Tag: Bally BASIC
While Atari itself may have wrapped up its 1980 wares in September, Activision had two final games for the year. The company itself announced these as shipping in December for sale in January, though it does appear at least some retailers started receiving and advertising them as available late in the month, shortly before the Christmas holiday in the US. Of these two games, Skiing is unquestionably the better known release today, as it wound up as an excellent rendition of the snowy sport.
September 1980 saw a surprising amount of maze-related content published on the VCS. In addition to Carla Meninsky’s Dodge ‘Em, Atari also published Rick Maurer’s follow-up to the smash hit Space Invaders: Maze Craze, also known as Maze Mania under its Sears title. And unlike Dodge ‘Em or 1978’s Slot Racers, Maze Craze is less about doing things within the maze so much as it is about navigating the maze itself.
Atari has once again returned to the pool of arcade conversions for its second of three fall 1980 releases, Dodge ‘Em. Like Circus Atari or Space Invaders, it’s an excellent home version of a fairly popular game from the 1970s, Head-On, meaning that just like those two, it’s a classic home version of a classic game… albeit not an official one. Much as was the case with Circus Atari, Dodge ‘Em – or Dodger Cars, under the Sears branding – is another unlicensed clone of someone else’s game.
By sheer coincidence, Activision and Atari both published VCS versions of the board game checkers roughly a month apart. Activision’s Checkers, by Alan Miller, started reaching stores in August, beating Atari’s effort to retailers. While it looks graphically more interesting, whether or not it bests the version published by his former employer depends on what you value in your board game translations.
Since Space Invaders kicked off the 1980 lineup of VCS games, it’s clear that this is the year that the platform as we know it today truly started to take shape. It’s the year that the VCS became a monster commercial success and pulled the home console market out from a small niche and into what would become a billion-dollar industry, but while Space Invaders had a big role in that, so too did the rise of third party publishers.
The idea of a “third party,” or a company besides the manufacturer publishing programs, existed in the realm of computers for years at this point. Small publishers had been selling programs for microcomputers such as the Apple II for some time by 1980, and even further back companies like RCA had published programs for IBM minicomputers. You could even make the case that open-source, freely available games and programs that date back to the 1960s were a precursor to the concept of a “third party” publisher popularized in the mid-’70s by companies like Microsoft. But the home video game market was a “walled garden” in the 1970s: the only companies producing games for a platform were the same companies that had made the hardware. If you owned a VCS, you had to choose from Atari’s games. If you bought an MP1000, you were limited to what APF was publishing. The only real exception was Bally’s BASIC cart for the Professional Arcade, which allowed people to write their own programs and make code listings or cassette tapes available for sale, but even this was, by 1980, primarily a hobbyist pursuit and quite niche. But in July of that year, the company Activision published its first four games for a game console they didn’t make or own: Fishing Derby, Boxing, Dragster, and Checkers. In the process Activision set the game industry down a path where today third party publishers and developers make up the vast majority of what’s out there.
3-D Tic-Tac-Toe, by Carol Shaw – yes, the same Carol Shaw who would write seminal classic River Raid – is in some ways the most ambitious of the four games Atari published in July 1980 – a group that includes Night Driver, Golf, and Circus Atari – though it certainly doesn’t seem like it at first glance.
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.
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.
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.
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.