Ovine By Design<\/a>. It was, even allowing for Wolfenstein and all manner of other things stashed in a small pile of discs, the most exciting find for me. Don\u2019t ask me why but it\u2019d never really occurred to me that, well, you could remake old games. It sounds so stupid, right? If you can make one thing then you can make another, right? But still, when you\u2019ve got this whole universe of untapped possibilities, why would you want to remake a videogame?<\/p>\n\n\n\nYet there we were and someone had done just that with The Burps. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I often joke that it was all downhill for Ultimate after Jetpac and I still stand by that opinion in the main but that doesn\u2019t mean there weren\u2019t a few more actually great games to come, right? And Atic Atac was such a great game, one of a handful of videogames that very early on sold me on videogames as being able to be set somewhere, in a place, not just in some abstract star field or rolling across the terrain of a supposed alien world. That videogames could do this outside of just describing with words the where and how of somewhere. Atic Atac was set in a big old house and I loved that so very much. And at some point around 1993, I discovered someone else who loved that as much as I did. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s funny now because obviously we have the internet proper and it\u2019s easy to find someone who gives the same amount of shits (or scarily more because this is the internet and giving a scary amount of shits about inconsequential media is a thing) about a thing as you but I could never run to Compuserve or any number of early connected things. I was poor, my family just scraping by, luxuries like that were well out the window. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s not even like it was really my first encounter with a remake, y\u2019know? My mate and I had an Amiga and they weren\u2019t in that short supply. It\u2019s just that, well, it was the first time it really sunk in. There\u2019s people out there who value these old things too. Enough to pour the time and effort into making them run on new machines. The timing helped. 92,93 and things were racing technology wise. It was, in true videogame fashion, all about excitement for the new, the upcoming, the technological leaps we were about to take. Old was out, here comes the filled polygon future. This wasn\u2019t just the novelty of \u201clook, it\u2019s Jet Set Willy running on an Amiga\u201d or something. It was more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Burps though? The first time I realised that old games didn\u2019t have to be forgotten in that race. The first time I realised the importance of having these things stick around to be talked about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And sure, it\u2019s just sort of Atic Atac for DOS when you look at it now but that\u2019s sort of the whole point too. \u201cJust\u201d Atic Atac for DOS is fucking cool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A fair few years later, I\u2019d stumble upon a remake of Elite\u2019s The Fall Guy by a chap called Gordon King and that\u2019d shift and change my life in ways unexpected but that\u2019s another story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Originally published October 17th 2015 on Take This Machine<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From the archives Molyneux only knows what year it was and Molyneux only knows where my boss got it from but at some point in the nineties, he let me (\u201cproviding I could carry it myself\u201d) take his excessively weighty PC round to my own home and nestling there amongst all these other games was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Rescued from the archive, a small piece on DOS Atic Atac remake, The Burps.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[26],"tags":[79,85,87,89,84,88,86],"class_list":["post-297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-videogames","tag-archive","tag-atic-atac","tag-ms-dos","tag-remakes","tag-the-burps","tag-ultimate","tag-zx-spectrum"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":306,"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297\/revisions\/306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spooky.punchingrobots.com\/public\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}