Category: Atari VCS

Histories of each Atari VCS game.

Bowling – March 1979

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

Atari’s new president, Ray Kassar, felt that only releasing new game cartridges for the holiday season was the wrong approach. Rather, Atari should follow what its competitors like Fairchild and RCA had been doing, and release new games throughout the year. While Atari had presented this as part of its plans in both 1977 and 1978 at various points, it did not follow through on these intentions until after Nolan Bushnell had been ousted at the end of 1978. And so, around March 1979, Atari published eight new cartridges for its VCS as part of a “first wave” for the year, including its own home version of the sport of kings, Bowling.

Bowling on the original FRED prototype.

Atari was not the first company to consider producing a take on the best sport you can drink to. Electromechanical versions of Bowling existed in arcades and bars for decades before commercial video games started hitting the scene, and as the sport gained popularity in the 1970s there was interest in developing a video game version of it.  Which brings us to RCA engineer Joe Weisbecker, who created a homemade computer called FRED and got it taken up as a formal RCA project once the company exited the mainframe computer market in 1971. Weisbecker and his group of computer engineers worked over several years to refine FRED into something that could have commercial legs, and games were a major consideration… including bowling. Weisbecker developed a primitive bowling game for the FRED around August 16, 1972 as described in an internal RCA memo, which kept track of the frame and your score. A ball would simply float back and forth on the lane until the player hit a button to send it on its way towards the pins, with a curve being optional. While visually the game is a bit unimpressive today, it would keep track of the score between the players, and even included a primitive method of including audio on the otherwise silent computer. With the right cassette tape hooked up to the computer, it could sync the ball toss action to an audio recording made from a bowling alley.

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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Brain Games – October 1978

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

The vast majority of the early VCS games covered so far were games that the developers were personally interested in putting together. Whether these were ports of popular arcade games, conversions of tabletop timewasters, or novel concepts, marketing had largely stayed out of the way on what games came along and focused on selling them. But there were exceptions, even at this stage, of which Brain Games is one.

The crux of the marketing department’s request involves the VCS’s mix of controllers. You’ve got the two major ones that were packed in with the console itself from the get go: the joystick and the paddle controllers. The vast majority of the games on the platform use the joystick, which is surprisingly flexible for having one button. A smaller number use the paddle controller, which is much more limited in the types of games that it excels at; developer Larry Kaplan noted that marketing specifically requested that the programmers create games that use the paddles to ensure that users were still getting use out of them, which is why he put together Street Racer for the VCS’s 1977 lineup. The VCS also hosted two other controller types though: The driving controller, used in the system’s heyday with only Indy 500; and the keyboard controller.

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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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Outlaw (Gunslinger) – October 1978

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

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.

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Slot Racers (Maze) – October 1978

Posted on by Kevin Bunch
Atari catalog, 1978

Most of the Atari VCS games we’ve looked at so far are ones where you know what you’re getting into just from the title. A game named Indy 500 is probably about racing. Space War is most likely going to have you fighting in outer space. Blackjack is going to involve playing cards, and so forth. But then you get to Slot Racers, and you’re probably going to be kind of baffled. What the heck is going on here, you might ask? After all, slot racing in real life is little more than model cars you insert into an electrically connected track and drive around a predetermined route. This game has player vehicles driving around a maze shooting at each other. If you have the Sears version of the game, which was released under the title Maze, you might have a better idea of what you’re getting into here. But the reason Slot Racers seems so far removed from the source material is because that wasn’t the premise in the first place.

But before we get into that, we have to step back a moment and recognize that Slot Racers is the first Atari VCS game developed by Warren Robinett. Best known for his seminal 1980 VCS game Adventure, Robinett was part of the second hiring wave of Atari home video game programmers, coming on board in November 1977 – shortly after other notable Atari developers like David Crane and Jim Huether joined the company. Robinett wrote about his experiences at Atari and developing Slot Racers in his book (unpublished as of this writing), and graciously provided me with a copy of the manuscript to help describe the development of his three VCS titles. He also explained to me that he felt that the best way to figure out how to program a game for the VCS within its limitations is to just start writing a complete one, and while driving to work one day he had an idea in his head for a game he called “Traffic.” In it, two cars would be driving around a city maze firing rockets at each other in a severe case of road rage.

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Home Run (Baseball) – October 1978

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

I don’t think it’s a secret that baseball, as a sport, doesn’t lend itself well to early video game consoles. One team is always going to have nine players on the field, while the other is dealing with their batter, along with any base runners they might have on the field at the moment. Meanwhile, the consoles in question typically are limited in resolution, controller input options, and memory. But that didn’t stop programmers and developers from trying their best to translate the popular sport to the video game machines of the day, and eventually they succeeded in making some really good renditions of America’s pasttime. Unfortunately, Atari’s Home Run, released by Sears as simply Baseball, is more of an iterative step on that journey rather than one of the benchmarks.

