After exiting Atari upon the completion of Video Chess and participating in the risky venture of starting up the novel idea of a third-party video game company, Bob Whitehead’s Activision debut showed up in August 1980 with another sports title, Boxing. This was his first project upon leaving Atari, but it’s very much in the same throughline as several of his previous games.
Looking broadly at Whitehead’s gameography, Boxing turned out to not be too surprising a title for him to work on; Whitehead was behind Atari’s Home Run and Football games, and referred to himself as a “wannabe sports guy” as a child. Furthermore, it’s also a sport that fits into his sweet spot of being simple enough that implementing a computer opponent wasn’t too big a challenge. Whitehead elaborated on this is an interview in Video Games magazine from August 1982, where he said he liked working on sports games because the rules are already defined, allowing him to be a bit lazy and focus on how the game plays.
Like most of the sports games the VCS has seen to this point, boxing did have an existing history in the video game space prior to Activision’s cartridge, though given the active nature of the fights it is somewhat shorter than something like golf or football. A text-based computer version called Olympic Boxing was written by Jesse Lynch and published in David Ahl’s 101 BASIC Computer Games book. Here, you would type in your moves, as well as your boxer’s strength and weakness. In arcades, Sega’s 1976 coin-op title Heavyweight Champ is an early defining work. Two players control a pair of boxers on screen as seen from the side, each using a massive boxing glove-esque controller on the cabinet to shuffle their fists up and down to block punches or pushing it inward to punch. Heavyweight Champ was engineered in discrete logic and the surviving cabinets are vanishingly rare today (let alone in working order), but for the time it was a visual feast and an incredibly unique play experience more reminiscent of an electromechanical machine than what we’d consider a standard video game cabinet today. There was also a portable video boxing game, sold in North America by Bambino in 1980. Over on the home console front, APF published a boxing game for the MP1000 in 1979 that, according to the memoirs of engineer Ed Smith, was based off the Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots toy he got for his kids and written by their primary game software developer, a woman he recalled was named Linda. This version had high and low punches, blocking, several computer opponents, multiple rounds and some limited movement within the ring.
Unlike Alan Miller’s Checkers and David Crane’s Fishing Derby, Boxing takes some of its cues from an Atari arcade game. In this case, it’s an unreleased game simply called Boxer (and later in development renamed to Boxing) that, much like Whitehead’s game, featured an overhead viewpoint of two men in a boxing ring whaling on each other. In a 2017 interview with Mike Albaugh, one of the primary developers on the troubled Boxer, he said this was his first experience with the 6502 microprocessor, and that he came to it partway into development after it was started by Howard Van Drepmond. Albaugh remarked that the staff wanted to make something more physically interesting to play, akin to what Atari wound up doing with its Football arcade cabinet. The initial control design by Jerry Lichac involved two handles atop a six-inch analog joystick bar, which you would use to maneuver on the screen and then twist the handles left or right to swing your fists. This control scheme used six potentiometers, requiring tight coding to read accurately; it was also prone to breaking in testing, Albaugh said. Several iterations followed, with changes to the program and the controls to try and produce a game that was fun and physically interesting; at one point Ed Logg of later Asteroids and Centipede renown came on board to try and get the project into a good state. While ultimately they never found a way to make Boxer work the way they’d hoped, Whitehead said that he remembered seeing it while working at Atari, and while he didn’t set out to copy it directly, it did influence his own title much in the same way that a musician will be influenced by what they’ve heard before, as he put it. In its unfinished state Boxer is a bit of a mess, but the idea there was sound enough that the Activision VCS release is a real standout game.
There’s no indication that any other boxing games were an influence on Whitehead beyond Boxer, but they show some real commonalities as to why boxing is well-suited to video gaming: factors like space control, effective blocking and even, in the case of Whitehead’s game, combination attacks against your opponent. That latter point is something he highlighted as a “little secret” when done against an opponent in the corner, as it can take them several hits before they’re knocked into a spot that they can block again. Unsurprisingly, a number of these design choices would become important aspects of the fighting game genre in the years ahead; I’m not saying that either of these boxing titles are fighting games in the modern sense, but there are certainly common aspects between them.
Whitehead said that the boxer sprites are basically identical, with him simply changing the size and “graphics” on the fly; this is to say that since a sprite on the VCS can change size and be multiplexed into multiple objects – think the plane formations in Combat – Whitehead changed these on each line on the screen to create the boxers. A similar technique was used to produce the shark in Fishing Derby, and the end result here is that you have two large, relatively high-resolution sprites for the boxers with smooth animation for their arms, in keeping with Activision’s “cartoony” house style. There’s also an animation for a blocked punch, and a little “smashed nose” animation for a successful hit. Despite the simplistic graphics, this all gives Boxing a distinctive visual style.
