E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

Wired.com readers might not have enjoyed the Raiders of the Lost Ark game, but Steven Spielberg liked the Atari 2600 title enough that he asked its designer, Howard Scott Warshaw, to design a game based on his upcoming film E.T.

In time for the film's release. Which was six weeks away.

Faced with an impossible deadline, Warshaw sequestered himself away in his Atari office, emerging just a month and a half later with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. It's not the single worst videogame ever created, but it lives in infamy as the videogame industry's first high-profile disaster. Again, let us look back at children opening their presents one fine Christmas morning in 1982, and watch as they attempt to maneuver E.T. around the game screen, only to fall into a pit that they cannot escape from, no matter how many times they try. Repeat until tears are flowing steadily and Mom takes the game back to the store.

There are many urban legends about E.T., and all of them are true. Atari manufactured 4 million copies of the game and found itself stuck with 2.5 million leftovers, which it buried in a New Mexico landfill. But E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial remains one of the best-selling Atari 2600 games of all time, proving the old adage that people will, in fact, buy any videogame with a movie license on the cover, no matter how terrible.

This is slightly embarrassing to admit, but I'm addicted to ... Space Invaders.

Not the 1978-issue game, mind you. No, I'm talking about Space Invaders Extreme -- a re-visioning of the original game, released this week for the Nintendo DS and PSP by Square Enix (which now owns Taito, creator of the original thud-thud-thudding arcade classic). The game is enormously fun, gorgeously rendered and -- other than the horrid use of extreme in the title -- a loving tribute to the Precambrian title that birthed the entire videogame industry.

But here's the really interesting thing. I think the new Space Invaders is the first "reissue" of a videogame that is completely successful.

This really has never been done before. This subgenre of gaming -- the classic remake -- is littered with failure. Defender, Asteroids, Galaga: You name the old-school game, and it's been ruined by some designer's misbegotten attempt to improve it. It's like a form of cultural taxidermy: They take a wonderful old game, surgically drain it of all joy, then leave the mounted corpse on your mantelpiece to glare at you with its creepy, glassy eyes.

But why? Why is it so hard to update a cool old game?

Usually because the designers get too fancy. They assume modern gamers will only play a game if it's 3-D, so they go to painful lengths to transform 2-D titles into full, "immersive" reality. Among other things, this inevitably screws up the control system. The playfully unmanageable chaos of the old-school Robotron 2084, for example, becomes the grindingly unmanageable chaos of the 1996 remake on the Nintendo 64.

Worse, by moving into 3-D, these games abandon the chunky, low-fi graphics that made those 1980s titles so vibrant and Jungian in their symbolic heft. In the original Battlezone, the world was rendered in green, vectorized geometric shapes. It was a perfect evocation of the ghostly quality of "surgical" Cold War combat: We fight amongst Platonic solids!

Then Atari redesigned the game in 2006 for the PSP -- transforming it into the sort of brown/beige 3-D sludge so omnipresent in today's gaming, with sundry powerups that promise "complexity" but only serve to ruin the Zen-like simplicity of the original.

This is what's so refreshing about the new Space Invaders. It avoids all these pitfalls. First off, it remains resolutely 2-D. Indeed, the aliens look precisely as they did in 1978 -- chunky, pixelated blots of Otherness dread. They still crawl across the screen, slowly at first and then faster as you eliminate their ranks. And as before, you can only zip back and forth along the ground and fire upward.

Yet Square Enix has also managed to insert clever new bits of gameplay. Some of the aliens carry shields that deflect missiles back toward you; others, once wounded, stagger downward in kamikaze attacks. Every once in a while, one of those mystery ships at the top of the screen will pause, fizz and unleash a searing, laserlike blast for a few seconds. Meanwhile, you've got new powerups: multiple missiles, cluster shots and a penetrating laser.

The upshot is that the game remains neatly balanced. The aliens have their new tricks, but so do you. In fact, as a whole, the game advances with the same sort of inverse logarithmic difficulty: Around 10 minutes in, you'll feel precisely the same oh-shit-oh-shit loss of control you experienced in the original arcade game. It's quite eerie.

What I'm trying to argue, ultimately, is that Square Enix has captured the spirit of the original game. The funky weapons, the zigzaggy attacks -- sure, they're new. But they also seem like part of the Space Invaders canon. In essence, Space Invaders Extreme feels like a game that Taito's designers would have wanted to produce if they'd had just slightly more processing power.

Square Enix's designers have deftly channeled the limitations that Taito's designers faced. And this, really, is the secret to their success -- because it's your choice of limitations, not freedoms, that makes for superb game design.

So yeah: It's 1978 again. Except, somehow, slightly better. Welcome back!

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Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.

Virtual Heroes, the game studio that collaborated on America's Army, has partnered with the Department of Homeland Security on Zero Hour: America's Medic. Training first responders for real-life natural disasters and terrorist attacks is the idea, but anyone can jump in and play through the realistic scenarios. Utilizing Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3 technology, players assume the role of an EMT and encounter scenarios that could occur in real life. The objective is to assess the problem and save as many lives as possible, even in the midst of major disasters like an earthquake or a lethal cyanide attack that derails a train.

