Pat Metheny on the Atari 7800


One game that I always wanted to play for the 7800 was called Ballblazer. It was from Lucasfilm Games. The game was pretty much a head to head, 3D take on Pong and Soccer. The game always seemed really interesting, even though I disliked sport games. But, as it happened, there was always some shitty arcade port there (such as Xenophobe or Crossbow), distracting me from software created especially for the 7800. And that's a pity, because the games that were designed from the ground up for that system (and there weren't many) were really top notch.

Although Ballblazer was designed for the 5200 and Atari 800, originally, these releases were delayed so the 7800 release could be finished and put out on the shelves. This was supposed to be the 7800's prestiege release.

The guys who did this went on to things like Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken.

Anyhow, years after the 7800 was handed over to Roger of Roger's Game Exchange, I started reading up on my old games on-line and read quite a bit stuff on Ballblazer. Everyone loves this game and everyone raves about the music.

Now the 7800 only had the soundchip of an Atari 2600. So what I got in 1988 sounded like what I had in 1982. The guys who made the 7800, for some idiotic reason, left out a decent soundboard in favor of making the 7800 compatible with the 2600. The system designers felt it safe to leave the sound and music totally up to the programmers. The programmers were to load sound on to each cartridge by themselves. You can probably how imagine how expensive and time-consuming this turned out to be.

Supposedly, Lucasfilm was the only software developer to ever do this.

What I heard about the music for Ballblazer boiled down to this: The gameplay actually influenced the sound and tempo of the song. The song itself was based around a Pat Metheny riff. Depending on what you were doing play, you'd get crazy hi-hat rhythms and rim-shots along with a twisting bassline and crazy riffs off the main bassline riff in the upper registers. The music never repeated itself. It was spontaneously composed as you played. At least the leads were. If you were really good, I guess you really got the game rocking.

I found this concept rather intriguing. I've read that they are now doing something similar for some game on the XBox. I'd always wanted to hear what this all sounded like. Wanted to know what my 7800 could really do in capable hands.

Tonight I found out, thanks to a post on AtariAge.

First, here is are a few pages from a press kit Lucasfilm cooked up.

Second, here's a whole page on Ballblazer by the original programmers (or one of them). This has a promotional video put together by Lucasfilm back in the day. The voice-overs--the obnoxious voice-overs--kind of get in the way of the music, but you can hear it, and it is in play, so you can watch it.

Finally, here's an article from the Wikipedia on algorithmic compositions. Unfortunately, all of the audio links seem to be dead and the content is being piped through Search Spaniel.