Cosmic Chasm | 1982 | Arcade Experience | Cabinet Simulation
This is my attempt to recreate the experience of playing the game Cosmic Chasm the way it was released, in an arcade cabinet with very beautiful art and the game being displayed on a vector monitor.
ABOUT THIS GAME
Cosmic Chasm is a 1982 vector game originally created by GCE for the Vectrex home game system. It became the first game developed for a home system to be turned into an arcade game after Cinematronics, which was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy at the time, released it as their last color vector game. The player controls a space ship armed with lasers and shields on a mission to destroy the Cosmic Chasm space station from the inside out. Each room of the space station has protector ships that attack the player directly and a center that slowly expands thus forcing the player not to linger in the room for too long after defeating the protector ships. The player must shoot away force fields that protect the exits in order to traverse the corridors that lead to other rooms. Each exit corresponds to a different direction on the map so choosing the shortest route is key. The goal is to fight your way to the station's reactor room, destroy it and make your way out of the station before being engulfed in the station's destruction.
ABOUT VECTOR MONITORS
In a vector display, the image is composed of drawn lines rather than a grid of glowing pixels as in raster graphics. For this reason it is impossible to accurately present what a monitor of this type is like in real life, so my attempt was to simulate a recording of this type of monitor, where trails of bright lights remain on the screen for a while before disappearing, and glows are presented where there is a large concentration of light.
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