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.
Canyon Bomber, released in November 1977, was the work of Wendi Adams, working off a suggestion by Nolan Bushnell for a game that Adams described as an upside-down Breakout. It bears some resemblance to a game idea described in an internal January 1975 memo as Bomber, where players would drop bombs on targets as they fly by, though there’s no clear connection that Bomber would become Canyon Bomber. Bomber may also have some relation to a November game proposal, Drop Zone, where the plane is countered by a second player controlling a missile launcher. Regardless on if these concepts evolved into Canyon Bomber or not, Adams’ game features one or two players flying over a canyon filled with spheres. Each sphere has a number denoting a point value; by dropping a bomb into these spheres, the values of any destroyed would count towards that player’s score. If the bomb fails to hit any spheres, the player’s count of allowed misses drops; missing three bombs means a game over for that player. What makes the game special is that it simulates gravity after a fashion – as bombs tear into the canyon, all the spheres above those destroyed will slip down to fill the gap. Adams managed to fit the game into a single, 2048 byte ROM chip, which she said in an interview won her a bet with her supervisor, Steve Calfee. Canyon Bomber is a fine game, albeit not terribly exciting. It’s easy to whiff your bombs if you’re not careful, but it’ll also count as a miss if you fail to drop a bomb before your plane leaves the screen. It’s certainly an arcade game that is a bit more entertaining with a second player. I should also note that Meadows Games published two games, Drop Zone 4 and Bombs Away, in 1975 and 1976, respectively, that also are built around the idea of a single player dropping bombs onto targets, though these are more akin to the bomb-dropping game in 1977’s Air-Sea Battle. That said, Canyon Bomber does feel like a real iteration upon those older games.
Meanwhile, Destroyer – originally known as Depth Charge until Gremlin had just published a game with that title – was released to arcades in October 1977 as a single player game. The player has a time limit to destroy as many submarines as they can using depth charges. The player uses a knob to choose the depth they want their charge to explode at, and pushes a button to drop it; a lever allows them to choose the speed their ship will move at. Again, this is a decent arcade game, but without a two-player option it gets old pretty quickly. Pairing Destroyer and Canyon Bomber for the VCS made sense: they were both military themed games about dropping explosives onto targets, and the task appealed to Crane.
With the games already designed, Crane said the difficult part was implementation. The gravity in Canyon Bomber was a particular challenge; Crane’s training in physics lead to him writing several pages of gravity calculations that were initially too complex for the VCS’s meager 6507 processor. He was able to simplify these pages of calculations into about 10 lines of code – as Crane put it, this may not sound like much, but it was quite an achievement.
Destroyer included changes to the shade of the water to create the sense of depth, and imitate how light quickly peters out the deeper you get. Crane had included similar transitions in the VCS Sea Bomber gametype, but also pixelated the transitions to break up the layers so that they wouldn’t appear to be sharp demarcations between depths. He would eventually use this same technique on the surface layer of water in Fishing Derby, his first Activision third-party release on the console, but the visual trick started here.
In a change from the arcade, the Canyon Bomber gametypes either give players six misses or an unlimited number to work with. In the limited misses gametypes, it’s simply a matter of scoring more points than your human opponent before you both use up all your misses, or getting to 1000 points without six misses counting against you if playing the computer. In the unlimited bomb scenarios, it’s a race to see who can get 1000 points first. If you clear the canyon of blocks, a fresh set will appear. Blocks go up in point value every two lines, starting off at 1 point per block and topping out at 4. If a block falls lower down, the point value will adjust to whatever line it has dropped to.
The difficulty switches will adjust whether or not you can cancel a bomb in flight with a new one – useful if you think your shot is going to end up whiffing and costing you a miss. If the difficulty switch is set to B for those who want to cancel your bomb drops, the computer does play a bit better to try and balance it out.
In keeping with Atari’s variation policy, Crane included gametypes that disabled the gravity calculations. In these games, destroying the blocks underneath existing ones doesn’t cause them to fall; they simply hover in place until they’re also destroyed. Crane said that when he showed the game to the marketing staff who would be writing the instruction manual, they were most impressed with this “anti gravity effect” after playing the initial, arcade-style gametypes. He relayed that there was an audible gasp as one of them asked how he managed to make the block stay up in the air, and that he did not have the heart to explain it was much more difficult to make them fall down realistically. This experience did illustrate to him just how powerful the suspension of disbelief could be to people playing these games, however – they expected the blocks to fall, and when the blocks didn’t, the players considered it anti-gravity magic.
