Tag: Sears

Superman – September 1979

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

 

We’ve come to the first of three VCS games published in the fall of 1979, and it’s a doozy. Superman is an incredibly ambitious game completely unlike anything seen up to this point on the VCS or its competitors; indeed, it’s an experience more in line with the games one would find specially made for computers. And what’s more, Superman absolutely succeeds in these ambitions: it’s a multiscreen adventure with a story, distinct goals the player has to achieve before they can reach an actual win state, and a conclusion to the tale and the game.

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Sky Diver (Dare Diver) – March 1979

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

In writing about Human Cannonball, I mentioned how odd it was that it came out alongside another daredevil themed game. This short-lived experiment in theme synergy might be something that only could have still worked in this last gasp of the 1970s daredevil craze in the United States, but I can safely say that Sky Diver – released by Sears as Dare Diver – is a much stronger and funnier than its cannon-based counterpart. I would go so far as to say that it stands in the upper echelon of great multiplayer games on the VCS, and certainly it’s one of the stronger entries on any home console in its day.

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Human Cannonball (Cannon Man) – March 1979

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

While so many home games of the late 1970s seem like perfunctory takes on arcade games or real-world activities, sometimes they get really strange… such as today’s game, Human Cannonball. As the name suggests, Human Cannonball is a game where you’re firing a person out of a cannon and trying to hit a target – in this case, a basket-shaped water tower – to score points. Much like last episode’s game, Canyon Bomber, this carnival-esque concept is complicated by physics. This essentially makes Human Cannonball a one-player artillery game; depending on the game type, you’re adjusting the cannon’s angle, the amount of power behind the shot, and location, all in service of nailing the target while also accounting for distance.

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Canyon Bomber – March 1979

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

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.

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Atari Archive: the book!

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

I don’t know how often folks check this website, but I wanted to bring your attention to something I am exceedingly proud of that came out this year: my book!

Copies of the Atari Archive Vol. 1 book.Entitled Atari Archive Vol. 1: 1977-1978, this covers the first two years of the Atari VCS’s life… and then some. If you’ve seen the video series or read this blog, you can guess the format of the book – much of it consists of delving into the history behind each game released in that two-year stint. The chapters are derived from these blog posts, but they aren’t identical, as I was able to come across some details during the writing of this book that I didn’t have putting the blog together.

But there’s additional content as well. In order to provide the context that I feel this particular era of video games demands, I also spent time delving into the state of the industry before the VCS’s debut, and dug in deeply on the creation and life of the VCS itself – even interviewing the surviving folks who were intimately involved in its development. There’s a chapter about the FCC’s impact on the video game home market in the 1970s, and chapters delving into the history behind all the competing programmable consoles from this era, pulling together all the sources I could possibly find for each one.  Topping it all off, we have an interview with Larry Wagner, the author of Combat and Video Chess (and the first head of Atari’s consumer development team for the VCS), a foreword by top-notch writer and my dear friend Jenn Frank, and absolutely lovely photography taken by Jeremy Parish of all the game boxes and cartridges – both the Atari and the Sears versions – as well as the consoles, the console boxes where i could source them, and some incredible rarities provided by other collectors. Rounding out the package are a slew of screenshots, flyer images, documentation and news clips where I could get reprinting permission.  I can’t guess the amount of time I put into this book, and I am really thrilled with how it came out.

Of course, with Twitter’s rapid demise it’s been difficult to promote it, and frankly I’ve been bad about pushing it as much as I really should be. But if you or someone you know is interested in the history of Atari or early video games in general, I think this is the book for you. My goal was to provide as definitive an overview of these games and this era as I could, and I’m confident enough to call it one of the best books on Atari and that time period of video games out there. You can buy it directly from the publisher, Limited Run Games, and on Amazon. And hey, if you don’t want to go through those, why not ask your local book store to stock it too?

Hunt & Score (Memory Match) – October 1978

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

If you’re going to sell a specialized controller, it’s important to ensure you have games that are going to make good use of it. It’s unlikely that Breakout would have worked particularly well if it didn’t have the paddle controller, and Brain Games makes excellent use of the keyboard controller to allow the player to tap a specific key to do exactly what they want. Which brings us to today’s game, Alan Miller’s Hunt and Score: the game uses the keyboard controllers pretty well, but it probably could have worked just fine without them.

Hunt and Score is the VCS take on a memory match game, which is not coincidentally the title Sears sold it under. You’ve got an array of squares, each with some kind of object underneath. The player’s goal is to match two identical objects in a turn. This incredibly simple concept has likely existed for at least as long as playing cards and their equivalents have, with the card game known under the title Concentration. And here, Miller brings that card game to the home console, without any need to shuffle a deck or clean up afterwards.

