One of the old Chuck Yeager games (I think Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Simulator) had a giant 3d EOA logo you could fly around hidden away in the map. I remember being fairly blow away when finding it as a kid.
@1:48 Hey, there's that game Piracy in the background (Another CRX 2023 presentation topic). @27:53 I was trying to decide whether or not I could say "horse choker". :D It sounded vaguely naughty, so I went with Robin's "horse tie" instead. @40:44 whispered "they're not there" Thanks for the fun!
I came here ready to blow everyone's mind with the fact that the silver square, silver circle and silver triangle were the 3 puzzle peices to unlock the final dungeon in Bard's Tale, but then you totally cover that one. Also at the start when you were speculating over the shapes and whether the circle was a 'C' I was saying 'but they had a logo where the letters were replaced with the shapes!' and then you also cover that one at the end too. So here I am, thinking I was super-smart but to no avail, heh.
I live about a 35-40 min. drive away from the original Legoland in Billund and have obviously been there many times, even on school trips to learn about the company's history. All of the outdoor miniature Lego landmarks and monuments have obviously been glued together, or rather welded together using acetone, and many of the bigger sculptures have even been reinforced with steel rods... So now, when Lego enthusiasts start cringing about gluing Legos together, you can just tell them to zip-it and get over themselves, because Lego has been doing it since the very beginning. 😄 - I love these videos about stuff I was completely oblivious to even were a thing. ❤
I actually knew that Lego themselves would glue display models; the Lego store at the Mall of America in Minneapolis, Minnesota has many large glued models in the open area around their store, sort of a tiny Legoland, and it's the closest Lego store to where I live. But I didn't want to give David a pass on this one ;)
@@8_Bit I had a few EA games for the Commodore 64 C back in the day I had Super Boulder Dash which was Boulder Dash 1 and 2 on the same disk along with a few others
There are triangles inside the reflective sphere on Pinball Construction Set. At least one looks like it was added and kind of out of place. Square tiles (and large square of square tiles?), center reflective sphere, triangles inside the reflection. E O A.
36:36 the same blue square, red circle, green triangle in the artwork are also represented in the bottom text E O A and u know, out of the options of letters, the ones they selected appear to be equidistant. thats brilliant
This was amazing. I had all but forgotten about this. Thanks for reminding me. I do think you have all the ones there, and if its not on the covers - its probably in the games somewhere.
Thanks for the shoutout Robin! Great video -- I'd love to have made those coasters for you personally but they were bought from Etsy; happy you found them and gave due credit in the description. My collection has had many coffee rings on them, but they clean up with some water to perfect condition. :) Don't shy away from using them. I have many of the same games in my collection...who'd have thought those (and Mastertronic sleeves) would outlast many traditional game boxes...
The Ultima series has a number of digs at EA. - Ultima V had NPCs that would scold you for swearing at them. The last entry in the list of swear words (buried in the game's files, DATA.OVL in the DOS version) is "ELECTRONIC ARTS". - Ultima VI had the pirate Captain Hawkins (a bloodthirsty pirate who stole the Silver Tablet and got murdered by his own crew) who was named after Trip Hawkins (founder of EA), and among his crew was Alastor Gordon (named after Bing Gordon), Bonn (named after Steward Bonn), and Old Ybarra (named after Joe Ybarra). - Ultima VII had, in addition to the generators and the symbols collected within, named the founders of the evil Fellowship Elizabeth and Abraham, or E and A. - Ultima VIII had the "Morphing Object", an object that shifted between a cube, a sphere, and a tetrahedron. Interacting with it would have the Avatar bow to it. By this time, EA had bought out Origin, and apparently someone decided to get back at them for their previous digs.
What I loved about The Ultimate Wizard was the fact that it came with a level editor, the first time I ever seen a game that had that. I had never played Jumpman before that and can see the similarities, but I loved The Ultimate Wizard on my C64. Great video, lots of memories in those games. I picked up Modem Wars at a world of commodore show in Toronto way back then and my friends and I all played it to death on our C64s with our modems. It was better designed for that than even modern games. I used to put spies on my friends regenerators and they would stop working and they would get so angry until I told them how I did it. ;) Dan Bunten was working on a new version of Modem Wars for online play, and had one up and running back then. I played it. You could only play online against other players. But sadly, he died and the online version died with him.
