While so many home games of the late 1970s seem like perfunctory takes on arcade games or real-world activities, sometimes they get really strange… such as today’s game, Human Cannonball. As the name suggests, Human Cannonball is a game where you’re firing a person out of a cannon and trying to hit a target – in this case, a basket-shaped water tower – to score points. Much like last episode’s game, Canyon Bomber, this carnival-esque concept is complicated by physics. This essentially makes Human Cannonball a one-player artillery game; depending on the game type, you’re adjusting the cannon’s angle, the amount of power behind the shot, and location, all in service of nailing the target while also accounting for distance.
For the unfamiliar, artillery games have a long history dating back at least to some point between 1969 and 1974, when a physics professor and scientist at Dartmouth named Arthur Luehrmann programmed a graphical artillery game called POTSHOT on the Dartmouth Time Sharing System. According to my interview with Luehrmann, he had been an early adopter of the then-new BASIC computer language, which was being promoted at the university for students and faculty alike as an easy way to become familiar with computers. Luehrmann developed a few programs, including a guessing game called ANIMAL and a graphical version of John Kemeny’s FOOTBALL game. POTSHOT was particularly ambitious, however. Developed as a fun way to demonstrate the physics of gravity and orbital mechanics to his students, the game involved two artillery outposts of varying heights on either side of a randomly generated mountain. Players could adjust their power and angle before firing a shot off, trying to hit their opponent. If they missed, the other player would get a turn to do the same. Luehrmann remarked that he hadn’t included any actual hit detection on the mountain, which led to his son challenging people in the game and then firing a full power shot directly at their outpost through the mountain, wiping it out in a single shot. A second variation of POTSHOT placed the cannons in orbit around the Earth, requiring an understanding of orbital mechanics and momentum in space to successfully hit your opponent.
While neither version of POTSHOT appears to still exist, a description of the terrestrial variant was published in the People’s Computer Company newsletter, and appears to have inspired conversions to other platforms; a fairly accurate-sounding one was done for the Compucolor II computer in 1977 called Shoot. In both cases, players are set on either side of a mountain; they can choose where they want their gun encampments and how high the mountain should be, and then will take turns setting their angles and power, trying to hit each other. Luehrmann did not indicate that POTSHOT was based on an any preexisting artillery game, but the genre was further popularized by David Ahl’s 1973 book 101 Basic Computer Games, with a single-player, text-based version that was widely ported to a variety of computer platforms. This single-player version involves firing to hit a target within a set number of turns, making it a likely starting point for Human Cannonball.
This VCS title may also be related to a game idea mentioned in an internal Atari memo dated January 14, 1975, currently held by the Strong Museum of Play. This game, Cannonball, would involve firing a daredevil out of a cannon to hit a target, with the player controlling the amount of powder with a handle. Each successful hit would move the target back, while the daredevil would land on his feet with a fanfare; an unsuccessful shot would cause a “splat” sound effect and animation. The game came back around in a May 21, 1976 memo about game ideas, and this time was picked up by Owen Rubin as his first game. Rubin had some development mishaps (such as not realizing he didn’t need to hand assemble the ROM) but put together a game where a little animated daredevil walked out, got into the cannon, and flew out to try and go through a hole in a wall. The “splat” sound effect when crashing into the wall was done by recording a wet towel being thrown at a tile floor, with that waveform then programmed into the waveform. Additional audio came from an 8-track tape that played licensed circus music when the game started. While the prototype ROM is online (albeit with missing sound effects), the game ultimately went unreleased. The author of the VCS Human Cannonball is unknown at the time of this writing, but Rubin has noted online that the game is similar to what he came up with for the arcade.
If there is such a link, it makes sense why Atari dropped the Cannonball arcade idea. This is to say it is a really weird game, and fine-tuning your shots would probably not work well in an arcade setting – though Rubin indicated it did pretty well at its location tests. There are several variables at play in this game that change based on which one of the eight game types is chosen. Some game types set a fixed position for the cannon and/or the water tower, while others allow one or both to be moved. Some give you a fixed angle or speed – measured in miles per hour – while others allow you to adjust one or both of these between 20 and 80 degrees and 0 to 45 miles per hour, respectively. Finally, four of the game types introduce a moving window that players must time their shots to pass through to the target. The difficulty switches adjust the width of the water tower, which functionally gives you more of a margin of error for your shots.
