Tag: intellivision
March 1981 introduced a pair of novelties to the VCS library, in that they are first-party Atari games that are also retailer-exclusives. Steeplechase and Stellar Track are the first two of four games that had some kind of exclusivity to Sears, then one of the largest retailers in the United States and a partner of Atari’s in the home gaming space since it stocked Atari’s dedicated Pong console in 1975 under its own branding.
At this point in the VCS’s history, the platform has hosted a slew of traditional, real world games. Chess, checkers, backgammon, blackjack, and several others have helped fill out the VCS library with ways for enthusiasts to enjoy these games by themselves – or at the least a venue to play them without the setup. With that in mind, today’s game is practically the end of an era: Othello marks the last VCS game from Atari itself trying to translate one of these pastimes to the console. It is also incidentally the first of five games we’ll be looking at that came out in March 1981, which seems to have been the busiest month for new VCS releases that year.
Atari didn’t take long to open up 1981 with a new release, as Championship Soccer – or Pele’s Championship Soccer, as it was quickly rebranded – started reaching store shelves that February. Despite being initially planned for a fall 1980 release, the first real soccer game on the VCS was seemingly delayed until after the Christmas season.
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.
At the same time Alan Miller was working on Activision’s Checkers cartridge in late 1979, at Atari, Carol Shaw had started work on her own translation of the board game, with both designers oblivious to each others’ efforts. While not as visually striking as Miller’s game, Video Checkers has more options and a stronger computer opponent, making this a better challenge for those who are pretty decent players already. Continue reading “Video Checkers (Checkers) – September 1980”
After exiting Atari upon the completion of Video Chess and participating in the risky venture of starting up the novel idea of a third-party video game company, Bob Whitehead’s Activision debut showed up in August 1980 with another sports title, Boxing. This was his first project upon leaving Atari, but it’s very much in the same throughline as several of his previous games.
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.
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.
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.