Boulder Dash, released in 1984, is no nonsense. Please don’t take the “we don’t like the pun” here, as in terms of this article it is all about the history of invention. Here are a couple of quick facts about the history of Boulder Dash:
- Peter Liepa, who is credited as the game’s creator, studied Physics as did Douglas Smith.
- Unlike the creator of Lode Runner, Peter didn’t get super rich quick.
So this is the story…
- Game Inventors: Peter Liepa, Chris Gray
- Occupation at time of invention: Peter Liepa — unemployed; Chris Gray – unknown
- Location at time of invention: Canada.
The concept of the game and its realization seem to be simple (at least in terms of modern technologies). Yet the Boulder Dash cookbook is made up of one man’s versatile interests and another man’s insight.
Fascination for animation.
Born in 1953 in Ottawa, as a child Peter aspired to be an animator or special effects designer on the one hand, and a particle physicist on the other. He had to abandon the latter because he found it too practical and confusing and thought that there was a vague future for particle physics. The incentive for animation, on the other hand, lived with Peter until the right moment came to let him out.
fascination with computers
When he was in high school, Peter was sent to the National Research Council of Canada for a week as part of an internship program. He had to work in a physics lab, Peter’s supervisor had a shiny new Wang calculator and it caught the eye of the young intern. In the same week, he took all the interns on a tour of the Council’s computer center. Shocked by what he saw, Peter asked to spend the rest of his internship there. In the computer center there was an interactive terminal, which in those days was something like a Teletype or IBM Selectric connected to a central mainframe. Peter quickly learned to program it, but after the weekend internship there was no opportunity to study computers for a long time. In those days, the concept of personal computers was unimaginable.
Peter started in Physics at university but soon switched to mathematics. His summer jobs were in computer programming, and he spent a lot of time playing early stuff like Conway’s Game of Life, which printed the results on paper and had no digital screen at all.
Fascination for human nature.
After graduating in mathematics, Peter devoted himself to studying subjects such as human memory and perception. He earned a master’s degree in Control Theory. Both control theory and knowledge of human nature are other key points in what would later become the cult game.
another man’s idea
When Peter was in his early twenties, he visited a friend of his, who was deeply interested in electronic toys and had a big screen TV and an Atari 400. Peter spent several nights playing the game and then had a flash of “I can do this.” “. . He went out and bought an Atari 800 to start writing games. But rather than just start writing a game, Peter thought it would be wise to contact a local game publisher to see what kind of game might be in demand.
The publisher put Peter in touch with Chris Gray, who had shipped a game in Basic, but didn’t have the skills to convert it to machine language. The game was similar to an arcade game called The Pit, but upon further examination, Peter found that the game had too few gameplay variations, too default.
The development
Not satisfied with Chris’s game algorithm, Peter started playing around with basic elements of dirt, rocks, and jewels and, within a couple of days, built the basic “physics engine” of what would become Boulder Dash. He realized that using a random number generator could generate random caves, and that controlling the density of rocks and jewels could make for interesting gameplay. The game was fascinating not only from the point of view of the puzzles, but also appealed to various emotional impulses: the obvious psychotic ones like greed (collecting jewelry), destructiveness (moving rocks and killing fireflies), and neurotic ones like cleaning up all the dirt. from a warehouse.
Chris and Peter lived quite apart, so their meetings were infrequent and involved a long drive. It quickly turned out that their design goals and methods were quite incompatible. Peter was developing a game quite different from Chris’s original, and he did it completely on his own. Peter designed all the elements, the physics, the caves, the gameplay, the graphics, the music and the title. Chris helped with some weird stuff: he suggested, for example, how to make the graphics for the game’s title by composing large letters from Atari character graphics. In the end, there was much debate about exactly how Chris should be credited and what his share of the royalties should be.
The game’s working title for a long time was cave raiderand several other variants like cavern crystals. Eventually, Peter came up with the name rock racewhich is a take off of the word nonsense. Coincidentally, a board game called Nonsense it was also published in 1986.
The main character of the game, Rockford.
Originally, in the early stage of the physics engine, Rockford was just a static crosshair-like shape. When one moved the shape, it would burrow into the earth and absorb the jewels. In fact, the graphics were very simple and the elements were all single characters on a 24 × 40 character screen. There was no scrolling in early versions of the game. It was Chris who suggested that the digging shape should be a “man”, and together they came up with a simple human shape. When Peter showed an early build of the game to a potential publisher, they pointed out that “the man” was too small and needed to be a more recognizable character. But you couldn’t make “the man” more prominent without making everything bigger, too. So this was where the hard work of converting the game from one that ran on a 24×40 character screen to one that scrolled across a much larger region began.
Now that the game elements were larger, Peter was able to add much more detail, including making “the man” more recognizable. He created a character editor to solve the pixels and the animation. It was at this point that Rockford’s character took shape. Rockford wasn’t supposed to be a particular type of human or animal, he just evolved in the pixel editor. Since Peter was often interested in animation, he elaborated on the character to make Rockford blink and move his feet. This was an innovation that added a lot of depth to the character.
The result
Overall it took Peter about 6 months to finish the first version of rock race with no more than 2 hours of actual work per day.
Although Boulder Dash was finished in half a year, it took another six months to find a publisher and reach a publishing deal. By then, Peter was already working full time at a company that developed word processing software.
And just like that, the rest is history: Boulder Dash was finally published by First Star in 1984 and was an instant bestseller.
Having survived for more than two decades on the market, the game is still here to fascinate us. You can always play our new version of Boulder Dash (http://www.zxgames.com/en/boulder-dash-episode-1.shtml), which is as close to the original as possible and doesn’t need emulators to run. . Where is Chris Gray now?
We have no idea.
Where is Peter Liepa now?
Peter works in software development at a company called Alias, which produces 3D software for design and entertainment.