Rescue on Fractalus!

Rescue On Fractalus! is a 1985 computer game created by Lucasfilm Games (later LucasArts Entertainment). It was originally released for the Atari 8-bit family and the Atari 5200 games console. It was also ported to other popular platforms of the day, such as the Apple II, ZX Spectrum (by Dalali Software Ltd), Amstrad CPC, Tandy Color Computer 3 and Commodore 64. The game was one of the first two products from the fledgling Lucasfilm Computer Division Games Group led by Peter Langston.

Synopsis

Flying

The game utilized fractal technology to create the craggy mountains of an alien planet, where the visilibility was drastically reduced by a gaseous atmosphere. The player controlled a fictional "Valkyrie" space fighter^[1] (converted for SAR duty) from a first-person view, attempting to land and pick up downed Ethercorps pilots. (The spaceship was named after the musical theme featuring in the game, Ride of the Valkyries.) Some of these mountains held anti-aircraft guns, which had to be avoided or destroyed. Due to the varied terrain, the direction finder had to be used to locate the pilots, whose visual beacons were often masked by mountain ridges.

At higher levels, the enemy Jaggis (named after the aliased look of the sprites) began flying kamikaze saucers at you. Your mission area also moved into day/night boundaries. Night missions were particularly difficult, requiring diligent use of the altimeter to avoid crashing.

Flying would consume the pilot's supply of fuel. The way to replenish this supply is to rescue downed pilots who brought their remaining fuel supplies on board.

The thick, gaseous atmosphere was sufficiently acidic that downed pilots' craft were being slowly disintegrated. An exposed pilot's survival time outside his craft was less than a minute, due to his flight suit and helmet literally dissolving. This made it imperative that the player rescue pilots as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Rescue

After landing within sufficient "walking" proximity to the pilot, the player would shut down the engine, also turning off the ship's shields. Turning on the engines prematurely would incinerate the exposed pilot. The downed pilot would then disembark his crashed ship, run down to the Valkyrie's cockpit, and knock on the crew entry door; the player could then open up and let the pilot in to complete the rescue. Failing to open the door would kill the pilot; his knocking on the hatch would become at first frantic, then slower and more feeble as they perished in the corrosive environment.

As an amusing twist on this relatively straightforward premise, added at the suggestion of George Lucas^[2], some of the "pilots in distress" were actually hostile aliens in disguise. After landing near a downed pilot, the player would watch him run off-screen, and then wait for several tense seconds—if it were human, the familiar, frantic "tap-tap" noise would be heard from the ship's hatch; otherwise, the alien Jaggi would suddenly jump back into view, sans helmet, roaring and trying to smash into the cockpit. Unless the player restored the ship's shields, the windscreen would crack open and kill the pilot. Likewise, inadvertently letting a Jaggi pilot into the player's ship resulted in disastrous results - the Jaggi would then enter the ship and begin to dismantle it. Many people have interpreted this as the Jaggi attacking the player himself, although the developers insisted this wasn't happening. According to head developer David Fox, this shock moment made Rescue on Fractalus! "the first [computer] game to really scare people"^[2].

Trivia

The development version of this game was called Behind Jaggi Lines!. This has a double meaning. The aliens in the game are called "Jaggi", so when playing the game you are flying "Behind Jaggi Lines". The word "Jaggi" was derived from "jagged" during development due to the fact that the graphics depicting the cockpit of the Valkyrie spacecraft were not anti-aliased and are therefore very "jagged". So the player is "Behind Jagged Lines".^[2]

The game, as many of other Lucasfilm Games' early releases (c.f. Ballblazer), was widely available to the computer underground on pirate bulletin boards.

Disk and cartridge based versions, on the Atari 8-bits, also had an extra intro screen depicting the pilot's mothership.

A poster of the game appears in Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders.

Unreleased versions

In 2004, an unreleased prototype of Rescue on Fractalus! for the Atari 7800 was found in the possession of its original programmers. While most of the core elements of the game were intact, the project was cancelled before the gameplay could be completed. The 7800 version would have taken advantage of the system's better graphical performance to produce a much smoother simulation of the planet Fractalus.^[3]

References

^ Atari Age scan of original game manual
^ ^a ^b ^c Interview with David Fox (from: James Hague: Halcyon Days: Interviews with Classic Computer and Video Game Programmers)
^ "AtariProtos.com page on RoF for Atari 7800". Retrieved 2007-11-26.