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Welcome to Project 64!

The goal of Project 64 is to preserve Commodore 64 related documents
in electronic text format that might otherwise cease to exist with the
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The Project 64 etext of the Zone Ranger help file. Original Windows(R)
help file obtained from the Activision C64 15 Pack was supplied by
Fandango. Converted by the Basic Bombardier. Some of the information
in this etext is assumed to be close enough to the original hardcopy
version until an orginal can be converted, which is likely to be
called ZRANG10B.TXT.

ZRANG10A.TXT, March 1996, etext #26

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Zone Ranger

Contents

 General Description   [ 1.0 ]
 How To Play           [ 2.0 ]
 Scoring               [ 3.0 ]
 Hints                 [ 4.0 ]
 Game History          [ 5.0 ]



[ 1.0 ] General Description

A Bad, Bad, Bad Night Indeed.

Screwy Satellites. Irksome Killer Rocks. Irritating Repairbots.

It's a sad and sorry sight. So, clean up the unfriendly skies by
blasting all satellites in the allotted time. Or, you're history.

Oooooh, it's ugly. The nasties are out in force. And you're headed
straight for a crash course in bad luck. Dead ahead. You've detoured
smack into a main drag of sudden violent little boobytraps. Oops.

So, get even. Grit your teeth. Squint. Look mean. Meaner. Your only
credo: Smash everything in sight. And stop giggling.

It's a terrible battle. What you strike only multiplies. But lucky for
you, even this awful Achilles has a heel. Find the mysterious super-
portal and scream into its dreaded inner sanctum. Pull the plug on
this devastatingly evil minefield of destruction. For now, that is.

It's up to you. Just remember: Fate calls but once. After that, it's
just one very long busy signal.



[ 2.0 ] How to Play

Basics

How to Start

Press F3 to select 1 or 2 Players. Press F1 to Start. Zone Ranger has
a built-in pause feature. If you press the space bar, it will pause
the game. To resume play, press the space bar again.


Cruise Ships

Begin with four and earn one more for every 1000 points earned. Each
ship has unlimited fire power.


The Nasties!!

They're everywhere. Colliding with ANY of them will destroy your ship,
but a few of them demand special mention.

Satellites - Destroy all sixteen satellites in any level to advance to
the next level. Green and red communication beams link the satellites
together. Don't let the red beams strike your ship!!

Killer Rocks - Silent, get-in-the-way stuff that just lumber about.
Relatively harmless....until you run into one.

Repairbots - When the red alert sounds, enter any warp hole. Then,
shoot the repairbot that's fixing to fix up a destroyed satellite.

Boomerangs - The worst. You'll find out. Strictly higher level
material.


Any Help Out There?

Warp Holes - A momentary means of escape. Enter and exit as you please.

Sonic Sparklers - Touch them and you'll be invincible for as long as
their music plays.

Super Portal - Your only entry into the Inner Sanctum.

The Inner Sanctum - Drop in for free help. Go for the dots.

Skyway Patrol - When you return from The Inner Sanctum, come in
contact with the Skyway Patrol. He'll knock off one satellite for
every dot you got.

Seventh Dimension - Enter at your own risk. Sure, you'll get more
points, but you won't last as long. (Found in level one only.)



Joystick

Pilot your cruise ship by moving the joystick in the desired direction.
To fire, press the joystick button.



[ 3.0 ] Scoring

 Destroy a satellite: 25 points
 Large Killer Rock:    5 points
 Small Killer Rock:    2 points
 Repairbot:           15 points
 Warp to 7th level:   brings your score to 7,500 points
                      (no extra cruise ships awarded.)
 Boomerang:           15 points



[ 4.0 ] Hints

Avoid touching the red walls in the Inner Sanctum.

From Dan Thompson, Programmer and Designer

"Just thought that I'd clue you in to what I've discovered out there.
Entering a Warp Hole may be an easy way to escape immediate danger.
But a word for the spacewise: it COULD be worse where you exit. Also,
in case you can't find the satellites, follow the path of the beams.
Finally, touch the safety Sonic Sparklers whenever you can -
especially if you plan to tackle one of the vicious boomerangs."



[ 5.0 ] Game History

From the Zone Ranger manual:

"Killer rocks, deadly drones, vicious boomerangs - I know, I know.
It's really wicked way out there all on your lonesome. You can't cheat.
You can't take shortcuts. And you won't want to give up. But one day,
you'll thank me for all of this. And, then again, maybe you won't."

Dan Thompson, Programmer and Designer

"A lot of the basis for Zone Ranger was the free-scrolling shooters
that were out at the time. Asteroids and Sinistar were some of my
favorite games, and still are. I liked the ability to fly in any
direction, as well as the fun involved with massive destruction. I
would have to say Zone Ranger was more like Asteroids than Sinistar,
but I wanted it to be much more than just shooting rocks."

