This Week In Retro: Tempest

October 1981: Hell is empty and all the devils are here

by Diamond Feit

Do you believe hell is real? I grew up in a non-Christian household, so I viewed the existence of a bad place where people go after they die as just another popular myth, similar to Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and White Jesus. It's not like I viewed stories from the Torah as any less fallible than those from the Bible, but at no point did any adult in my life teach me that these tall tales were factual, so I could hold "hell" at arms length and evaluate it as a concept. It scared me, but not in the way that dying scares me (which it very much does).

I was but a wee child in 1981 when Tempest appeared in arcades, but it scared me. It's a shooter, but unlike any other shooter I had seen before. The player controls a yellow crab-like craft that moves around the screen on a fixed path. That path is a series of lines which vanish into the distance, giving the appearance that the player is teetering along the edge of a giant pit. There is movement at the heart of the pit as things make their way outward; the player must fire shots into the center to destroy whatever is trying to emerge. Victory means the player flies into the hole to reach the next pit which is a different shape than the last.

Unlike hell, I could see Tempest was very real, and the gameplay lent credence to the idea that an underworld full of horrors exists beneath our feet. Furthermore, I had no idea what "tempest" meant, and I certainly did not know the Shakespeare play, so given the context of the cabinet artwork I surmised tempest was synonymous with "inferno" or "abyss" and signified an evil place where demons spawn before invading our world.

Realistically, the drawings on the side of the machine did a lot of heavy lifting, as the objects in Tempest are all simple shapes that do not resemble any monsters or even animals. However, this was par for the course in arcade games of the era. Midway's American promotional art for Space Invaders presented the interstellar threat as ferocious beasts, but on-screen they looked more like seafood. Missile Command's missiles were just dots, barely a pixel wide. Berzerk's killer robots looked like R2 units with limbs, and Evil Otto was a literal smiley face, but that didn't stop me from viewing them with fear in my heart.

Tempest's unique look was not just tied to its odd perspective but also its full-color vector graphics. Older games such as Asteroids and Battlezone had previously used primitive monochrome lines to create their on-screen images, but Tempest did so with bright colors, an essential innovation given how crucial it is for players to see and distinguish enemies from a "distance." Vector graphics also make it possible for everything on screen to seamlessly scale outwards, creating an illusion of depth crucial to the immersive experience.

Tempest designer and programmer Dave Theurer was the main creative force behind the game, initially pitching the project as a first-person take on Space Invaders. According to a 1995 interview, Theurer got the game working just fine, but there were two problems. First, it was "too much like Space Invaders," perhaps an inevitability given the concept. Second, "it wasn't much fun," a significantly larger problem for a video game. With cancellation looming, Theurer came up with a twist, wrapping the playfield around a "tube" and turning it into a pit.

Just as Theurer's first game, Missile Command, drew inspiration from nuclear annihilation anxiety, Tempest was also tied to his personal fears. He reportedly told management "I've got this nightmare I have where monsters are coming out of a hole in the ground and I've got to kill them before they get to the surface and kill me." This version proved to be more entertaining, especially with a rotary controller to spin the player's "flipper" around the pit. That too required some fine-tuning: "I first tried rotating the tube instead of the flipper, but that made everybody want to puke, plus it was a lot more work," Theurer said.

Tempest is a challenge to play, more so than many of its contemporaries. The nature of the pit and the division of the playfield into lanes restricts the player's movement and shots. Even with rapid-fire, keeping the enemies at bay is difficult, and since the player can only shoot down, any creatures which reach the outside edge of the pit are much harder to repel. There are also spikes laid inside the pit that can cost the player one life as they travel downwards to the next stage.

Tempest's distinctive qualities created a problem when it came time to bring the arcade experience home, as no consoles were able to do the color vector graphics justice. I put many more hours into Space Invaders, Missile Command, and Berzerk on our Atari 2600 than I did in arcades, but I could only play Tempest on original hardware. By the time a home port became feasible in the late 1980s, the game landscape had changed. Tempest was no longer cutting edge, and fewer people were interested in a retro experience chasing high scores when 8 and 16-bit games offered deeper, longer adventures.

Tempest inspired sequels, both literal and spiritual, yet never shed its enigmatic reputation. As a result, Tempest occupies a place in my mind that few arcade games can: it scared me, I remember it well, but I never got used to it. It never became familiar. I'm a grown adult now, and games have come a long way, so it takes a lot more to frighten me than "geometric shapes emerge from a pit," but Tempest retains a mysterious air all these decades later. Born from a nightmare, filled with tension, it always caught my eye but never truly made sense to me...and we always fear that which we do not understand.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.