Basketball – October 1978

Posted on November 14, 2021November 14, 2021 by Kevin Bunch

We’ve seen a slow progression of video game sports through the 1970s up to this point, both on the VCS and off of it. Pong was a deeply simplified version of ping pong, and all the other sports games on the original Magnavox Odyssey were functionally the same basic thing. The same holds true for a number of early arcade sports renditions: hockey becomes Pong with a specific goal area, Volleyball and Basketball become vertically oriented versions of Pong, and so on. Racing games got to become their own genre pretty early on, however, and baseball followed shortly thereafter. 1978 would prove to be a watershed moment for one particular sport, however, as a full, non-Pong version of Basketball made its debut on the Atari VCS.

Coincidentally release at the same time as another basketball game that came out alongside the Magnavox Odyssey2 in 1978, Atari’s VCS version of the sport is seemingly the first commercial attempt at the game to really try and translate the major appeal of basketball into a video game. Creator Alan Miller has noted that he played on his high school basketball team, and as the eldest of six kids had spent a lot of time in his youth coming up with games for everyone to play; it seems likely that he wanted to try and translate a sport he enjoyed to the VCS, and he largely succeeded.

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Breakout (Breakaway IV) – October 1978

Posted on November 11, 2021November 14, 2021 by Kevin Bunch

It’s undeniable that Atari initially made its name with Pong. This simple two-player take on a tennis game was an incredible arcade success for the company, with competing clone machines popping up in the years following its 1972 debut. Even the earliest years of the home console market saw an array of Pong clones – itself a clone of the tennis game on the original Magnavox Odyssey. There is just one problem with Pong: It’s a two-player game. If you don’t have someone to play with, you’re not going to spend money on it.

There are two ways to tackle this problem, and Atari essentially covered them both. The first is the solution seen in the 1977 VCS game Video Olympics, where developer Joe Decuir programmed a simple computer opponent for players to compete against. This required actually having the memory available and the processing power to actually create your digital foe, and in the mid-1970s these were both in short supply. The other option was to reimagine Pong as a single player game.

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Flag Capture (Capture) – October 1978

Posted on November 6, 2021 by Kevin Bunch

This game is something of a treat for these early years of the VCS. Not only is it an original game concept, it’s actually a pretty nifty title in its own right. Flag Capture doesn’t exactly have name cachet like Combat or Outlaw, and arguably it’s one of the more overlooked non-sports games from the console’s first few years, but it’s absolutely a treasure.

Flag Capture, released as simply “Capture” by Sears, is the first game that developer Jim Huether wrote for Atari. In interviews, Huether has said that he originally wanted to port the board game Stratego to the console. For the unfamiliar, Stratego is a two player game where each side sets up a field of soldiers and bombs, but their opponent has no idea which is in which space (and vice versa). You simply have to approach with one of your pieces and attack; if it’s a soldier, whoever has the higher rank will win the battle (with the exception of the spy, who can kill anyone he attacks first). If someone other than a miner lands on a bomb, they are removed from the board, otherwise the bomb is removed; it carries on like this until someone finds their opponent’s flag piece. This is a lot of complexity to ask from a 2k Atari VCS cartridge and on a single screen, so rather than try to adapt Stratego in its entirety, Huether boiled it down to the underlying idea behind the game: finding a flag before your opponent.

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Outlaw (Gunslinger) – October 1978

Posted on November 5, 2021November 5, 2021 by Kevin Bunch

Coming as it did at the tail end of westerns’ day in the sun, the old American west might not be the most popular setting in video games, but it has popped up a few times over the years, from Wild Gunman to Sunset Riders up to the recent Red Dead Redemption games. But if you want to see an early example of a video game western, then Outlaw has you covered.

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Slot Racers (Maze) – October 1978

Posted on November 2, 2021November 3, 2021 by Kevin Bunch

Most of the Atari VCS games we’ve looked at so far are ones where you know what you’re getting into just from the title. A game named Indy 500 is probably about racing. Space War is most likely going to have you fighting in outer space. Blackjack is going to involve playing cards, and so forth. But then you get to Slot Racers, and you’re probably going to be kind of baffled. What the heck is going on here, you might ask? After all, slot racing in real life is little more than model cars you insert into an electrically connected track and drive around a predetermined route. This game has player vehicles driving around a maze shooting at each other. If you have the Sears version of the game, which was released under the title Maze, you might have a better idea of what you’re getting into here. But the reason Slot Racers seems so far removed from the source material is because that wasn’t the premise in the first place.

But before we get into that, we have to step back a moment and recognize that Slot Racers is the first Atari VCS game developed by Warren Robinett. Best known for his seminal 1980 VCS game Adventure, Robinett was part of the second hiring wave of Atari home video game programmers, coming on board in November 1977 – shortly after other notable Atari developers like David Crane and Jim Huether joined the company. Robinett wrote about his experiences at Atari and developing Slot Racers in his book (unpublished as of this writing), and graciously provided me with a copy of the manuscript to help describe the development of his three VCS titles. He also explained to me that he felt that the best way to figure out how to program a game for the VCS within its limitations is to just start writing a complete one, and while driving to work one day he had an idea in his head for a game he called “Traffic.” In it, two cars would be driving around a city maze firing rockets at each other in a severe case of road rage.

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