Whitehead also claims credit for the on-screen Activision logo sprite seen in all their games as a simple little visual kernel; he described it as a cute thing that he got working in the labs, and the developers all agreed it should be used in their games specifically for brand recognition and marketing purposes. As a result, in this and pretty much all successive titles from the company, you’ll see the Activision logo on screen. Eventually this was even tuned up to include a rainbow graphic, but even this early on just having a legible, high resolution word is impressive enough. Of course, the low-resolution graphics of the VCS worked to Boxing’s favor in Whitehead’s view, as he remarked that because the graphics aren’t, well, graphic, the inherent violence in the sport of boxing doesn’t really come through in a way that’s disturbing.
Much like Fishing Derby, Boxing’s major game selection options come down to whether or not the game is running with one player or two. The difficulty switches adjust the movement speed of each boxer, allowing players to handicap themselves or the computer by moving slower in the ring. The boxing match itself is about 2 minutes long, with the winner being whoever has the highest score – long range punches are worth 1 point, while up-close blows are worth 2. If one player scores 100 points, then that is counted as a knockout, and an automatic victory. Each blow knocks the one being hit back, but if they’re knocked into the ropes it’s possible to land multiple punches in a row, with the opponent being bounced back and forth between punches for a brief period of time. Whitehead said this was an intentional little “secret” he put into the game, and it’s key to getting those knockouts. Helpfully, the game automatically picks your swing based on your location compared to your opponent. The computer is a surprisingly worthy foe, and its presence keeps the game engaging even when you don’t have another person to play against. While it would have been interesting to see different opponent “personalities” in the vein of the APF game, Activision’s fighter knows to take shots when it can get them in and does a pretty decent job of trying to block your blows accordingly.
The computer opponent has some simple aggressiveness programmed in to keep things interesting for the player; if the computer is behind on score, they’ll move in to attack more intensively. This rudimentary variable challenge is similar to the computer opponent in Alan Miller’s 1978 Basketball cartridge, where it adjusts how difficult it is to compete against based on the score, and it works very well here. After the 1-minute mark has been passed the computer will get “tired” and have slower reactions. This is something of a godsend, given that playing a couple rounds of this game with the stock Atari joystick will tire the player out too – something Whitehead obliquely alludes to in the manual, and the reason why he set the timer to 2 minutes. As it turns out holding the base of your joystick while also shoving the stick in all directions to maneuver around the ring is really taxing, and this is a funky bit of game design that is entirely lost if you’re just playing the game with a modern controller.
This physical exhaustion playing the game was noted by Bill Kunkel and Arnie Katz in their Video magazine review of the game, noting that players will want a rest period between rounds in the game – advice they repeated in the first issue of Electronic Games, where they did a roundup of VCS software. The pair seemed to really enjoy the game, as it received an honorable mention in their 1981 Arcade Alley Awards in the categories of best competitive game, best sports game and most innovative. The game also received a brief review in the June 1983 edition of Video Games, where it was described as a “good, rousing game” with solid sound effects.
Decades later, Boxing would be the subject of a scientific experiment into fuzzy logic for game AI. In a study presented in 2011, researchers from the University of Manitoba and the K.N. Toosi University of Technology in Tehran described using it as a base to create Clever Boxer, a Visual C# remake where the boxers have the ability to rotate, but more importantly, have the option of being controlled by a scripted AI or through fuzzy logic. A scripted AI is closer to how the original computer opponent handles, reacting to opponents in a predetermined way based on what they do; through fuzzy logic, the computer’s decisions are not so cut and dry, resulting in a more dynamic foe. The study concluded that while scripted opponents had numerous repetitive behaviors over the course of multiple matches, when even one is operating with fuzzy logic, the game gets more unpredictable and tends to adapt to new situations more effectively. There are a few VCS games that have served as baselines for computer studies in recent years owing to their relative simplicity, and certainly the stripped-down nature of Boxing makes it well-suited for this particular vein of research.
Mattel would publish its own boxing game around October 1981, though this version has much more in common with APF’s take than Activision’s, from the angle to the very methodology of the boxing controls. Players can choose from six boxers, two of them with balanced stats, three with specific strengths and weaknesses, and one with random stats each fight. You then get 15 90-second rounds to either win on points or knock out your opponent. The game uses the Intellivision keypad for its controls, with the disc relegated to maneuvering around the ring and the side buttons going unused. There are multiple types of punches to choose from in the bout itself, along with feints and dodges, and even combination attacks. In typical Intellivision fashion the aim here is to try and make the game close to the real deal, and despite its complexities and unusual control scheme, this version certainly is more accessible to new players than some of their other attempts at home sports. The only downside is that it has no computer opponent.
