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.
When the VCS launched around August 1977, one of its initial nine releases was Bob Whitehead’s Blackjack. This was a straightforward take on the classic card game that used the paddle controllers, allowing for up to three players to take on a computerized dealer with the goal of coming closest to a sum of 21 without going over. Whitehead explained that the programmers liked to joke about the target demographic being teenagers between the ages of 18 and 35 (which accounted for all of them), and Blackjack was one such game that he felt he’d be interested in playing. He wasn’t the only person who thought so, as RCA and Fairchild published their own Blackjack cartridges for the Channel F and Studio II, and in the years to come card games would appear on several other platforms as they launched as well. Gambling games were seen as something that game companies could sell to adults, and so seemingly everybody had at least one game of chance for sale on their game system. Whitehead had bigger ideas than just Blackjack, though. Halfway through development Whitehead decided he wanted to try and expand it to include other card games, but due to a need to pump out product ended up shelving the idea. He would ultimately get the opportunity to revisit the idea and create an expanded card game collection simply called Casino, or Poker Plus under the Sears label.
In writing about Human Cannonball, I mentioned how odd it was that it came out alongside another daredevil themed game. This short-lived experiment in theme synergy might be something that only could have still worked in this last gasp of the 1970s daredevil craze in the United States, but I can safely say that Sky Diver – released by Sears as Dare Diver – is a much stronger and funnier than its cannon-based counterpart. I would go so far as to say that it stands in the upper echelon of great multiplayer games on the VCS, and certainly it’s one of the stronger entries on any home console in its day.
Here we go again with another sports game for the Atari VCS that is a bit of an odd fit for the console. Unlike two other prominent and effective sports translations to the platform – fellow March release Bowling and 1978’s Basketball – Football is a game that, by its nature, requires teams to field far more players than the limited number of sprites the VCS can normally place on screen. Despite this, the game actually kind of works, and is a fun, if not terribly accurate, take on the sport.
Football was written by Bob Whitehead, the same fellow behind the 1978 release Home Run – another team sports game that tried to translate something the VCS is ill-suited for. In fact, Whitehead said that Football runs a similar kernel as Home Run – a kernel being a graphics-generating part of the program, essentially the VCS equivalent of a game’s engine. In that game, he was able to multiplex sprites to create a line of three fielders at a given time, and using sprite flickering – alternating which sprite appears where on each individual frame – he could create the appearance of many more players on the field at once. This technique doesn’t come across great on modern displays, but on an old cathode-ray tube television, it’s a bit more subtle. Like baseball, football requires a lot of players, so Whitehead once again combined multiplexed sprites with flicker to field two teams of four players each, alternating which player is visible each frame.
While so many home games of the late 1970s seem like perfunctory takes on arcade games or real-world activities, sometimes they get really strange… such as today’s game, Human Cannonball. As the name suggests, Human Cannonball is a game where you’re firing a person out of a cannon and trying to hit a target – in this case, a basket-shaped water tower – to score points. Much like last episode’s game, Canyon Bomber, this carnival-esque concept is complicated by physics. This essentially makes Human Cannonball a one-player artillery game; depending on the game type, you’re adjusting the cannon’s angle, the amount of power behind the shot, and location, all in service of nailing the target while also accounting for distance.
March 1979 brought the VCS a slew of new releases, and while some of those were original works, others returned to the tried-and-true realm of arcade-to-console conversions. Canyon Bomber, written by David Crane, brings together two arcade games – the titular Canyon Bomber and Destroyer – into one faithful package, and even improves on them in a few aspects. Much like the arcade Canyon Bomber, two players are dropping bombs from airplanes into a canyon to destroy blocks of varying point values, while the Sea Bomber games see the players controlling aircraft that are dropping depth charges to catch submarines. Looking at them some 40 years later, the cartridge seems pretty fun, but it’s easy to overlook the technical wizardry Crane did to make these games work on the VCS. To truly appreciate those efforts, we have to first look at the arcade originals – both of which are really the first games ported to the VCS that came out *after* the console’s launch, making this cartridge something of a pioneer in a very large group of releases.
Atari’s new president, Ray Kassar, felt that only releasing new game cartridges for the holiday season was the wrong approach. Rather, Atari should follow what its competitors like Fairchild and RCA had been doing, and release new games throughout the year. While Atari had presented this as part of its plans in both 1977 and 1978 at various points, it did not follow through on these intentions until after Nolan Bushnell had been ousted at the end of 1978. And so, around March 1979, Atari published eight new cartridges for its VCS as part of a “first wave” for the year, including its own home version of the sport of kings, Bowling.
