Tag: 1980

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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