The Game

If you are interested in how to play RIP OFF, here is a pretty good YouTube video demonstrating single player mode.

It gets frantic in the more advanced levels.

I guess because of Spacewar!, Asteroids, and Lunar Lander I always thought of the players and enemies in RIP OFF as "space ships".  Even when the player I was controlling in the game came to an immediate halt when I stopped pressing the "FORWARD" button, I didn't clue into the fact that I was actually controlling futuristic tanks.

RIP OFF Arcade Cabinet Controls

I didn't realize this until I was reading some reviews of RIP OFF for this project.  To make matters worse here is the cabinet art.

Cabinet Side Panel Artwork

Tank treads! What an idiot I am. That was like a forty plus year brain fart on my part.

Inspiration

So aside from the fact that I like the game RIP OFF, there are a few other reasons that I think it might be a good fit for the PDP-1:

  • Plain black background.
  • Small number of simplistic white "sprites".
  • Little text.
  • One or two players (cooperative in two player mode).
  • Only four button controls for each player left, right, thrust, and fire (perfect for the Spacewar! controllers).

My concerns are:

  • The original game is very fast paced (leading to persistence issues).
  • Converting the original vector graphics to bitmaps will be difficult.
  • Sound adds a lot to the gameplay. It will be missed.

As with my Lunar Lander for the PDP-1 I will have to simplify everything quite a bit and hope that it doesn't affect the game play too much.