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.
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.
This initial FRED bowling game would be superseded by a 2nd version written for a somewhat more capable prototype known as FRED 1.5 that was visually more appealing and included sound effects, but was otherwise pretty similar. This version would be reworked for RCA’s 1975 arcade machine prototype, and was location-tested alongside five other machines. Not only did this make Coin Bowling the first bowling games seen by the public, it would also become one of the first microprocessor-based arcade games in history. Ultimately RCA shelved the arcade machine idea, but similar technology would be used for the RCA Studio II game console, which included a built-in new iteration of that Bowling program.
This take on the sport is similar to those versions developed in the years prior – the ball moves up and down the lane until the player chooses to throw it with one of three keys, indicating if the ball will curve in either direction or go straight. A spare will earn the player 15 points, and a strike 20; the game doesn’t seem to do any additional score adjustments beyond that so the highest possible score is 200. This version of Bowling is pretty admirable and one of the better games on the platform… and incidentally, Bowling on the VCS is the last time a game on the two platforms would overlap, due to the Studio II’s North American discontinuation in February 1978 making it it the first of Atari’s programmable rivals to fall. Its successor, the Studio III, would only be sold overseas as a piece of licensed tech by the Hong Kong-based Conic. Ironically given all this effort into producing a commercial bowling video game, Weisbecker was not a fan of the sport himself, according to his daughter Joyce.
Nevertheless, Atari’s home version follows three others that play awfully similarly to RCA’s game. Both Magnavox’s Odyssey2 and APF’s MP1000 consoles launched in the fall of 1978 with their own Bowling games, and Fairchild released their own version for the Channel F around November as well. These three games all orient the lane vertically, but otherwise feature the same arrangement as RCA’s game: the ball will bounce from one end of the lane to the other, and the player decides when it rolls down the lane and where the curve might come in. Fairchild’s includes a “pick up spares” game mode, and the APF and Fairchild games allow for different speeds, but otherwise they all look and play pretty similarly.
When designing Atari’s Bowling, Larry Kaplan took a much different approach. The player is represented by a human avatar and can freely move up and down the lane as they see fit. Pushing the button lets go of the ball and 
sends it towards the pins. Bowling features three different control variants; the first allows you to begin curving the ball wherever you want after it’s been thrown; the second allows the player to freely control the ball all the way down the lane, and the third only lets you throw the ball straight ahead. The difficulty switches simply tweak the pin physics to make it easier or harder to get a strike or a spare. And true to standard 10-pin bowling, this version of the game allows for bonus rounds in the 10th frame following any strikes or spares, and also does the proper addition for them to max scores out at 300 points.
Bowling would be Larry Kaplan’s final VCS game while at Atari. Written in 1978, Kaplan said that he had been bowling a bit, and while he wasn’t great at it he thought it would make a good video game. He recalls spending time getting the physics right on the game, with the sound effects being simple up-and-down scales. After three months, he found that development wasn’t progressing any further and decided to let it go for production. Kaplan said that while it turned out okay, in hindsight he felt like he could have done much better. He would then end up writing Super Breakout and Video Easel for the Atari computer line for fun before being roped into the effort with Alan Miller and David Crane to create an operating system and BASIC language interpreter by the January 1979 CES show.
Despite feeling that Bowling still had room to improve, the game is a lot of fun. Matches go quickly, even with two players, and there is a degree of skill needed to properly line up your shot and knowing when to start the ball curving to consistently get strikes. Having more control over where your bowler is throwing from makes for a much more interesting game than its preceding bowling video games, and I find the animation and sound effects of your bowler celebrating after a strike or spare quite charming. The steerable ball gametype is suitably wacky and can let players rack up some impressive scores even if they aren’t particularly good at it. The only weak point is the straight throw gametype, a decidedly less exciting take.