The Canyon Bomber cartridge uses the paddle controllers, but it essentially is a one-button game. The analog-style controls come into play in the Sea Bomber gametypes. Mimicking the knob on Destroyer, the player can use the paddle to adjust a depth indicator line vertically. Should the player decide to drop a charge, it will explode at that particular depth. The paddle controllers provide incredibly precise controls for this game, though the player loses the ability to control their ship speed like in the arcade. Despite this, it’s hard to claim that Destroyer was a better play experience, as Crane allowed for two players on his VCS conversion, making for a much more entertaining game. The first player to reach 1000 points wins, and point values change the further down a submarine is traveling at – starting off at 20 points and maxing out at 60.
Much like its arcade counterpart, the Canyon Bomber gametypes are entertaining if a bit shallow. The bomb-reset option really deflates the challenge, though it does make the game much easier for a beginner to get the hang of. The anti-gravity games can also make shots a little easier to land, but it’s not a big enough difference that I can say if you aren’t a fan of the standard Canyon Bomber gametype that this will change your mind. And the unlimited bomb games can just kind of drag. But those are really the negatives here – the underlying Canyon Bomber game is still pretty fun with a second player, and though the computer opponent leaves something to be desired it at least provides some challenge while a single player gets the hang of how the bombs drop. My personal preference is sticking to arcade-style limited bombs with gravity, as is the game default. This cartridge really shines with two-player Sea Bomber, though. The added layer of choosing the depth your explosives will go off at adds such a great twist to the format to begin with, and it can be genuinely engrossing watching to see if your explosive will go off on target. Destroyer desperately needed a second player option, and Crane delivered that here.
Incidentally, if the sprites in this game seem familiar, it’s because they also appeared in Air-Sea Battle! Atari’s developers frequently shared graphical elements between their games, notably how number graphics are identical in numerous early VCS titles.
Try as I might, there doesn’t seem to have been much coverage for Canyon Bomber at its debut. Dick Cowan mentioned that it was one of his favorite games from Atari’s March 1979 lineup in an April 14 Xenia Gazette article, but he doesn’t go into much detail. Less positive is the March 1983 issue of Vidiot, which essentially called the game coma-inducing. The game doesn’t appear to have ever been officially published outside of North American territories by Atari itself, but in the 1979-1980 period where Epoch distributed the VCS in Japan as the Cassette TV Game, Canyon Bomber was among the titles it brought over – though reportedly, the only VCS games that they saw success with during their tenure with the platform were Superman and Space Invaders. Canyon Bomber was a steady seller for Atari right up to the end in its home country, though, as Atari Corporation produced and sold roughly 52,000 copies between 1986 and 1990. And similar to Bowling, Sears did not change the name of this cartridge for its own branded release, leaving it known as Canyon Bomber regardless of where you purchased it.
And being overlooked but reasonably well-remembered describes Canyon Bomber well. It’s not a big enough game that I think comes straight to anybody’s mind as one of the system’s all-time greats, nor do I think was it unpopular enough to be considered a cult classic or an outright bad game. Despite falling into that middle ground, it still has some two-player charm that I find rather emblematic of this early era of VCS game development – maybe it’s not one worth revisiting often, but it’s good to have available with a buddy.
Sources:
David Crane, correspondence with the author, August 17 2017
Wendi Adams, interview with Scott Stilphen, Ataricompendium.com, 2007 [Note: Adams transitioned in 2017, and this interview link still reflects her previous name]
All in Color for a Quarter, Keith Smith, unpublished manuscript, 2016
Xenia Gazette, April 14, 1979
Vidiot, March 1983
Atari Corp. 2600 Sales figures, 1986-1990
Epoch and the Cassette Vision – 1997 Developer Interview, Shmuplations.com
The Atari Coin-Op Division Corporate Papers, Strong Museum of Play
Release Date Sources:
Canyon Bomber (VCS) – Source: New York Daily News, March 22 1979; Philadelphia Inquirer, April 8 1979; Xenia Gazette, April 14 1979
