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Tournaments and TalksAlso in the main room was a series of tournaments, hosted by Retro Lords, starting with Pong, the classics game which, originating in 1972, is as old as I am. The version we played was more a home console version. I assumed it was on the Atari VCS, but thinking back it might not have been as the controller wasn’t familiar. It’s a game I haven’t played for a long time, but I signed myself up for it, as one of 16 players, and I managed to make it through to the final!
I’d done very well, if I say so myself, but when it came to the last round, instead of a single game with regular paddles (and I’d also played on a fast ball, so I’d got used to that), it went to small paddles… Not even a ‘best of 3’ could help me. Any chance I got to fire the ball back, was pure chance. I didn’t catch the name of the guy who beat me, but I have to hand it to him since he, as they say, had the skills to pay the bills, and batted it back many more times than I did to him.
Coincidentally, the picture I took of the tournament, which isn’t a great one, features the guy whose head you can see the back of.
Next up, was a tournament for Doom II Deathmatch!
Three of us, at a time, would take on John Romero at the game he created, so obviously he’s going to have an advantage, although he wasn’t allowed to use the mouse, so that theoretically levelled the playing field. That said, I rarely played with a mouse back in the day, as I found it easier to get about with the keys, strafing left and right as required.
I don’t know what happened early on, but the PC I was on got stuck, and I couldn’t respawn for a while, so I fell behind. However, I’m generally bobbins at Deathmatches so I wasn’t going to win, but once I got going again it was still a great blast and I got to have my picture taken with him, as you saw on page 1. It still doesn’t feel real because this man created Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake – three of the defining PC games of the 1990s as I grew up through my early 20s. Each one brought something new to the table, and, in modern parlance, the words that would spring to mind are “OMG!!”
I’m not sure how many went up against Mr Romero in total, but the final round saw all three finalists score more frags than him (bearing in mind his mouse handicap), and Spencer Guest was the winner. Thanks to Amy Grimwood for the picture below. I think I’m grinning as I’ve finally found out how to respawn.
Later on, came the tournaments for Warlords and Micro Machines, and while I did also sign up for the former, I completely lost track of time, as I didn’t know what time the tournaments were due to start once I was away from that area, and the reason I was away, was because I was watching John Romero give his talk. Then straight after that, I had to have something to eat as by then it was around 3pm and I was starving. So, apologies to the Retro Lords if they were calling my name ad infinitum (well, maybe twice before filling the gap).
The prizes were generally retro consoles from the ’90s, such as a PSone and a Nintendo 64, so very cool indeed.
Soon after the Deathmatch was complete, and a number of us had had their photos taken with him – including one fan who had his Nintendo 64 copy of Daikatana signed, it was time for John Romero’s talk, entitled by the guys at Revival, “The Seven Labours of John Romero”, where we would be taken through seven specific games during his career and he would have to vote on whether they were a ‘joy’ (as in ‘joystick’) or a ‘sorrow’ (the relevance of which will come shortly).
I won’t say which games fell into which camp, as the talks are going to be released on DVD, and at least one has been put online, so there is stil chance to see them whether you were there and missed some, or couldn’t attend the event at all.
The seven games began with his first published title, Scout Search (1984), published on the Apple II by inCider Magazine (apples? cider? get it?), a game where a bear was roaming round a maze in rather random fashion, searching for scouts. A bizarre idea, indeed. Then came Commander Keen, one of seven titles in the series – the first of which was subtitled “Marooned on Mars“, and you sadly don’t get to play with British actress Diane Keen, but instead take the role of a boy called Billy Blaze, travelling through space in a side-scrolling platformer.
The third game brought us to Wolfenstein 3D, which I’ve already mentioned blew me away. Any self-respecting gamer will know of this one. It wasn’t his first 3D-based title, though – that was Hovertank 3D, After that came the one and only Doom. And if Wolfenstein 3D blew my mind, then Doom napalmed what was left into next week.
Quake was next on the list, and I played both this and Unreal so much in the latter half of the ’90s. I wasn’t so keen on the multiplayer versions, as I’d always get my arse kicked (hence why I didn’t do very well in the aforementioned tournament) but I got more than enough entertainment and excitement from the single-player versions. This continues to this very day on all first-person-shooters. And would you believe that John, himself, coined the term ‘Deathmatch’ – since it was a match to the death, as well as ‘Frag’ – for ‘fragmentation’.
The sixth title was Daikatana, another first-person-shooter, but one which didn’t work for me at the time. John talked about how it was made with expert gamers in mind, rather than novices, and while I’d played many games previously, this one was plagued with problems such as the fact that you would pass certain checkpoints and the PC needs to load in the next part of the game, at which point it would stop dead! When once there was action, noise and movement, now there was just silence and stopping. A huge dragonfly then approached me on one leve, causing me to take a backwards step and… yes, it all stopped again. And even though you’re in the same location, any baddies that were after you suddenly disappear. It also spent four years in development, having been promoted with a poster reluctantly approved by Romero at the time, with a red backdrop and large black lettering proclaiming “John Romero’s about to make you his bitch”.
Finally, the last game was one that passed me by at the time – Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows, While I loved the original arcade Gauntlet, this one followed Gauntlet Legends and Gauntlet Dark Legacy, and I didn’t go a bundle for Dark Legacy, hence why I probably discounted playing this one.
Other talks included Andrew Hewson – whose Hewson Consultants titles include Cybernoid and Uridium (the ZX Spectrum version of which was written by a guy called Dominic Robinson, but who wasn’t me), Andrew Oliver talking about the history of Dizzy, Newsfield (Roger Kean, Oliver Frey, Gary Penn, Steve Jarratt), and Ocean Software (Paul Owens, Matthew Cannon, Phil Trelford, Mark Jones Jnr, Simon Butler, Jim Bagley). I wish I’d een to see the Ocean one, particularly, as I’d taken my Ocean: The History book along for signing, but as I didn’t have a list of the talks to hand, and there was nothing obvious to remind me what time they were taking place, I missed it. So it would be good if some extra posters could be put up to confirm the times of the talks.
Note, however, that the talks were this year held upstairs, in a massive room that’s perfect for this, as opposed to setting up an enclosed space downstairs where there’s lots of gaming noise. Here’s hoping this continues next year as it was fantastic. There were over 150 people attending each talk, including a figure topping 200 for John Romero.
Now, for obvious reasons I couldn’t attend both the Ocean talk *and* the Doom II Deathmatch simultaneously, but thankfully, Retro Asylum have uploaded the entire 71-minute talk on Youtube and you can see it below:
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.