Dartmouth Championship Football [FTBALL]: Prehistory VII Addendum Post w/ Scores

I don't know how I got on this train of thought, but here we are anyway.

I was revising the master list, and revisiting some online game collection websites I used to peruse, and somehow Digital Championship Football from my seventh Prehistory article got stuck in my mind.

There were a few things I realised from this that I want to address in this quick post. The first is a pretty minor one, but from now I'm going to refer to Digital Championship Football as Dartmouth Championship Football. The latter of these is what the original game actually calls itself, the former title is from the Sol-20 microcomputer port. In the interest of being historically accurate and precise - even in minutia such as these - I needed to make this change.

I also made a slight error in the original article. I said that the version of Dartmouth Championship Football in the 1978 version of 101 BASIC Computer Games was credited to Raymond Miseyka. This isn't actually true. This game is clearly credited to John Kemeny in the book, while a second football game was included, which was the one developed by Miseyka. I was misled by the title on the web version of the book hosted at Atari Archives. This second game by Miseyka was also in the original 1973 version of the book, alongside a different football game made in-house by DEC. Interestingly, Kemeny's game wasn't there. An easy solution for this omission would be that Kemeny's game simply wasn't known about; it hadn't been discovered at that time.

The evidence in question.

However, the most important lesson that I gleaned from these reflections was that I was being inconsistent. Comparisons with PDP 10 Timesharing Basketball started flooding my mind while I was prepping a new profile on a certain site, and I realised that these two games are actually very similar. Both have very similar gameplay in how you choose plays, and the outcomes of both are likely random, or at least semi-random, as far as I can tell. (I don't know anything about Grid-Iron or Basketball strategy to know what plays are better when, and if choosing good real-life strategies correlates to better outcomes in the game. Any of my more sporty readers - feel free to enlighten me in the comments.) You even choose the name of your opponent in the same way. It honestly wouldn't surprise me if John Kemeny re-used much of the Dartmouth Championship Football code for PDP Basketball.

Yet, in spite of these similarities, I saw it appropriate to change my mind on PDP Basketball and score it, but didn't do the same for Dartmouth Championship Football. Why did I do this? I have no idea, to be completely honest. Chalk it up to inexperience and a bit of laziness. 

I have to admit, I was quite lazy with those early articles in terms of research and whatnot, so maybe I just couldn't be bothered; threw it into the "too hard" bucket. I had little idea what I was doing - how I wanted to review games, or what I wanted the blog to be back then.

With over a year of experience under my belt now, I see things quite differently. Having a better understanding now of how I want to score games, I see that Dartmouth Championship Football probably is game enough to warrant giving it a score (it's final score will justify my stance.) It's more game than some other later titles I've done, I can certainly say that (looking at you, War...) 

Therefore, I've decided to give Dartmouth Championship Football a score. This does necessitate me playing it again, which isn't too much of a problem as matches are very quick to complete. I played out two matches for this - the first ending in a nil-all draw, and the second I won 15-0, including a Touchdown and a Safety. I know enough about Grid-Iron that I've heard of a Safety before, but I still don't understand the concept entirely. We actually get some NFL games broadcast on free-to-air TV in Oz, so I've seen a few games. My former pastor is from the US, so we watched a couple of the more recent Superbowls together also. I think I maybe saw a Safety occur once in all of those matches. Fun facts.

Time Played: Maybe around 20 minutes, all up. Playthroughs are so spread out for this game that I have no idea anymore.

Difficulty: 0 (N/A) 

Doing this because the game determines the run of play mostly at random, as far as I'm aware.

Gameplay: 3/20

For being only the second ever game written in BASIC, it has a surprising and appreciable amount of detail. It adheres to the basic rules of Grid-Iron/American Football, but also includes some additional rules I didn't expect or see in my first go around. The Safety is in the game (as I just mentioned), as well as penalties (which you can choose to accept or refuse), and the opening coin toss. Players can fumble the ball in various ways, and the game can even be delayed by a dog on field. Bizarre, but also hilarious that this was included.

The chief, overwhelming issue, of course, is what I've been harping on about during the article - the (potential) illusion of choice, as I've begun to call it. It's my new number one pet peeve in video games. I hate being presented with a situation in a game where there's a perceived significant choice (or choices) to be made in a game, but the actual outcome of said choice(s) doesn't actually matter, as the outcome is already predetermined (or completely randomised), regardless of your choice. That's likely what we have here, as the outcomes of your selected play are either completely or partially random. I have no way of knowing, as I don't know BASIC, so I can't look into the code, and I'm not playing this game for hours to test the theory, either. There's enough detail in the game to disguise it a bit better than, say, PDP Basketball, but not by much.

Controls: 5/10

Controls are regulation for an early text game. The plays are all integers - no irrational decimals in sight - so that makes things pretty easy to manage. However, the game also has you type in full words for the coin toss and penalty accepting/refusing, which is a little different.

Visual: 5/10

Very plain, but that's to be expected for one of the first text-based video games. One interesting little detail is that your opponent's plays are all indented one space. I don't know exactly why this would be, but perhaps to help distinguish between your and their plays when scrolling back through the game timeline.

Functionality: 5/5

Nothing to see here.

Accessibility: 3/5

It's standard for text-based games, provided you understand Grid-Iron on a fundamental level. I do, but just barely.

Fun Factor: 4/20

I think all the random extra details in the game sway me to give this an extra point or two, despite the ever-present illusion of choice. It does make replaying the game of some value, just to see if there are any other extra hidden details or events that may occur. It's actually kind of impressive, considering Dartmouth Championship Football was developed at the infancy of BASIC. Most games after this for several years don't include anywhere near as much detail as this one.

Dartmouth Championship Football justified a score, as it ends up with a 25 [35.71%], which actually places it at the top of the E-tier, believe it or not. The 1965 game outperforms several games developed years after - some significantly so.

That does this odd little bonus article. Currently, looking down my list, it's unlikely that any other untiered Prehistory games will get this same treatment. I still disqualify the playable ones for various reasons. I'll only revisit this era when new discoveries are made from now on, I think.