Rescue On Fractalus! is a March 1984 computer game created by Lucasfilm Games (later LucasArts

LucasArts

LucasArts Entertainment Company, LLC is an American video game developer and publisher. The company was once famous for its innovative line of graphic adventure games, the critical and commercial success of which peaked in the mid 1990s...

 Entertainment). It was originally released for the Atari 8-bit family

Atari 8-bit family

The Atari 8-bit family is a series of 8-bit home computers manufactured from 1979 to 1992. All are based on the MOS Technology 6502 CPU and were the first home computers designed with custom coprocessor chips...

 and the Atari 5200

Atari 5200

The Atari 5200 SuperSystem, commonly known as the Atari 5200, is a video game console that was introduced in 1982 by Atari Inc. as a higher end complementary console for the popular Atari 2600...

 games console. It was also ported

Porting

In computer science, porting is the process of adapting software so that an executable program can be created for a computing environment that is different from the one for which it was originally designed...

 to other popular platforms of the day, such as the Apple II, ZX Spectrum

ZX Spectrum

The ZX Spectrum is an 8-bit personal home computer released in the United Kingdom in 1982 by Sinclair Research Ltd...

 (by Dalali Software Ltd), Amstrad CPC

Amstrad CPC

The Amstrad CPC is a series of 8-bit home computers produced by Amstrad between 1984 and 1990. It was designed to compete in the mid-1980s home computer market dominated by the Commodore 64 and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, where it successfully established itself primarily in the United Kingdom,...

, Tandy Color Computer 3

TRS-80 Color Computer

The Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer was a home computer launched in 1980. It was one of the earliest of the first generation of computers marketed for home use in English-speaking markets...

 and Commodore 64

Commodore 64

The Commodore 64 is an 8-bit home computer introduced by Commodore International in January 1982.Volume production started in the spring of 1982, with machines being released on to the market in August at a price of US$595...

. The game was one of the first two products from the fledgling Lucasfilm

Lucasfilm

Lucasfilm Limited is an American film production company founded by George Lucas in 1971, based in San Francisco, California. Lucas is the company's current chairman and CEO, and Micheline Chau is the president and COO....

 Computer Division Games Group led by Peter Langston

Peter Langston

Peter Langston is a computer programmer who wrote and distributed for free several games for Unix systems in the 1970s, including the original version of Empire and the program "Oracle" upon which the later net-wide Oracle was modeled. He is also an experienced jazz, rock, and folk musician.In...

.

Flying

The game utilizes fractal

Fractal

A fractal has been defined as "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is a reduced-size copy of the whole," a property called self-similarity...

 technology to create the craggy mountains of an alien planet, where the visilibility was drastically reduced by the dense atmosphere

Atmosphere

An atmosphere is a layer of gases that may surround a material body of sufficient mass, and that is held in place by the gravity of the body. An atmosphere may be retained for a longer duration, if the gravity is high and the atmosphere's temperature is low...

. The player controls a fictional "Valkyrie" space fighter (converted for search and rescue

Search and rescue

Search and rescue is the search for and provision of aid to people who are in distress or imminent danger.The general field of search and rescue includes many specialty sub-fields, mostly based upon terrain considerations...

 duty) from a first-person view

First person (video games)

In video games, first person refers to a graphical perspective rendered from the viewpoint of the player character. In many cases, this may be the viewpoint from the cockpit of a vehicle. Many different genres have made use of first-person perspectives, ranging from adventure games to flight...

, attempting to land and pick up downed Ethercorps pilots. Some of these mountains hold anti-aircraft guns

Anti-aircraft warfare

NATO defines air defence as "all measures designed to nullify or reduce the effectiveness of hostile air action." They include ground and air based weapon systems, associated sensor systems, command and control arrangements and passive measures. It may be to protect naval, ground and air forces...

, which have to be avoided or destroyed. Due to the varied terrain, the direction finder

Radio direction finder

A radio direction finder is a device for finding the direction to a radio source. Due to low frequency propagation characteristic to travel very long distances and "over the horizon", it makes a particularly good navigation system for ships, small boats, and aircraft that might be some distance...

 has to be used to locate the pilots, whose visual beacons are often masked by mountain ridges.

