Classic 1984 video game Robot Odyssey available online (opens in new tab)

An "awesome story" that isn't the way it happened (as with too many "awesome stories"). See the comment I made (posted below by niawalker). To summarize here, I said I love "Rocky's Boots", and I love the basic idea of "Robot Odyssey", but for end-users, using simple logic gates to program multiple robots in a cooperative strategy game blows up too much complexity for very little utility. A much better way to do this would be to make a "next Logo" that would allow game players to make the AI brains needed by the robots.

So what I actually said, is that doing it the way you are doing it will wind up with a game that is not successful or very playable.

Just why they misunderstood what I said is a bit of a mystery, because I spelled out what could be really good for the game (and way ahead of what other games were doing). And of course it would work on an Apple II and other 8 bit micros (Logo ran nicely on them, etc.)

After posting that, I ran into this, which I feel obligated to post: the most recent comment on the article, apparently from Alan Kay, 6/16/2017 (the article was published 01/2014).

"A few corrections. (I was Chief Scientist of Atari at the time.) I told the TLC people that this was the greatest game concept that I'd ever seen (and still think so). I had loved Rocky's Boots and was really excited when Ann showed me the ideas for Robot Odyssey.

What I told her -- and it's clear she misunderstood -- was that scaling up the Rocky's Boots approach missed the point of "robots" and "computers" (meaning that robots should have a "no ceiling" range of being "really capable") and that programming was invented for computers for a reason.

I didn't say it couldn't be done -- I said it wouldn't work well enough for most potential users and players (and I believe that the sign they made was "Alan Kay says this won't work" (and if you think about it, it really didn't given what TLC was trying to do):

(a) I was very sure that the UI ideas they had wouldn't scale gracefully, and

(b) I was very sure that scaling logic up would quickly change the "bang per effort" ratio for the worse.

What I tried to get TLC to understand was that using some higher level language e.g. "nicer Logo" for programming the robot brains would revolutionize game design and playing, and would make Robot Odyssey a big hit.

After all these years I still think this is a wonderful concept, and is still waiting for the right designers and builders to marry the concept with the resources needed to make it great to use."