Tempest review: a shooter wrapped around the inside of a tube

You look down into a glowing shape, a tube or a funnel or sometimes a flat open strip, divided into lanes. Things crawl up those lanes toward you. You sit on the rim, and you move around it by spinning a knob. Then you fire straight down the lane you are in. It sounds abstract, and the first time you play, your hand understands it before you do.

A shooting gallery bent into a circle

Dave Theurer later described the idea simply: he took Space Invaders and wrapped the surface into a circle. The design came, he said, from a nightmare about monsters crawling out of a hole in the ground. You can feel that in the game. The enemies are always coming up out of the dark, and you are always at the edge, waiting for them.

The rotary knob is what makes it sing. Theurer used a dial much like the one on Pong instead of a row of buttons, so moving around the tube is one smooth turn of the wrist. Your blaster snaps from lane to lane as the knob turns, fast enough to cross the whole shape in a flick, precise enough to stop exactly where you mean to.

Tempest does not ask you to move a ship. It asks you to turn the world under your hand.

Every enemy does something different

Flippers climb to the rim and try to drag you down to the far end. Pulsars electrify their whole lane. Spikers leave lines of spikes behind them. Tankers break open into more enemies when you hit them. Each one asks for a different response, and the tube shapes change from level to level, so the same enemy plays differently on a closed ring than on an open strip.

When a level is in real trouble you have the Superzapper, which wipes the field once per level. Then, when the lanes are clear, you travel down the tube into the next shape, and any spike left in your path will destroy you on the way. That final dive punishes lazy play from earlier in the level, which is a lovely touch.

What it meant back then

In a dim American arcade, Tempest glowed. It used Atari's color vector display, and the sharp, bright lines of the tube stood out from across the room at the mall or the back of a pizza place. People who had never heard of it walked over just to see what it was.

It also let you choose your starting level, the first game to do that. So there was always someone at the machine who skipped ahead to prove a point, and a kid behind him who wanted to know how he did it.

Playing it now

Tempest still feels futuristic in a way few early games do. The shapes, the spinner and the speed make it feel closer to a musical instrument than a joystick game. It is best with a real knob, because the whole design is built around that turn of the wrist. Start at the beginning, learn what each enemy wants, and save your Superzapper for the moment you really need it.