Atari was not the first company to consider producing a take on the best sport you can drink to. Electromechanical versions of Bowling existed in arcades and bars for decades before commercial video games started hitting the scene, and as the sport gained popularity in the 1970s there was interest in developing a video game version of it. Which brings us to RCA engineer Joe Weisbecker, who created a homemade computer called FRED and got it taken up as a formal RCA project once the company exited the mainframe computer market in 1971. Weisbecker and his group of computer engineers worked over several years to refine FRED into something that could have commercial legs, and games were a major consideration… including bowling. Weisbecker developed a primitive bowling game for the FRED around August 16, 1972 as described in an internal RCA memo, which kept track of the frame and your score. A ball would simply float back and forth on the lane until the player hit a button to send it on its way towards the pins, with a curve being optional. While visually the game is a bit unimpressive today, it would keep track of the score between the players, and even included a primitive method of including audio on the otherwise silent computer. With the right cassette tape hooked up to the computer, it could sync the ball toss action to an audio recording made from a bowling alley.
I don’t know how often folks check this website, but I wanted to bring your attention to something I am exceedingly proud of that came out this year: my book!
Entitled Atari Archive Vol. 1: 1977-1978, this covers the first two years of the Atari VCS’s life… and then some. If you’ve seen the video series or read this blog, you can guess the format of the book – much of it consists of delving into the history behind each game released in that two-year stint. The chapters are derived from these blog posts, but they aren’t identical, as I was able to come across some details during the writing of this book that I didn’t have putting the blog together.
But there’s additional content as well. In order to provide the context that I feel this particular era of video games demands, I also spent time delving into the state of the industry before the VCS’s debut, and dug in deeply on the creation and life of the VCS itself – even interviewing the surviving folks who were intimately involved in its development. There’s a chapter about the FCC’s impact on the video game home market in the 1970s, and chapters delving into the history behind all the competing programmable consoles from this era, pulling together all the sources I could possibly find for each one. Topping it all off, we have an interview with Larry Wagner, the author of Combat and Video Chess (and the first head of Atari’s consumer development team for the VCS), a foreword by top-notch writer and my dear friend Jenn Frank, and absolutely lovely photography taken by Jeremy Parish of all the game boxes and cartridges – both the Atari and the Sears versions – as well as the consoles, the console boxes where i could source them, and some incredible rarities provided by other collectors. Rounding out the package are a slew of screenshots, flyer images, documentation and news clips where I could get reprinting permission. I can’t guess the amount of time I put into this book, and I am really thrilled with how it came out.
Of course, with Twitter’s rapid demise it’s been difficult to promote it, and frankly I’ve been bad about pushing it as much as I really should be. But if you or someone you know is interested in the history of Atari or early video games in general, I think this is the book for you. My goal was to provide as definitive an overview of these games and this era as I could, and I’m confident enough to call it one of the best books on Atari and that time period of video games out there. You can buy it directly from the publisher, Limited Run Games, and on Amazon. And hey, if you don’t want to go through those, why not ask your local book store to stock it too?
If you’re going to sell a specialized controller, it’s important to ensure you have games that are going to make good use of it. It’s unlikely that Breakout would have worked particularly well if it didn’t have the paddle controller, and Brain Games makes excellent use of the keyboard controller to allow the player to tap a specific key to do exactly what they want. Which brings us to today’s game, Alan Miller’s Hunt and Score: the game uses the keyboard controllers pretty well, but it probably could have worked just fine without them.
Hunt and Score is the VCS take on a memory match game, which is not coincidentally the title Sears sold it under. You’ve got an array of squares, each with some kind of object underneath. The player’s goal is to match two identical objects in a turn. This incredibly simple concept has likely existed for at least as long as playing cards and their equivalents have, with the card game known under the title Concentration. And here, Miller brings that card game to the home console, without any need to shuffle a deck or clean up afterwards.
Continue reading “Hunt & Score (Memory Match) – October 1978”
the release of the Atari keyboard controllers in the fall of 1978 necessitated the development of games that actually use them. Atari’s developers were in need of game ideas that could play to the keyboards’ strengths, and as such turned primarily to existing mental puzzles and computer programs. We saw this last time with Larry Kaplan’s Brain Games, a collection of basic memory and mathematic games, and we’ll see it again next time with Hunt & Score. But for now, we’ve got Codebreaker, which is the VCS rendition of a pair of logic puzzle games with fuzzy origins; one dates back at least to the early 1900s and the other to around the 1500s in its current form, but is probably really a variant of a number game that goes back to the earliest days of human civilization.
The original version of the first game on this cart is known as Bulls and Cows for reasons I haven’t quite managed to put together. In that rendition, one player comes up with a secret, four-digit number and the other must try and guess it in as few turns as possible. After the second player gives their guess, the first player lets them know how close it is by telling them the number of cows – the number of digits that are correct but in the wrong position – and the number of bulls – the number of correct digits in the right spot. If the second player gets four bulls, they win the game. The game is probably better known under the name Mastermind, a codebreaking game using colored pegs instead of numbers that was first published commercially in 1971 by Invicta Games.