, and the ''RePlay'' upright arcade cabinet charts from January to February 1983. It was among the thirteen highest-grossing arcade games of 1983 in the United States. The same year, Olivier Chazoule of French magazine '' Tilt'' rated the arcade game favorably, noting the two player gameplay and fantasy setting. ''Computer and Video Games'' rated the Atari VCS version 83% in 1989. A writer for ''Video Gaming Illustrated'' called ''Joust'' exotic with lifelike animation. '' Antic'' called the Atari 8-bit version a "unique, addictive arcade game" that was "almost identical" to the original. The magazine concluded that ''Joust'' was "Atari's finest since ''Star Raiders''". A ''Computer and Video Games'' writer called the game "weird and wonderful".

Retrospective

In 1995, ''Flux'' magazine ranked the arcade version 26th on their "Top 100 Video Games" list. In 1996, '' Next Generation'' listed the arcade version as number 83 on its "Top 100 Games of All Time", saying that it had original concepts, quirky designs, and playability. Video game historian Steve Kent considered ''Joust'' one of the more memorable games of its time. Author David Ellis agreed, writing that the game remains enjoyable even in modern times. In 2008, Guinness World Records listed it as the number sixty-nine arcade game in terms of technical, creative, and cultural impact. In 2015, ''Hardcore Gamer'' listed the game on their "200 Best Video Games of All Time".

Kevin Bowen of ''GameSpy''s Classic Gaming wrote that ''Joust'' has an "incredibly stupid" concept but is an appealing game with good controls and competitive gameplay. He said it is "one of the first really fun multiplayer games", differentiated from other contemporary multiplayer games, and a precursor to the video game deathmatch. ''Retro Gamer'' writer Mike Bevan called the game's physics "beautifully" realized, and described ''Joust'' as one of the "most remarkable and well-loved titles" of the Williams library. Author John Sellers praised the competitive two-player gameplay, and attributed the game's appeal to the flapping mechanism. In 2004, Ellis described ''Joust'' as an example of innovative risk absent in the then-current video game industry. In retrospect, Newcomer commended Williams Electronics' management for taking a risk on him and the game. The game has garnered praise from industry professionals as well. Jeff Peters of GearWorks Games lauded the gameplay, describing it as unique and intuitive. Jeff Johannigman of Fusion Learning Systems praised the flapping mechanism and Kim Pallister of Microsoft enjoyed the multi-player aspect. Steve Wright, Atari's former head of its special project department, included ''Joust'' on his list of games to be stranded on a desert island with, citing the new type of competitive and cooperative gameplay it introduced.

Legacy

Williams released an arcade sequel, '' Joust 2: Survival of the Fittest'', in 1986. The company planned to sell an arcade conversion kit, and to increase the kit's saleability, attached a sequel to one of its games to the project. While updated technology allowed ''Joust 2'' to feature improved audio-visuals and new gameplay elements, it sold significantly fewer units than its predecessor.

Since its release, developers have both copied and built upon ''Joust''s design. Publishers released clones on several systems, including '' Ostron'' and '' Winged Warlords'' for the ZX Spectrum in 1983 as well as the 1980s shareware ''Glypha'' for the Macintosh. Ultimate Play the Game's 1983 '' Jetpac'' as well as Nintendo's 1983 '' Mario Bros.'' and 1984 '' Balloon Fight'' have elements reminiscent ''Joust''s gameplay. The flying mechanics in the 2000 game ''Messiah'' were inspired by ''Joust''. The arcade game ''Killer Queen'' was heavily inspired by ''Joust'', and mixes elements of it with RTS and MOBA games. Players armed with lances and mounted on large birds who fly around an arena to capture balls and defeat enemy players riding other birds is the gameploy for TooDX's 2014 ''Sportsball'' Wii U game.

''Joust'' has been parodied and referenced in popular culture, including ''Robot Chicken''s episode "Celebutard Mountain" and the '' Code Monkeys'' episode "Just One of the Gamers". Within video games, references include Shang Tsung's friendship finishing move in Midway Games' '' Mortal Kombat 3'', which Jon Ryan of IGN ranked as the ninth "craziest finisher" in the series, and a ''Joust''-like minigame in '' World of Warcraft: Cataclysm''.
Additionally, the book '' Ready Player One'' includes a scene featuring ''Joust''.

Remakes and adaptations

A 3D remake titled '' Dactyl Joust'' was in development for the Atari Jaguar in 1995. Despite being promoted at the 1995 E3, the game was eventually canceled. ''Electronic Gaming Monthly'' staff reported that the original 2D arcade version would have been included as an easter egg. Video footage of the game running on the Jaguar console later surfaced in 2003. Midway Games made a second attempt at a 3D remake a few years later for the Nintendo 64. Tentatively referred to as ''Joust 3D'', ''Joust X'', and ''Joust 64'', the game featured 3D arenas with split screen for the two-player battles. While the company was enthusiastic about the demo developer Play Mechanix had created, Midway canceled the project after a game from its San Diego studio that featured flying and fighting, '' Bio F.R.E.A.K.S.'', performed poorly in its field test.Game Boy Advance