In keeping with new Atari president Ray Kassar’s desire to see carts published throughout the year, Bowling started rolling out in North America alongside seven other games around March. Unsurprising given how well it has aged, the game seemed to have been well-liked at its release. The Xenia Gazette ran a Dick Cowan review on April 14 where he showered Bowling with praise, considering it one of the best games available on any programmable console at the time, applauding the “realistic” nature of how the game plays and sounds. He even noted that his kids were happy to continually play the game repeatedly. Later that year Bowling would get reviewed by Arnie Katz and Bill Kunkel in their Video magazine column Arcade Alley, alongside several other 1979 Atari releases. They particularly enjoyed the steerable ball gametype and the victory animations the bowler gets when successfully making a strike or spare. Sales figures seem to bear out its popularity – an internal sales document seen in Once Upon Atari noted Bowling was Atari’s 14th best-selling VCS game, and while much of its figures are cut off, the company reported 245,670 copies of the game were sold in 1980 alone. With that said, Bowling does appear to have been discontinued after 1987, when Atari Corporation sold about 3,700 copies of the game.
Atari’s bowling would remain arguably the most advanced take on the genre for some time in the console space. In 1981, Mattel would publish a much more ornate and realistic version of the sport for the Intellivision, allowing players to select both the curve and the degree of spin on their throws, the weight of the ball, which hand they bowl with, and even the slickness of the lane. This was actually the first game put into development in-house for the Intellivision, as previous games had been developed by outside contractor APh. Authors Rick Levine and Mike Minkoff were technically working out of the APh offices as they had the Intellivision development stations Mattel lacked in its own facilities, but remained Mattel employees and put together a realistic and forward-thinking game. Levine was no stranger to bowling, as an avid player himself and the developer behind Mattel’s older Bowling handheld game – experience Levine was able to leverage by taking the FORTRAN simulator he’d developed for the handheld and massaging that algorithm into something the Intellivision could recognize. Minkoff was a long-time Mattel toys division member who found himself on the Intellivision program, and who would work on quite a few games following PBA Bowling. Working on the audio was John Sohl, who utilized Mattel’s in-house recording equipment to record sounds at active bowling alleys to help inform the game’s soundscape. The Intellivision wasn’t capable of moving all the pins at once, nor the physics calculations a proper bowling experience would require, but Levine and Minkoff found workarounds (such as retaining two pins as background objects until they needed to be moved, and inventing their own faux-physics engine to handle the ball and pins). With more in-depth options for ball weight, lane slickness, handedness, throw angles and curves on top of a second Pick-Up Spares mode, PBA Bowling is a pretty robust package. But while more realistic, it’s hard to consider it more playable compared to Atari’s arcade-style version so much as more complex for those interested in that sort of thing; indeed, future bowling games tended to land somewhere between the two in accessibility vs. options.
And honestly, Kaplan’s version holds up pretty well against the bowling coin-op video games that came out in the late 1970s. Exidy produced Robot Bowl in 1977 with a little on-screen avatar that could be positioned for the throw, much like Kaplan’s game. 3D Bowling was published by Meadow Games, and allows the player to line up their throw and send it down a 3D simulation of a bowling alley, hooking the throw as they desire. The next year Midway published 4 Player Bowling Alley, a top-down take that uses a trackball to simulate the ball being thrown, allowing for beer frames and flash bowling options. These might be more visually impressive than Kaplan’s game, but I’d hesitate to say any of them are better than the others.
Atari’s Bowling still stands pretty well against the more advanced video takes on the game that would come down the pipe much later. When people talk about the iconic games of the VCS platform that actually do stand the test of time, Bowling can absolutely be counted among their number. Games are quick, exciting, and especially with another player can just draw you right back into another round. Kaplan did well in this first-party swan song.
Sources:
Larry Kaplan, interview with the author, 2017
Larry Kaplan, interview with Scott Stilphen, 2006
Joyce Weisbecker, interview with the author, June 17, 2021
B.J. Call, interview with Alex Magoun, Sept. 10, 2004
FRED Note #6, Aug. 30, 1972, Hagley Museum & Library
Atari Corp. 2600 Sales figures, 1986-1990
PBA Bowling article, Blueskyrangers.com
Rick Levine, interview with Al Backiel, Digital Press
Intellivision: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie, Tom Boellstorf and Braxton Soderman, 2024. MIT Press
All in Color for a Quarter, Keith Smith, 2016, unpublished manuscript
Xenia Gazette, April 14, 1979
Video, April 1980
Once Upon Atari, Howard Scott Warshaw, 2003