Greetings Programs: Space Paranoids – Old School Gamer Magazine

In 1982, Disney released a movie that would help to revolutionize the film industry. TRON was a sci-fi/adventure flick that imagined life inside the computers of the time. While the movie wasn’t the runaway box-office success Disney hoped for, it was a groundbreaking film in its own right. It was the first movie to make extensive use of computer-generated graphics, at a time when computer graphics required machines the size of basements and a single frame of animation took hours to render. The 96-minute movie contained around 20 minutes of actual animation, representing thousands of manhours of work.

One key plot point was a fictional arcade game, Space Paranoids. It was presented as a 3D maze game where the player controlled a tank trying to survive waves of enemy ships, known in the movie as Recognizers. Of course, little did programmer Kevin Flynn know that this was exactly what was happening in the digital world inside the computers and arcade games.

Early-80s video game technology couldn’t create the graphics seen in the movie in real time. The “gameplay” in the Flynn’s Arcade scene was pre-rendered, like the rest of the movie’s CGI, and projected onto a prop arcade cabinet screen. 27 years later, however, gaming technology had surpassed what the movie showed, and a real version of Space Paranoids was released to coincide with the long-awaited sequel, TRON: Legacy. Unfortunately, this version of the game, which lived on a promotional website, no longer exists.

Retro enthusiast and developer Landon Smith has released a new version of Space Paranoids, fully playable on the web and now on mobile devices. Interestingly, instead of recreating the game’s graphics as seen in the film, Landon chose to present it as it would have appeared in the early 80s.

Arcade games such as Star Wars, Battlezone, and Tempest are emblematic of early-80s 3D arcade games, using vector graphics and simple polygons to represent characters, vehicles, and environments. This version of Space Paranoids foregoes the film’s filled polygons and gives us a classic green vector display. And it looks awesome.

You control a tank as you move through a maze. Your goal is not to make it out of the maze, but to hunt down the Recognizers flying around the labyrinth and destroy them all before they destroy you. If you manage to locate and destroy the entire wave within the allotted time, you are transported to another maze to face off against another wave of Recognizers.

You start out with three lives, with the possibility of gaining an extra life at 10,000 points. Fortunately, your tank does have a shield to help absorb some enemy fire. You will also come across energy pools around the maze that will replenish a small amount of shield energy. Survive as long as you can and go for the high score!

The game plays super smoothly, really evoking the feel of those early vector graphics games. The vectors will even ghost as the screen updates, which is a nice touch and helps to sell the idea that you are playing a classic arcade game from the 80s.

While the game uses keyboard input on a computer browser, it switches to touch controls in a mobile browser, making it highly playable on your favorite phone. What’s more, once the game has fully loaded in the mobile browser, you can play it without access to cellular or Wi-Fi data.

If you’re looking to relive the glory days of classic arcade games or step into the world of TRON, give Space Paranoids a try.

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Space Paranoids – https://landonjsmith.com/projects/spaceparanoids/

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