XP Arcade: Klax

It is 2024, and there's still time for Klax

This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

It’s another one of those moments where it’s important to remember that “Atari” and “Atari Games” were two distinct entities. In 1984, Warner Bros. split Atari’s divisions up, with the home and computer side sold to Jack Tramiel, and the coin-op division retained by Warner. Atari Games kept making arcade titles and formed Tengen, allowing them to publish home conversions of their arcade titles on Atari platforms without utilizing the Atari name to do so, while Atari kept on putting out home platforms for another decade or so.

Atari Games ended up sold by Warner, then reacquired at the time of the Time Warner merger, then was sold once more and folded into Midway Games after that spun off independently of WMS Industries, which had control of the Atari, Williams, Bally, and Midway arcade brands. Which is how a bunch of Atari Games arcade titles ended up included in the Midway Arcade Treasures collections back during the Xbox/Playstation 2/GameCube era of consoles. And after Midway closed shop, many of their assets were purchased by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, including the Atari Games once that Warner once controlled decades prior. This is also why random Atari Games titles are included in Lego Dimensions on in-game arcade cabinets. Which, sadly, is the only representation some of these titles have had on modern platforms, since Warner Bros. Interactive doesn’t seem keen on following in the footsteps of Atari and putting together a collection of the classic Atari Games titles in their portfolio, like with Atari 50. Hey, Atari Games was founded 40 years ago now, that’s still worth releasing a collection over, isn’t it?

Klax would be one such obvious candidate for a collection, or even a solo re-release. It’s a falling block puzzle game, the kind that, at that point in time, would be considered similar to Tetris since the object was to match blocks falling from the top of the screen in order to clear them, and everything in that moment in time was “a Tetris clone” or compared directly to it. That’s where the similarities begin and end, in the same way people would say that Columns or Puyo Puyo were a lot like Tetris. Klax is a bit closer to those two, actually, since you need just three in a row for a match rather than a full line across the playing area, a la Tetris.

Image credit: MobyGames

Klax is also goal-based, rather than endless. There are a set number of levels — 100 of them — and each gives you a specific challenge to clear. You can aim for a total overall high score, too, as you can still score points however you’d like and for as long as you’d like, so long as you eventually clear the stage’s requirements to move on to the next one. Like with Atari Games’ RoadBlasters, you can also choose to start somewhere besides the beginning, and there are “warp” stages along the way that let you jump ahead. The difficulty will be higher, but you’ll receive a point bonus for the skip, too, so it'll feel less like you just jumped ahead even if that’s what you’re doing.

The levels are grouped into sets of five, with a chance to skip ahead five or 10 levels after every fifth one. In addition to the point bonus, you also are allowed more “drops,” after a level skip, which means more chances to let pieces fall off of the conveyor belt they’re coming to you on without you having caught them first — you’ll need the extra drops eventually, especially in the arcade version, where the speed of the belt can increase in a noticeable way. The expectations for clearing the challenges grows as you progress, too, with the final, 100th level requiring that you score 250,000 points just to finish it. To put it into your head how daunting of a task a quarter-million points in a single stage is, a basic klax — a clear — will net you 50 points.

That’s not to say that you need to do this 50 points at a time. The real key to Klax is in figuring out other ways to score points beyond the most basic match, as that’s where the real points are. Three in a row, in a vertical stack, is 50 points. Three blocks in a row horizontally? That’s 1,000 points. Three in a row, diagonally? That’ll be a cool 5,000 points. You also get additional points for rows of four or five blocks — four blocks in a row, horizontally, is 5,000 points, and diagonally is 10,000 points — and for stages where it’s counting down the total number of matches you make, four in a row also counts as two klaxes, and five as three. Combos are possible, increasing points further, but require some finessing and planning so that everything literally falls into place.

The playing area is just five by five, which is compact and feels it, especially if you’re trying to pull off any of the four- or five-block clears. Blocks come down a conveyor belt, which you can control the speed of: by pulling down on the joystick — or pressing down on the D-pad, if you’re playing on a console — you can make the pieces come to you faster. By pushing/pressing up, you can fling the top piece on your paddle, which is used to catch the blocks as they come down, back up the conveyor belt a bit. That’s a vital skill for the moments where space has become limited in the playing area, and your paddle is already pretty loaded up: it can hold up to five pieces, but anything you try to catch while already full up on the paddle will drop below, costing you an available “Drop.” You only get three of those to start, with the possibility of two extra as the game goes, and using up all of your drops will cause you to fail out of a stage and have to try over. In the arcade version, you could keep your score, but of course have to add in additional credits to keep playing, while in ports, like the NES one, your score resets with every loss, but you do have infinite retries.

