![]() ![]() “But maybe I wanted to give an extra reward for killing the butterflies, by having them make jewels. “When I started adding enemies there were pursuits and flight – basically there were primal emotions that corresponded to the mathematical stuff on the screen,” Peter points out. In fact, the airborne enemies had originally tapped into native survival instincts. Oulder Dash’s butterflies hadn’t always turned into gems on their demise, however. Of course there also had to be motivation, so the jewels came in as a scoring mechanism, and then I had tangible goals: to pick up jewels and find the exit.” “Rather than design caves, I just had a random number generator that threw out rocks and dirt and space at random,” Peter explains, “and maybe in some cases I’d supplement that. The rocks were just the letter O, and the dirt was probably just solid squares.” Initially, Boulder Dash lacked level designs and an objective – other than surviving, but its subterranean setting soon gave purpose to the game’s hostile environments. It was like a black world, where everything was in a position on a grid. ![]() So I took that general idea and wrote rules for the rocks and gravity. “There was a mathematical concept called cellular automaton, where the idea was that cells changed state according to the cells around them. That was the backbone of the game,” Peter notes. “I basically started from scratch with a very simple simulation of physics. Instead of converting Chris Gray’s game into assembly language, Peter transferred its core mechanics into a new project with gravity-affected boulders rather than on-rail rocks. ![]() It brought Chris and I together with the intent that I would help him commercialize it, but that intention evaporated very quickly as I realized that the rocks always rolled the same way each time you played it – because they were pre-programmed.” ![]() “Chris worked on a sort of a clone of a game called The Pit, which he wrote in BASIC,” Peter remembers, “and a local publishing house, In-home Software, was interested in it. Take Boulder Dash, for example, which resembled a little known arcade game until Peter Liepa took over from its original developer Chris Gray. In fact, many take inspiration from existing concepts and then gradually evolve into something new. Ot all videogames begin as entirely fresh ideas. ![]()
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