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Hangman (Spelling) – October 1978

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

In the early days of home game development, it was pretty plain to see when developers were pulling from an existing arcade title, and when they appeared to just be seeing what they could make work on a microprocessor. Hangman, released by Sears as Spelling, seems very much like the latter. It falls into the category of games that can be played with another person around the house, albeit not a terribly exciting one.

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Space War (Space Combat) – October 1978

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

Fresh off a strong and successful 1977, Atari’s Video Computer System was in a good place. Hundreds of thousands of units had been sold; the company’s home game design team continued to grow and was getting more experienced. Having exhausted most of Atari’s top-tier arcade titles, those same developers had to get creative on what to make next. One of those designers, Ian Shepherd, seemed to have decided to look backwards for inspiration – about 15 years backwards, specifically, to one of the very first video games ever designed: Spacewar.

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Surround (Chase) – September 1977

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

Ask someone what they know about Tron, and odds that if they know it at all, it’s probably because of the light cycle sequence. In it, cyclists create walls of light behind them as they move, trying to trap their opponent and cause them to crash. As it happens, that idea didn’t originate with Disney, but dates back to the 1976 Gremlin arcade game Blockade. And as we’ll see, Blockade would find itself cloned time and again, including by Atari for the VCS with Surround.

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Basic Math (Math) – September 1977

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

 

For as long as people have been mashing up numbers, they’ve been looking for ways to make the process easier. Whether it’s mathematical techniques like long division or using an abacus to keep track of large numbers, anything that can help reduce human error, we like.  And similarly, anything that might make teaching math easier, well, we’ll give that a shot too.

It’s no secret that computers are good at math problems, and the introduction of the pocket calculator in 1971 gave the general public its first real opportunity to find that out firsthand; suddenly, the idea that using a computer to learn things that traditionally required books, paper and pencil didn’t seem so far-fetched. And so when the first programmable game consoles started arriving on the market, they all tried to position themselves as being more than just game machines – they could teach your kids math, vocabulary, and even some social studies in a fun, entertaining environment.

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Blackjack – September 1977

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From early on, video games have been translating the games people play in the physical realm to the digital. Sometimes this manifests as a sport, like racing cars, but it can also take the shape of something you might play in everyday life. One of the earliest computer games was a 1954 computer conversion of blackjack done on an IBM-701 by Los Alamos engineers to break down the best ways to play the game, and it would prove to be a popular target for computer programs in the 1960s and 70s, with early renditions such as David Frailey’s September 1967 version for DEC’s PDP computer line, and another written in BASIC that was included in David Ahl’s seminal book, 101 BASIC Computer Games.  With this kind of background, it’s not terribly surprising that the card game was routinely among the earliest releases on the first programmable consoles, either.

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Star Ship (Outer Space) – September 1977

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

 

Outer space has been a part of video games almost since their inception. One of the earliest computer games, Spacewar, came about in part because its designers were fans of pulpy science fiction stories such as the Lensman series. Spacewar went on to serve as inspiration for the first commercial arcade game, Computer Space, providing the first glimpse of the setting for public gaming consumption by having players shoot down UFOs within a time limit. Spacewar and the television series Star Trek inspired a text-based fan-made Star Trek computer game in 1971, with players jumping from sector to sector seeking out Klingon ships. But 1977 would prove to be an inflection point for a couple reasons.

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Street Racer (Speedway II) – September 1977

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No small number of VCS titles from 1977 were based on arcade games. Tank begat Combat, from Anti-Aircraft came Air Sea Battle, Pong morphed into Video Olympics, Indy 800 brought us Indy 500, Star Ship is based on Starship I, and Surround is a conversion of Dominos. But a few of these early games were unique creations, such as the one being highlighted here, Street Racer. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the weakest titles in the 1977 VCS lineup.

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Indy 500 (Race) – September 1977

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

 

When the Atari VCS launched in 1977, there were two racing games that went out alongside it. Indy 500 is almost without question the better of the two, and features some of the best racing action on the platform in its lengthy life. 

