[HN Gopher] Moonbase Alpha: That time NASA made a meme video game
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Moonbase Alpha: That time NASA made a meme video game
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 108 points
Date : 2025-06-23 19:13 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.spacebar.news)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.spacebar.news)
| nosmokewhereiam wrote:
| Obligatory John Madden song clip showing off the speech to text
| engine: https://youtu.be/ovcTKHupdxo?si=Qh_nsYmkGtwcxrMR
| kotaKat wrote:
| John Madden? John Madden!
| jacknews wrote:
| Bah, thought this was related to the classic UK TV series
| Space:1999.
| sdovan1 wrote:
| Here is my favorite one: https://youtu.be/aFbuSShYKpc
| blueflow wrote:
| aeiou aeiou
|
| brbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbr
|
| -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv6RbEOlqRo
| slantaclaus wrote:
| That was what it was like
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| John Madden
| spiritplumber wrote:
| football
| hakkoru wrote:
| This video (on top of stuff like YouTube Poops) did an insane
| amount of damage to my sense of humor growing up.
| WhaleClub wrote:
| I hope Elon or someone creates a moon base called aeiou
| lawlessone wrote:
| anyone tried putting his kids name into the DecTalk?
| Darvon wrote:
| Elon? That trust fund oligarch who bought twitter and was
| throwing around Sieg Heils on stage at donalds's
| inauguration?
|
| The one teaching his nazi AI to lie about "wHiTe GeNoCiDe?
| That dickhead elon?
| mzajc wrote:
| In case anyone wants to play around with DECtalk without
| downloading the game, there's https://webspeak.terminal.ink/
| ryan42 wrote:
| huehuehuehuehuehue john madden john madden
| ethagnawl wrote:
| I'm not sure why but that is one of the funniest things I've
| ever seen on the internet.
| Hovertruck wrote:
| My wife and I still say this to each other all the time
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| Mamma mia
|
| Pappa pia
|
| Baby got a
| nurettin wrote:
| Spent years playing this game. It is the closest thing I've seen
| to real time chess. Also excellent soundtrack that sets the mood.
|
| EDIT: whoops I thought this was moonbase commander, another NASA
| sponsored game from another time.
| p1mrx wrote:
| > real time chess
|
| That would describe _Crypt of the NecroDancer_.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| Another one is the Microsoft Sam (& co) speech synthesis, it can
| also produce funny results, like someone making copter sounds
| with it:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_vNhLYW_e4
| pimlottc wrote:
| Wow, I can see how many people would find this to be a very
| boring game but it looks amazing to me. Sad that I missed its
| golden age.
| _bent wrote:
| here comes another chinese earthquake ebrrrbrbrrbrrbr
| dirtyhippiefree wrote:
| Moonbase Alpha was the location where the TV show "Space: 1999"
| was set.
|
| First episode saw the moon permanently leave Earth orbit.
| scudsworth wrote:
| aeiou
| bobsmooth wrote:
| Bad TTS is like an inverse uncanny valley where it's so inhuman
| it's charming.
| dmoy wrote:
| > which tasked the company with working on updates for "America's
| Army," the 2002 first-person shooter
|
| 30 seconds
|
| Ahhh so they're the ones who made that game less realistic and
| more modern shooter-y. Which I have no doubt is exactly what they
| were asked to do, because the original AA game was slow and a lot
| of people hated it compared to ut or cs1.6
|
| Shame though, it was the only game that kinda had that level of
| realism, with "rifle from prone while waiting can hit you at 400+
| yards, but if you're running around you struggle making hits
| under 100 yards" that encouraged very methodical play with
| teamwork and spotting.
| gundmc wrote:
| I still remember sitting through a legitimate field medic first
| aid course before unlocking the medic class. That game was
| something else!
| lawlessone wrote:
| I remember sitting in the prison...
| dtech wrote:
| It was finances by the army as a recruitment tool and to save
| on training costs, that's why
| Yeul wrote:
| If you want realistic they should have put IEDs and PTSS in
| it.
|
| The Netherlands now has to spend 5% of GDP on the military
| which is doable- recruiting fools is the hard part in a
| country with free university and a functioning welfare
| system.
| dmoy wrote:
| IIRC the sniper course in AA had IED disposal (via anti
| material rifle) in it as one of the major components for
| passing.
|
| But yea it was very much a rah-rah-go-Army game, nothing
| about the aftermath.
| urda wrote:
| I felt so cool after passing Sniper School, then you could
| pick that role in matches.
| seivan wrote:
| The training course to sneak past behind enemy lines for the
| SF role was the hardest, lol.
| Bjartr wrote:
| Doesn't the ARMA series at least support that level of realism?
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Could snipe people at 2km+ in arma 2.
| fetzu wrote:
| Which is also (arguably not easily) doable IRL. The most
| realistic part of it surely being the pacing and "tactical"
| aspects of it.
| somenameforme wrote:
| At those distances there's a lot more involved in shots
| than just bullet drop/gravity, which AFAIK is all that
| ARMA models.
| petsfed wrote:
| > Shame though, it was the only game that kinda had that level
| of realism, with "rifle from prone while waiting can hit you at
| 400+ yards, but if you're running around you struggle making
| hits under 100 yards" that encouraged very methodical play with
| teamwork and spotting.
|
| The original Ghost Recon came out the year before, and the
| Delta Force series was already well underway. I recall enduring
| the interminable mandatory training of America's Army, just to
| discover that it was a flashier, gamey-er version of games I
| was already playing.
|
| In fairness, I think you can definitely see AA's impact on the
| design of e.g. Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter on the PC, but
| hilariously (and true to form) when ArmA came out in 2006, its
| clear they took not one cue about how to build a playable game.
| nocoiner wrote:
| Wasn't ArmA the successor to Operation Flashpoint?
