********** Nessie **********

 

Three screenshots from the 1984 Atari version of Nessie. The object of the game is to snap a clear photograph of the legendary Loch Ness Monster, fondly known to fans as "Nessie." Of course, these game graphics are primitive by today's standards.

In the summer of 2024, a YouTube creator informed me that I'm credited as the author of the world's first photography videogame. That's a game in which the player operates a virtual camera to take pictures of things inside the game. A Wikipedia entry says the same. I was flabbergasted! I had no idea.

My game is Nessie. In 1984, I conceived the concept, designed the sound and graphics, and wrote the program code for Atari eight-bit home computers. (Those models included the Atari 400, 800, 800XL, 1200XL, and others.) At the time, I was an editor at Compute! Publications, an ABC company that published magazines and books for a variety of home computers. In those days, we printed source code in our magazines and books so readers could type it in and run the programs.

The start screen of Nessie

When the game starts, the player can select a wide-angle or telephoto lens for the "camera." Wide-angle is the default. Its larger viewfinder frame is easier to aim at the elusive Nessie. The telephoto frame is much smaller and more difficult to aim, but clear photos are worth more points. As this screen shows, a clear picture of Nessie with the wide-angle lens is worth 2,000 points and a clear picture with the telephoto lens is worth 20,000 points.

Clear pictures aren't the only possible result. As the start screen also shows, a partial picture of Nessie (a crop) is worth only 100 or 1,000 points, depending on the lens. If you're fooled and photograph an ordinary fish or water snake, you gain only 50 or 500 points. (The picture isn't worthless because maybe you can sell it to a magazine like National Geographic.) But if your picture is too blurry to recognize anything, you get zero points. Blurred photos happen when you press the joystick button to snap the camera's shutter while moving the viewfinder.

The main game screen

The next screen shows the game in action. Your joystick moves the viewfinder (shown near center) around the screen. Fish and other creatures randomly appear on the lake's surface, swim for a short distance, and disappear underwater again. The water snakes resemble Nessie but don't have a neck and head. The top of the screen shows how many shots remain on your roll of film. (Remember, this 1984 game precedes digital cameras.) You get only 20 shots on the roll.

The darkroom screen

After finishing your roll, the screen goes black to simulate a photographic darkroom. Gradually, as they develop, your 20 pictures appear. In this screenshot, the player got only one clear picture of Nessie (the first one). Five frames show a partial view of the monster. The other 14 frames are blank because the player wasn't fast enough to capture the image of a rapidly swimming creature. Game over!

Here's the story of Nessie. The game was partly inspired by one of my hobbies (photography), by my boyhood fascination with the Loch Ness Monster, and by a friend who wanted a nonviolent videogame for his young son. It occurred to me that a game could challenge the player to photograph a monster instead of shooting a monster. The animation would be much the same. By drawing a frame around crosshairs, the game would simulate a camera viewfinder instead of a rifle's telescopic sight.

That's how Nessie came to be. I wrote it in my spare time and essentially donated it to the company. It's written mostly in the Atari BASIC programming language, but for faster execution, I wrote the critical animation routine in 6502 machine language. My Compute! colleague and friend, Charles Brannon, liked the game and suggested a Commodore 64 version. In those days we often ported programs from one computer platform to another. (We called them "homogs," short for "homogenizations.")

Charles was the company's best programmer. His skills far exceeded mine. Whereas I had used redefined character graphics for the creatures, and had used sprites (Atari player/missile graphics) for the viewfinder, Charles used sprites for the creatures, too, and they are animated.

The Commodore 64 version of Nessie

Oddly, neither program appeared in our magazines. Instead, we published them in a pair of books. Due to our book schedule, the Commodore version of Nessie was published first, in Compute!'s Second Book of Commore 64 Games (1984). My original Atari version was published later in Compute!'s Atari Collection Volume 1 (1985).

A code snippet from the Atari version of Nessie

Today, emulators can run Nessie on modern computers. I'm surprised, because my 6502 machine-language routine for animating the player/missile graphics executes during the vertical blank period of the video display. A machine-level vertical blank interrupt (VBI) triggers my routine, which must execute and exit in a very limited number of CPU clock cycles to keep the display from going haywire. Modern emulators must be simulating the vertical blank, because today's LCD (liquid-crystal display) screens work differently than the old CRTs (cathode-ray tubes).