Thanks for mentioning my books. I appreciate it. :) Thanks for all this work. This is fantastic. Very, very cool. I've passed it on to a colleague of Suzuki-san, to pass on to him. I'm sure he'll be very pleased to see people still interested in his original game. --- EDIT: As an aside, when I first discovered this, after interviewing Suzuki-san, as you can imagine in 2013 there was almost zero information, even in Japanese, and finding screenshots almost impossible. I had to rely on a scan from a magazine. So to see now, 10 years later, the game preserved as a piece of history for anyone to play, it's fantastic. Thank you. I don't have my interview to hand, but as I recall, the 1979 version was shown at a fair? It was part of this deal they had with Taito. They were paid to come up with these computer games. They would create games and show them to Taito. Except Taito didn't publish them - though in the case of this specific game, Taito copied the idea for its Lupin arcade game, which Suzuki was not happy about, since there had been talk of royalties, which ultimately did not materialise. (The entire reasoning behind the deal is a mystery lost to time.) Now, finally, this lost artefact can be viewed easily in its original and optimised context. Kudos to you, good sir, and your efforts.

That's an impressive PET game for 1979. Even more impressive that it is written in BASIC and still runs fast enough to be playable.

The animations have so much character! It's impressive that the original dev got so much out of plain PETSCII.

Regarding the transliteration: There are two common systems in use when transliteration Japanese to Latin characters: Hepburn and Nihon-shiki. In *very approximate* terms, Japanese syllables boil down to an optional initial consonant (none, K, S, T, N, H, M, Y, R, W), followed by a vowel (A, I, U, E or O). This allows you to make a table of all the valid combinations of consonants and vowels. There are, however, a few exceptions in how these are actually pronounced. In Nihon-shiki, the romanization follows this logical table: し is S + I, so it's transliterated as "si". But Hepburn approximates the actual pronunciation closer, and this character is one of those exceptions: it's pronounced "shi", so Hepburn uses that. But there is an added twist here: you can modify the I characters by suffixing a smaller version of a character from the Y line. The title is an example of that: in pure kana, it's "まんびきしょねん"; ma-n-bi-ki-shi-(yo)-ne-n, where the yo is one of those smaller characters that modify the "shi". When that happens, you replace the vowel with the vowel from the Y character, so しょis pronounced "sho", and Hepburn will romanize it as such. Nihon-shiki, however, writes it as "syo", replacing the I with the Y character transliteration. English speakers tend to use Hepburn when romanizing, but Japan itself generally goes with Nihon-shiki (or Kunrei-shiki, which is very closely related, and shares this particular difference anyway). It's generally not a big issue; for the most part the romanizations do align with each other, so once you've learned one, it's easy to learn the other as well.

That’s cool! The late Satoru Iwata, who worked for Nintendo, actually programmed his very first game on a Commodore PET.

The way this was presented and the fact you could type it in, would have certainly helped people to learn programming.

The shop attendant mr K has quite the flamboyant walk

What an amazing piece of preservation! Thanks for your hard work! The PET was the first computer I ever pressed a key upon, probably when I was 6 or 7 years old. I still remember the community college summer program where I saw it. I was hooked right away.

The "Syo" is indeed supposed to be "Sho", it's a different way of transliteration system. "Sho" is easier though for English speakers to pronounce correctly just by seeing it (as in "show"). You occasionally see also "tu" in the game, but that is supposed to be pronounced "tsu". I could talk an hour about this, haha ;p Might be able to translate some of it :)

Oh yeah ... Commodore cursor keys ... I still have that shift-goes-opposite-direction-feeling stored in the muscle memory of my right hand index finger😂

Pretty interesting blast from the past. Definitely shows how an intelligent individual can work wonders even when they're severely limited.

A lot of these games weren't so much lost, but rather, just didn't have a way to get distributed and travel beyond your own machines. There were no BBS's, modems were uncommon, and the internet was pretty small only connecting universities mostly. Maybe you made a few copies on tapes (and then floppies) for your friends... I did this for my C-64 programs. I wrote a massive text adventure game for the TRS80 Model III that I guess you could say was the first and only text adventure game of someone's real life house and farm. And unlike Alexa, my text parser understood conjunctions, like AND, OR, NOT... When I finally did have a way to upload my hand written games to BBS's, I'd get random phone calls at very random times from people who opened up an about box and saw my contact info. I remember two in particular... one about a Trivia Hangman Game I had written for the Mac, and one about a copy I did of Milton Bradley's Merlin in Hypercard.

