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The Turbo that never was


Nathan Strum

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Time for another... Stupid Game Idea! (idea... idea... idea... cookie... idea...)

 

Turbo was one of my favorite arcade games, and was the best arcade racer until Pole Position came along. Even then, it was still a groundbreaking game that would pave the way for others like Out Run, Cruisi'n USA, Chase H.Q., and all of their various sequels and spin-offs.

 

Sometime back I wrote up a little blurb on my involvement with the 2600 Turbo prototype. Initially, I was brought in to create artwork for a reproduction box, manual and label for the game (which I did). Also, since the original prototype was effectively unplayable, I was asked to re-design some of the graphics and provide gameplay feedback for an enhanced version. That way, there would be something playable on the cartridge, rather than just a nice box on a shelf.

 

And while the work Thomas Jentzsch, Fred Quimby (batari) and Dennis Debro did on the prototype was impressive by any standards, the whole project was still a pretty major disappointment to me because it still wasn't as much like Turbo as I hoped it could be.

 

Part of the problem, was this:

 

eg-turbo.jpg

 

That was from Electronic Games' 1983 Software Encyclopedia. Quite the build-up, wasn't it? So how could you not anticipate something great?

 

Unfortunately, the game that was written up in that preview was never finished or released. It was listed in various magazine ads in the early 80's, so I thought that maybe it had. But I watched and waited, and it never showed up.

 

Over time, a couple of tantalizing mockups appeared (this one showed up on Digital Press, but I don't know its origin, since the link is now broken):

 

turbo2.jpg

 

And this one, from the actual Turbo flyer:

 

poster_turbo.gif

 

But it never appeared for real until the prototype was found in 2006. (Apart from a particularly elaborate April Fools' joke, that is.)

 

Once I got to play the actual prototype, it was extremely disappointing. The controls were terrible, everything ran too fast, the game was really incomplete. I suppose compared to some of Coleco's other efforts though, it was probably par for the course (I'm looking at you Zaxxon... and Donkey Kong... and Donkey Kong Jr...).

 

So a lot of work had to be done. The question though with updating a prototype is always - how much do you do to it? At some point, you can only do so much without re-writing the entire kernel, at which point you might as well just program a new game.

 

To be faithful to the original programmer's intent, the decision was made to improve it as much as possible within the original kernel. Effectively - make the game as good as Coleco possibly could have made it back in the day using the existing kernel, had they taken the time to do so.

 

The final enhanced version of the prototype is night and day from the original. It's now very playable, and at times almost feels like Turbo. I don't know how much of the original code is left (Thomas would), but if memory serves, very little of it wasn't changed, at least to some degree.

 

Some of the changes made include:

  • Speed adjusted
  • Controls improved (inertia added)
  • Graphics improved (cars, roadside objects, score)
  • Audio improvements/additions
  • Roadside collision detection added
  • Skidding on ice added
  • Scoring changed to match arcade
  • Extended play/extra lives changed to match arcade
  • Flashing score when timer reaches 10 seconds left
  • Fire button can start games
  • Reshaped the road (straight sections)
  • Improved difficulty progression (this took a lot of playtesting)
  • Tons of bug fixes
  • And more that I'm sure I'm forgetting

That said, because the original kernel was so limiting, some things just couldn't be added. Some of these really defined what Turbo was:

  • The ambulance
  • Water puddles
  • Vertical player movement (one of the key risk vs. reward elements)
  • Manual shifting
  • More environments/road variations
  • A better sense of movement
  • Large roadside objects
  • More road, less sky (Turbo used a vertically-oriented monitor)

For awhile, at the same time we were kicking around ideas on improving the existing prototype, Thomas, John Champeau and I began discussing what a written-from-scratch homebrew version of Turbo could be.

 

One of the arcade game's most distinguishing characteristics (besides its above-and-behind view, since most racing games of that era had been top-down), were all of the environments you drove through. With Turbo, you always felt like you were getting somewhere, and you could track your improvement by where you ended up at the end of a game. A certain bridge, or curve, or whatever. The sky color does change in the 2600 prototype, but apart from the snow and tunnel stages, they didn't look that distinct. To make convincing environments in Turbo, there needed to be a variety of roadside objects, and they had to be big. The sprites were already going to be used for the cars, so re-using those for other objects would cause massive flicker.

 

Another problem with the prototype (and probably the biggest one), is that you just don't get much of a sense of movement. The roads (drawn with the playfield) are coarse and static. You only see one opponent car at a time, and one roadside object at a time (and no roadside objects on the curved sections). By comparison, Pole Position on the 2600 and Enduro had smooth, moving road edges using the ball and missile objects. But they have no roadside objects, and the road and roadsides had to be the same color. So how could we get a sense of movement, and get the roadside objects that defined the look of the game?

 

After some discussion, we decided the approach would be to use the playfield to animate the roadside objects (as suggested in both unreleased mockups). The problem is, this would require multiple playfield color changes to pull off. While it would leave all of the sprites for cars/puddles/the ambulance, there wouldn't be enough kernel time left for smoothing out or animating the road edges. So that meant the animation of the roadside objects had to be convincing enough to make up for the coarse, static road edges.

