In my last blog I talked about the origins of the concept for Amazing Ants and in this blog I want to talk about the influence of the 80's video games had on this project.
With the 80's came the advent of the video game revolution. As a young person in that era like everyone else I got caught up in it. We got our first system a Coleco Vision game system it came with the classic Donkey Kong and Cosmic Avenger games. I later added Frenzy and Lady Bug to the mix of games.
The games were simple and played with controllers that were very cumbersome with two buttons one on each side of the rectangle. It had a large number pad that resembled those phones you get for short sighted people with the large numbers.
With classic arena rock blaring we would stay up all hours of the night straining our eyes at a black and white TV. One night we decided to see what our highest score in Frenzy would be. Frenzy was a game where your stick man wielding a gun would shot robots then exit the room before the giant ball with a happy face would squish you. You could shoot the ball but he would return faster and have an angry face. Anyway the game went almost 24 hours straight as we took turns you would get a free life after 100,000 points. When we could no longer bend our fingers we just started dying on purpose and the game had to end.
Like classic games of the 80`s Amazing Ants relies on simple game play. But thanks to the modern invention of save game one no longer needs to wait til their fingers are arthritic before you could beat that high score or reach that certain level.
