Scramble (arcade game)

is a 1981 horizontally scrolling shoot 'em up, arcade game. It was developed by Konami, and manufactured and distributed by Stern in North America. It is considered as the world's first ever 'multi-level' shoot 'em up^*.

Gameplay

The player controls a spaceship and has to guide it across a scrolling terrain, battling obstacles along the way. The ship is armed with a forward-firing weapon, and bombs; each weapon has its own button. The player must avoid colliding with the terrain and other enemies, while simultaneously maintain its limited fuel supply, which diminishes over time. More fuel can be acquired by destroying fuel tanks in the game.

The game is divided into six sections, each with a different style of terrain and different obstacles. There is no intermission between each section; the game simply scrolls into the new terrain. Points are awarded based upon the number of seconds of being alive, and on destroying enemies and fuel tanks. In the final section, the player must destroy a "base". Once this has been accomplished, a flag denoting a completed mission is posted at the bottom right of the screen, and the game continues by returning you to the first section again, with a slight bit more difficulty.

Legacy

Scramble was cloned to many of the computer systems and game consoles of the time. Its direct sequel was the notoriously difficult helicopter game, Super Cobra. Scramble will be released on the Xbox Live Arcade for the Xbox 360 in 2006.

With the release of Gradius Generation for the Game Boy Advance in 2001, Scramble was retroactively added to the Gradius series and is officially referred to as the first game in the series. This is evident in a traditional Gradius introduction sequence where a pictorial history of previous games is displayed.

Legal history

Scramble was the subject of an important court case in the field of Intellectual Property, specifically copyrights. In Stern Electronics, Inc. v. Kaufman, 669 F.2d 852, the Second Circuit held that Stern could copyright the images and sounds in the game, not just the source code that produced them.

Trivia

A Scramble unit appears in the 1983 movie Joysticks.
In 1982, R. Cade and the Video Victims recorded a song titled "Scramble", and released it on the album "Get Victimized!", a lesser-known video game song album.

Notes and references