The 2009 Nibbler Championship
Joshua Bearman wrote about the 2009 Nibbler Championship at the LA Weekly Blog. He says:
Why is this so awesome? Nibbler, as I mentioned in a brief aside in my Harper's piece on Billy Mitchell, was an arcade game made by the jukebox company Rock-Ola in the early 1980s. Nibbler is mostly forgotten other than its historical appeal as the sole arcade machine whose counter had enough digits to display 999,999,999 and therefore turn over at 000,000,000, or one billion points.The game itself sucked -— “playing the thing is joyless,” says Dwayne Richard, the number two Nibbler contender of all time—but as the highest of all potential scores, the “billion on Nibbler” was a universal goal in the early 80s. Many tried and failed. Eventually, on January 15, 1984, Tim McVey from Oskaloosa came to Walter’s arcade and finally reached a billion after playing forty-four hours—except that instead of turning over to zeros, the counter kept going. Tim gave up at 1,000,042,270 when he realized the true milestone was ten billion points, another order of magnitude away, and sadly, well out of reach for him and all humanity. (Rock-Ola gave Tim a Nibbler machine, which he promptly traded to Walter Day's rival arcade down the street -- for $200! In tokens!)
Tim is back, playing against Dwayne Richard. I put up a fairly detailed post about, talking about how Nibbler represents how obsessive classic game competition is, for the players, just another facet of human achievement. Like climbing Everest. Or enumerating Pi. And to that end, I posted the first opening to my Harper's piece, which fell by the way side for editing reasons. But it tells the story of Robert Mruczek's marathon session on Star Wars at Fascination Arcade in New York in 1984, and sets the stage for the idea of this whole pursuit as part of the epic story of man versus machine, but more importantly, man versus self.
the latest
latest episodes
for the rest of the planet - they talking about Snakes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_(video_game)
Or, for those of us that grew up on MS-DOS and QBasic, Nibbles.
I don't know about you, but I am still looking for a CD-ROM version of intellivision golf...
I played tons of games in the 1980s. Tons of crappy games.
Playing Nibbler is like having to listen to a cousin's tedious story. Who is this cousin? And what is this story about?
Anyone who played it more than once might have form of PTSD.
Tim McVey? I had a student in my class named Charlene Manson once and I thought her life was bad....
This is the Nibbler(SFW) I prefer.
So if everyone thought hitting 1,000,000,000 would reset the counter to 0, how does anyone know that hitting 10,000,000,000 would?
Perhaps the counter just keeps going until no more digits can fit on the screen?
I say someone writes a program that can play for weeks straight. Just to find out.
Enough is enough! I've had it with these m***f***n snakes in this m***f***n game!
In all likelihood the counter goes to some power of 2, like 2^32 (4,294,967,296), which might be the maximum bit width of a bank of registers on the processor. I'd be surprised if they coded it to properly handle arbitrarily large scores.
I think it's a testament to good programming!
@ #2 - My first and still favorite golf game is the original Nintendo Mario Golf. After Ultima, that's probably my fav Nintendo game.
Wow, I haven't thought of Ultima in a long time. As far as pure exploration goes, I haven't seen many games as good as the first few Ultima games. My wife and I spent many an hour mapping and charting those games.
The first few Final Fantasy games were great too - but those started on the Super Nintendo, right?
@tom hale: The first Final Fantasy (as well as the second and third in Japan) were all on the NES. The first one on the SNES was FFIV, aka FF2 stateside.
Thanks Earbox, I loved FF 2 and 3. My wife played FF7 - I think it was FF7, it was the last one before FF became Sci-Fi - and the last one I liked.
I'm amazed that all of this was happening just miles away from where I grew up on a farm in rural Iowa. I had no idea Ottumwa was considered the videogame capital of the world until a few years ago. I didn't even know there was a Fairfield until I saw The King of Kong.
Take off the skirt Mc Vey. Ned Troide did 62 hours on Defender, before it was cool.
http://www.boingboing.net/2004/08/24/gamer-flashback-1982.html
Apparently the new Mario Golf Game on Wii will allow players to unlock special titanium clubs, however you'll need to unlock earplugs first.
@#13 Tom Hale: You probably are thinking of Final Fantasy VI (originally released as III on the SNES in the US.) VII brought in the gunblades and motorcycles (and bears oh my!) and was on the Playstation and PC.
I'm more impressed by the guys playing Desert Bus. That game was designed to be boring.
@#6: Unfortunately not, with SafeSearch off. Now please get that image off my mind. *shudders*