Joust is an arcade game produced by Williams Electronics in 1982.

Description

The player controls a knight armed with a lance, mounted on either an ostrich (player 1) or a stork (player 2), who battles waves of computer-controlled enemy knights mounted on giant buzzards. These knights have three different speed and agility levels. The game screen is static; its only features are five platforms hanging in mid-air (some wrapping around the screen), the ground, and a pit of lava beneath.

The simplicity of its controls are a factor in the game's wide appeal. A joystick moves left and right, and a "Flap" button flaps the mount's wings once. Pressing "Flap" in rapid succession will produce a gain in altitude until simulated gravity drags the mount downward.

Gameplay

Each wave begins with enemy knights appearing on the screen at one of four "spawn points". The three types of knights, from weakest to toughest, are: Bounder (red, 500 points), Hunter (white, 750 points), and Shadow Lord (blue, 1,000 points). To destroy a knight and collect its point value, the player must collide with the knight while the player's lance is vertically higher than the knight's. If the player's lance is vertically lower, he or she loses a life and is awarded 50 points.

After destroying a knight, an egg will fall to the ground. The player must touch the egg to destroy it before the egg hatches to produce another, more powerful knight. This hatchling is harmless and may also be destroyed by touch prior to the knight mounting a new buzzard. The award for destroying eggs and hatchlings progresses with each one collected, from 250 to 1,000 points in 250-point increments. This progression starts anew upon the death of the player or the beginning of another wave. Players are further rewarded with 500 bonus points for each egg caught before it touches the ground.

A wave is cleared when the player destroys all enemy knights and eggs. Survival Waves reward a player who avoids death during the round with 3,000 bonus points. If too much time has elapsed during a wave, a pterodactyl will appear from one side of the screen and fly around until it either collides and kills the player, the player clears the wave, or the player destroys it by hitting the pterodactyl directly in the mouth with his lance, earning 1,000 points.

Two players can play Joust simultaneously, and each player earns points for destroying enemy knights as well as his human opponent. Cooperative play is possible by agreement, but accidental kills through collision remain possible. Completion of Team Waves award 3,000 bonus points each to players who successfully avoid killing one another. Gladiator Waves encourage players to kill each other by similarly offering 3,000 bonus points to the first player to do so.

During the first two waves flooring at the bottom of the screen covers a lava pit, which is uncovered on the third wave as the floor burns away. On the fourth and subsequent waves, a troll inhabits the lava pit; if any player or enemy knight flies too close to the lava, the troll's hand will emerge and tug the mount down toward the lava. Players can escape the troll's grip by repeatedly pressing the "Flap" button.

Programming bugs

One flaw in the program's design, later touted by producers as a "hidden feature", gives players a strategic advantage. Two platforms are situated on the right side of the screen so that one slightly overhangs the other. If a player flies his or her mount so that its belly skims the lower platform such that its legs do not extend, the bird will then "belly flop" across the platform and illogically "squeeze" through the point where the two platforms meet, shooting out below the upper platform. Skilled players took advantage of this flaw to suddenly appear and land by surprise on an enemy knight or competing player. Game creator John Newcomer stated in interviews that this design flaw was so popular it was intentionally retained as a permanent feature of the game.

Early ROM revisions of the game presented a situation which a player could periodically exploit to accumulate an indefinite number of points with low risk. The player could maneuver an enemy knight too close to the lava, such that the lava troll would grip it, but not low enough that the troll would succeed in pulling it in, and not high enough that the enemy knight could escape. By doing so, the knight could not attack the player and the wave would never end. The player could then stand in the middle of the central platform to safely face oncoming pterodactyls, striking them in the mouth merely by standing still. Pterodactyls would appear at an increasing rate from different sides of the screen to be killed repeatedly, scoring large amounts of points toward extra lives. Arcade operators were not too pleased to see players exploit this bug.

Legacy

Williams Electronics produced a Joust-branded, head-to-head pinball machine in 1983. In 1986, the company released Joust 2: Survival of the Fittest, an arcade sequel that did not meet with the same level of success as its forebear. As part of its "Extreme Chain Series", Tiger Electronics marketed a handheld adaption of Joust in 1998. The movie rights to Joust were optioned by Midway Games to CP Productions in 2007.

Ports

In the 1980s and 1990s, Atari ported Joust to its 2600 (1983), 5200 (1983), 8-bit (1983), ST (1986), 7800 (1987), and Lynx (1992) home systems and, through Atarisoft, to early IBM PC compatibles (1983). This era also witnessed ports to the Macintosh (1994) and Nintendo's NES (1988), Game Boy (1995), and Game Boy Color (1999). Between 1995 and 1997, Joust also appeared within the Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits collection for the PlayStation, SNES, and Sega's Genesis and Saturn consoles and within the Williams Arcade Classics anthology for personal computers (both MS-DOS and Windows) and the Game.com handheld.

In 2000 Midway licensed ten Williams Electronics games, including Joust, to Shockwave to demonstrate the power of the content platform through Shockwave Arcade Collection, an online applet created by Digital Eclipse. Digital Eclipse grouped Joust that year alongside five other titles as Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits 1 for the Dreamcast and Nintendo 64 and three other games in Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits for the Game Boy Advance in 2001. A later anthology, Midway Arcade Treasures, released in 2003 for the Nintendo GameCube, PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Windows, also features Joust; it was subsequently released for the PSP in 2005 as Midway Arcade Treasures: Extended Play.

Publishers have also released ports of Joust for a nominal price to online services that support current-generation video game consoles, such as the Xbox Live Arcade (November 22 2005) and the PlayStation Network (May 24 2007).

In popular culture

• In Mortal Kombat 3 and its updates, when you perform the Friendship move with Shang Tsung, he turns into the ostrich-riding knight of Joust and hops offscreen, passing by the dizzy opponent.
• On the Code Monkeys episode "Just One Of The Gamers", Jerry had a Joust dream sequence of him and Mitch (Who was really Mary). Mitch was riding an ostrich and fighting enemies.

See also

• Balloon Fight, a similar arcade game
• DragonHawk, a clone for the Commodore 64
• Glypha III, a clone for the Macintosh
• Ostron, a clone for the ZX Spectrum
• Winged Warlords, a clone for the ZX Spectrum

References

External links

• Play Joust online for free at Midway's website