Song at the end was great. One of the best yet

I'm playing it on my 4032 :-) Thanks for the link to the disk file you did.

The POKEs mentioned in the magazine article to save are absolutely necessary when saving to tape. It's a long-known problem that if you are doing CB2 sound and you leave the VIA registers in the state used for playing sounds, it prevents the tape routines from working. I haven't checked line-by-line, but if this program doesn't restore the original shape of the VIA registers, you have to use those POKEs. There is no issue with the CB2 sound interfering with IEEE-488 disk drive operations AFAIK.

This is awesome! It's great that someone archived those old magazines.

Brings back memories. These first games were innovative. Thank you.

"Stealth game too good at hiding" could be the headline for the first section of the video... I also like how at <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="1145">19:05</a> you're already anticipating speedrun categories.

what a wonderful story and piece of software, I find these ancient games and hardware analyzed through modern technology so nostalgic. Never heard of this game before, but quite cool of a concept, specially predating almost every game ever, 1979 is before Pacman, Donkey Kong. It's crazy

What a find!! It's completely amazing and love the changes you made. Thanks for sharing and the shout-out

I am fascinated by the effort someone put into the PETsci graphics and animations!!

closing music was genius. Shades of Crash Test Dummies.

Really cool to learn about the game. Thank your for the clear explanations and your amazing work in optimizing the code. It's always a good day when old media gets rediscovered!

Amazing that is written in BASIC. I remember being blown away by the Space Invaders game on the PET and hoping to look at the code only to find it was written in assembler which I hadn't (yet) learned.

Thank you for helping to preserve this bit of gaming history by sharing it with the rest of us!

This is so funny! The old games really had charm!

Wow! This is amazing! Can you make a C64 port and add some colour and SID beeps and boops? Not done watching so I’m sorry if you already talk about a C64 port.

Wow Robin, this is great stuff (as always).

Man, I really like the animations! Very well designed for typed in Basic!

Thank you for the work put into software preservation.

This is so cool. As a VIC-20 kid, the PET was something that I kind of missed (still need to finish assembling all of the mini-pet parts.). But now I want to see if I can do a VIC-20 port. 🤔Just trying to figure out the best approach to make it fit within the vic-20 limited display resolution. Thinking of a "Zoomed out" view while in the game and a "Zoomed in" view during the animated sections (including when you're caught). I also want to see how far I can get on unexpanded. Thanks to your videos, I was encouraged to make my first assembly VIC-20 project. As a kid, I never understood assembly. But after multiple years working in high-level languages it was fun to go back to basics and bang the hardware. :)

Definitely worth documenting this game, improving it and contributing so much to preservation.

Very cool and great improvements!

Love this video and your channel! Really appreciate all that you share.

Candidate for 'first game where you play as the villain' too? :-)

It's possible that the King's Quest games were among the first stealth games. You had to avoid getting caught by the witch, the wizard (Manannan), the troll, the wolf and a number of other bad guys. Although King's Quest was not really of the stealth game genre, you had to do a fair amount of sneaking around.

what a fantastic episode again!

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="633">10:33</a> 万引き 少年 (manbiki shōnen) means "Shoplifting-Juvenile" or "Shoplifting-Boy" (="young shoplifter") う！ない！(u! nai!) means something along the lines of "Ugh! There is nothing!" or "Oh, no!!" 監視員 (かんしいん) (kanshiin) means "guard" つかまえろ (tsukamaero) means "catch me" 文部科学省奨学金 (monbukagakushō shōgakukin), formerly also "Monbusho Scholarship" is an academic scholarship offered by the Japanese Ministry of Education that supports foreign students 空いててよかった！(Sui tete yokatta!) means "Good thing it's open!" いけ! (ike!) means "Let's go!" こい！(koi!) means "come!" まて! (mate(ee)) means "wa(aa)it!" ばかめ！(baka me!) means "(you) idiot!" うまい！(umai!) means "good" or "excellent" or even "tasty" いい気分 (Ī kibun) means "good feeling" or "feeling good" (from the Slogan 7-ELEVEN いい気分)