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Codebreaker – October 1978

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

the release of the Atari keyboard controllers in the fall of 1978 necessitated the development of games that actually use them. Atari’s developers were in need of game ideas that could play to the keyboards’ strengths, and as such turned primarily to existing mental puzzles and computer programs. We saw this last time with Larry Kaplan’s Brain Games, a collection of basic memory and mathematic games, and we’ll see it again next time with Hunt & Score. But for now, we’ve got Codebreaker, which is the VCS rendition of a pair of logic puzzle games with fuzzy origins; one dates back at least to the early 1900s and the other to around the 1500s in its current form, but is probably really a variant of a number game that goes back to the earliest days of human civilization.

The original version of the first game on this cart is known as Bulls and Cows for reasons I haven’t quite managed to put together. In that rendition, one player comes up with a secret, four-digit number and the other must try and guess it in as few turns as possible. After the second player gives their guess, the first player lets them know how close it is by telling them the number of cows – the number of digits that are correct but in the wrong position – and the number of bulls – the number of correct digits in the right spot. If the second player gets four bulls, they win the game. The game is probably better known under the name Mastermind, a codebreaking game using colored pegs instead of numbers that was first published commercially in 1971 by Invicta Games.

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Basketball – October 1978

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

We’ve seen a slow progression of video game sports through the 1970s up to this point, both on the VCS and off of it. Pong was a deeply simplified version of ping pong, and all the other sports games on the original Magnavox Odyssey were functionally the same basic thing. The same holds true for a number of early arcade sports renditions: hockey becomes Pong with a specific goal area, Volleyball and Basketball become vertically oriented versions of Pong, and so on. Racing games got to become their own genre pretty early on, however, and baseball followed shortly thereafter. 1978 would prove to be a watershed moment for one particular sport, however, as a full, non-Pong version of Basketball made its debut on the Atari VCS.

Coincidentally release at the same time as another basketball game that came out alongside the Magnavox Odyssey2 in 1978, Atari’s VCS version of the sport is seemingly the first commercial attempt at the game to really try and translate the major appeal of basketball into a video game. Creator Alan Miller has noted that he played on his high school basketball team, and as the eldest of six kids had spent a lot of time in his youth coming up with games for everyone to play; it seems likely that he wanted to try and translate a sport he enjoyed to the VCS, and he largely succeeded.

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Breakout (Breakaway IV) – October 1978

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

It’s undeniable that Atari initially made its name with Pong. This simple two-player take on a tennis game was an incredible arcade success for the company, with competing clone machines popping up in the years following its 1972 debut. Even the earliest years of the home console market saw an array of Pong clones – itself a clone of the tennis game on the original Magnavox Odyssey. There is just one problem with Pong: It’s a two-player game. If you don’t have someone to play with, you’re not going to spend money on it.

There are two ways to tackle this problem, and Atari essentially covered them both. The first is the solution seen in the 1977 VCS game Video Olympics, where developer Joe Decuir programmed a simple computer opponent for players to compete against. This required actually having the memory available and the processing power to actually create your digital foe, and in the mid-1970s these were both in short supply. The other option was to reimagine Pong as a single player game.

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Flag Capture (Capture) – October 1978

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

This game is something of a treat for these early years of the VCS. Not only is it an original game concept, it’s actually a pretty nifty title in its own right. Flag Capture doesn’t exactly have name cachet like Combat or Outlaw, and arguably it’s one of the more overlooked non-sports games from the console’s first few years, but it’s absolutely a treasure.

Flag Capture, released as simply “Capture” by Sears, is the first game that developer Jim Huether wrote for Atari. In interviews, Huether has said that he originally wanted to port the board game Stratego to the console. For the unfamiliar, Stratego is a two player game where each side sets up a field of soldiers and bombs, but their opponent has no idea which is in which space (and vice versa). You simply have to approach with one of your pieces and attack; if it’s a soldier, whoever has the higher rank will win the battle (with the exception of the spy, who can kill anyone he attacks first). If someone other than a miner lands on a bomb, they are removed from the board, otherwise the bomb is removed; it carries on like this until someone finds their opponent’s flag piece. This is a lot of complexity to ask from a 2k Atari VCS cartridge and on a single screen, so rather than try to adapt Stratego in its entirety, Huether boiled it down to the underlying idea behind the game: finding a flag before your opponent.

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