Tempest: Difference between revisions

Tempest was quite a success at the arcades.  However, unlike Asteroids, it was difficult to take the crisp clean graphics that defined Tempest, and port them successfully to early home consoles.  They simply didn't have the resolution or the graphical processing power to do it.  While prototypes have been discovered for the [[Atari 2600]] and the [[Atari 5200]], official conversions were not released until 1987, when the game appeared on several popular British home computers.  In response, Atari published an official conversion for their [[Atari ST]] line of 16-bit home computers.  Tempest saw an update in 1994 as ''[[Tempest 2000]]'', initially for the [[Atari Jaguar]], but also released for [[Windows]], the [[Sega Saturn]], and [[Sony Playstation]].  Another sequel, ''[[Tempest 3000]]'' was developed for the doomed NUON hardware.

There's no back-story to Tempest, but the origins of its creation are interesting.  Designer Dave Theurer started out trying to develop a first-person variant of [[Space Invaders]].  His initial experiments were not too successful. One night, after having a nightmare about aliens or monsters climbing out of a hole, Dave sat down and started to redesign the game, and Tempest was the result.