Tag: Channel F
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.
While David Crane’s other August release, Fishing Derby, was a unique experience in the gaming space, the same can’t exactly be said for his other Activision debut cartridge. Atari’s first-party releases to this point are predominantly made up of arcade conversions and takes on real world activities, and with today’s game, Dragster, David Crane covered both of those bases for his new company – just with some serial numbers filed off.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.