 

I went through Turbo in MAME, and captured screenshots of all of the different environments. Then went about visually designing a kernel with Thomas and John that could - in theory - reproduce those environments. The mockups from those discussions are what follows.

 

I should point out that absolutely no code was ever written for this version. But since these were mocked-up with the input of programmers, most of these could be done, and I suspect that now it would be well within the capabilities of the Harmony cart (which didn't exist then). Possibly even with smoothed road edges. :ponder:

 

So let's get on with it...

 

First, the city (arcade version):

 

turbo_arcade_1.gifturbo_arcade_23.gif

 

This is from the prototype:

 

proto-city.gif

 

And the proposed homebrew mockups (these all took multiple revisions, but I figured I'd just include the final ones):

 

color_cycled_buildings.gifcolored_buildings_night.gif

 

Note that there's now room for the player's car to move vertically. The score, "cars passed" progress bar, gear indicator, lives left, and timer are at the top.

 

The road widths changed in the arcade game, plus there were different types of trees, and "hills":

 

turbo_arcade_33.gifturbo_arcade_31.gifturbo_arcade_32.gif

 

This was the prototype's lone tree:

 

proto-tree.gif

 

Here are different sized trees (hills were never mocked up, but would just use a narrower road for the upper half):

 

turbo_short_shrub_pf.gifturbo_tall_shrub_pf_2.gifturbo_tree_pf_2.gif

 

The mountains and sky were borrowed from the prototype.

 

We went from multiple rows of street lamps in the arcade:

 

turbo_arcade_18.gif

 

To just one in the prototype:

 

proto-lamp.gif

 

Getting decent detail using the playfield is a challenge, but the point is less about the detail, and more the overall effect of movement and environment:

 

turbo_street_lights_pf_2.gif

 

Curved roads were an important part of the arcade game - especially the seaside blind curve:

 

turbo_arcade_4.gifturbo_arcade_5.gifturbo_arcade_16.gifturbo_arcade_17.gif

 

The prototype kernel only had one curve, and it only went one direction. It also had no sense of movement, since it had no roadside objects:

 

proto-curve.gif

 

The mockups had moving objects, plus the blind curve (reverse directions weren't mocked up, but the intent was to include them):

 

turbo_curved_pf_road_2.gifturbo_blind_corner_3.gif

 

There were other environments in the arcade game as well:

 

turbo_arcade_38.gifturbo_arcade_13.gif

 

At least the prototype had the snow scenes and tunnels:

 

proto-snow.gifproto-tunnel.gif

 

These are the mockup versions:

 

turbo_snow_mountains.gifturbo_tunnel_pf_3.gif

 

However, not in the prototype at all were the bridges. There were several in the arcade game, and they helped serve as points of reference, plus the narrow red one made it really hard to pass other cars:

 

turbo_arcade_21.gifturbo_arcade_29.gifturbo_arcade_30.gif

 

So I felt it was pretty essential to have them in a 2600 version, too (again, the cityscape in the distance was borrowed from the prototype):

 

turbo_bridge_medium.gifturbo_wide.gifturbo_bridge_narrow_3.gif

 

The environmental elements are mixed and matched in the arcade games, to give seaside roads, or different trees, etc:

 

turbo_arcade_7.gif

 

Which should be possible on the 2600, to some degree:

 

water_one_side_straight.gif

 

 

Finally, the arcade version could have four other cars onscreen with you:

 

turbo_arcade_1.gif

 

The prototype could only ever have one:

 

proto-tree.gif

 

Even with the asymmetrical playfield and color changes, Thomas figured we could still fit up to six cars onscreen (two in each horizontal section). This is without flicker, too. The nice thing about having so many objects is we could include the ambulance and water puddles if we managed things properly. (It might have also been possible to use a missile for the puddle, but I seem to recall there wouldn't have been enough cycles to do it, plus it would take on the color of whatever sprite was its parent.) The non-player cars would have to be single color, but not necessarily all the same color:

 

curved_sprite_colored.gif

 

So there you go. The Turbo that was never made. Maybe someone will take it on someday... but I'm not going to hold my breath. I waited for 26 years to play the last version of Turbo for the 2600, and it wasn't worth the wait. Besides, I'm still hoping for Bosconian, don'tcha know. ;)

 

Still, you can pick up the prototype in the AtariAge store and play that. It has both the enhanced version and the original prototype on it, so you can quite literally say it's not half-bad. ;)

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Very nicely documented. Love all the mock ups too. I remember buying Enduro back in the day and being amazed by the different environments, day to night effects, and backgrounds. If this came out in your revised form at the same time that would have been an epic battle for my $30.

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Those mockups look very impressive - I'll look at implementing them after PoP and Project Bruce :)

 

I haven't played 2600 Turbo yet (no PAL version) so I'm unclear how the corner works. Does it go from a straight road to a curve immediately or are there various intermediate stages of curvature?

 

Chris

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It jumps from straight to curved - no transition. The arcade game does that too. The arcade game has brief transitions between some of the straight sections (going into the tunnel, for example), but they're only a few frames.

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