@nyrath this is why I'm bothered when people call fallout a "satire of 1950s America". Gods, no! It's a representation of 1950s America, and building on the "what if they actually pushed the button?" scenario.
We were actually that crazy with our nukes,
satire isn't needed.
@nyrath To put the ad in context, I was either a sophomore or junior in high school when this come out. I got one or two of them. (I ate Cheerios before the promo)
I also had put together a Revell (I think) kit that had all of our rockets at the time.
At the time, I wanted to work on a large airplane like the B52 or work on rockets. USAF was nice enough to keep it around long enough for me to be able to do it after I spent six years in the Army, ten years as a broadcast engineer, and two years in industry. Then a few decades later, I worked on a targeting pod for it.
As far as rockets, well, I was the SME for propulsion on the Kill Vehicle for National Missile Defense for a while. IDK if Shuttle payloads count in that.
@nyrath
no, I don’t recall ever watching it as a kid—though we did still have nuclear drills at school
(fun fact: A nuclear drill was identical to a tornado drill, except that for a tornado drill you opened all the classroom windows so they wouldn’t break, but for a nuclear drill you closed them to protect us from the fallout. I shit you not.)
@sudnadja
we definitely had war toys and models (and I was the kind of kid who had an intense fascination with tanks and combat aircraft and the like)—but we weren’t playing with toy Titan ICBMs, which I guess would have been a little too on-the-nose @nyrath
@tkinias@nyrath Titan II was also a regular launch vehicle (such as for the Gemini capsules) and I think many kids had Titan models specifically for those reasons rather than the warhead delivery kind. But yeah.
Well, when I was a wee lad I did have a toy B-29 "Enola Gay" which dumped a Fat Man A-bomb when you pressed the secret button. With no subtlety at all, it was blatantly a nuclear weapon.
But then again, my father was a bombardier in the USAF SAC. Dropping nuclear bombs was his day job. So he saw that as a proper plaything for his son.
@nyrath@tkinias I think there has also been a cultural shift in the west on the view of nuclear weapons. They started out as just yet another destructive device and tool of war, but somewhere along the way turned into a moral outrage and obvious end of the world on any use at all (basically going from one extreme to the other). It was interesting reading the leaked Russian commanders conversations in Oct '22, clearly without the same moral outrage that westerners have.
@tkinias@nyrath IIRC, the Atari 2600 port lacks the game over message of the arcade version: THE END.
And then there's Avalon Hill's Nukewar, that could end with both sides running out of nukes and there still being millions of people left. (I only played the C64 port, not Winchell's Atari 8-bit version.)
I seem to remember programming the C64 port as well.
Did it have animations of tiny ICBMs arcing down to create an animation of a tiny mushroom cloud? I spent a lot of time drawing the animation frames for those. In real clunky low resolution.
@nyrath
Did NukeWar have animation? I thought it was only textmode—but I really don’t remember it well.
Missile Command definitely had very low-res animations, though the ICBMs were just single pixels with one-pixel-wide straight lines for contrails... @isaackuo
Only the C64 version, and it wasn't much animation. Mostly it was a text display.
But when nukes were dropped, tiny bomb sprites would fall in arcs on the text display, the city icon would show a five frame animation, then the city was replaced by a crater.
@nyrath@tkinias FWIW, nowadays there's interest in old school BASIC game programming on the Atari 8-bits, C64, and others. Obviously the annual 10 liner contest is limited to dinky little games, but there's also "big" games like dungeon crawlers and such.
Avalon Hill distributed an amazing (for the time) dungeon crawler called Telengard. To squeeze the game into 32K of Ram, Daniel Lawrence wrote an algorithm which generated a fully-connected maze given random data.
Then it used the block of memory holding the program code as the maze data. So the 32K of RAM did double duty: held both the program code and the maze data.
Side effect: editing the program would alter the maze.
I remember the game, which inspired some fun copycats on Purdue's RSTS system.
I visited Dan semi-regularly while he was developing it in C (probably Aztec C) for the PC. He was living above Harry's Chocolate Shop (which is not a chocolate shop) at the time.
@nyrath@isaackuo@tkinias I recall Chris Crawford had a simulation game where if the Cold War goes nuclear there's a preachy little paragraph about how he's not going to animate people being vaporized and dying of radiation sickness to reward your failure, you savage.
Add comment