Apple II Bits

I had marked November 17th as the date Jordan Mechner would return to the world of Karateka, his classic Apple II fighting game. Ten days early, Sean Fahey announced that my marked date was for the PC, iOS, and PlayStation 3 versions of the new Karateka, but that the Xbox Live Arcade version was now available.

As primarily an Xbox gamer, I was happy to hear this news and immediately downloaded the game, accepting of the fact that I’d be unable to load it upside-down. Up until then, I’d wondered as to the game’s genre and nature: was it best described as a sequel? A reboot? A reimagining? Having played only the ten-minute free trial, I would describe the game as a remake — and one that doesn’t capture modern gamers with its demo.

How much has Karateka changed in the last 30 years?

With an art style and musical underpinning that harken back to the classic Apple II fighting game, Karateka is a visual and aural delight. The Japanese gardens and goofy goons that our hero encounters are evocative of another time and place. There is little freedom to explore these environments, though, as the protagonist (one of three) proceeds through it on two-dimensional rails, unable to move any direction but forward.

Once he engages with a foe, the opportunity for input becomes limited to three buttons: punch, kick, and block. It is impossible to strike an enemy without first blocking his own attack, at which point his guard is lowered and he is open to a chain of attacks. In an interview with Polygon’s Samit Sarkar, Mechner describes the combat system as rhythm-based in which players "have to time your attacks to the score from Grammy-winning composer Christopher Tin". This was not my experience; my blocks were based solely on cues from the castle’s keepers — tells that they were about to strike. A successful block then let me pound the punch and kick buttons, but there seemed to be neither functional difference between the two nor incentive to experiment with a variety of combos.

In an interview with Steve Peterson, Mechner indicates that the simplistic gameplay is intentional, allowing other aspects of Karateka to take center stage:

Mechner believes Karateka is an unusual design, one that will attract a broader audience. "It’s not a fighting game in the sense of trying to rack up points, or fighting for fighting’s sake. It’s fighting in order to get to the happy ending in the story, and it’s a love story. I think we’re appealing to a slightly different audience than most fighting games," he says.

I can appreciate Jordan Mechner, as someone whose ambition has always been to write Hollywood scripts, wanting to focus on that aspect of Karateka. Storytelling has become an increasingly important part of both big-budget and indie games, with hits such as Braid, Portal, and even the BIT.TRIP series having set new milestones for their innovative and memorable plots.

But plot is also the hardest quality for a game to convey in a short demo. It is more effective to draw players in with engaging gameplay, then present them with an increasingly intricate and meaningful narrative. In that respect, the free demo I played falls flat. The only challenges I encountered in my time with Karateka was identifying a foe’s pattern and timing my blocks accordingly. With digital distribution and mobile apps, there are much more involving experiences I could get for my $10, and demos that give me more confidence in that investment than Karateka has.

(Hat tips to Blake Patterson, John August, and Steve Melton)

Jordan Mechner is a hot ticket these days. I don’t know exactly when that happened — in 2003 when his Apple II classic Prince of Persia got rebooted for a modern gaming audience, or 2010 when the franchise was adapted to film, or 2012 when he was the PAX East keynote speaker. Regardless, he and his properties seem to be popping up everywhere these days, with The Last Express coming out for iOS this month and a new Karateka due out real soon now.

The Mechner story that was perhaps of most relevance to Apple II users occurred earlier this year, when the source code for his original Prince of Persia was found and salvaged. The effort was 95% Tony Diaz, with the other 5% being Jason Scott knowing to bring Diaz into the equation. As the connective tissue, Scott observed the entire experience and gave a presentation about it on Friday, September 28, 2012, at Derbycon. The entire 52-minute session is now available online (note: contains NSFW language):

Remove the foul language and the tendency toward eccentric clothing, and Scott is still an entertaining speaker who knows his material and has a good delivery style. I recommend this and any other presentation of his you have the opportunity to attend.

What’s next for Jordan Mechner? At PAX East, he commented that computer gaming was essentially a sidequest toward his goal of becoming a Hollywood scriptwriter. Yet gaming seems to be where he’s known best, and he continues to return to that scene. Whichever one makes him happy, I look forward to his continued works.

Switzerland may be the birthplace of the World Wide Web, but that invention is just a component of the larger Internet, for which the United States of America can claim responsibility. Yet the USA has fallen behind in broadband penetration and speed (6.7 Mbps average — just 43% of what South Korea attains).

So embarrassed by this performance that the USA may lose another of its children: Steve Wozniak wants to move to Australia, where a national broadband network is being deployed.

Theo Crazzolara

"I support it very much. It’s one of the reasons why I actually like this country and want to become a citizen," Woz told the Australian Financial Review. "It turns out I can keep my American citizenship. I intend to call myself an Australian and feel an Australian, and study the history and become as much of a real citizen here as I can."

This isn’t just idle chatter, either: The Mercury News reports that Woz was in Brisbane at the time of the iPhone 5’s launch, filing the documents necessary to begin the citizenship process to settle in the Land of Woz.

It’s ironic that Woz would place so much emphasis on personal broadband, as his current California residence lacks that connectivity. The Woz is apparently able to get by with mobile access from his multiple cell phones.

Be it mobile or broadband, Woz’s and the world’s connectivity needs are very different from the days in which the Apple II was invented. Even today, though the telecommunication projects of Ewen Wannop are nearly essential additions to any modern Apple II user’s software library, there’s so much we can do offline with our classic computers. While the same can be said for Macs and PCs — games and productivity suites often work fine without an Internet connection — I never feel as crippled with an offline Apple II as I do with an offline MacBook. Instead, I enjoy the slower pace of the Apple II, the thoughtful navigation and swapping of disks, and the monotasking work environment.