The overhead perspective and game mechanics seen in Indy 500 were pioneered by Atari in its March 1974 single-player arcade game Gran Trak 10, the company’s first true racing game. Gran Trak 10 was inspired by a pen-and-paper game called Racetrack published in the January 1973 edition of Scientific American. Developer Steve Mayer felt like the calculations used in that game to determine the movement of cars along a track could be used in a video game. Larry Emmons did the circuit design, and eventually Ron Milner came on board to help them finish the game, which included several firsts for arcade games: it’s the first game to use a ROM chip to store sprite data rather than hard-coding characters on the board. It’s the first game to use a dedicated monitor rather than repurposing a television, and it’s the first game to use interlaced video for its display. Essentially, the game will draw all the odd-numbered scanlines first and then circle back around for the even-numbered scanlines, which allowed for higher resolution and smoother animation. Despite all these innovations, Gran Trak 10’s production was a debacle, with manufacturing problems, pricing problems and expensive parts. The issues were great enough that even though the game sold around 10,000 units, Atari still took a hit in 1974 that put them $600,000 in the red. The game was nevertheless reportedly successful for arcade operators.

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Video Olympics (Pong Sports) – September 1977

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

 

When the VCS hardware was being conceived by Jay Miner and Joe Decuir, their mission was to build a console capable of playing, at minimum, home versions of Atari’s Tank and Pong arcade games. Tank was the proof of concept game that would later be fleshed out into the pack-in title Combat by Larry Wagner, but even after hiring a group of programmers in 1976, by early 1977 nobody had taken up the task of writing a commercially viable Pong game for the system.

  Of course, even by 1977 Pong was an old game concept. The arcade version launched in 1972 as the first commercial game released by Atari following the Computer Space game that Atari founder Nolan Bushnell had worked on alongside Ted Dabney. Computer Space had been published by Nutting Associates the previous year, but was considered in retrospect by Bushnell to be too hard to control for a game set up in bars and bowling alleys. Bushnell tasked early hire Al Alcorn with recreating a simplified version of the Magnavox Odyssey’s tennis game using arcade hardware as a test project, to familiarize himself with Dabney’s circuitry and their game design technology in general. Bushnell motivated Alcorn by telling him they already had a contract with General Electric to produce this game and that it had to cost less than $15 in parts. Alcorn simplified the game design from the Odyssey by eliminating the extra paddles that allowed players to move horizonally and affect the ball’s flight directly; instead, players can only move along a vertical axis, and the ball’s angle is determined entirely by where it connects with the paddles. Bushnell wanted cheering and boos as background audio, but Alcorn simply found tones that were already being generated by the game and hooked them into the speaker instead.

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Air-Sea Battle (Target Fun) – September 1977

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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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Combat (Tank Plus) – August, 1977

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

 

The 1970s were a time of rapid growth and change in the nascent video game industry. Over the course of the decade, arcade video games were commercially introduced, grew in complexity, and shifted from black-and-white to color. But the video game industry as we know it started in the home, and there was a great deal of interest in bringing those arcade experiences back to the rumpus room. Much like the earliest arcade games, early home consoles were dedicated machines capable of only playing whatever the circuitry had built in. There was no real programming involved because there weren’t really microprocessors available to run these games; as such game design was in large part a function of hardware design. Although Magnavox’s Odyssey system functionally was the home market for the first few years – featuring changeable cards that, under the hood, were little more than circuitry that told the hardware to use specific rules for whatever game – around 1975 the market was flooded with dedicated consoles that largely worked to recreate the popular arcade game Pong.  Such a market was always going at risk of becoming a fad the same way that CB radios or digital watches were, and electronics giants like Fairchild and RCA were in a race with arcade game developers such as Atari and Bally to change that paradigm and hit the storefronts with consoles capable of interchangeable, new games with a sturdier shelf life.

Atari’s effort, the Video Computer System, had its first proof-of-concept prototype design completed on paper in December 1975, by engineers Steve Mayer and Ron Milner of Cyan Engineering, which was a subsidiary of Atari. Mayer and Milner had been discussing how to follow up Atari’s Home Pong dedicated console that summer when Mayer suggested moving away  from dedicated consoles, which required designing from the ground up new circuits and hardware for each new game, to building a base unit with different ROM chips that could be plugged into it to run games instead. The idea of porting the popular arcade game Tank – which was produced by another Atari subsidiary, Kee Games and published in November 1974 – was in the front of the engineers’ minds as a natural follow up to Pong. The initial prototype design included the idea of running what would become Combat on the eventual system, and used the arcade machine’s dual-stick control setup to run a basic version of Tank as a proof-of-concept. A second pair of hardware designers named Jay Miner and Joe Decuir were charged with building out that prototype design and turning it into a commercial product, with one basic edict: That the VCS should be able to run home versions of Tank and Pong, as well as home versions of other popular arcade titles such as Jet Fighter and Gran Trak 10.

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