At higher levels, the enemy Jaggis begin flying kamikaze

Kamikaze

The were suicide attacks by military aviators from the Empire of Japan against Allied naval vessels in the closing stages of the Pacific campaign of World War II, designed to destroy as many warships as possible....

 saucers. The mission area also moves into day/night boundaries. Night missions are particularly difficult, requiring diligent use of the altimeter

Radar altimeter

A radar altimeter, radio altimeter, low range radio altimeter or simply RA measures altitude above the terrain presently beneath an aircraft or spacecraft...

 to avoid crashing.

Flying consumes fuel. The way to replenish this supply is to rescue downed pilots who bring their remaining fuel supplies on board.

The thick atmosphere is sufficiently acidic that downed pilots' craft were being slowly disintegrated. An exposed pilot's survival time outside his craft is less than a minute, due to his flight suit and helmet literally dissolving. This makes it imperative that the player rescue pilots as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Rescue

After landing within sufficient "walking" proximity to the pilot, the player shuts down the engine, also turning off the ship's shields. Turning on the engines prematurely would incinerate the exposed pilot. The downed pilot then disembarks his crashed ship, runs down to the Valkyrie's cockpit, and knocks on the crew entry door; the player can then open up and let the pilot in to complete the rescue. Failing to open the door kills the pilot; his knocking on the hatch becomes at first frantic, then slower and more feeble as he perishes in the corrosive environment.

As an amusing twist on this relatively straightforward premise, added at the suggestion of George Lucas

George Lucas

George Walton Lucas, Jr. is an American film producer, screenwriter, and director, and entrepreneur. He is the founder, chairman and chief executive of Lucasfilm. He is best known as the creator of the space opera franchise Star Wars and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones...

, some of the "pilots in distress" are actually hostile aliens in disguise. After landing near a downed pilot, the player watches him run off-screen, and then has to wait for several tense seconds—if it were human, the familiar, frantic "tap-tap" noise would be heard from the ship's hatch; otherwise, the alien Jaggi would suddenly jump back into view, sans helmet, roaring and trying to smash into the cockpit. Unless the player restores the ship's shields, the windscreen cracks open and the pilot is killed. Likewise, inadvertently letting a Jaggi pilot into the player's ship has disastrous results - it begins to dismantle the ship. In early levels, the Jaggi can be distinguished by their green heads versus the white human helmets. However in later levels the aliens evidently learn to don the human helmet and become identical in appearance. This, along with an unpredictable pause between the human/alien approach and the tap-tap/alien jump makes for a very tense experience. According to head developer David Fox, this shock moment made Rescue on Fractalus! "the first [computer] game to really scare people".

Trivia

Prior to release, Rescue on Fractalus! was named Behind Jaggi Lines! during development. This name refers both to the Jaggis, the fictional race of hostile aliens in the game, as well as the lack of anti-aliasing

Anti-aliasing

In digital signal processing, spatial anti-aliasing is the technique of minimizing the distortion artifacts known as aliasing when representing a high-resolution image at a lower resolution...

 in the game's graphics, resulting in jagged lines.

The Atari 8-bit versions of the game featured an intro screen depicting the pilot's mother ship.

A poster of the game appears in Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders

Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders

Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders is a graphical adventure game, originally released in October 1988 , published by LucasArts . It was the second game to use the SCUMM engine, after Maniac Mansion...

.

Unreleased versions

In 2004, an unreleased prototype of Rescue on Fractalus! for the Atari 7800

Atari 7800

The Atari 7800 ProSystem, or simply the Atari 7800, is a video game console re-released by Atari Corporation in January 1986. The original release had occurred two years earlier under Atari Inc. The 7800 had originally been designed to replace Atari Inc.'s Atari 5200 in 1984, but was temporarily...

 was found in the possession of its original programmers. While most of the core elements of the game were intact, the project was cancelled before the gameplay could be completed. The 7800 version would have taken advantage of the system's better graphical performance to produce a much smoother simulation of the planet Fractalus.

External links

• Early Lucasfilm Games Group remembrance by founder Peter Langston
• An Atari 8-bit reminiscing site
• Video from the 1984 Lucasfilm press conference introducing Rescue on Fractalus! and Ballblazer
• Thrills, Chills & Pant-Spills — Rescue on Fractalus elected as one of the scariest games ever by the Way of the Rodent gaming magazine