Joust is a 1982 action game developed and published by Williams Electronics for arcades. Players assume the role of knights armed with lances and mounted on large birds (an ostrich for Player 1 and a stork for Player 2). They progress through levels, which consist of a single screen filled with floating platforms, by defeating enemy knights riding buzzards and other opponents.

Using the computer hardware from the company's earlier arcade game, Defender, John Newcomer led the development team: Bill Pfutzenreuter, Janice Woldenberg-Miller ( Hendricks), Python Anghelo, Tim Murphy, and John Kotlarik. Newcomer aimed to create a flying game, with cooperative two-player gameplay, while avoiding the overdone space theme. After deciding to use birds as characters, he forwent the standard eight-direction joystick control scheme and devised collisions as the means of combat.

The game was well-received by players and critics, and the mechanics influenced other games. Praise focused on the unique premise and enjoyable gameplay. While not the first two-player cooperative video game, Jousts success and polished implementation helped popularize the concept. It was followed by a less popular arcade sequel in 1986: Joust 2: Survival of the Fittest. While Joust was ported to numerous home systems and included in several multiplatform retro game anthologies, efforts to adapt it to other media and create updated video game remakes have been fruitless.

Gameplay

Joust is a platforming game where the player controls a yellow knight riding a flying ostrich (player 1) or a stork (player 2) from a third-person perspective. The player navigates around the game world, which consists of rock platforms floating above a flat island surrounded by lava, via two-way joystick and a button. Home console versions, however, use game controllers with directional pads and analog sticks. The joystick controls the horizontal direction that the knight travels, while pressing the button flaps the ostrich’s wings. The rate at which the player repeatedly presses the button directly determines the bird's ascension, allowing the character to fly upward, hover, or slowly descend. When traveling off the screen to either side, the character will continue its path reappearing from the opposite side.

The objective is to defeat groups of enemy knights riding buzzards that populate each level, referred to as a "wave". Upon completing a wave, a subsequent, more challenging one will begin. Players pilot the knight to collide with enemies. The higher of two jousting lances is the winner, whereas a collision of equal height repels the characters apart. A defeated enemy will turn into an egg that falls toward the bottom of the screen, which a player can collect for points. If the player does not collect the egg, it will hatch into a new knight that gains a new mount and must be defeated again. The game features three type of enemy knights—Bounder, Hunter, and Shadow Lord—that are separate colors and are worth different amounts of points. A pterodactyl will appear after a predetermined time frame to hunt the hero. Players can defeat the pterodactyl for bonus points. An indestructible Lava Troll will grab any character flying too low over the lava and drags them into the lava. Losing a clash against an opponent or contact with lava deducts an available game life; the game ends when all game lives are expended. A second player can join the game, controlling a blue knight on a stork. The two players cooperatively complete the waves, optionally attacking each other.

Development Joust was developed by Williams Electronics, with John Newcomer as the lead designer. The development also included programmer Bill Pfutzenreuter, artists Janice Woldenberg-Miller and Python Anghelo, and audio designers Tim Murphy and John Kotlarik. The game features amplified monaural sound and raster graphics on a 19-inch color CRT monitor. Like other Williams arcade games, Joust was programmed in assembly language. A pack of three AA batteries provide power to save the game's settings and high scores when the machine is unplugged from an electrical outlet. Anghelo stenciled the cabinet artwork on a wooden frame, and designed artwork for promotional materials. One such flyer features archaic English, which was also incorporated into the game's onscreen instructions and game-over message.

Conception Following the success of the 1981 game Defender, Williams searched for new creative staff. John Newcomer, believing video games to be the future of entertainment, left his job as a toy designer to work at Williams, who hired him to create game ideas as support for development staff. After a few days, he generated a list of ideas that included ideas for his top two games, The War of the Worlds and Joust. Technical specifications dictated the selection because his vision of The War of the Worlds was technologically infeasible, whereas Joust could be accomplished with hardware already available at Williams. A development team was formed, which decided to create the game using Defenders hardware.

Newcomer conceived Joust as a "flying game" with cooperative two-player gameplay, but he did not wish to emulate the popular space theme of previous successful flying games like Asteroids and Defender. To that end, he made a list of things that could fly: machines, animals, and fictional characters. After evaluating the positive and negative of each idea, Newcomer chose birds for their wide appeal and his familiarity with fantasy and science fiction media featuring birds. To further increase his understanding, Newcomer went to the library to study mythology. He believed that the primary protagonist should ride a majestic bird. The first choice was an eagle, but the lack of graceful land mobility dissuaded him. Instead, he decided that a flying ostrich was more believable than a running eagle. To differentiate between the first and second player characters, the developers picked a stork, believing the proportions were similar to an ostrich while the color difference would avoid confusion among players. Newcomer chose vultures as the main enemies, believing that they would be recognizably evil. Anghelo created concept art of the characters as guidance for further design.