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| Yes. Operation Flashpoint was made by Bohemia Interactive
| and published by Codemasters, with BI owning the code but
| Codemasters owning the trademark. When the companies went
| their separate ways (iirc there was some drama, but can't
| remember about what), BI had to rename the next installment
| of the game series.
| fetzu wrote:
| Operation Flashpoint having also been spun off into "VBS"
| (Virtual Battlespace Systems) a military combat simulator
| whose first client/user was incedentally the USMC. So
| AA's was probably arguably the first mainstream (from the
| heavy promotion and the fact it was free, something out
| of the ordinary for an "AAA Game" at the time) "realistic
| shooter", but certainly not the first.
| lawlessone wrote:
| OF was great, i'd spend hours in the editor just making
| custom scenarios.
| dmoy wrote:
| Fair, I guess I never played Ghost Recon
|
| I do remember winning a lot of AA games without ever even
| taking out my rifle, and just using binoculars and telling
| all my teammates (who were lying in bushes for minutes not
| moving) where people were moving.
| seivan wrote:
| I loved how slow that game was, my favourite map was the bridge
| one, before they added the ridge so you could circumvent the
| bridge as a chokepoint.
| ranger207 wrote:
| AA3 was my first shooter, and it was slowed down a lot compared
| to AA2 (then AA4 sped things back up) and I haven't been able
| to find anything quite like it since. Some of those maps were
| incredible
|
| That team also did a helicopter flight simulator at the Space
| and Rocket Center in Huntsville (IIRC the devs were at Redstone
| Arsenal?) that I saw once and was surprisingly in depth.
| Required 2 players, one of whom would be the gunner and the
| other would be the pilot, complete with stick, collective, and
| pedals. A far different experience than helicopters in video
| games at the time
| bloqs wrote:
| somewhere, deep in my soul, I heard:
|
| "JohnMaddenJohnMaddenJohnMaddenJohnMaddenJohnMaddenJohnMaddenJohn
| MaddenJohnMadden"
|
| "uuuuuUuuuuUuuuuuuUuuuuuuUuu"
| imchillyb wrote:
| Ben Bova wrote a book: "Welcome to Moonbase."
|
| I purchased that as a kid, in a souvenir shop, on our way out of
| Cape Canaveral. We were there specifically to see the Space
| Shuttle slow-crawl to it's launchpad destination. I never got to
| see a shuttle take off first hand.
|
| That book, though, began a life-long love of space and all things
| unexplainable.
|
| I love space, science, and the unknown. That love all comes down
| to a childhood fascination with the Space Shuttle program, and
| Ben Bova opening my childish mind to the idea of life on the
| moon, and how different everything would be.
|
| Thank you Ben Bova. And thank you NASA for daring to dream big.
| You've both made a lifelong friend.
| shibeprime wrote:
| kick it in the front seat
| nahuel0x wrote:
| There was another Simcity-like game called Moonbase for DOS:
| https://www.mobygames.com/game/25993/moonbase/
| lxe wrote:
| This took me on a DECTalk rabbithole.
|
| - Here's a web version (with backend):
| https://webspeak.terminal.ink/
|
| - Steam thread:
| https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=91936...
|
| - "Modern" codebase and builds:
| https://github.com/dectalk/dectalk/
| spiritplumber wrote:
| uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
|
| UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
| Sweepi wrote:
| What do you mean, 'meme video game'? Played this for weeks with
| friends in Mumble to climb the (time-trial) leader boards. As
| always lots of fun + lots of being angry on the person who
| fumbled the third run in a row (me, most of the times).
| Akronymus wrote:
| Id say "a game that became a meme" to be much more of an apt
| description
| 827a wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1B488z1MmaA
|
| The final song in that one is so subtly sophisticated; check out
| the underlying text. For example, to get it to sing "it doesn't
| matter now" the user types "tdah zih ntmae trr nnaw"; they're
| providing the phonetic sounds of every word rather than the words
| themselves, presumably because it produces better output and it
| allows them to change tone in the middle of words.
| pachouli-please wrote:
| johnmaddenjohnmaddenjohnmadden
| brailsafe wrote:
| I got a chance to sit in briefly with Khal and the developers for
| a few weeks at their company while I was a naive and hapless
| high-school student going into post-secondary, during the
| development of this game. Their dev studio was _tiny_ , like 4 or
| 5 people at the time. It was interesting to get some exposure to
| professional game development at that time in my life, because I
| was maybe 17, playing WoW and various RTS titles, which gave them
| a chance to ask me what I thought of it and what makes good games
| in general.
|
| I recall probably not seeming so enthusiastic for many of the
| same reasons I don't understand why people play Star Citizen now,
| there just didn't seem to be any compelling gameplay loop or
| reason that it would be more intrinsically interesting than any
| other game or any other source of media on Space. If you were
| already a Space enthusiast and looking for Space games, I
| imagined it might be another thing to play with, but they and
| Nasa seemed at the time to hope that it was going to spur that
| interest, almost like if bureaucrats wanted to make a
| rollerblading game to get people interested in being active, even
| though it would have taken a miracle to resurrect what had
| already become unpopular. As in, if you don't have an interest in
| space, it would take a miracle to make a sufficiently compelling
| game, especially setting out to build an MMO, especially with a
| small budget, and relatively dated sdk, to capture the attention
| of kids who already had endless options. It was a grand vision
| that seemed unlikely to be captured, and I guess I was hoping I
| was wrong.
|
| Aside from all that, it looked like a challenging and compelling
| project from the development perspective, probably a good
| learning opportunity for the team, it must have pushed them
| pretty hard. I appreciated being welcomed into their Space
| despite certainly impairing their productivity, and I hope
| they've continued on to other ambitious projects since.
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