Tag: David Crane
Rounding out the blockbuster year of 1980, Bridge is perhaps the most niche release to come out of Activision on the VCS. In fact, it’s arguably the most niche game on the platform. This is a single-player conversion of the team card game of the same name – a card game, it should be noted, that has appeared on home video game consoles approximately one time that I’m aware of, and that’s right here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Coming as it did at the tail end of westerns’ day in the sun, the old American west might not be the most popular setting in video games, but it has popped up a few times over the years, from Wild Gunman to Sunset Riders up to the recent Red Dead Redemption games. But if you want to see an early example of a video game western, then Outlaw has you covered.