Category: Atari VCS

Histories of each Atari VCS game.

Golf – July 1980

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

It’s been over a year, but Atari has returned to the world of sports with the company’s take on plain old, windmill-free golf. You may recall that the company had published a version of Miniature Golf in March of 1979 seemingly based on an unreleased arcade game. Golf, based on the regular version of the sport, is substantially different in just about every aspect, and feels like a better realized, more functional game all around… just not one that necessarily moves the video golf genre forward a whole lot owing to its console-oriented origins.

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Night Driver – July 1980

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

These days, nearly every racing game published is designed around the player’s viewpoint being either behind the car or in the driver’s seat itself. While Night Driver did not originate this perspective, it without question popularized it both in arcades and in Atari’s home conversion.

Yes, Night Driver is a return to the realm of first-party arcade conversions for Atari – something not seen since March 1979’s Canyon Bomber and Sky Diver ports. The VCS version is based off of the October 1976 arcade game of the same name, then nearly four years old by this point. But the technical marvel that was arcade Night Driver and its fast paced, first-person perspective is no less impressive in the scaled down VCS port, as a machine designed to play versions of Tank and Pong is once again pushed to new ground.  But that same arcade game has something of a sordid history, as Atari and two of its arcade competitors practically lifted it wholesale from a German arcade game, Nürburgring 1.

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BASIC Programming – April 1980

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

Warren Robinett’s BASIC Programming may be the oddest fit for the VCS out of any cartridge released on the platform – certainly it’s the oddest first party release. It’s not really a game in any sense of the word; rather, it’s a version of the BASIC computer language designed to run on the VCS. I’ll preface this by noting that I am not a programmer and haven’t really written any code since high school aside from type-in programs, but that degree of familiarity is what this cartridge expects out of its audience.

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Adventure – March 1980

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

Of all the original games Atari put out for the VCS, Adventure may be the one that most people are familiar with today. Warren Robinett’s third and final VCS game – though seemingly the second to actually be released – serves as a counterweight to the arcade action of its March 1980 brethren Space Invaders by providing a nearly unique experience on a home console in its day.

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Space Invaders – March 1980

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

The Atari VCS was supported commercially on the market for a mind-boggling 14 years, starting in 1977 and ending its run in 1991. There are a handful of incredibly notable moments in time during the system’s life on the market, and March 1980 might be the most important one for the console’s fortunes – and for those of the home video game industry in North America. It was that month that one of the biggest VCS games ever published, Space Invaders started hitting store shelves, a cartridge that can be directly credited with making the VCS the runaway hit and social icon for the era that it became. Simply put: without Space Invaders, the VCS probably would have never survived another 11 years, let alone to have the kind of afterlife it’s seen since then.

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Video Chess – November 1979

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

 

The final VCS game from the 1970s was a long time coming. Video Chess is a technical feat in several ways, and it’s also a game that owes its existence in part to a marketing decision dating back to the VCS launch back in 1977, and to the joint efforts of one of the original software developers on the platform and one of the company’s star programmers making it a reality.

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Backgammon – November 1979

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

While not nearly as obviously exciting as Superman, the last two VCS games to come out in 1979 push boundaries in their own technical ways. Backgammon and Video Chess are both attempts to bring their respective strategy board games to a platform not suited for the necessary thought processes or even displaying the game boards. Up to this point bringing these types of games to the platform hadn’t really been attempted – the closest is Codebreaker, but that doesn’t have nearly the level of variables as these two and is a much simpler game to display. Both Backgammon and Video Chess have intertwined development histories, but for my purposes, we’ll be talking about them separately.

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Superman – September 1979

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

 

We’ve come to the first of three VCS games published in the fall of 1979, and it’s a doozy. Superman is an incredibly ambitious game completely unlike anything seen up to this point on the VCS or its competitors; indeed, it’s an experience more in line with the games one would find specially made for computers. And what’s more, Superman absolutely succeeds in these ambitions: it’s a multiscreen adventure with a story, distinct goals the player has to achieve before they can reach an actual win state, and a conclusion to the tale and the game.

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Slot Machine (Slots) – March 1979

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

Here we are with the third and final gambling game to be published on the VCS during its commercial life. Unlike Blackjack and Casino, Slot Machine trades in card games in favor of a simulation of, as the name suggests, a slot machine. In this respect it succeeds in producing a perfectly accurate take on slots, but there’s not a whole lot else to it.

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Miniature Golf (Arcade Golf) – March 1979

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

When discussing and playing Atari VCS games, a certain degree of abstraction is expected. Backgrounds are low resolution, and the missile and ball sprites are quite limited in appearance. As such, chunky sprites and blocks representing people, footballs, basketball hoops, cars and so on are the norm. Even by these standards, Miniature Golf, also known as Arcade Golf in its Sears release, is an incredibly abstract take on golf’s fast-paced, wacky cousin.

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