Tempest was an arcade game, developed by Atari in 1980, and was the first game to make use of Atari's Color-Quadrascan technology, which was a colored vector display system. Previously, vector monitors can only produce black and white images, or at best, shades of gray. However, since Atari used vector displays in quite a number of games, they developed a technique to display vector graphics using different colors. This made Tempest stand out equally among monochrome vector games and colored raster games.
The object of Tempest is to destroy every enemy that is attempting to climb out of the "well". You control a weapon, with the dial, that can circle around the outside edge of the well (assuming that it's circular, some boards are not) firing shots down each of the columns. Enemies are only vulnerable as they are rising out of the well, and enemies that make it to the outer edge become especially dangerous for the player. The player is given one alternative "Zapper" weapon to use each stage in case of emergencies.
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.
Story
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.
Table of Contents
Gameplay summary
- You control the Blaster which resides on the outer edge of the well. You can move clockwise or counter-clockwise around the well, and you can fire directly down into the well.
- Enemies climb up from the bottom of the well to the outer edges where your Blaster sits. You must destroy every enemy in the well in order to advance to the next stage.
- You must avoid contact with every enemy and the shots that they fire at you or you will lose one life. You must also avoid well spikes when you advance to the next stage.
- In addition to your main gun, you receive one Zapper weapon every stage, which can be used to obliterate every enemy currently on the screen.
- The Zapper can be used on additional time with a much weaker effect, only eliminating enemies that are right on top of you, per stage.