Tag: Mattel

Space Invaders – March 1980

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

The Atari VCS was supported commercially on the market for a mind-boggling 14 years, starting in 1977 and ending its run in 1991. There are a handful of incredibly notable moments in time during the system’s life on the market, and March 1980 might be the most important one for the console’s fortunes – and for those of the home video game industry in North America. It was that month that one of the biggest VCS games ever published, Space Invaders started hitting store shelves, a cartridge that can be directly credited with making the VCS the runaway hit and social icon for the era that it became. Simply put: without Space Invaders, the VCS probably would have never survived another 11 years, let alone to have the kind of afterlife it’s seen since then.

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Video Chess – November 1979

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

 

The final VCS game from the 1970s was a long time coming. Video Chess is a technical feat in several ways, and it’s also a game that owes its existence in part to a marketing decision dating back to the VCS launch back in 1977, and to the joint efforts of one of the original software developers on the platform and one of the company’s star programmers making it a reality.

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Casino (Poker Plus) – March 1979

Posted on by Kevin Bunch

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.

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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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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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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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