What a great game! =D Thank you

I'd like to translate the Japanese instances seen in this game. "Nai!" = "Nothing here!" Monbusyo/Monbusho = Minister of Education, Science, and Culture "T(s)ukamaero!" = "Catch him!" Kanshiin = Watchman "Ha(-)haaaaaa(i)!" = "O-okaaaaaay!" "Aitete yokatta!" = "I'm glad it's (the store's) open!" "Ike!" = "Go!" (imperative) "Mateee!" = "Stop!" "Bakame!" = "Idiot!" "Umai!" (上手い) = "(He's) skillful!" "Yoku yatta!" = "You did well!"

Mud1, created in 1978 may have a prior claim. You could attack other players while invisible.

Fun Fact: Even in ascii one can tell, the Nord is enforcing the law, and the Redguard is looting.

Great video, thank you for going the extra mile and discussing the flowchart, it was really fun 🙂 By the way, what did you use to get the magazine pages translated and displayed on your iPad (or other tablet)?

I happen to speak Japanese (not fluently though), and I can explain the "syo" vs. "sho" thing - it's two different styles of romanization. The "Hepburn" romanization is based on English pronunciation, so it's fairly obvious to an English speaker how to say something, and so 少年 would be written "shōnen" or "shounen". A simplification of this is the most common system used outside of Japan. But "Nihonshiki" or "Japan-style" romanization is more normalized according to Japanese use, so you don't have as many exceptions - but as a result it's not as phonetically accurate, and you get "syônen" or "syoonen" instead. You'll often see Nihonshiki romanization used in Japan proper, as it's the official standard there.

Stealth mode & god mode were the only things that made Quake II addictive. Just racing through all 12 hours of obstacles without having to fight enemies or get past the enemies without being mortal was an exciting challenge on its own.

It's funny you should mention the Space Invaders soundtrack. My friend borrowed his older brother's boombox. A Pet 4016 I bought has an Archer speaker phone inside connected to the port for sound.

"Shounen" and "syōnen" are just two different ways to romanize "しょうねん", which is pronounced like you pronounced "shounen". The second romanization is in Nihon Shiki, which is Japan's official system, in which they seem to prefer consistency over what makes sense to Westerners. In this case, し = "shi", ょ = small "yo". Small kana are used to modify the regular ones, so when you put these two together, you get "sho", but for them, spelling it as "syo" makes more sense, because all of the other combinations with "yo" are like that. Also, "ou" is just a long "o", for historical reasons, and Nihon Shiki writes it as "ō", which actually does make more sense to us. But obviously that computer has no such character, so the programmer used just a plain "o".

I happen to have a PET 2001-8N. Not very often you find a game designed for/on that particular model. Cool find.

An early game with a stealth element is Saboteur! for the ZX Spectrum, published in 1985. Stealth isn't a theme of the game per se, but it is possible to sneak up on guards and kill them without a fight. It works in much the same way as in Prince of Persia - running will cause a guard to turn around in the direction of your footsteps, but walking does not. Interestingly, Saboteur! does not even have a 'walk' feature, but you can simulate it by quickly tapping then releasing the direction controls so the character takes one step at a time.

I don't read or understand Japanese, but if you use Google Translate in camera mode it pretty accurately (it seems) shows what those characters say on the cover of RAM magazine. [edit: Sorry, I wrote this comment before the video was finished. Seems Robin has the same idea!]

what a game XD !!! Cheers!

The way many do Commodore program loaders is to position the LOAD"[file]",8 and RUN commands on the screen load the keyboard buffer with a few 13s (return) and exit the program so the cursor lands on the LOAD line... that gets around the thing with end of BASIC not resetting when loading in program.

Pac-Man is "kinda" a stealth game. You're trying to clear the maze of dots without being seen and chased.

Superb video, containing so much backstory and detailed information. Question: I assume the link to the game in your description is to your optimized version; is there a copy of the original version available for download somewhere too? Many thanks.

Pretty neat!

