Defender: The Definitive Review

Welcome To The Dawn Of Machine Malevolence

When I was lucky enough to enjoy a curry with Jeff Minter, I knew I had to ask him about one of his most obvious videogame obsessions. The general myth with Jeff is that he’s all about Tempest, though the deeper you look into his early catalogue, the more you’ll see that his true love was actually a different game altogether. I think I actually framed a question by mentioning he’s more known for Dave Theurer’s vectorised blaster, and obviously more associated with Atari in general, but how did he feel about Williams’ first in-house videogame? Jeff replied, with more than a small glint of gleeful romance in his eyes, that he could take me to the exact spot in a park in Basingstoke where he first saw Defender. I’m not sure he could say the same for Tempest, and this highlights something very important. Defender is special. Very special. I’ve written before about games that have unique charisma, an aura of something magical that evokes some sense of a complex, wild spirit that dwells within. Defender is perhaps the earliest example of that.

There’s a reason why Eugene Jarvis’s first game carries a cachet that precedes most people’s experience of playing it. It’s not just Martin Amis proclaiming it a masterpiece, as I doubt there are that many gamers who know that even fucking happened. As a game, Defender is notoriously difficult and ruthlessly unforgiving. Can we say the strict demands of Danmaku actually start with Defender? It’s also wildly intense. The challenge, the explosions, the booming audio. In many ways, it encapsulates a stereotypical notion of the dangerous videogame with genuine aplomb - it’s a savage assault on the senses, not to mention your ability to compute, to react. And it’s like that from the off. It’s the kind of game that concerned parents would think emanated a miasma of digital neurotoxicity, that its ferocity could damage the minds of those playing it. Of the ‘golden age’ arcades, it’s the one game I most wish I could master, for its flow state is uncannily thrilling. Riding Defender is like being strapped to a missile you can barely control; a kind of sublime union with the custom control scheme and the demands of the rapid, demanding systome that sees your best prospect as that of temporary survival. The goal isn’t to overcome, but to fend away for as long as you can until you’re inevitably killed. This remains the case for the most high-end of players on the game’s highest difficulty. You may be able to rack up enough extra lives to go to the loo lower down the scale, but at 99-99 you will never be free to own the gamespace as yours alone; the enemies will get you even if you’re the best in the world.¹

Being roughly aligned with 1978’s Space Invaders and 1979’s Galaxian, as games where a lone ‘hero’ destroys alien invaders, Defender has a unique position temporally. It’s straddling the vogues of late-70s videogame designs, and the culture’s notable lack of convention, with the brighter aspect of a far-horizoned future and capabilities of improving hardware as a herald of the decade ahead. It counterparts beautifully with Battlezone as harbingers of what’s to come. The 1980s brought standardisation to the Arcades and was where the shooter transitioned from the static screens of the Space Invaders mould and out into the defence of lesser and lesser abstracted places, or in Defender’s case, initiating the sense of the shmup as a geographical journey as much as a battle against the odds. In a sense, Defender is the game that breaks the Space Invaders dogma and asserts, for a short while at least, the idea that the American arcade game is every bit the equal of its Japanese equivalents. Williams might not have enjoyed the same riotous catalogue of diverse splendour that Atari² delivers throughout the decade, but in some ways its biggest hits are all the more iconic considering how few duds Williams had compared to its bigger, far more corporate rival. So much of that is down to the staff, and Jarvis/DeMar in partnership would prove themselves capable of defining two of the American golden age icons with an almost effortless grace.

Robotron is, of course, the little brother to Defender that’s wildly more popular, leading to a game template that survives today. The twin-stick shooter begins at Robotron, although its immediately-accessible control scheme must be a reaction to the hyper-quixotic technicality of Defender’s. And therein lies the rub - Defender is difficult in play, yes, but it’s also difficult to play. Well, as long as you’re the kind of try-hard heathen that was indoctrinated on 8-way joysticks and single-button interfaces. Worse are still the filthy masses that expect twin analogues, shoulders, triggers and a multitude of face buttons, who would recoil in horror at what I’m about to describe. A massive part of Defender’s beguiling uniqueness is its now-bonkers control method. Shoot, thrust, reverse, hyperspace, bomb. Five buttons. And a lever! That moves the Defender up and down on the screen, meaning all horizontal movement is via thrust and reverse. It’s astonishingly counter-intuitive for anyone used to the post-JAMMA, post-8-bit standards for controls, and yet it’s a scheme specifically designed to fit the game and perhaps more importantly, vice versa. There’s a symmetry there, as with a lot of the early golden age titles, where the interface and the design are in a kind of creative harmony that isn’t quite the same when everything must adhere to the 8-way stick and a bunch of buttons. Defender is from the era of Missile Command’s trackball, of Tempest’s spinner, Pacman’s sole joystick. It raises the question: was the ‘golden age’ golden because game and controls were designed together, to work together?