Stages will tell you what you need to do at the start, and sometimes give you hints as to what might help, either with progress or point scoring. The first “wave,” as the game refers to them, just needs you to make three klaxes. Any kind of klax will do. The third stage wants you to get three klaxes, as well, but they have to all be diagonal ones. Eventually you’ll be asked to score 10,000 points, which feels like a lot when you’re just starting out, but should be second nature if you’re a return player who has started messing with four- and five-block matches. Maybe the toughest of the challenges are the ones simply asking you to catch X number of falling blocks with your paddle: you can’t aggressively score your way out of those, and the speed is often most apparent in these as the game attempts to catch you napping at the one thing you actually need to be doing.

Klax starts adding new color blocks in the deeper you go, too, which adds a level of complexity and difficulty beyond just speed and requirement increases. There are nine colors for blocks in total, plus a flashing block that serves as a wild card, able to create matches with any other colors so long as you’ve got the requisite setup in place for a match.

Music in Klax isn’t always present, and is optional in some releases, too: you can turn music on and off at any time in the NES pause screen, for instance, just by pressing the B button, which will rotate through all of the available songs or allow you to choose no music. That’ll let you hear the clack, clack, clack of each piece as it comes down the conveyor belt, like in the embedded Game Boy Advance gameplay video above, which is also the sound that inspired the name of the puzzler, according to the game’s designer, David Akers, himself.

This game might have started out in arcades, but it was ported everywhere. That’s not overstating it, either. Klax was ported to, in alphabetical order: Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 7800, Atari ST, BBC Micro, Commodore 64, DOS, FM Towns, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Game Gear, Genesis, Linux, Lynx, MSX, NES, PC-88, PC-98, SAM Coupé, X68000, Master System, TurboGrafx-16, ZX Spectrum. It also ended up on the Xbox, Playstation 2, and GameCube via Midway Arcade Treasures Vol. 1, which worked via backwards-compatibility on the Wii and Playstation 3 (but not the Xbox 360). Klax’s inclusion in Lego Dimensions took care of that for 360 owners, though, and that game was also released on the Xbox One, Playstations 3 and 4, and Wii U.

The Atari 7800 port didn’t release when you think it would have: it was nearly complete back during the era of the 7800, but Atari dropped support for the console, and all outstanding projects were also dropped because of it. In 2002, though, Lee Krueger of ResQsoft received permission to publish the game for people who still had a 7800 and wanted to buy a copy. Just to give you an idea of how long ago that really was, the site listing ResQsoft’s products was hosted on Earthlink. This version featured three “Impossible” levels that only opened up after you completed the standard 100 stages. I can’t speak to their difficulty myself, but the last of them straight-up tells you that it’s going to be “cheating” in order to keep you from succeeding in your goal of clearing the stage.

Digital Eclipse’s president, Mike Mika — back when he was a programmer for the original version of the company — actually programmed a marriage proposal into the Game Boy Color port of Klax, which his girlfriend of the time then did not find no matter how much he tried to hint at her need to give Klax a go. From Eurogamer’s story that transcribes part of the interview:

Mika explained that one day Tips & Tricks magazine called and asked if he had any special codes that had never been revealed to the public. And boy did he ever! Tips & Tricks published the piece, specifically calling Mika's girlfriend out by name and telling her what code to put into the game.

"I left that out one night with the magazine and the game, everything queued up, and I can't really be here or she'll tell me to do it, so I get out of the house," Mika said. "I just kinda drove around a little bit and she came home, checked it out, and it was a proposal.... she calls me up on the phone - like with 'yes!' The rest is kinda history after that."

If Digital Eclipse ever does a Gold Master series edition involving Klax, I need a whole path with video interviews and documentation detailing this period in the game’s history.

At this point, though, any version of Klax out there on modern platforms would be a win. Warner Bros. Interactive hasn’t shown much interest in re-releasing these games outside of that Lego Dimensions goodie, which, again, that game released long enough ago that it showed up on both the Xbox 360 and PS3, and also a game tucked away inside of a different, more expensive game isn’t really a “release” as it were. Klax opens up with a text screen that says, “It is the nineties and there is time for Klax” — it might be 2024 now, but believe me, there’s still time for Klax, whether Warner Bros. Interactive realizes it or not. Find yourself a copy on one of the roughly 900 platforms it was once available for, and start making matches.

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