Does Woz need to switch countries — or computers?

(Hat tips to Paul Lilly and Om Malik)

Steve Wozniak‘s star continues to shine brightly, with media appearances all over the world and the Internet.

In May, Woz spoke with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) of Sydney. The MP3 of the interview is short, clocking in at fewer than ten minutes. The only new piece of information I gleaned was that (if I understand correctly) the Apple-1 was designed not with a personal computer in mind, but an Internet terminal. That’s unsurprisingly prescient of Woz.

More interesting yet less publicized was Woz’s Leap Day interview with tech podcast inThirty, hosted by Justin Freid. Part one (iTunes) and part two (iTunes) each run about 30 minutes, for one hour total. These interviews are much meatier, conducted as they are by a tech guru and not a mainstream media anchor, even though both inThirty and ABC want to know about Woz’s relationship with the late Steve Jobs.

inThirty’s exchange most relevant to Apple II Bits readers was prompted by the question: "How much of the Apple II do you see in the iPhone and iPad? Is that philosophy of Apple being an engineering company still prevalent?" Woz’s answer:

It’s very hard to see any similarity between the Apple II that I designed and the iPhones and iPads today in terms of the product features… I built the Apple II for myself, and Steve Jobs wasn’t around — he was up in Oregon, he wasn’t talking to me… Here’s what’s similar … the Apple II, I just built them because I wanted a computer to do my work at Hewlett-Packard… I wanted to play games and have a machine for fun… that was all I ever wanted out of the thing, and as such, I was building it for myself… It’s very important to know who you’re building something for, so that it comes out good and consistent for that person, and the person was only one person, which was myself. I like things simple, clean — I don’t want them full of stuff that nobody understands. That’s a beauty to me.

Woz likes things simple and clean, yet he pushed for the Apple II to have seven expansion slots, against Steve Jobs’ wishes. Is the sleek, streamline form factor and interface of today’s iOS devices therefore not the antithesis of Woz’s philosophy, as commonly believed, but rather its realization?

Apple Inc.’s logo has been through three major revisions: from the early, cerebral scene of Sir Isaac Newton, to the rainbow logo we Apple II users identify with, to the modern, sleek, silver fruit. The shape of the logo has not significantly changed in more than three decades, its simplicity proving enduring. Such a legacy inspires questions to its origins, which designer Rob Janoff answered in a 2009 interview. Were the rainbow theme and the bite from the apple a joint reference to the fate of Alan Turing, the supposed "father of computer science" who committed suicide by biting a cyanide-laced apple, to avoid prosecution for homosexuality? It’s a clever tale, but not one that holds up to Janoff’s take on history — though supposedly, Steve Jobs himself refused to debunk the myth.

A recent article in Scientific American, "Hunters of Myths: Why Our Brains Love Origins", explains Jobs’s reticence:

Jobs, it seems, understood intuitively an important facet of our minds: we like to know where things come from. We like stories. We like nice tales. We need our myths, our origins, our creations. It would be disappointing to know that the apple was nothing more than an apple—and the bite, a last-minute addition to clarify scale, so that it was clear that we were seeing an apple and not a cherry. And that rainbow? A representation of a screen’s color bars, since the Apple II was the first home computer that could reproduce color images on its monitor.

How boring. How much of a letdown. Far better to have a story " and the better the story, the better for us.

The article elaborates on this anecdote, using it as an example of why clever or secret origin stories are often preferable to the truth:

Psychologist Tania Lombrozo argues that such impromptu causal explanations are critical to our everyday cognition. They contribute to improvements in learning. They can foster further exploration and idea generation. They can help us form coherent beliefs and generalize about phenomena—and then use those beliefs to understand, predict, and control future occurrences and, in turn, form new beliefs.

It’s a short but interesting article that demonstrates yet another aspect of Jobs’s genius. His contribution to design may’ve been questionable, and his first tour of duty at Apple may’ve marked him as an irascible manager who failed to respect the humanity of his employees — but given the success of his products, Jobs did seem to have a keen understanding, if not of human nature, then of human desire. Even when it comes to logos:

Steve Jobs’s silence was truly perceptive. Sometimes, it’s just better to let natural human tendencies take over and start weaving tales, true or not, that will help people understand and relate to you better than anything you say ever could.

(Note: I originally wrote the below blog post for Apple II Bits but ultimately sent it to PCWorld, with whom I now have a relationship to publish gaming articles after covering last month’s GameFest.)

Last week, Jordan Mechner was the keynote speaker at PAX East, Penny Arcade’s annual three-day celebration of gaming and gamers. Mechner kicked off the event with his personal story of how creating Karateka and Prince of Persia indirectly led him to fulfill his life goal of breaking into Hollywood, and how he has since revisited those properties many times across various media.

Mechner’s tale was one of persistence and perseverance. When he first tried his hand at programming in 1982, his debut game garnered the attention of Broderbund’s Doug Carlston. "Unlike in Asteroids, where you’re a triangle-shaped ship shooting at rocks," described Mechner, "in my game, you’re a triangle-shaped ship shooting at colored balls. It had physics and everything." Despite the wicked awesome name of Deathbounce, the game remained unpublished — "There’s a reason [Carlson] passed on that," said Mechner.

But once Mechner went public with the story of Deathbounce, PAX attendees demanded its release, going so far as using the Q&A session to hand Mechner money toward a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. Hey, if it’s worked for Tim Schafer, Brian Fargo, and Al Lowe, why not Jordan Mechner?

Continue reading this story at PCWorld.com Â»

(Hat tip to Jordan Mechner, via Paul Marzagalli of NAVGTR)