Cassette 50

Sometime now-ish the retroremakes.com Cassette 50 games compo/jam will have a line drawn under it and become a very modest bit of history. It's a tiny event in what has become an endless parade of game jams. It doesn't have the cachet of Ludum Dare or the topicality of the FlappyJam. Hardly anyone will ever play the games from it and most people who play one of them probably won't want to play another. The output is intentionally unapproachable to pretty much everyone.

So, I joined in! Here are my two entries:

Kramer vs. Kramer - a heartbreaking rendering of the Academy Award winning film starring Dustin Hoffman. Playable Flash Version

PieRim - an epic quest to rescue a nation from making do with a cheese sandwich. Playable Flash Version

What the Hell?

Some explanatory context for those not familiar with the reference: Cassette 50 was a games compilation for 8-bit home computers published by a company called Cascade back in the 1980s . The compilation was heavily advertised in back pages of home computing magazines and offered fifty games for £9.95. Considering the average game cost £5-6 each at the time this was quite an offer. Eventually they juiced up the deal with a "free" calculator watch. Surely there was no way to lose?

Cascade's most evolved trap... I mean advertisement. Note the glowing praise quoted for Frogger.

Of course nothing is that good a deal (well, Steam sales and Humble Bundles have spoiled us but, back then, nothing was that good a deal). The truth behind the ad was that the games were all throwaway amateur projects written by teenagers for a tenner a piece. Those unfortunate enough to persuade their parents to write a cheque received in return a couple of hours of misery working through the tape and having the youthful optimism beaten out of their heads one shitty game at a time.

If you didn't buy it you knew of someone who had and the curious would borrow it. That's how I got it. The owner/primary victim, a school friend, tried to persuade me not to bother. Being too stupid to take his good advice I kept asking and he eventually agreed to lend it to me. The tape was handed over apologetically on a Friday lunchtime.

"No, really, they're all shit. Here, have Wheelie for the weekend too so you've got something decent," he said, trying to protect his game swapping credentials. It was a good move and I still lent him Scuba Dive the following week. Smart guy. I should have kept in touch.

I don't recall how many of the games I played. I doubt it was half of them. I just remember being amazed at how bad the games really were. They were all written in BASIC and mostly worse than the type-in listings in magazines. (For those too young to remember, tape duplication was too expensive back then to put a tape on the cover, so magazines would print game code for you to type in yourself. And we did. I'm not kidding.) I also remember, thanks to not having wasted my money, finding it quite funny.

Needless to say the Cascade Cassette 50 became a sort of touchstone for those who grew up playing videogames on those 8-bit computers, at least in the UK. Which brings us back to the jam/competition theme - write a game celebrating the awfulness of Cassette 50. There was also an optional sub-theme, which was to write a one-screen version of some bigger game. A bad one.

Why Write a Bad Game?

On its face it seems like a bit of a waste of time writing something intentionally bad and I made my first entry, Kramer vs Kramer, on a whim without thinking I'd get much out of it. It turned out to be great in a number of ways though:

•  Having the freedom to create something terrible is liberating. I spent very little time worrying about decisions and the whole thing had a great creative flow.
•  It didn't take very long. With the mentioned flow and the freedom to not polish KvsK took a couple of days (even with a fair chunk of non-game effort) and PieRim took less than 2 hours.
•  I used both games as a testbed for a simple framework for prototyping and jams I'm putting together.
•  It was a huge giggle. I mean I was literally laughing out loud while implementing things like the Billy tantrum code. I don't care if anyone else finds them funny. I found them hilarious.
•  I got to join up with the bunch over at retroremakes. I've swung by there many times in the past but never signed up to the forum. It seems like a great little dev community. 

So, all in all, it was a great success. If you've got a nostalgic twinge from the advert above or just fancy playing a bunch of terrible games then head over to retroremakes.com and check out the entries here.