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Yak's "Hardcore", and my "DEATH"
Feb. 26th, 2018 05:25 pmHardcore was a game being developed by legendary game developer Jeff Minter (aka Yak) of Llamasoft in 1992, following the success of Llamatron and Revenge of the Mutant Camels. It was never finished, because he was hired by Atari to work on games such as Tempest 2000 for the forthcoming Jaguar console. Hardcore was therefore only released as a five-level demo. When I played it aged about 14, I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I noticed recently that there was only one video of it on YouTube, and the quality of that video was terrible. So I've produced two high-quality videos of the game, one running at the default refresh rate of 50 Hz, the other running at 60 Hz (which my 14 inch TV couldn't even display at the time).
In these videos, I'm playing the game on an emulated Atari ST running at 32MHz, rather than the 8MHz that the standard models of the ST ran at – this is to ensure a perfectly smooth frame rate. For the 50Hz video, the difference between 8MHz and 32MHz is very minor, but the 60Hz version benefits much more.
In the late 90s, aged about 19, I did some work on a game of my own which was inspired by Hardcore, named "DEATH". This was also never finished, but I have recently made some tweaks to it and put it online – it can be downloaded from http://argnet.fatal-design.com/pilsbry/death.htm
My goal with this game wasn't to make an exact clone of Hardcore – and at the time I was writing it, I wouldn't have had the programming and game design experience to achieve that anyway. I definitely wouldn't say it's a great game, but with 20 years more experience, it's interesting to look back at my game vs Hardcore, and have gained a greater appreciation for the design of the latter.
In these videos, I'm playing the game on an emulated Atari ST running at 32MHz, rather than the 8MHz that the standard models of the ST ran at – this is to ensure a perfectly smooth frame rate. For the 50Hz video, the difference between 8MHz and 32MHz is very minor, but the 60Hz version benefits much more.
In the late 90s, aged about 19, I did some work on a game of my own which was inspired by Hardcore, named "DEATH". This was also never finished, but I have recently made some tweaks to it and put it online – it can be downloaded from http://argnet.fatal-design.com/pilsbry/death.htm
My goal with this game wasn't to make an exact clone of Hardcore – and at the time I was writing it, I wouldn't have had the programming and game design experience to achieve that anyway. I definitely wouldn't say it's a great game, but with 20 years more experience, it's interesting to look back at my game vs Hardcore, and have gained a greater appreciation for the design of the latter.
