The Raster Bar

Memory

The night a Commodore 64 was finally plugged in at home was a magical moment for my pre-teen self.

Having been dragged around the shops for weeks to find the 'best' machine, the anticipation leading to this moment was huge. Things could have been very different - at one point the Amstrad CPC 464 was a definite contender, due largely to the heavy presence of Burnin' Rubber demo units in the local retailers. And my older cousin's Spectrum 48K almost swayed me to that machine, thanks entirely to its light gun-compatible port of Operation Wolf - a game I was obssessed with (and traumatised by) as a child in the arcades.^[1] Ultimately though, after much ado, the sleek-looking C64C was the one that made it to our living room: the next stage in our home entertainment journey after the archaic Atari 2600.

The aforementioned Speccy light gun no doubt played a role in the decision, as the C64C bundle we bought, Light Fantastic, prominently featured a gun of its own (a Cheetah Defender 64), along with a pair of anaglyph stereo glasses, the latter included in a dubious attempt to market some of the games as '3D'.^[2] Of the software included - a quartet of gun games, Batman: The Caped Crusader, Mike Read's Computer Pop Quiz, and a suite of creative utilities - one tape cover stood out to my young eyes, adorned with imagery of beyond-my-age-rating icons like Rambo and RoboCop. This was Blaze Out, a collection of scenes from various hit games re-tooled for light gun support, and the first tape ever loaded on my brand-new Commodore 64.

Watching the datasette counter showly creep up, the multicolored bars flashing across the screen, the grey-and-red gun controller sweaty in my palm... my heart was pounding. And when the RoboCop title screen and unforgettably melancholic music burst forth from the television, I knew something special was about to happen. I pulled the trigger to start.

It... didn't go so well. RoboCop proved a brutal introduction to light gun gaming on the C64: with no visual or aural feedback for shots or hits, and a cursor that only moved when the trigger was held down, it was nearly impossible to gauge your accuracy against the hostage-holding antagonist of the scenario. The poor hostage was killed multiple times thanks to my family and I's confusion and ineptitude. It was an oddly sour note to begin my C64 gaming career on, struggling to adapt to this unforgiving new world. Eventually, through a mixture of perserverance and the tactic of 'getting way too close to the screen', I was able to advance beyond RoboCop and on to better things, though these quirks of control would persist in some form through the entirety of Blaze Out, and had to be compensated for through practice.^[3]

Combat School had a great sense of urgency in its three timed stages of target shooting. I recall being slightly put off by the odd colouration of the backgrounds, cited in the Blaze Out manual as necessary to improve the gun's tracking. Still, seeing an army of robotic tanks trundling over what looked like a grassy lake felt a little strange at first. The final stage introduced penalty targets amongst the regular ones, providing a nice difficulty curve that took a little while for my childish lack of accuracy to overcome.

Hyper Sports was a mere interlude of clay pigeon shooting, not much of substance, though the curious rhythm created by the shotgun and clay 'blips' in tandem was strangely hypnotic. With three attempts per play, and a low qualifying score, it was just a formality of getting through it to the good stuff.

The 'good stuff' in this case being Platoon. Crawling the dank corridors of a tunnel system in first-person viewpoint, fending off ambushes from lurking Viet Cong soldiers, all to an intensely foreboding soundtrack; the atmosphere and tension just bled from the screen, despite the speed with which the doctored game moved you around. It was a far cry from the bombast promised by Blaze Out's cassette cover, but all the more compelling for it. The later bunker section - a brief riff on Operation Wolf with the added strategy of limited flares for visibility - was also memorable, and cleansed the palate for what came next. But that tunnel system, with its network of winding passages and rooms to explore (albeit on-rails), always brought me back, and if I ever chose to think of Blaze Out as a complete experience, it was Platoon that was the 'main event' in my mind.