Interacting with patients is an essential part of Zero Hour. Players diagnose symptoms that victims report. This process doesn't always go smoothly in chaotic conditions, and the player is often hurried on to other serious cases.

In some cases, what appears to be a flu can be much more severe. Epic's Unreal Engine 3 brings out all of the details in these patients, including the red in their eyes. It's important to read victims' visual cues as well as converse with them.

Zero Hour trains players how to properly do things in actual emergencies, like setting up a triage area, and then throws them into virtual situations that require them to parlay those lessons into practice. For instance, it's important to bring the right gear based on the information received from Dispatch in the ambulance.

When a freight train derails near a heavily populated train station and releases cyanide into the air, victims run out of the station. As medical commander, the player must set up a triage area and sort through these patients as quickly as possible, making sure proper treatment is administered.

A succession of bombs go off during the early innings of the St. Lillo Lions home baseball game. Firefighters alert the player that radioactivity is present. Amid extreme chaos -- and quickly -- the player must set up a triage area a safe distance away from the scene and treat victims of the dirty bomb.

An earthquake has turned buildings to rubble. Setting up a safe haven for treatment as aftershocks roll through the disaster scene means treating the victims strewn throughout the area is extremely urgent.

Players arrive at each scene as EMTs inside an ambulance responding to a disaster call Dispatch. They must use pertinent information from Dispatch to assess the correct gear for each situation, as they see quake damage unfolding from the vehicle.

The city of St. Lillo doesn't exist, but it's based on real U.S. cities. Virtual Heroes worked with EMT personnel in urban hubs like Boston and New York City to add a flavor of those locales to the game, and elements of Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco were blended in.

EMERYVILLE, California -- Spore is an ambitious game, years in the making, from Sims designer Will Wright. It lets players create creatures, then influence the beasties' evolution from single-celled organisms to space-exploring monsters.

Wired.com got a look at Spore's Creature Creator component, which will let players design the beings they'll interact with and share with the world, during a Tuesday night press event at Maxis Software's studios. Aside from the official presentation, an array of cardboard cutouts, colorful posters and other items spied in the Maxis offices all hinted at things to come when Creature Creator is released June 17.

Spore is scheduled for a Sept. 7 release.

Left:

One of the many brutes greeting us at the door as we trickled into the EA office Tuesday evening -- the yellow chap made of cardboard, not the Maxis employee. Both were probably amused at the horde of journalists stumbling about their office space.

If this bulbous monstrosity is any indication of things to come, the Creature Creator will not be for the faint of heart. That gaping maw, those cold, vacant eyes ... surely the spine-chilling product of some severely twisted imagination. Or promo material for Electronic Arts' The Simpsons Game.

Spore invades Earth! Community is central to the game's experience, with a great deal of the content spewing from the minds of those who get their hands on the Creature Creator. This poster, spotted on a wall at Maxis, offers a time line of events past and things to come in the Spore development cycle, and provides insight into the ideas driving the creative process.

An onsite 3-D printer crafts little ceramic models of creatures that the folks at Maxis have been coming up with. Eventually, the Spore Store will offer the option to have a model of your own little monster created and shipped to you.

A sneak peek at possible planet sketches for the final game. Only the Creature Creator was revealed during Tuesday's press event, but hints and glimpses of the full experience were strewn about the Maxis office.

This poster, tacked on a wall in the Maxis office, offers suggestions of the evolution or growth of a particular creature. Details about Spore were sparse, but you will be able to guide your very own creation from its first cell, to shambling beast, and finally through the air and to the stars.

Spore will ship with the Creature Creator, a Vehicle Creator (for land, sea, air and space) and a Building Creator, says executive producer Lucy Bradshaw (pictured). Players can tinker with these tools and share their creations with other members of the Spore community. Mac and PC versions of the game will be released simultaneously, and players can swap and share with whomever they like, regardless of the operating system they use.

Here's a tip: Your creature's "front" faces toward the arrow on the podium on which it stands. Be sure to orient your camera in the right direction -- or not. A pair of eyes on either end might lend your creation an extra advantage.

Once you're facing in the right direction (or not, depending on the look you're going for), you're free to add all manner of limbs and details to your creation, and morph them as you please. The mouse wheel scales the size of body parts, so if you're into large feet and small hands, your dream date will be ready in minutes.

Legs are optional, as this wheeled chap illustrates. The limbs you tack on to your creature will affect various stats, helping or hindering your speed, attack power, dancing ability and more. This particular monster may not be able to bust a move, but those teeth and claws probably aren't built for hugging.

With the Creature Creator offering complete control over bone structure, body morphing and limbs -- plus a robust color palette -- it's impossible to predict what the Spore community will come up with as players create content before the game's September launch. There should be enough claws and scaly beasts to go around (like this Toucan Sam on Wheaties, for example), but there will probably be plenty of cuddly creations, too.