Design

The decision to use birds prompted Newcomer to deviate from the standard eight-direction joystick. He implemented a flapping mechanism to allow players to control the character's ascent and descent. With the vertical direction controlled via the arcade cabinet's button, a two-way joystick was added to dictate horizontal direction. Though other Williams employees were concerned about the design, Newcomer believed that a direct control scheme for flight would strengthen the connection between the player and the character. The combat was devised to allow for higher levels of strategy than traditional shooting games. Because flying became an integral gameplay element, he chose to have characters collide as a means of combat, with victory decided by onscreen elevation.

The developers created the game using 96K of ROM chip storage, which limited the data size of individual graphics and sound effects they could use. The ROM size limits also prohibited Newcomer from creating more characters. The graphics are hand-animated pixel art. To animate the birds, Woldenberg-Miller referenced Eadweard Muybridge's book Animals In Motion. Given the limited memory, she had to balance the number of frames (to minimize file size) while maintaining realistic animation. Woldenberg-Miller initially chose gray for the buzzards' appearance but changed it to green to optimize the color palette as the developers had only 16 colors to create the entire display. Once the colors were decided for the character sprites, Newcomer finalized the look of the platforms. The hardware had limited audio capabilities, and sounds typically require larger amounts of memory than graphics. Working with these restrictions, Newcomer instructed Murphy and Kotlarik to focus on select sounds he deemed important to reinforcing gameplay. He reasoned that the audio would serve as conspicuous hints that players could use to adjust their strategy. Newcomer prioritized the crucial wing-flap sound above others related to the pterodactyl, collisions, and hatching eggs.

In designing the levels, Newcomer added platforms to the environment after the combat was devised. A static game world was chosen, instead of a scrolling world, to focus on detailed visual textures applied to the platforms; the hardware could not easily display the textures while scrolling, and the team believed that displaying the whole environment would aid players. The final game world element designed was a lava pit and a hand reaching out of it to destroy characters too close to the bottom of the screen. Newcomer placed the platforms to optimize Pfutzenreuter's enemy artificial intelligence (AI), which was programmed for attack patterns based partly on platform placements. The knight enemies were designed to exhibit progressively more aggressive behavior. Bounders fly around the environment randomly, occasionally reacting to the protagonist. Hunters seek the player's character in an effort to collide. Shadow Lords fly quickly and closer to the top of the screen; Pfutzenreuter designed them to fly higher when close to the protagonist to increase the Shadow Lord's chances of victory against players. The pterodactyl was designed to prevent players from idling and to be difficult to defeat. The enemy's only vulnerability is its open mouth during a specific animation frame, and it quickly flies upward at the last moment when approaching a player waiting at the edge of a platform. The game prioritizes its graphics processing to favor the player characters over the enemies, so enemies begin to react more slowly when the number of on-screen sprites increases.

While playtesting the game, the team discovered an animation bug they described as a "belly flop". The flaw allowed players to force the ostrich or stork sprite through an otherwise impassable small gap between two adjacent platforms of very close elevation. Because it provided an interesting method to perform a sneak attack on an opponent below the gap, and because of limited time available, the developers decided to keep the defect as an undocumented feature rather than fix it. A second bug, which allows the pterodactyl to be easily defeated, was discovered after the game was first distributed. Newcomer designed the game and its AI with each sprite's dimension in mind. A day before the game was finished, however, the pterodactyl's sprite was altered to improve the appearance. The new sprite allowed the pterodactyl to be easily defeated by waiting at a ledge. Upon learning of the flaw, Williams shipped a new ROM for the arcade cabinets to assuage distributors' complaints.

Release

Williams first released Joust into arcades in September 1982. The company filed the stylized logo with the United States Patent and Trademark Office on September 27, 1982. The same day, it registered Jousts program, visuals, and cabinet artwork with the United States Copyright Office.

Given the peculiar control scheme, Williams was concerned that the game would be unsuccessful, and arcades were hesitant to purchase the game. Williams eventually shipped 26,000 units. A cocktail table version was later released, engineered by Leo Ludzia. It is unique among cocktail games with its side-by-side seating rather than opposing sides, which allowed Williams to reuse the same ROM chip from the upright cabinets. With substantially fewer units manufactured (between 250-500 units) than the upright arcade machine, the cocktail version is a rare collector's item.

Home ports