Classic of the Month - Defender

Manufacturer:	Williams
Developer:	Williams
Genre:	Shoot 'em up
Year:	1980

On the whole, games on home platforms are made to be completed, while arcade games were not. There is a simple reason for this: money! The quicker you finish your game on your Gameboy or Megadrive or PlayStation or XBO, the sooner you'll go out and buy another; equally, the quicker an arcade game depletes your lives to zero, the sooner you'll jam in another 20p. There are exceptions to this rule in both camps (something anyone who's played From Software's Souls games on modern consoles can testify to), but I finish most games I buy, while I've only ever finished a few arcade games. However, even among the hard-as-nails world of arcade games, there are those that are famous (or infamous) for being truly hardcore. And the game that was hailed as the one that kick started the trend was Williams' extreme shoot 'em up Defender.

Before I talk about how and why Defender was so tough, I want to give you a quick history lesson. Released in 1980, Defender was the first game to be developed by pinball developer Eugene Jarvis. Despite his inexperience, Jarvis created a master piece that went on to be Williams' most successful game. Jarvis himself is now a legend in the industry, responsible for some of the all time classics like Robotron and Smash TV. His current company, Raw Thrills, is one of the few video arcade game manufacturer's left today.

Now for Defender. It's highly unlikely you haven't played Defender at this point, but for those who haven't here's a quick summary. It's a horizontally scrolling shoot 'em up, with wrap-around levels, where you have to protect the humanoids wandering around the terrain from the invading alien forces. Given a chance, these aliens will pick up a humanoid and take them to the top of the screen, where they turn into fast-moving mutants. Preventing you from doing your job there are lots of different alien types and with each wave new types are introduced. To help you do your job you have a laser gun, a hyperspace and a smart bomb, the latter of which had limited capacity.

That all sounds fairly humdrum, but Defender is far from humdrum -- in fact playing it is downright stressful. If you play it on a home platform there are several major factors contributing to this sense of duress.

• There are lots of aliens and multi abductions happening at any one time.
• Everything about the game is fast! You're fast, the aliens are fast (especially the zombies) and the abductions are fast. 
• For every humanoid abducted, the resulting mutants made it harder.
• Saving a humanoid didn't just mean killing the abducting alien, you also had to catch the humanoid mid-fall, otherwise they were pulverised on the terrain and turned into Pulp.
• Failing to protect the humanoids caused all remaining Lander aliens to turn into Mutants, so if you were bad at the game, it only got harder!

If you ever played the game in the arcade there was another factor: its non-conventional controls, as can be seen in the image below:

As you can see from the arrows above and below the joystick, it only goes up and down. To go forwards you need to use the thrust button on the right, between the fire and smart bomb buttons. That's all fine, but it gets tricky when it comes to using reverse, which is next to the joystick. A skilled player could possibly hit this with the side of their left thumb, but it's quite unnatural. The biggest problem of all is with the hyperspace button, which is in the middle of the control panel. This meant you had to let go with one of your hands to use a power that was already fraught with danger (Eugene Jarvis himself is on record as saying using hyperspace had a 25% chance of getting you killed). If you translated that to a modern Xbox or PlayStation controller controller, it would be like having reverse on the Back/Select button and hyperspace on a different controller sat on your lap!

Let's look at Defender in action:

Sadly, although Defender was available on the XBLA marketplace, when Midway (who distributed the game in the West) went under, it was pulled. Fear not, its legacy lives on in countless clones. For Xbox 360 owners I would recommend Orbitron Revolution on the Xbox Live Indie Games marketplace (which I reviewed here). Also on both XBLIG and Steam there's the cute and hilarious Aqua Kitty: Milk Mine Defender. And for those hip kids with the next gen consoles, PlayStation 4 owners get the most recent homage, RESOGUN for free with a PlayStation Plus account. I covered RESOGUN in brief here a few months ago.

For another look into the challenges of playing Defender and how playing difficult games is a unique pleasure, check out 'The History of Defender: The Joys of Difficult Games' on Gamasutra from 2009.

MTW