While watching the latest Chuck last night (‘Chuck Versus Tom Sawyer’, which, knowing UK TV, aired sometime last year in the USA), Missile Command became a major plot point. Chuck (the show) is harmless fun, but it did highlight a problem in taking history and messing with the truth with merry abandon.

The episode was mostly quite well-written and the revisions not nearly as irksome as, say, Titanic taking First Officer William Murdoch and turning a guy who saved lives into a murderer, but I was nonetheless decidedly uncomfortable at times. The reason? Missile Command is essentially a pacifist game. As ex-Atari guy Greg Rivera mentioned to me in a recent interview: “One of the goals [of the Missile Command team] was to teach the futility of war. No-one ever won Missile Command,” adding that there’s no ‘game over’ in the production, just an ominous ‘THE END’ when all your cities are destroyed. In Chuck, however, Dave Theurer is turned into Atari’s Japanese chief engineer, with terrorist ties.

All shows take liberties with history, and I’m sure no malice was intended by the scriptwriters. But in an increasingly hostile age, it’s a shame to see a fantastic satirical, pacifist statement by a true giant of classic videogames misrepresented in such major fashion. Then again, the concept of a living, breathing, vibrant and bustling Atari HQ in the USA almost makes up for it.

Some gaming experiences stay with you forever. I’ve played more videogames than I care to remember, on many different platforms, but I distinctly remember ambling into a very small arcade in Clearwater and, among the beaten-up and half-dead machines, spotting S.T.U.N. Runner.

Akin to smashing a futuristic bobsled game into a rollercoaster experience with a hammer, S.T.U.N. Runner got over the feeling of speed in a way no games had done before and few have done since. The pace was breathtaking to my younger self, and the game over incredibly quickly. But on getting to grips with the game’s mechanics, S.T.U.N. Runner became a fantastic means to while away an hour, escaping from the hot Florida midday sun.

Snapping back to more recent times, Ed Rotberg was kind enough to chat with me last year about his classic tank game Battlezone, and we then talked about S.T.U.N. Runner. Preparing for the interview a day earlier, I fired up the game in MAME and had forgotten how pretty it is. Sleek vector-based designs shoot past at breakneck speed, and even when using a PC, control of the craft is just perfect.

Perhaps this is nostalgia putting the boot in, but I think it’s a massive shame that the game has never been done justice on home formats (with the exception of an astonishing and surprisingly faithful Atari Lynx effort), because even in today’s rush for increasingly extreme gaming experiences, S.T.U.N. Runner still impresses.

My interview with Ed (and co-conspirator Andrew Burgess) is in the current Retro Gamer.

Imagine’s answer to EuroGamer, NowGamer, went live recently. With the publisher having a dedicated retro magazine—the rather spiffy Retro Gamer—it should come as no surprise that NowGamer offers a dedicated retro section.

Most of the section appears to be reprint, but there’s some great stuff in there, including a slew of making-of articles, a smattering of company profiles and a couple of ‘def guides’ to videogame series. A fairly random selection of my own articles has been reprinted on the site, including The Making Of: Hitchiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, where I interviewed Steve Meretzky about his collaboration with Douglas Adams.

The game itself remains one of the meanest, toughest and funniest pieces of interactive fiction to date, and with the original article buried away in an old issue of Retro Gamer (and not making the cover nor even the contents pages), it’s great to see it get another airing, not least because Steve Meretzky was a wonderful interviewee. I hope that we can one day talk about the controversial Leather Goddesses of Phobos, which would make for a fun making-of in the mag.

Elsewhere, you can also read my making-ofs on seminal soccer title Sensible Soccer, ubiquitous action puzzler Tetris, US platformer Miner 2049er, fantasy/chess mash-up Archon, and overhead bouncing ball action game Bounder.

As for the magazine itself, Retro Gamer’s on the stands, priced £4.99, and can be bought from retrogamer.net. The current issue includes a making-of Space Invaders, Amiga and Mega Drive retrospectives, and my interview with Ed Rotberg and Andrew Burgess on their classic S.T.U.N. Runner.

Late last year, I had the good fortune to interview Ed Rotberg, creator, among other things, of the groundbreaking Battlezone. This vector graphics tank simulator was the first truly immersive 3D environment in videogames, and probably the first 3D update of a 2D classic, what with it being heavily based on Kee/Atari’s various overhead Tank games.

The current issue of Retro Gamer, 59, includes portions of the interview in ‘The Making of Battlezone’, and the game is featured on the cover as a beautifully rendered faux-vector scene.

This seems to have been good timing by Retro Gamer, since all kinds of Battlezone-related things seem to be cropping up right now. First, there’s Vector Tanks, a heavily Battlezone-inspired blaster for iPhone, written by the supremely talented Peter Hirschberg. Secondly, Wade Shooter’s video for Fujiya & Miyagi’s Sore Thumb dresses the band and instruments in vector ekoskeletons, occasionally cutting to scenes of vector tank warfare.

Hop to it!

As if bomb squads don’t have a hard enough time, Jumpman is tasked in this platform game with defusing bombs in Jupiter Headquarters, a place that clearly needs a serious heath and safety check. Precarious platforms and all manner of hazards await our athletic chum in this dated, playable and frequently frustrating platform game.

With Jumpman originally arriving on 8-bit computers in the early 1980s, it’s not much to look at, and the sound is guff, but designer Randy Glover had a wicked sense of humour and a real sense for level design. Therefore, each of the 30 levels brings its own set of dangers, such as ledges that vanish once you defuse a bomb, UFOs that dart around the screen, and manic robots hell-bent on killing you in the face. Also, when you inevitably come a cropper and tumble down the platforms to your untimely demise (and a jolly, slightly sarcastic rendition of the death march), you still defuse bombs that you bump into and can therefore sometimes complete a level during your dying moments, which is a nice touch.

Aside from poor aesthetics, niggles with Jumpman largely relate to some screens being absurdly difficult and controls being twitchy on the faster levels. However, if you can put yourself in the mind of a 1980s gamer—it was a time when gamers were real men: hardcore, but with mullets—you’ll find Jumpman a compelling, challenging, and occasionally maddening game.

Jumpman is available now for 500 Wii points (about £3.50). It’s tough, so wimpy gamers need not apply. Mullets, however, are optional.

Ignoring the ladder entirely, our hero aimed for the bomb by leaping majestically.