Tempest 4000 is a euphoria induction apparatus designed to simulate the mystique of vector display technology and the ancient magnetism of exotic electricity. It is overwhelming and it is hard as shit and it doesn't care. Tempest 4000's score-chasing energy, in the wild purity of a "video game," feels like a magical retreat.
EAT ELECTRIC DEATH. Potent, perfunctory, and technically possible, eat electric death was the in-game banner for Tempest 2000’s Jaguar debut in 1994. Its meaning1 relates to the visual assault and neural overload induced by Dave Theurer’s 1981 classic Tempest, itself a mixture of then-novel vector display technology fueled by (what felt like) dangerous amounts of electricity. The sinister aura of grimy arcades packed with neon lights, suspicious characters, and legitimate drugs was absent from Tempest 2000’s place in a living room. The ambiance had to be simulated. Eat electric death does the work without the agony of time travel.
Eat electric death still graces screens of Tempest 4000, the latest revision of a game Jeff Minter has been tinkering with for a quarter century. Along with Minter’s work on the Nuon’s (!) Tempest 3000, the Xbox 360’s Space Giraffe, and the Vita’s TxK, Tempest 4000’s brand of tunnel shooting mayhem hasn’t deviated far from Tempest 2000’s revolution. This path would be suspect if it weren’t for the scarcity of capable imitators. Tempest 4000 is as distinctive, punishing, and visually impressive as Tempest 2000 was in 1994.
Tempest 4000’s open objective is identical to the original Tempest. Navigate your “claw” spacecraft between defined line vectors across a geometric shape, “the web,” while shooting down the onslaught of hostile aggressors. Space Invaders with a tunnel may have been the original pitch, but Tempest’s shift in perspective and expanded dimension birthed a brand new kind of game. Successive webs arrive with more hostile opponents and their density never seems to decrease. Tempest 4000 is often a matter of being in the right place at the right time through strategic applications of aggression and patience.
t Bonus pick-ups, alternating between power-ups and points, are often dispatched down the tube. Each of Tempest 4000’s levels is an equation that can be solved by acquiring as many power-ups as possible. Upgrading your pea-shooter to a particle beam, adding a jump mechanic that temporarily frees your ship from the web, and brief moments of screen-clearing invulnerability are invaluable crutches for basic progress. An AI droid, which rolls across the field and demolishes anything in its line, would feel like cheating if Tempest 4000 ever bothered to take its foot off the gas. Each power-up, along with your one-use, screen-clearing superzapper, reset after each level.
It doesn’t take long for Tempest 4000 to amplify its speed and complexity. Enemies in the form of flower petals take longer to destroy or push down the tunnel. Geometric disco balls flash hazardous colored lasers across half of the web. Side-winding zappers shoot extended lasers straight down multiple paths. Your ship can be grabbed and pulled away or outright destroyed by incoming fire. How crowded the playing field gets is Tempest 4000’s most intimidating asset and surely the greatest obstacle in understanding its language.
As an ode to its arcade heritage, Tempest 4000 is not interested in explicitly teaching anything. From its menus to its mechanics to its general organization, Tempest 4000’s says almost nothing while expecting the player to learn everything. The only way to learn is by repeatedly playing the game, a measure only possible to achieve through a lingering curiosity. With time, things that seemed hard soon become easy. This is a cycle Tempest 4000 repeats about every four levels. You learn how to see through the code, so to speak, and position your ship with newly forged instincts of efficiency and preservation.
Parsing confection is Tempest 4000’s hardest lesson. Much like Minter’s work with Polybius last year, Tempest 4000 delights in filling the screen with neon colors and psychedelic acts of optical violence. Edges of the screen are consumed by Rez-like geometry, the opaque field of play constantly shifts its colors, and enemies routinely explode into sprinkles of neon artifacts. Eventually the entire stage will start to rotate unpredictably. This feels impossible until it doesn’t, which, again, is a lesson only learned through repeated and dedicated play. Not everyone will be able to do this and Tempest 4000 doesn’t especially care. It’s an arcade game. This is OK.
There’s a frailty to the learning process. I discovered you can run into enemies on the web’s rim, provided you’re simultaneously firing out of the correct side of your ship. Judicious and reserved movement was sometimes more advantageous than mapping-out when-to-be-where across memorized enemy patterns. While the weight of new levels eventually crushes all would-be heroes, time and dedication erode their power. Presently I am only on level 42 (of a purported 100), making Tempest 4000 one of the few games I didn’t properly finish before reviewing, which is…something.
It’s just so easy to feel smitten by the focused work of a single entity. Almost nothing in Tempest 4000 seems like it was processed through the gamut of focus groups or gross influence of executives. I discovered three different versions of the soundtrack by pressing triangle on the start menu. I still don’t quite understand how the options menu is organized. I have no idea what half of Tempest 4000’s arcane references mean, what obtaining an “angel” score entails, or Minter’s lingering fascination with farm animal noises and references. The only truth is the satisfactory dopamine hit when oblique words of encouragement literally float across the screen while I try to unleash hell.
The search for nostalgia, presumably the reason for entry, is revealed as a backdoor to the cultivation and application of vintage skill. Minter’s interpretation of Tempest graces consoles once a generation, carrying an effect likes Pac-Man Championship Edition DX or Space Invaders Extreme without significantly adjusting its rules. 4K televisions—hey it’s Tempest 4000—appear to be the most recent justification for another appearance. Pursuit of a high score is attractive once you’re able to shed the notion of one-and-done campaigns or multiplayer loops.
It’s telling that, 25 years after the Atari Jaguar’s catastrophic debut, Tempest 2000 remains its most modern and playable game. It’s an even greater irony that Atari’s executives personally wondered what it was doing on the system next to legendary turds like Trevor McFur and Cybermorph. A sound foundation creates room for a reliable structure, allowing Tempest 2000 and its descendants to build more progressive architecture across different decades. Having spent time with it recently—and discovered it uses some of the same music—it’s clear this style and this game were both built to last.
Tempest 4000’s design proximity to Tempest 2000 may chafe some of the more pedantic members of humanity. The progression of levels, the bonus levels, the music, the amount of points scored, and the web designs feel either identical or similar to Tempest 2000. It can seem like twenty five years of additional technology was only used to tremendously amplify an existing idea. Which, yes? Yes. Tempest 4000 is essentially Tempest 2000 on a dangerous amount of steroids. If people can suffer indistinguishable iterations of tent-pole franchises every year, I can’t see why this would be a problem.
Tempest 4000 is a defiant artifact that returns to life once a console generation. What would it be like if someone who made games for the VIC-20 in the early 80’s authored another game in 2018? How many programmers from that generation are still even in this line of work? An answer to these curiosities may seem like a precarious way to spend $30. Thankfully, as either a psychedelic wonderland or a classic arcade score chase, Tempest 4000 is full of eccentric support.
1this is speculative
