Raid on Bungeling Bay

The Good
I remember when Will first started writing this game. I was skeptical about the potential, but about 6 months later I was vacationing on Fripp Island and Will brought his C64 with him with an alpha of RoBB. Another friend brought his Sony Walkman, and I listened to the Police Synchronicity II on headphones at full blast and played RoBB until about 6am for two days straight. My hat is off to Will for proving his chops at cramming a lot of graphics and AI into 64k on a 1MhZ 6502 processor.

I spent a lot of time beta-testing RoBB. I remember one bug that was horrific to find at the time, but Will finally tracked it down: "It turns out all those crashes were because the self-modifying sprite animation assembly code was very efficiently animating random addresses in the C64 memory space."

A year or two after the C64 release of RoBB, a dedicated hardware standup video arcade version was produced in Japan. Will received one of them, which I had the joy of playing at Will's home in Oakland. Alas, it was destroyed in the great Oakland firestorm of 1991. I don't know if any dedicated RoBB arcade machines survive but they would be worth a lot today to collectors.

The Bad
Eventually you got pretty good at crushing the AI, so replay value diminished quickly. But even then, it was just mindless fun to fly around and shoot.

The Bottom Line
Blue Thunder tries to take out the evil SimCity before they take out the good SimCity you are trying to defend.