Joust (arcade)

This game simply shouldn’t exist. Even in the early eighties videogame boom period, it must have been instantly apparent that producing a game based on a mediaeval sport, involving large flightless birds and the complete absence of anything resembling a fire button was commercial suicide.

Someone needs to get their eyes tested…

But get made it did. Somehow, John Newcommer managed to persuade the powers that be at Williams Electronics that a game which revolved around knights flying, variously, an ostrich, a stork and buzzards would be a good idea. Now, it would be nice to credit Williams Electronics with spotting the design genius behind the game, until you look at the other games released around the same time (Bubbles? Splat? Do me a favour) and you realise that they were desperately clutching at straws hoping for another Defender sized hit...

And it could so easily have gone disastrously wrong.

But it looked so nice in the shop!

Miraculously though. Everything went right. Joust just feels ‘right’ – there’s no other way to put it. You, and your opponents, have a real feeling of weight – it’s a fantastical world, but it is utterly consistent. Your flight feels exactly as you imagine a knight, sitting on an ostrich, would.

And that feeling of weight, of consistent (if illogical) rules, drives this game. Joust is all about learning, and exploiting, the rules - swooping around the platforms, bouncing through the gap on the right hand side and performing mid-air pterodactyl takedowns (the platform bug is for chickens). After a while, your right hand instinctively taps out the flap-flap-flapflapflap rhythm needed to keep your champion airborne, and don’t play co-op with someone you care about - it will cause arguments (almost worth it though for one of the most frenetic, and rewarding, two minutes of gameplay that arcades have ever provided…)

It helps that it’s a gorgeous machine too – allegedly, the artwork predated the game by several months.
Thank you Jan Hendricks.

I love Joust firstly because it’s a great game, but I also love the fact that it was like nothing that had been seen before, and that nothing like it will ever make it past the design boards and focus groups that typify modern game development. And that makes me a little sad…

www.shockwave.com/sw/content/joust

AHCHAY, November 2004.

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