While Atari was working on developing its first programmable machine, the Video Computer System, the bare-minimum goal was to have something that could run home versions of their 1970s hit games, notably Tank and Pong. The company hired a programming crew in 1976 to begin the task of turning what was the cutting edge of arcade releases into something playable on a dramatically less capable system, as well as beginning the work of making home-exclusive games.
Among those early hires was Larry Kaplan, who came on board in August of 1976 as the company’s first VCS software designer after impressing them by building his own Altair 8800 computer from a kit. Kaplan enjoyed taking advantage of the company’s free arcade game room and was a fan of the 1975 arcade game Anti-Aircraft located there, deciding to make that one of his first projects for the system still in development.
Anti-Aircraft, developed by Gary Waters and released in June 1975, is a fairly straightforward two-player game where each player fires anti-aircraft guns at horizontally passing planes or UFOs; in an early example of a video game easter egg of sorts, a minor board modification will change out the planes for alien ships. Scoring is based off of how many aircraft the player hit, and whoever has the higher score at the end of the time limit is the victor. As a relatively recent arcade game and one suited to two players, it fit Atari’s ideal of bringing its arcade hits home.
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