All of these game types are playable with one or two players. In a one-player game, you want to try and make seven successful shots before missing the target seven times. With a two-player game, it’s simply a race to seven points; if one player reaches that score, the other is given one more turn to try and tie the game.
At first appearance it might seems difficult to actually hit the water tower, but as you get a feel for the angles and power of the shots, it becomes easier to catch your human bullet. A whiffed shot gets you a little animation of your person falling to the ground and somehow still being with it enough to utter “ouch.” Credit to the spritework: a bad shot does look like it hurts. With a successful shot, you also get a little triumphant person popping up in the tower, arms wide, as if to say “Look! I’m somehow alive!” The visuals in the game are practically centered on the human sprite as they are launched out of the cannon and pray for a safe landing, so these little charming details go a long way.
And from personal experience, just remember that you can move the water tower in half the games or you’ll really be struggling to get it. The game doesn’t have any visual indication that this is something you can do, and given that it’s uncommon for an artillery game to allow you to shift the target’s position around, it’s easy to not even think to try.
Unsurprisingly for an Atari game of this vintage, Human Cannonball is at its best with two players. That said, I’m not sure there’s enough to this game for it to rise above it making an occasional appearance in your system or emulator of choice. It’s a lot of fun for what it is, and making improbable shots work by moving the basket is always a trip, but it doesn’t take long for players to figure out how to nail shots consistently. The moving window requires you to properly time your shots or fire over the thing entirely, but with how readily your daredevil gets knocked back for even brushing against the barrier, it almost feels like an overcorrection of how easy the game types without it can get. And somewhat surprisingly, there’s no game type with a stationary window to emulate what Rubin did with his arcade game to try and split the difference. You can see this with the game’s sole contemporary review, as well – Dick Cowan in the Xenia Gazette, writing about Atari’s March 1979 crop of games, remarked that while the water tower and cannon could be moved, it still felt almost impossible to predict where the daredevil would land.
I also can’t help but feel that Human Cannonball loses something by virtue of being a target-based artillery game. Unlike Shoot, or subsequent two-player versus games like Artillery Duel or Worms, the lack of direct two-player competition takes some of the tension out of your shots. At that point, it just comes down to how much you personally enjoy this specific kind of trajectory game. I could say the same about the single-player modes too; having a specific goal target that you either make or fail at only has so much life in it unless this genre appeals to you. Again, it’s not a bad game by any means, just a bit thin.
Even if this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, it seems that Human Cannonball was a game that Atari continued to sell and advertise from its March 1979 release into the 1980s. There is evidence to suggest that it might have fallen off pretty quickly, however. Advertisements see the game being sold from around 20 dollars in 1981 to being marked down to around the 10 dollar range the following year with some other also-ran games from the 1970s like Home Run and Flag Capture; like many other VCS games it was being cleared out for around 5 dollars by late 1983. The Sears version, Cannon Man, is rather rare – only showing up in advertising that I’ve found from 1979 through 1981 – and today a boxed copy can sell for hundreds of dollars, if you can find it. There is more solid sales evidence, too; Atari Corporation reported selling 666 units of the game in 1987, with 24 of those returned over the following two years. So not a terribly popular game, even if it was readily available during the system’s peak years.
For better or worse, unlike other 1979 releases like Canyon Bomber or the similarly daredevil themed game Sky Diver (also based on an arcade game by Rubin), Human Cannonball’s two-player matches take longer to go through, which is unusual given how many of the VCS’s games are built to the system’s fast-paced strengths. Not that there’s anything wrong with being more deliberate, but in an era where the most well-remembered and returned-to games on the platform tend to be speedy, it’s a weird one to recommend. Still, I enjoy it for what it is. While it’s not the best artillery game on the VCS, it only takes a shot or two before can figure out what you’re doing. And until that moment hits you, there’s always something a little bit comical about seeing your daredevil whiff their shot.
Sources:
Arthur Luehrmann, interview with the author, Sept. 12, 2022
Cannonball – 1976 Atari Inc., Owen Rubin, atarimuseum.ctrl-alt-rees.com
The Atari Coin-Op Division Corporate Papers, Strong Museum of Play
People’s Computer Company, September 1974
Atari History Timelines, Michael Current
Atari Corp. 2600 Sales figures, 1986-1990
Xenia Gazette, April 14, 1979
Release Date Sources:
Human Cannonball – Source: New York Daily News, March 22 1979; Philadelphia Inquirer, April 8 1979; Xenia Gazette, April 14 1979
POTSHOT – Source: People’s Computer Company, September 1974