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The final stage on the tape was Rambo III, presenting a view from inside a tank as it moved inexorably towards the Afghanistan border, mowing down an entire army of Soviet troops, helicopters and armour. The instructions claimed the gun would overheat under sustained fire, but this didn't seem to be possible, reducing potential strategy to mere spray-and-pray until the timer ran down. Finishing the stage showed a punctuation-free victory message including the words 'HOPE YOU ENJOYED YOUR NEW GUN', and though the accompanying music was suitably gritty and uptempo, it was overall a strangely subdued note to end on, almost a bookend to the confusion of my initial contact with Blaze Out. Still, I returned to the collection many times in the early part of my C64 experience, almost always for the Platoon section, until I bought that game itself in full years later.

Analysis

Even viewed through my naive young eyes at the time, it's clear that Blaze Out is a bit of a hack - a crude poke around the innards of its parent games, with just enough changes to support the light gun and alter a few of the display elements. That it works at all is, in hindsight, a minor miracle, but that initial sense of shoddiness lingered for some time, perhaps exacerbated by my love of arcade Operation Wolf and my (unreasonable) hope for a comparable experience at home.^[4]

The RoboCop section is a baffling choice to lead with, as it's the least-tactile and most-frustrating section of the entire collection, and I imagine many other new players just bounced off it like I did. Perhaps familiarity with the full version of the game may have smoothed the experience and my expectations of it, but that wouldn't come til much later. Still, once I had attuned to the quirks of the gun handling and the C64 itself, Blaze Out became a vital part of my early experience with the machine: a showcase of its capabilities, and the wealth of genres and aesthetics it could offer.

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As a young kid with little musical exposure beyond what was on the radio and TV, the SID chip rapidly became a primary fascination of mine, and Blaze Out remains an impressive testament to what it could do even in 1989. RoboCop's downbeat title melodics feel strange and alienating when juxtaposed against the futuristic drama of its gameplay theme, while Combat School provides an entire suite of rip-roaring, filter-abusing action tunes and triumphant fanfares to really embellish its sense of urgency. Even the otherwise-dull ending from the Rambo III stage still offers a stomping militaristic theme to herald your victory.

Yet again though, Platoon is the sonic highlight. From the portentous and dramatic start-screen tune, to the creeping, echoing dread of the tunnel system section and the ethnic-sounding instruments scoring the desperate bunker defence of the final part, it is a feast for the ears. Playing it at the time, I quickly realised that this beige box was capable of some truly amazing sounds - sounds I had never heard before, on the radio or anywhere else. I could write an entire raft of articles on my love of the SID - and may yet do so - and it was seeded right here, perched before the TV with a plastic gun in my hand.

The gun itself remained part of my C64 experience going forward, its mystique driven largely by the lack of available software for it. My later angst at finally obtaining C64 Operation Wolf, only to find it lacking light gun support outright, was tempered in time by both Operation Thunderbolt and my eventual purchase of an entirely different light gun package that included Wolf - the gun support, once again, seemingly hacked in.

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Yet despite the struggles of ownership and quirks of gameplay, my memory of the light gun remains fond. Its relative tactility, sense of physical presence, and obvious novelty offered both a tantalising approximation of the contemporary arcade experience, and a promising whisper of what later console peripherals, and ultimately VR gaming, would offer in the decades beyond. The gallery/rail shooter genre has seen something of a modern resurgence in new fully-immersive clothing, and in the likes of Pistol Whip and Superhot VR, I occasionally sense the tangible echo of my early Blaze Out runs.

Modern-day usage and emulation of the Cheetah Defender and its cousins is stymied by their dependence on CRT technology for timing and accuracy - something impossible on today's LCD monitors and TVs, leaving little option beyond mouse input as a substitute on VICE. I would love to see a real-hardware solution some day, perhaps involving workarounds using Nintendo Wiimotes or similar motion controllers, and return to Blaze Out for one final blast through a mixed, awkward, but ultimately formative C64 experience.

njmcode

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Notes

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