"As I was writing it, the first thing to materialize was a ship and
some rocks floating around. I thought to myself 'Ok, this is a good
start. Now, how do I make a game out of it?' As it is sometimes, you
just get insight in a flash, completely out of the blue. My
inspiration hit me one day, in the shower no less, and *BING*, the
satellite grid materialized. I remember thinking instantly 'Yeah -
that's it. That's the objective for each level.' From there, the ideas
kept coming. Next was the concept of the beams, then the color of the
beams - start out green and benign, and later turn into the red killer
beams, and so on."

"Once the basic gameplay was in, I needed some aliens. I put the
drones in first - the little blue circles. They were good, because
they chased you around, but you could outrun them and dodge. They
basically just kept you moving, but you could avoid them. We knew that
every game had to have a really nasty enemy - somebody to really get
your blood boiling. Someone who, when you saw it on the screen, would
make you think instantly 'It's him or me'. Even Defender had the
Baiter. You knew if you didn't move enough, the big bad guy would come
and get you. In Zone Ranger, the big bad nasties were the Boomerangs.
Those things were vicious."

"The Inner Sanctum came during the latter part of development. The
drones and Boomerangs were done, and I had added the repairbots that
travel on the communications beams. I was a big fan of variety, and a
single-screen game was boring, I thought. I also like to put a little
mystery in the games I design - rather than having the player know
everything up front, you have to discover the secrets for yourself,
which of course is a big thing now, like hidden moves, and so on. For
example, I had done a game called Repton for Sirius Software. In
Repton, once the enemies finish their base, you fly to a different
screen, and confront them in their stronghold. Maybe the Inner Sanctum
came from that. The principle was that you go inside and get a prize,
and when you return to the game itself, the prize would help you. Thus,
the Skyway Patrol was born. And the maze got more difficult as you
went through, so you could get the first 3 diamonds fairly easily, the
next 4 were more difficult, and so on. The Skyway Patrol had a flight
mechanic so that if you wanted to avoid him, you could. The original
placement of the Inner Sanctum was random, so the idea was that if you
stumbled across it, you went for it to make your job easier."

"Part of the problem was getting the game to fit into an 8 K cartridge
for the home computers. For machines like the Atari 2600, 8 K is a
world of space, but for a bitmap machine like C64 or the Atari 800,
which Zone Ranger was originally written on, it wasn't much room at
all. Bitmaps, even with only 4 colors, take a lot of space. Obviously
the game could have been much more if they expanded the specifications
and removed the 8 K limit from the beginning, rather than later on."

"The only reason the game was able to grow, the only thing that
allowed the sanctum to appear was that the management-types eventually
bumped up the limit to 16 K. Since I was initially designing for 8 K,
there were certain limitations to deal with. Once they doubled the
allowance, I didn't want to just start over, because I had a great
game started, and to mess with the design would have lost that. So I
just expanded from where I was at the time the best I could. Even with
16 K, though, the Inner Sanctum looks simple because of that memory
limitation. There was no more room for flashy graphics on a second
level."

"The original title of the game was 'Warp Wars' because the warp grid
was the basis for the game. For whatever reason, marketing didn't like
that, so they tried to come up with another title. Their first try was
'Obliterator', which I thought was too big a word for the kids, so I
asked them what else they had. That was when they came up with 'Zone
Ranger'. Personally, I still like 'Warp Wars'."

"I had been a big fan of the Apple II during High School - still am,
actually. Programming was a hobby of mine, and I had written a game on
my Apple II at home that was basically an imitation of an arcade game
that was one of my favorites at the time. I just kept it at home as a
little pet project, until one day when a friend of mine and I went to
a computer show in Phoenix. I really didn't think I was a talented
enough programmer, but my friend finally talked me into showing it to
someone. I just sort of walked up and said halfheartedly 'I've got
this game I wrote...Do you want to see it?', and they loved it! They
told me to come back the next day, and when I did, they had a contract
all drawn up, they advanced me money on the game, and so on. The
company was Sirius, and the game turned into Borg. While I was working
at Sirius I also did several other originals, such as Repton and
Twerps, and some ports of other games. So that was how I ended up in
the game industry."

After leaving Activision, Dan did independent contracting work in the
gaming industry. He then worked for Hasbro on the Isix project,
working on a multi-track videotape-based game with fellow Activision
alumnus Mark Turmell. He then moved on to Accolade. After many busy
years there, Dan has recently moved to Williams Electronics in Chicago,
where he is once again working with Mark Turmell. Console fans will
remember Dan's Sega Genesis hit Hardball. Currently, Dan is working on
the next version of a Williams hit.

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End of the Project 64 etext of the Zone Ranger help file.

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