That outro song is just plain awesome! Can you please release this somehow? :) I take it this is all a family production?

great video and cool game

I was following your explanation of the code along, but somehow I missed where it checks whether you have the shotgun equipped. Also, how were the microtransactions required to rent more backpack slots so that you can empty the entire store in one go implemented?

@<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="505">8:25</a> When you showed the Mini PET, I was thinking "uh oh, is he going to type in the listing on that?!?" :D @<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="1320">22:00</a>, Wait, the first program has to be longer than all subsequent programs?? Got more details on that? Also, what happens if the time runs out and you didn't finish shoplifting?

Thanks for the great video! What software was used to make the translations while maintaining the magazine's layout?

Yeah, you pretty much said it correctly the first time. "Mambiki Show-Nen"

Nice game for a type in.

UMAI = delicious!

"Szczepaniak" is a "simple" Polish surname, while your pronunciation was far from perfect it was a really good effort, 7/10 BTW, I reminded myself of a Black Box V8 cartridge that had a Polish version of a voice synthesizer (based on an English one, I would have to turn my C64 again to tell more about it) that was very hard to understand but did a pretty good job back at the time. And was also really funny, I like software trying but failing

Hey hey not a single Sniper Elite game! I have many hours in those and I recommended them as a stealth game.

Let’s not forget “Sneak King,” an XBOX game from Burger King where the purpose was to sneak up on people and give them Whoppers, shakes and fries.

There's a Smiths joke somewhere in there.

Definitely the first heist game... Maybe

nice little game

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="175">2:55</a> sometimes you sound very much like Christopher Walken. lol. 🙂

seems like the pet and vc 20 were popular in japan but commodore stopped being successful in japan quickly while the c64 was popular in many countries it was not very popular in japan. i think its because it doesn't support Japanese characters .they tolerated it in the early days when having any computer was a luxury and Japanese characters are harder to render anyway. and japan made their own systems that were very good unlike most countries that either didn't have the wealth or manpower or did but were not as advanced as America or japan or the uk. like in france they had a few systems but they fell behind quickly and started using the same stuff the rest of the world was using quickly. all the east block countries did it because it was the only option and gave up when it was no longer necessary but japan still had their own systems until the 90s i heard they had to stop Japanese companies from making their own systems instead of just making pc compatibles. because it was becoming a problem with the rise of the internet and having to port everything to those systems.

FWIW, the Y in "syonen" is a consonant, not a vowel, so it sounds like "s" + "yonen", which when run together is not all that different from "shonen". The two spellings are just different ways of transliterating the same sound, whose Japanese version is somewhere between English "sh" and "s+y".

could this be ported to the Vic20?

A lot of sloppy unnecessary code. Just looking at the movement routine for example. Looking at lines 4005 and 4010 it appears there is a slightly higher chance of switching to the left, since it could switch right then immediately left. The movement could have been better coded using Q=1 for movement in the right direction and Q=-1 for a moment in the left direction A change of direction could be simply coded as if RND(1) < 0.0286 THEN Q=Q-1 And subsequently A=A+Q could have been used. Small improvements like this could speed up the game.

Choplifter>Shoplifter

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="1310">21:50</a> You should be able to do the keyboard-buffer-POKE thing like a lot of VIC-20 and C64 programs do to load the next part of a program as if the user had entered LOAD and RUN manually.

thats okay Im not up on my Japanese either. 🙂

That mistranslation is hilarious it's almost as bad as that one all your bases are belong to us

the orgirinal thief dark project IS THE BEST STEALTH GAME EVER RELAESED. the 2014 version you had in your intro is HORRIBLE.

This game wouldn't translate well for Americans these days. All the items would be chained down.

NOT FIRST!!!

万引き少年- Shounen is pronounced Show Nen which means "boy" or "young boy." For some reason, some Japanese people use the 'y' in romanizing Sho - like an upside-down H. It's still pronounced 'sho' and in this case, it's a long O, held for an extra syllable. Shounen. Momotaro - Mo Mo Tah Roe Composite - com POZ zit Koi - "Come!" Matee - mah teh! "Wait!" or "Hold it!" Bakame - bah kah meh "Dumbass" Yoku yatta - "You did well"

Is that you in the ending song? I never noticed until now