Defender’s controls meant anyone who learnt to battle the systome on home hardware, from the Atari 2600 to the home 8-bit computers, would be useless when faced with the real thing. From this, it’s understandable how the cachet grew. To compete at arcade Defender meant doing time on arcade Defender, which meant doing *a lot* of time on Defender. With that in mind, you can understand how the game gets its cool points by means of its barrier to entry, and how those who can wrangle the machine can command kudos and respect from those who tried, but couldn’t. Having never attempted the game in the arcade, I struggled enormously when I got Williams Arcade Classics on CD-ROM for a bargain price in the mid-90s. PC keyboards are no substitute for a real panel.³ Various attempts at configuring something passable via M.A.M.E. fared no better. However, it was when I was unbelievably lucky enough to get a Vectrex for £50 that I finally got some sense of mastering the beast. There was a beautifully calibrated homebrew version⁴ for the vector wonder that transposed the buttons-and-lever scheme onto the Vectrex stick-and-four-buttons controller. The real core of the Defender controls lies in the thrust and reverse options. Thrust propels you with a bit of inertia on button lift. Reverse swaps your horizontal direction but also displaces your vertical position, moving you towards the opposite end of the screen as you flip. An intuitive grasp of the distance and speed of that displacement is utterly critical to survival, and where the real mastery lies. Deployed correctly, the reverse is amazingly powerful in tight dodging situations as a stacked swapping of positions to avoid player-targeted bullets - or precisely the kind of play that Defender will rapidly escalate to if you make any progress. You can move up and down during the displacement and, naturally, you’re completely vulnerable to bullets or enemy collisions the entire time. What’s interesting is that it’s digital control in both senses - an on/off switch pressed by a finger. It’s not a directional move, and that abstraction seems to define the entire manner by which the player can deal with the game’s more extreme enemies. This was the stumbling block I had to triumph over to get to the game’s heart and with enough grinding on the Vectrex, I had managed to acquire a reasonably passable flowstate wherein I could play with the tiniest dash of confidence.

I love games that subvert your initial expectations, and I was suitably delighted to realise Defender isn’t about systematically clearing the stage of baddies but instead making sure you’re in the right place at the right time. The game’s central play, which is killing the cannon fodder Lander enemies to prevent them from kidnapping humanoids and turning into much more erratic and shooty Mutants, is more about patrolling with a seek-and-destroy mentality until you get the audio alert that a Lander is making a grab for a humanoid. You then need to get to wherever that is happening and make sure the kidnapping isn’t completed, for Mutants are much more of a handful than Landers. Achieving this without overshooting, crashing into enemies, being shot etc, is the chief thrill of the game. The destruction borne of the game’s amazingly-represented laser cannon is merely a component of that sense of dashing around. It’s the importance placed on position and movement that separates Defender from the Space Invaders lineage. Throw into that the spawning Baiters, which actively hunt you down, and you get a second dimension of distinction from the general thrust of ‘kill the flocking alien baddies’ arcade games. This is the key divergence: Defender expresses a real, tangible sense of machine malevolence.

In this clip from the 1982 mini-documentary, Arcade Attack, a youthful Defender player expresses his disdain for both the limitations of the Space Invader’s mechanistic march of descent and the ‘snidey’ behaviour of Defender’s Mutants. For him, he isn’t playing a game as much as he’s battling another mind - the game is operating on that intellectual level as far as he’s concerned. It’s a fairly baroque anthropromorphisation for the humble Motorola 6809 at Defender’s heart, but it underlines the impact the game had in presenting itself as an opponent actively working against you. Even the likes of Galaxian had the sense of automatons going through the motions in their balletic swoops towards the player, and Pacman’s ghosts seemed to be mindlessly homing in on you, not working in cohort. Berzerk’s Evil Otto comes closest perhaps, but Defender’s active enemies carried that extra magical weight of perceived malign intent. With that notion, Defender aligns more with the murderous HAL 9000 and the T-800 that’d arrive three years later than the processional baddies of Space Invaders and its offspring. Many people would cite Defender’s horizontal scrolling as the key innovation it brought, but I think its ability to make you feel as if you were being played as hard as you’re playing the game that makes Defender so uniquely valuable. It was interesting that Defender’s conjuring of malevolence would carry over to Robotron with considerable ease in translation, only to emerge as a literal personification with 1983’s Sinistar.⁵ Williams, it seems, went the whole hog and the legendary status is rightly deserved.

