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Atari, Creative Making & Zombie Computers: Robbo. Solucja

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Atari, Creative Making & Zombie Computers: Robbo. Solucja Marecki: Atari, Creative Making & Zombie Computers Atari, Creative Making & Zombie Computers: Robbo. Solucja. Piotr Marecki Jagiellonian University [email protected] Abstract In 1989, Janusz Pelc wrote the game Robbo on an 8-bit Atari, one of the first personal computers, which enjoyed a cult-like status in Poland before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Robbo, a small robot, collects screws and has to get through 56 planets. The game has achieved cult status, spawning hundreds of remixes and modifications. Beginning in the 1980s, fans (once mainly young boys, today adult men) played this game, collecting screws and running away from enemies such as bats, flying eyes, devils etc., while drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, eating crisps and telling jokes. One of the places where you play Robbo are the so-called demoparties, which gather computer geeks, technology nerds and fans of old computers. They are the heroes of Robbo. Walkthrough (2018), the first computer generated book published in Polish asRobbo. Solucja. The game’s basis is a text generator with soundtrack, made using technology original to the Atari. The concept and text was created by Piotr Marecki. The project was presented as part of the wild compo during the demoparty Silly Venture 2017 in Gdańsk. The program lasts 56 minutes and generates walkthrough for the 56 individual planets. However, it is looped, so it generates an inexhaustible amount of solutions, one of which contains a published book. All of the elements of the work – text, music, code, composition, as well as graphics – were created by Polish Atari enthusiasts. It premiered at the Atari-themed party and are being distributed among retro computers enthusiasts. While Robbo generator can be regarded simply as an entertainment or a joke, its authors believe that it also comments critically and playfully on computational obsolescence. The practice of returning to the discarded and dead (or “zombie”) media, in this case the Atari computer, is one challenge to the seeming inevitability of technological acceleration. This essay describes the history and making of Robbo. Walkthrough and provides a critical commentary on the value of “zombie” computing. Atari, Creative Making & Zombie Computers 1 Published by RIT Scholar Works, 2019 1 Journal of Creative Writing Studies, Vol. 4 [2019], Iss. 1, Art. 5 Essay Robbo. Solucja (Marecki and Bociański 2018) is not an ordinary book, although at first glance it looks like one. It has a title, authors, pages, a cover, spine and ISBN number. Inside it has text. Despite all these traditional aspects, it has several elements that make it unique. Robbo. Solucja is an analog book; however, it was generated on an 8-bit Atari computer, which is treated like a “zombie” computer: dead commercially, but revived by fans of the platform (Hertz and Parikka 2012). It contains the code of a program written in Mad Pascal and presents one of the possible variants of the text it outputs. The author of the code [https://gitlab.com/bocianu/GSR] is Wojciech Bociański. I, in turn, was responsible for the input data from which the algorithm randomly generated the final version of the book. However, book publication is just one of the modes of functioning of Robbo. Solucja in the media universe. The nature of this work is that of a media hybrid--it was designed for both digital and analog media. Indeed, Robbo. Solucja is also a text generator, that is – according to Leszek Onak’s definition – a literary machine “that creates dynamic textual compositions using a set of rules to process input data” (Marecki 2018). As such, it belongs as a genre to the field of electronic literature. Digital space, unlike print, allows for generating an infinite number of end results in the form of text strings using the algorithm. Photo 1: Piotr Marecki, Wojciech Bocianu Bociański, Robbo. Solucja generated on the Atari 65 XE. Photo credit: Piotr Marecki. Journal of Creative Writing Studies 2 https://scholarworks.rit.edu/jcws/vol4/iss1/5 2 Marecki: Atari, Creative Making & Zombie Computers Robbo. Solucja functions as an example of digital creativity in yet another dimension. The work was presented live as a wild demo at the Silly Venture 2k17 party in Gdańsk – the text generator we were working on with Wojciech Bociański (known on the Atari scene as “Bocianu”) was shown accompanied with music by Lisu (created in Raster Music Tracker). [Link to recording of English version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJNpkf3nVyw] The first part of the title refers to the gameRobbo (1989), considered the most iconic Polish pro- duction created for the 8-bit Atari. The second part references a genre popular in the field of digital media – the walkthrough (in Polish – solucja), meaning a text describing how to finish a game. Hence, both the above-mentioned demo and book constitute an attempt at describing the walk- through of the iconic Robbo. However, the twist is that the reader who decides to play Robbo using the tips given in these works will quickly fail. This is because the work is a literary (not to say: absurd) version of a walkthrough. The book itself was also created in a rather unusual way. The text generated on the 8-bit Atari computer was rewritten into a text editor, and then typeset by Atari expert user Piotr Mietniowski (nickname “Kroll”) using the Calamus program created in 1987 for working in the Atari ST / TT environment. All elements of the work, including text, music, code, typesetting, and graphics, were not only written by Atari enthusiasts, but also shown for the first time at an Atari event and distrib- uted among enthusiasts of retro computers. A reader skeptical of this experiment could ask about the motivations for carrying it out at all, pointing out a few issues. First: why was the book generated on the Atari, which has been a com- mercially dead computer for several decades? Second: why would one devote interest to a game on a platform that has long been out of use, and write a walkthrough to it? Third: why produce books that are computer-generated? Fourth: why is the book typeset using an old program and old computer, if the contemporary DTP industry has gone so much forward and offers more advanced tools that better meet current standards? This article reconstructs several contexts of the creation of the work, at the same time attempting to answer such questions. Atari, Creative Making & Zombie Computers 3 Published by RIT Scholar Works, 2019 3 Journal of Creative Writing Studies, Vol. 4 [2019], Iss. 1, Art. 5 Why Atari? In the FAQ tab on Atarionline.pl, one of the websites devoted to the Atari computer, Krzysztof “Kaz” Ziembik explains this platform in a very accessible manner: For some, Atari is the American company very powerful in the 1980s, for others it means its home computers, millions of which were produced from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, for others yet it constitutes a symbol of the [then-]emerging market of video games and consoles. But Atari is also the atmosphere that arose around the company and the users of its equipment. It is the countless anecdotes and stories about wars fought with the rival Commodore company, about the devastating defeats and joyous triumphs of the Atari company, about setting new standards in the computer market and disappointing marketing failures, about amazing hardware constructors, genius programmers, and teenage fanatics, and, finally, about the personal experiences of anyone who had come across the magic logo in the shape of Mount Fuji (Ziembik 2007). Photo 2: 8 bit Atari 65 XE from the collection at the UBU lab (ubulab.edu.pl). Photo credit: Iwona Grabska. Atari played, and continues to play, a special role in Polish computer culture as well as creative pro- gramming in the central and eastern European region. Poland is often named as “the Atari Empire,” regarding both past and present. It is in Poland that the largest Atari party gathering the platform’s fans from around the world is organized, Silly Venture in Gdańsk. Poland is also home to a very large group of fans (estimated 4000) of this platform, which has been commercially dead for several decades. It is also the only country in which works on the Atari are produced in such numbers.1 1 For example, 115 new works for Atari computers and consoles were presented during the 2017 Journal of Creative Writing Studies 4 https://scholarworks.rit.edu/jcws/vol4/iss1/5 4 Marecki: Atari, Creative Making & Zombie Computers Photo 3: Silly Venture United Atari Scene Art Festival, the world’s largest party gathering Atari users organized in Gdansk since 2000. It usually gathers more than 400 users of the platform and the competition features more than 100 new creative works written for Atari. Photo credit: Piotr Marecki. The Atari computer – alongside Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC - is an iconic 8-bit computer, a symbol. The role of these platforms was significant also in the cultural sense. There are several reasons why this occurred. First, the above-mentioned platforms were the first personal computers that became widespread in users’ homes and could be used for various purposes: education, entertainment, and creativity. Programs, games, music and literary texts were created using them. In addition, in some regions of the world some computers became more popular than elsewhere. One factor that determined this was the level of affluence of their inhabitants. Atari became the most popular in Poland. This is important because often the first contact with a particular computer leaves a mark in the user’s memory and contrib- utes to shaping their idea of a computer in general.
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