Month: February 2025
When discussing and playing Atari VCS games, a certain degree of abstraction is expected. Backgrounds are low resolution, and the missile and ball sprites are quite limited in appearance. As such, chunky sprites and blocks representing people, footballs, basketball hoops, cars and so on are the norm. Even by these standards, Miniature Golf, also known as Arcade Golf in its Sears release, is an incredibly abstract take on golf’s fast-paced, wacky cousin.
When the VCS launched around August 1977, one of its initial nine releases was Bob Whitehead’s Blackjack. This was a straightforward take on the classic card game that used the paddle controllers, allowing for up to three players to take on a computerized dealer with the goal of coming closest to a sum of 21 without going over. Whitehead explained that the programmers liked to joke about the target demographic being teenagers between the ages of 18 and 35 (which accounted for all of them), and Blackjack was one such game that he felt he’d be interested in playing. He wasn’t the only person who thought so, as RCA and Fairchild published their own Blackjack cartridges for the Channel F and Studio II, and in the years to come card games would appear on several other platforms as they launched as well. Gambling games were seen as something that game companies could sell to adults, and so seemingly everybody had at least one game of chance for sale on their game system. Whitehead had bigger ideas than just Blackjack, though. Halfway through development Whitehead decided he wanted to try and expand it to include other card games, but due to a need to pump out product ended up shelving the idea. He would ultimately get the opportunity to revisit the idea and create an expanded card game collection simply called Casino, or Poker Plus under the Sears label.
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.
Here we go again with another sports game for the Atari VCS that is a bit of an odd fit for the console. Unlike two other prominent and effective sports translations to the platform – fellow March release Bowling and 1978’s Basketball – Football is a game that, by its nature, requires teams to field far more players than the limited number of sprites the VCS can normally place on screen. Despite this, the game actually kind of works, and is a fun, if not terribly accurate, take on the sport.
Football was written by Bob Whitehead, the same fellow behind the 1978 release Home Run – another team sports game that tried to translate something the VCS is ill-suited for. In fact, Whitehead said that Football runs a similar kernel as Home Run – a kernel being a graphics-generating part of the program, essentially the VCS equivalent of a game’s engine. In that game, he was able to multiplex sprites to create a line of three fielders at a given time, and using sprite flickering – alternating which sprite appears where on each individual frame – he could create the appearance of many more players on the field at once. This technique doesn’t come across great on modern displays, but on an old cathode-ray tube television, it’s a bit more subtle. Like baseball, football requires a lot of players, so Whitehead once again combined multiplexed sprites with flicker to field two teams of four players each, alternating which player is visible each frame.