Tag: Sears
Atari’s fourth and final game from July 1980 follows in the footsteps of games like Night Driver, Outlaw, Indy 500 and numerous others in being a home conversion of a 1970s arcade game that is much, much better known today by its VCS counterpart. And much like Outlaw before it, Circus Atari – or the much more direct Sears title, Circus – is an unlicensed version of another company’s original; in this case it’s Exidy’s 1977 arcade game simply named Circus.
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.
Of all the original games Atari put out for the VCS, Adventure may be the one that most people are familiar with today. Warren Robinett’s third and final VCS game – though seemingly the second to actually be released – serves as a counterweight to the arcade action of its March 1980 brethren Space Invaders by providing a nearly unique experience on a home console in its day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.