Boxing seems to have been pretty successful for Mattel. Through June 1983, the game shipped 475,700 units to stores. In fact of all the 1981 releases, it seemed to do the best of all the non-space-themed games at 137,200 units, which is a pretty good achievement given how rabid the gaming public was for space-themed titles at the time. Reviews also bear out its appreciation, with Video Games’ June 1983 sports game roundup describing it as having terrific attention to detail. They also indicate that while it is challenging to master, it is fairly easy to pick up and play, making it a great experience… adding that the endurance fighter is their pick as the “top tier” of the title. Mattel’s Boxing was also reviewed by Electronic Games in July 1982, where Kunkel and Katz wrote that it lived up to Mattel’s image as the go-to for outstanding sports games, and while it could have used better color selections, it is overall a fine treatment of its originating contest. The company nearly included it in a Go For the Gold Olympics-themed package, alongside its skiing, basketball and hockey games, but Mattel Electronics closed its doors in January 1984 before it could go to manufacturing.
Surprisingly, Atari itself would not publish its own take on boxing on the VCS until 1988, when Realsports Boxing finally made its debut. This is more in line with the Intellivision version, with multiple boxers and a side-angle view, though the in-ring mobility has some echoes of Whitehead’s own Boxing title. The complexity is what you’d expect from a game of its era, though this does render it a bit harder to jump right into without studying the manual first compared to the relative simplicity of Activision’s version.
Boxing would not be Whitehead’s last trip to the sports well on the VCS. We’ll see the next such game in a few months with Skiing, and he would eventually follow this up with Sky Jinks in the years to come. Boxing may be the most approachable of all these, however – matches are speedy (if exhausting), it’s immediately apparent what you’re trying to do, and it’s really just fun to go head to head with your friends. It’s simple and certainly not the most realistic take on the sport, but it works incredibly well for the hardware it’s running on. There’s no indication that Activision’s Boxing had any influence on future titles in the genre, but this doesn’t detract from the timelessness of the game itself. Boxing continues a trend of standout titles for Activision in its first year and for the VCS in 1980.
Sources:
Bob Whitehead, interview with the author, September 4 2018
Bob Whitehead, interview with Scott Stilphen, Ataricompendium.com, 2005
Mike Albaugh, interview with Scott Stilphen, Ataricompendium.com, 2017
A New Era Begins: Activision Exploits Atari’s Success, Bill Kunkel and Arnie Katz, Video, December 1980
The 1981 Game Awards: The Best of a Great Year, Bill Kunkel and Arnie Katz, Video, March 1981
They’ve Got Their Act-ivision Together, Randi Hacker, Video Games, August 1982
Video Sports Games Illustrated Part 2, Noah Greenberg, Video Games, June 1983
Boxing, blueskyrangers.com
Intellivision: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie, Tom Boellstorff and Braxton Soderman, 2024
Spock Ships!, Imagine That! The Story of One of the First African Americans to Work in the Design of Video Games and Personal Computers, Ed Smith, 2020
All in Color for a Quarter, Keith Smith, 2016 (unpublished manuscript)
Olympic Boxing, 101 BASIC Computer Games, David Ahl, 1973
Cartridge Shipment Memo, Mattel Electronics dated Nov. 30, 1983
Deploying Fuzzy Logic in a Boxing Game, Hamid Reza Nasrinpour et al, 6th Annual International North-American Conference on AI and Simulation in Games, September 2011
Release date sources:
Boxing (Activision, August 1980): Weekly Television Digest, April 28 1980; New York Daily News, August 22 1980; Winnipeg Free Press, November 22 1980; Asbury Park Press, October 9 1980; Merchandising, June 1980
Boxing (APF, November 1979): Janesville Gazette, November 21 1979
Boxing (Intellivision, October 1981): Coshocton Tribune, November 25 1981; Dover Times Reporter, November 27 1980; Electronic Games, May 1982; Merchandising, October 1981; Merchandising, December 1981;Blue Sky Rangers game list; Toy & Hobby World, October 1981
Realsports Boxing (December 1987): Computer Entertainer, March 1988; Baltimore Sun, March 17 1988; Albuquerque Journal, March 17 1988; Atari 1987 internal sales figures