View Full Version : Highscore in old games
jajaja
05-15-2005, 05:58 PM
Why was acctualy highscore included in old games? Lets take NES for example. Many games have highscore, but no battery so whenever you restart the game the highscore is gone. Seems useless to me..
I know some games are arcade ports tho so that is understandable.
Some old games used to have warp zones too. Do any new games have this?
digitalpress
05-15-2005, 06:03 PM
Seems obvious to me. They had high scores so you had something to shoot for. Back then, my friends and I would just jot down our (proven) high scores for "the ages" but in a single session we'd just play for however long with the victor being the one with the high score up there.
jajaja
05-15-2005, 06:06 PM
Ye.. true that, but I think it strange that they werent saved :) Probly cost alot more to add a battery to each game.
Cthulhu
05-15-2005, 09:35 PM
Yes, the cost of making a battery-backed cart was higher. That's probably the main reason they didn't do it.
If you made an action game in those days without a high score table, you were being a little sacreligious though. Games were SUPPOSED to have a high score table. Go to the arcade, see? Everything has one! :D
Graham Mitchell
05-15-2005, 09:42 PM
A lot of the early NES games actually did save your high scores in their Japanese counterparts, because they were released on the Famicom Disk System, which could save scores and player data without the necessity of a battery. This is the reason the "save" and "load" features in U.S. NES games such as Mach Rider, Excitebike, Load Runner (the Programmable Series) do absolutley nothing. But they were functional in their original incarnation.
Rogmeister
05-15-2005, 10:00 PM
I think that started probably in the arcades. You'd meet a friend at the arcade, you'd ask "What's your high score?" and the conversation went from there.
digitalpress
05-16-2005, 06:30 AM
Ye.. true that, but I think it strange that they werent saved :) Probly cost alot more to add a battery to each game.
I know what you're sayin' but if you were playing at that time you didn't think twice about it. In fact, they didn't start putting batteries in cartridges until the NES era. The only game that had one prior to that was Lord of the Dungeon for ColecoVision and that wasn't actually released "in the day".
rolenta
05-16-2005, 09:39 AM
What was the first game to include a battery? The first one I remember was Monopoly for the SMS.
rbudrick
05-16-2005, 01:16 PM
Rolenta, see Joe's thread just above yours.
As a note to that, I always thought Zelda WAS the first, but it was Lord fot he Dungeon, Joe? Shit, I didn't know that...
-Rob
rolenta
05-16-2005, 01:45 PM
Rolenta, see Joe's thread just above yours.
I did. I want to know the first RELEASED game with a battery.
rolenta
05-16-2005, 01:51 PM
I just verified it was Legend of Zelda (1987)
The "didn't think about it" stuff has to do with gamers implicitly accepting the "limits" of console technology. Saving information was a highly advanced feature! How could your 8 bit console ever handle that?!
Arcade games looked and sounded so much better than console games that we were willing to accept less from our consoles.