2019-04-01_Retro_Gamer

ULTIMATE GUIDE: ROAD RUNNER

RETRO GAMER | 61

Before the coin-op there was...

something different.

ROAD RUNNER 5200

T

he Atari coin-op was not the first game to use the

Road Runner licence. In 1983 a title was put into

development for the Atari 5200 console that married the

Road Runner chase scenario with a slide block puzzle

game, and the result was not unlike the Konami coin-op

Loco-Motion. Here players were on the side of Wile E and

they had to manipulate the game board pieces to ensure he

chomped more birdseed than Road Runner. It made zero

sense and was such a peculiar use of the licence that the

game was unsurprisingly smothered before it had chance

to snatch a breath. Years later the unfinished prototype

was discovered and shared, so you can now at least play

the game – and quickly realise that there was far more

appropriate uses of the licence.

Plenty of video

recordings were

taken so I could use

them as reference

back home

Sean Townsend

the amount of time and money already spent on Road

Runner meant that the game itself was saved. Ed

Logg left the project at this point and he was replaced

by Mike Hally of Gravitar and Star Wars fame.

M

ike’s job was not to redesign the

game but to convert it to run on

Atari’s System 1 hardware – a new

spec that allowed games to be

easily interchanged. The sprites already existed,

so it was primarily a case of recreating the cartoon

backgrounds from the LaserDisc using the System 1’s

256-colour display – a job which Atari artists Sam

Comstock and Mark West handled with aplomb.

An impressive parallax-scrolling effect was added to

complete the cartoon look. The original LaserDisc

audio was replaced by chip music, and the cartoon

attract mode and intermissions had to be chopped,

but overall the System 1 version of Road Runner was

admirable close to the LaserDisc prototype.

There was a key difference to the gameplay,

however. In the prototype the birdseed that littered

the route was only there to boost your score, but in

the released version Road Runner would ‘faint’ and

lose a life if a total of five birdseeds were missed.

This made the game much harder overall, and was

no doubt a business decision designed to keep the

quarters flowing. It was a fairly short game, featuring

four stages that looped indefinitely (with the difficulty

increasing with each loop), so the birdseed challenge

ensured that players could not exhaust the game with

little effort – or expense.

Road Runner belatedly arrived in arcades in 1986,

around two years after the project was started. It was

available as a dedicated upright cab or as a conversion

kit for Atari’s existing System 1 games such as Marble

Madness, Peter Pack Rat and Indiana Jones And The

Temple Of Doom. The marquee and control panel

featured memorable artwork from the cartoon, and

the catchy (and loud) rendition of the Sabre Dance

movement that played over the attract mode certainly

drew attention to the machine.

Brit publisher US Gold saw the appeal of the game

and grabbed the home licence in 1987. “It was an

obvious choice because everyone knows Road Runner

and it’ll sell,” US Gold’s Tim Chaney told the games

press at the time. “It’s also an easy conversion. There’s

no point in licensing something that’s unconvertible.”

He went on to make reference to Gauntlet, another

» [Arcade] Riding his volatile Acme rocket, Wile E tries in vain to swipe Road Runner.

Acme Rocket

Rollerskates

Running

Wile E

Meep

Meep

Meep

Meep

Sprinting

Wile E

Meep

Meep