How George Lucas Helped Create The First Video Game Jump Scare

By Alex Riviello/March 31, 2017 8:00 am EST

The list of truly effective video game jump scares is a short but powerful one. The dogs bursting through the windows in Resident Evil. The woman with the broken neck in Fatal Frame. Freddy Fazbear in Five Nights at Freddy’s. The aliens in Rescue on Fractalus! Wait…what’s that last one?

Yes, it turns out that an 8-bit LucasArts game originally released for the Atari 800 contains what may be the first (and still most effective!) jump scare in video game history…and George Lucas is partially responsible.

How George Lucas Helped Create The First Video Game Jump Scare

By Alex Riviello/March 31, 2017 8:00 am EST

A LucasArts Without Star Wars

“I was disappointed, yeah,” admits Fox. “I wanted it to be Star Wars. When I realized we couldn’t do that, then it was ok, since we kept the game design the same, just not in the same universe any more.”

Thus was born Rescue on Fractalus!

Behind Jaggi Lines, No One Can Hear You Scream

See, if you don’t open the airlock right away the pilot will knock on the door. The banging sound is unsetting in the void of space, but also reassuring, as only humans knock. Jaggies rear up in front of the windshield with a synthetic screech and pound at it with their fists, smashing through and killing you if you don’t get the shields up in time to fry it.

“If you’re playing a horror game then you’re probably bracing yourself at all times,” says Fox. “But a true jump scare has to be during a time where nothing’s being telegraphed, you’re not expecting it and it happens.”

But it turns out that the whole concept for the alien attack came from none other than George Lucas.

“We were showing [Lucas] the game for the first time and he had some feedback. One of the things was that we had to add some suspense by making one of those pilots you pick up not be a pilot, make it something else like an alien. So we had the aliens already in terms of the story and we decided to figure out a way that we could pull it off within the constraints of the memory and everything else.”

This led to the creation of this monstrosity by Gary Winnick, who was hired on as an artist and animator on LucasFilm Games’ first titles before moving on to design titles like Maniac Mansion.

It may not seem like much in this age of bloody, mind-bending titles (and VR experiences), but the very nature of its surprise left impressionable minds with life-long scars. I can attest to this because I am one of them. I played the game as a child on my aunt’s Commodore 64, which was conveniently located in her basement, a dark and cold place that, from that point forward, I was always afraid to visit.

“I knew it was powerful but I didn’t know how much it would traumatize people or stick with them,” says Fox. “People would remember the first time it happened. A women who we were working with said her five-year-old kid came out screaming ‘Mommy there’s a monster in my computer!’”

The Sounds of Jaggies

Charlie Kellner also managed to create multi-channel audio that made it seem as if they were playing way more sounds than they actually were, a virtual 16-track that allowed lower sounds to drop out and be superseded by louder ones before coming back. He added sounds like an engine drone and whine that made you feel more immersed in the ship…and the silence before a pilot appears that much more tense.

“We had this THX theater that was already part of Lucas. We already knew how important sound design was so we had great sound designers. Peter Langston, who was our general manager, was also a great musician and he had a Yamaha synthesizer keyboard in his office and he was able to come up with some cool sound effects. I told him what I was looking for the chord that plays when the Jaggi pops up. Without that the Jaggi pop-up is nowhere as effective, kind of a horror show stinger.”

Another Connection to the Stars

The key behind his effects were fractals, geometric figures that allowed them to recreate a mountainous alien landscape:

“I had actually met him a year and a half earlier when I was working on a book on computer animation and knew him as a fractal person from then. He’d done this video called Vol Libre while he was still working for Boeing and that’s what got him the job at Lucas. So I asked him when I started working there – ‘Do you think it’s possible to do fractals on an 8-bit computer like the Atari?’ And he kinda laughed at me and went “No, no, course not.” And then he was thinking for a second and he said “‘Well… maybe.’”

Newsflash: Lucas Loves Lasers

The enemy saucers and gun emplacements that try to shoot you down were always in the game, but your ship wasn’t equipped with lasers to fight back. There was still skill involved, as flying erratically could help you avoid getting locked on by the gun emplacements. This works in the final game, but in the original design, the only way to get away from saucers was to make them crash:

During a meeting with George Lucas, however, that all changed:

“The idea was going to be if you fly towards a mountain and make a hard turn, they wouldn’t be as quick as you are and would end up flying into it and crashing, all of this using a rear-view mirror. It was always supposed to be a defensive game.”

Thus, lasers.

“The first thing Lucas tried was pushing the red joystick button and he said ‘Where’s the fire button? Why doesn’t this do anything?’ I told him why and he asked if that was for gameplay purposes, or was it a philosophical purpose? I started hemming and hawing and he understood that it was more philosophical than game design. So he said ‘Put in a fire button.’”

ILM

‘The [saucer] model was maybe fourteen inches across and the guy who did it had spent the last six or seven years working on the three Star Wars movies, and he was just excited to be doing something that was saucer-shaped. So he put all his energy into it and made it tremendously detailed, way more than the photo shoot called for.”

“I sat inside the cockpit and they had me in a flight suit. The helmet was a motorcycle helmet that was sprayed kind of a cream color and for the earpieces they put model tank turrets so it looks like a antenna coming off the top. I actually have that still.”

The Never-ending Story

“We didn’t have space!” says Fox. “We didn’t know what the win would be and we didn’t have the space on a 16k cartridge so we figured okay, we’ll just make it harder and harder till it’s impossible.” Theoretically there’s 99 levels because that’s how much code was written, but he doesn’t know of anyone who’s made it that far, and he could only get to 30 or 40 himself.

But at the time, no one seemed to notice it was unbeatable. Perhaps players just assumed that they could make it to the end if they just got a little better at the game.

The Future

They never got to the point of contracts, so Fractalus! still lies marooned behind enemy lines. Perhaps, one day, we will return to the stars to fight the Jaggi menace once more but for now, Rescue on Fractalus! lives on only in scars from childhood memories.

“I actually tried to do a deal with LucasArts maybe eight years ago where we wanted to do a mobile version of the game. We got pretty far and had great discussions with the team at LucasArts. At the time they were all doing remakes of some of the Monkey Island games, so the idea of bringing out some of the golden oldies and revamping them was already something they were doing. Then the president of LucasArts, who was a huge fan of the old games, got laid off, and they had a big shakeup. And then it was ‘We don’t want to do old games, just the Star Wars games. Just new stuff’ And the deal got killed.”

A LucasArts Without Star Wars #

Behind Jaggi Lines, No One Can Hear You Scream#

The Sounds of Jaggies#

Another Connection to the Stars#

Newsflash: Lucas Loves Lasers#

ILM#

The Never-ending Story#

The Future#