ULTIMATE GUIDE: ROAD RUNNER
I
t’s not hard to see why the Road Runner
and Wile E Coyote cartoons are so popular
with kids. The simple chase premise, the
outlandish Acme contraptions Wile E uses to
try and capture his feathered prey, the way said
contraptions backfire spectacularly and leave him
flattened, on fire, at the foot of a deep ravine, or
typically all three. It’s a classic from the golden age of
animation that never gets old.
Someone who loved the cartoon as a kid was
Atari’s Ed Logg, codeveloper of Asteroids and
Centipede. As Atari was owned by Warner Bros, the
coin-op division was actively encouraged to consider
Warner properties for its arcade games. From the vast
wealth of Warner’s assets Ed chose Road Runner,
mainly because he was a fan but also because he
believed that the chase-and-evade theme would make
for a good game. And so a side-scrolling design was
conceived where the player, as Road Runner, raced
through the wilds while being doggedly pursued by the
Coyote. There were hazards to avoid, such as traffic,
falling boulders and broken bridges, but Wile E was
always the main threat and as per the cartoon he’d
give chase using a variety of wacky devices including
rocket-powered rollerskates, a jet-propelled pogo stick
and a backpack helicopter – all ‘satisfaction guaranteed’
by Acme, of course. It was a simple concept, but the
initial implementation was anything but.
At the time Atari was heavily invested in LaserDisc
games and Road Runner was chosen as one of
several titles to utilise the new technology. The various
sprites would be overlaid onto the scrolling desert
background that streamed from disc and when the
perusing Coyote became a cropper, the gameplay
would be interrupted to show actual cartoon footage
of his demise. A working prototype was created for
a test location and it received lukewarm reactions,
largely down to issues with the LaserDisc technology.
Sometimes the sprites and disc footage didn’t marry
up quite right and the gameplay was often disrupted
due to delays in accessing the disc. Compounding
matters were the high failure rates of Firefox, the one
Atari laserdisc game that did make it out of prototype.
The LaserDisc program was soon scrapped, butSean Townsend coded the Commodore 64
version of the game.How did you wind up working
at Canvas on the Road Runner
Commodore 64 conversion?
I was working for Binary Designs in Manchester
and got along well with Steve Ward there. We’d
oen go to the arcade at lunchtime to play
Gauntlet. Steve le to work for Canvas and I
followed him a short time later. My first job for Canvas was the
C64 version of Road Runner. Canvas was based in Crosby and I
worked from home in Rochdale. I had to turn up at work once a
month or so to show my progress.What did you think of the Road Runner
coin-op, and did you have access to it while you
were doing the conversion?
I thought the original arcade game was great. It played well and
had lots of ‘fun’ elements taken straight out of the cartoon. I
did have access to the coin-op for a short period of time in the
Canvas office. Plenty of video recordings were taken so I could
use them as reference back home.Can you recall Atari
or Warner approving
your work?
I’m not sure about this.
Maybe the directors had to
show the demos I had done?
If they did have any issues
they never made it back to
me. I can only assume they
were happy with the demos
and the final product.The only real criticism levelled at the C64
version was the multiload on cassette. Can you
recall any efforts to try and mitigate this?
The cassette version didn’t get much love from me, to be honest.
All I was interested in was getting it finished on time. There
were a hell of a lot of graphics and level data to load and it
worked quite well loading from disk. The cassette version was
always going to be a pain, having to rewind the tape every time
you died. I did find out much later that someone (or a group) had
managed to compress the levels and load them all in at once.
I have no idea how they did this as I know just how short of
memory I was at the time. I was even switching out the kernel
as there was no way I had enough RAM without that extra 8K.Overall were you happy
with how the C64
version turned out?
Yes, I was happy. There were
a few issues that I would have
liked to have ironed out, but I
just didn’t have the time. Even
now, the games I develop can be
thrown together quickly but to
fix all the issues and add some
fairy dust takes much longer.CONVERTING
ROAD RUNNER
» [C6 4] The graphics were drawn by Mar tin Calver t
while Fred Gray contributed the soundtrack.» [C6 4] All of the gameplay elements from the arcade
original are featured.I thought the
arcade game
was great. It
played well and
had lots of ‘fun’
elements
Sean Townsend» [Arcade] Dodging pogo stick Wile E is one of the harder challenges, especially on later loops.