Defender now exists in the culture almost purely as an icon. A symbol of the best of a lost age rather than a peer to the contemporary melee. And yet its challenge remains just as daunting now as it did in 1981. The game isn’t any easier despite the inherited wisdoms of forty-five years hence. But sadly, it faces a kind of erasure. It exists as an occasional logo on some merch here or there, and lives more in the shadow of Robotron thanks to Geometry Wars’ singled-handed revival of the twin-stick shooter. It remains, however, a vital touchstone in the Gen-X experience as a game that only needed to live by virtue of its reputation as one of the very best, only to be mastered by the very best, even if so few ever got to appreciate its true majesty. And majestic it is - the bitterness of the battle, when your fingers actually know how to fight it, is more fraught than skirmishing a legendary Elite in Halo, or whatever example you’d use for human vs computer battling in the modern videogame context. The sense of valiance in shooting a Lander just before it converts to a Mutant and catching the falling humanoid while killing the enemies that surround you is supreme, every bit as thrilling as the best that contemporary games can offer. I love the game so much, I tried to pitch a retrospective to Eurogamer once, only to be told, off the record of course, that one Christian Donlan wanted to do it because he had the best fucking interview with Eugene Jarvis that you’ve ever fucking heard. Respectfully I re-tooled my retrospective into something else, but I’d still love to read that Defender retrospective, Christian!

To compare to other media, Defender is not quite Train Pulling Into A Station, as for movies the most contemporary exponent of the best of cinematic craft doesn’t go that much further than the very first action sequence. Rather, Defender is more akin to ancient cave paintings, being in possession of a necessary form that’s required for the true experience. You have to go into the cave and feel the rock where 250,000-year old hands put pigment to surface by torchlight to truly experience those images. To experience Defender you might not need the CRT or the classic arcade speaker for the audio-visual glee, but you absolutely need the controls. In my lottery-win dream arcade, Defender is absolutely the first cabinet I’m buying, and if it was the only one I owned, I’d be more than satisfied. I admire the game that much, and I’d be honoured to keep one alive. And it’s a wonderful thing to encounter for real. I had a chance to do that at Arcade Club in Bury, happily communing with a real machine in its own cave of sorts. I wondered if I could fire up those old Protector neurons and get my Defender control schema up and running again. And you know exactly what happened? It fucking kicked my fucking ass.

[21]

1. Mikeville66 might not be officially the best in the world, but when I interviewed him for an he was the only guy I could talk to who had 25+ years of experience and his YouTube videos of 99-99 Red Label play - the most difficult on official ROMs - have moments of Defender battling that defy belief. It was watching Mike, a Swedish nurse, grabbing Defender by the neck and wringing it that inspired me to pitch to Eurogamer, which later became an Edge feature about expert arcade players, securing me a credential I lean on offensively to this very day.

2. What's mad about 1980s Atari arcade games is the lack of falling into genre that you get on the JAMMA side of things. Atari goes from trackball madness like Centipede and Crystal Castles, onto Marble Madness before a wild swerve to I, Robot, Paperboy and 720 Degrees. Ends up with Escape From The Planet Of The Robot Monsters, Xybots and fucking Hard Drivin’. AND I HAVENT EVEN MENTIONED GAUNTLET OR APB.

3. There has actually been a solid industry in making and selling replica panels, just for Defender fans. Yes, of course I fucking want one.

4. This is Protector by Alex Herbert, by the way.

5. Not just a vocal snippet for the intro to legendary TV series Bits, the titular Sinistar is one of my all-time favourite videogame enemies AND bosses thanks to his overt personification of the malignant computer-controlled enemy. I got to play the arcade sometime in the mid-80s and was utterly enthralled by his shouting. Oblivious to the Sinibomb-mining gameplay you're supposed to undertake, I remember exploring the gamespace for the source of the speech and being thrilled at the terror of being chased by him, to my inevitable demise. It was the first time I'd experienced a videogame enemy that seemed to be an actual evil bastard rather than some robotic, mechanistic hazard.