Don’t worry, I don’t really have any phasers. Phasers are a made up ray gun thing from Star Trek. It’s all part of a hilarious pun you see, in as much as you can make a pun out of something by simply adding some punctuation. Oh it’s all falling apart isn’t it?
I’VE DONE IT ALL WRONG.
This whole pun fiasco was supposed to serve as a devastatingly witty introduction (where necessary) to S.T.U.N. Runner, a fantastic 1989 arcade game by Atari. For reasons still not entirely clear to myself you, the protagonist, had to hurtle down a series of tubular 3D chasms at breakneck speed in some sort of futuristic bobsled. It’s an experience probably not unlike doing the Cresta Run having been spiked with a near fatal dose of weapons-grade hallucinogens, or being shrunk to the size of an ant and flushed down the toilet into a sewer system made entirely of brightly coloured geometric shapes. In a little ant toboggan, of course. I have vivid memories of jaunts to the arcades by the seaside with my good pal Flaps as a child, straddling the brightly coloured S.T.U.N. Runner machine and pumping a startling quantity of freshly-minted 20p pieces into it. Happy days.
It was while playing my fashionable iPhone the other day that I happened to reminisce on those halcyon days of my gaming youth, when suddenly a thought rammed itself right up my brainpipes:
“Why hasn’t S.T.U.N. Runner been ported to the iPhone?”
It makes as near to perfect sense as you’re likely to get from me. The iPhone (or iPod Touch, for the paupers among us) has more than enough magical computer powaz to churn out a game from 20 years ago, and the motion sensors in the iPhone could be used to replicate the movement of the yoke-style controls from the arcade machine. Why, it’s almost too easy. All we need now are the following things (in no particular order):
You see? This should be a piece of piss. If that bearded West Country oaftrumpet Justin Lee Collins can just about but not quite get the original cast of Grange Hill together, then I can surely get an elderly computer game ported to the iPhone. Think of it as a sort of challenge which I’ll almost undoubtedly fail and then pretend never happened in the first place.
The first step is to get in touch with the original Atari team who produced S.T.U.N. Runner…
I last week spoke to another Atari dev whose game was recently owned by the now bankrupt Midway, and he said WB owns that game. I therefore suspect that S.T.U.N. Runner’s likely in the same position.
Regarding development, Ed had some interesting stuff to say to me regarding the Xbox port and its poor framerate: “They may have been trying to emulate it from the original ROMs. I don’t know why they didn’t just rewrite it – it’s not that complicated of a game… They can certainly extract that data from the tunnels and just use those… convert the actual graphic objects into more modern format and do it that way… The physics is really cheesy in that game, so I just don’t see it being that that hard!”
I’d be surprised if the rights hadn’t been absorbed into some vast corporate entity with no intention of ever letting them see the light of day, but there’s always hope! Interested to hear Ed Rotberg’s comments about the Xbox port – I expect it was just cheaper and easier to emulate and get the product out than spend any time re-engineering. For shame.