EOA symbols on Pinball Construction Set are not dubious. The shadows cast by those three main elements create the symbols. So, the square is not found from the surface pattern but from the shadow, just like with sphere and triangle Robin suggested.
It certainly seems like the shadows *should* be the triangle, circle, and square, but no matter how hard I squint or wish, that last (right hand) shadow just doesn't look square to me.
I've played a zillion games of Lords of Conquest. I had never thought to look for those symbols before on that one. But I found them on the original game jacket that I have. And, yes, that square on the M.U.L.E. game jacket is likely hovering in the background. I can see it clearly on the 3 ft x 3 ft poster I made of the art which hangs on the wall in the retro room.
Lords of Conquest has been my go-to game if we have friends over for a "board game night". It's on the big TV, with a real C64 beneath it, and an atari 2600 joystick with cable extender. A nice way to introduce friends to 8-bit. :)
+1 for Legacy of The Ancients. A friend of mine had it and he wanted me to edit the save games to give him more gold. As I recall, I couldn't easily figure out how they encoded the amount of gold you had. Finding the bytes was easy, but the amount wasn't saved as a straight 16-bit number (might have had some kind of parity bits checksum to keep people from cheating?). However, since we knew the bytes, and food was encoded in exactly the same manner, I just had him spend all his money on food. Then, I copied the food bytes to the position for gold... rinse, repeat, and each time we did it we exponentially increased the amount of gold. I might have to look that game up one day to see if the bytes are easier to decipher now that I'm older and wiser.
Archon II: Adept was one of my favorite and most-played games, although I only had a pirated copy. Partly because I didn't have a very extensive library, but mostly because it was fun. I always thought the devs should have gone with a bit more "gating" but it was okay that you could go right for Armageddon relatively easily. I just would have liked a bit more thought put into how the game's progression was laid out. It just seemed a bit too easy to get to the end fight. I never knew anything about the EOA Easter eggs till now. (I can never unsee them as letters; although I think the cube, sphere, tetrahedron is the most likely answer now that I've seen more on the subject. The letters just don't make much sense to me, now, but that's how I saw them for a decade or more..). Thanks for covering this fun topic.
A friend of mine I went to HighSchool worked in their support section in Vancouver for a few years. He said it was one of the most soul-crushing jobs he'd ever done including doing telephone Marketing in the 80s out of Calgary
Return To Atlantis - Layers in 3D from nearest to furtheest - Square (gold border) Circle (round regulator) Triangle (Nose). All drawing you into the reflection on the googles, which features (in mirrored order) Squares on the right, Circles in the middle and Tetrahedron on the left. Not satisfied? Look then at the symbols on the left, below the eye. You have what appear to be the familiar shapes.
Fun stuff. Interesting about Archon. I wonder what that means. Granted I have said that it's my favorite game cover of all time. So in that respect, it might've been seen as so good that they didn't want to mess with it. But Robin's interpretation I think passes the grade. As far as Pinball Construction Set, there is a triangle in the reflection in the sphere. In it is a pinball playfield so I'm guessing a square might be found if you look long enough--I didn't, but the tiles are good enough for me.
My original company logo (and avatar on Google/RU-vid) was inspired by the EA logo. The company name ACE Enterprise was chosen before the logo, but as I designed the original logo I noticed I could make it a triangle, circle, and square, and to complete the EA style, put thin lines down the lettering. Since the 3 shapes make up the primary shapes, I also chose another symbolic style, and made the 3 letters Red, Green, Blue. All in all, it was definitely a nod to the early days of EA, and my love for their early software and ethics.
I wonder if Trip Hawkins sort of borrowed the EOA logo for his 3do logo. Obviously not the same shapes, but it's the same concept. Now who's up to check some of 3do games cover to hunt for 3do shapes?
That Amnesia Remembered book looks absolutely awesome... then I looked it up and almost fainted at the price. Why so expensive?! On Amazon and eBay it's over $300CAD
I liked the author's first book a bit better, "Retrogame Archeology: Exploring Old Computer Games". That one is also crazy expensive, but just put it on a watch list and grab it if you see a cheap copy float by.
Wow! I used to look at my hard hat mac box and noticed the logo on the beam and always wondered why that was there cause it seemed very extra and i thought there had to be some purpose to it. Never had another ea game though i dont think.
amazing find. I wonder if the Lost files of sherlock holmes boxart (for DOS or 3do, not sure if amiga ?) has the logo, the art is very blocky and could have it
Anyone else seeing a very tiny version of the shapes just to the left of the driver's visor on his helmet at 37:16 ? It's a bit fuzzy but it looks like square circle triangle to me...
