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coleco cUriosity
We talk to Matthew Householder, author of the completed, but originally
unreleased, Colecovision port of Moon Patrol
So how did you get involved
with Moon Patrol?
I had been hired by Atari to join
their in-house ColecoVision game
development group. Atarisot
[the division of Atari that published games on
non-Atari systems] was our publishing label
and I was assigned to convert the arcade
game Vanguard. I spent a month learning
the Colecovision hardware and ZAX Z80
development system and during that time I
designed a sotware-scrolling background
engine to use with the Vanguard port as the
Colecovision has no hardware scrolling. Then,
in September 1983, I was told to drop that and
convert Moon Patrol instead.
What did you think of Moon Patrol?
I was happier, as it was a better game, but
realised it would be more challenging work,
too. A machine soon turned up in our oice. No
source code or graphics were provided, but I
had the keys to the machine and its operator
manual. I played it for several hours a day
until I could get through the beginner course
and most of the championship course. Then I
set the DIP switches to allow me to pause the
machine as I played in ‘God’ mode, allowing me
to reverse engineer how far apart the craters
were, how may UFOs there were, how they
behaved, how high the buggy jumped, and
so on. I employed the sophisticated tools of a
pencil, pad of paper and ruler.
How long did it take?
Through to March 1984. I wrote the code,
created the sound efects and drew the
graphics. All the art was done on graph paper
and then converted by eye into hexadecimal as I
typed it into the assembly source code iles.
Did you change the game at all?
I added some personal touches. I modelled the
irst section’s graphics on my ride to work which
included a series of seemingly-endless foothills
and a coastal mountain range. I also redesigned
the cityscape to have a more modern ‘Jetsons’
feel to it rather than the naturalistic, organic
sprites of the original. It used fewer graphic
elements that way, and I preferred the look, too.
The exploding buggy is more elaborate too, with
a little mini mushroom cloud that morphs into a
skull as it collapses.
Sounds like fun! What happened then –
why was the game unreleased?
Throughout my employment, it was rumoured
Atari had been losing more than $1 million
dollars a day. Rumours were spreading that no
more Atarisot titles would be published ater
some unnamed title, so I slapped a quick title
screen on it and submitted it to testing. But then
it stalled, and in May 1984 Atarisot was closed.
Fortunately, I kept the ROM image and my
design documents and then made a few quick
art changes. In 2014, a reconstructed version of
Moon Patrol was manufactured and distributed
to a handful of fans. I have a copy.
» [ColecoVision] The ColecoVision version of Moon Patrol
surfaced in 2014.
I played it for several
hours a day
until I could get
through the
beginner course
Matthew Householder
enemies on the ground, in the form of bright
yellow tanks and flying cars. These must be either
shot or jumped over, otherwise its curtains for
your valiant hero. Even worse, the devils have
placed landmines within certain sectors, and have
a propensity for rolling rocks down at the buggy
whenever it climbs an incline. The moon is fighting
you, too: some craters are occupied by volcanoesque
plants that try to grab the buggy as it flies
over them. This is no ordinary patrol.
moon Patrol was released in arcades in
1982 by Irem, with Williams handling
distribution in the west. Generally
assumed to have been designed by
Takashi Nishiyama (Kung-Fu Master), it, along
with Taito’s Jungle Hunt, is one of the first side-on
games to contain parallax scrolling. Each of the
three levels of gameplay scroll at a different rate,
giving an excellent impression of depth, despite
the fact that the majority of the action takes place
at the bottom of the screen. The game contains
five stages which are made up of a series of
checkpoints based on the alphabet. Each stage
comprises of five letters (except for the last, which
has the extra letter) and these checkpoints mark not
only the player’s progress, but also the restart point
should a buggy be destroyed. The display above
the action screen contains the data you’d expect
(timeline style map, score, number of lives left)
as well as three coloured indicators that warn the
player of incoming hazards. The top light indicates
38 | RETRO GAMER