☆ 1:09 Jeri Ellsworth looks *WAY* different from usual. Maybe it's the glasses… □ 9:47 Pyramid, noun: (geometry) A solid with triangular lateral faces and a polygonal (often square or rectangular) base. A triangle is a polygon. ○ 27:46 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_collar △ 39:36 Found most of them. ♡ 50:41 I couldn't find the triangle or the square in the credits!
I always liked those old C64 EA games, but I seem to remember that almost all of them took FOREVER to load from disc. The theme song to M.U.L.E. still stands as one of my all-time favorite game scores, even though it's quite unsophisticated compared to others.
@@JustWasted3HoursHere I may have also experienced slow EA loading for similar reasons :) So I was shocked later when I started building up my collection of originals that some of the games were a LOT faster to boot than I remembered. That was actually the origin of this video - originally I was going to look into the EA loader. Maybe I'll get back to that eventually :)
@@8_BitWasn't Epyx the first to use a fast loader? A video on loaders in general might be cool. The BASIC trick of: 10 IF A=0 THEN A=1: Load part one... 20 IF A=1 THEN A=2: Load part two... etc. ...used to confuse the heck out of me until I found out how (and why) it works. Other loaders did things like play music while simultaneously loading, etc (something that I had heard was not possible).
@@JustWasted3HoursHere I feel like I've covered those sorts of BASIC loaders before, maybe in the LOAD"*",8 vs LOAD"*",8,1 episode. But I think I also have a patron video that should be released publicly soon about trying to load commercial games from device 9 (some work, many don't!) which also covers that to some degree. That's a good question about the first fast loader. I really don't know! I'm pretty sure the first fancy "IRQ Loader" was by Epyx though, for their G.I. Joe game. It showed a truck animation and probably played music at the same time. It was the animation that blew me away when I was a kid as I thought that was impossible too.
Please get to the river raid game by carol shaw, first woman in the gaming industry. It'd be great to see if you could go through the code and explain how it works or find your tweaks. 😊
oh they're definitely evil. Not as bad as activision/blizzard. While I don't like microsoft buying blizzard and getting bigger, I acutally think microsoft MIGHT be able to make them less evil. But yeah EA has a reputation for taking a good game and ensuring that it's ruined for it's next iteration.
Yup. Sorry, caught COVID at VCF-MW, and better now, but there's a lingering tickle in the throat. I consumed a *massive* amount of tea all throughout the CRX talks.
We looked at nearly 50 games in this video. "Most" (which generally means at least a majority) of these games were never released for Atari at all, never mind first! If we only look at the first 2-3 years of releases, then more of them debuted on Atari, like Archon and M.U.L.E. But according to Mobygames, even Hard Hat Mack, Pinball Construction Set were on C64 before Atari, and some of those early games weren't on Atari at all like Worms?, The Last Gladiator, and The Standing Stones.
@@8_Bit Yeah, EA got a hard-on for piracy and mostly blamed Atari users for it. In some sense you can say that Atari users did it to themselves with rampant piracy, but show me any group of computer users that didn't pirate warez back in the day. EA knew that if they dumped on C64 users like they did on Atari users, they'd alienate their largest user base. It didn't help that there were all the premature rumors of Atari's death being repeated by all the magazines, etc.
@@michaelstoliker971 A bit of history I forgot to mention in the video is that EA's Realm of Impossibility (1984 for Atari/Apple/C64) was an expanded version of BRAM's Zombies that came out for the Atari 8-bit in 1983.
@@DavidYoud Thanks for that. About 1985 EA decided to cut off Atari as a warning to software pirates. Which is why later EA titles didn't appear on the Atari.
Regarding Amnesia...I think the book details a university restoration project and released as a "playable" game at a website named amnesia-restored. Except...it's really not playable online, at least not on the current version 2.5. And I've tried, using various browsers. It's impossible to make it out of the hotel. Maybe they've since fixed it, but right now it plays like a demo.
As the person who wrote the book they're talking about (thanks for the mention, btw!), I can assure you that's not the case. I do know about that restoration project, although it's not something I'm involved with. Unfortunately my book has steep academic pricing, which I have no control over, although the ebook version's price isn't too outrageous.
