The Atari World Series

 

Muscle Doof vs. Blue Kryptonite Metallo

Is that the ship from Vanguard? FIGHT! 
 

Have You Fibonacci Today?

Pong
Qix
Pac-Man
Atari
8-bit computers
Created neon memories

Nothing Rhymes with Atari

Into the skies soars a rocket Atari
Funded by NASA and princes Qatari 

 

Atari 400 Rising

Sylvia and I spent some time cleaning up the garage this weekend, and in the process I found the old Woods family Atari 400 plus most of our cartridges for the system and a few manuals. At least three of the best games--Pac-Man, Tennis, and most tragic of all, Star Raiders--are missing. 

None of our joysticks, either Atari branded or third party, survived. I guess we were pretty hard on them. I don't think we ever had paddle controllers, and we threw away all the peripherals a few years ago, after they stopped working. 

But as far as I know, the computer itself still operates--at least, it did the last time we tested it, which was, to be fair, at least a decade ago now. 

I also found an Intellivision Space Armada cartridge in the box. That's weird, because we never owned an Intellivision, and I don't think any of my friends or Sean's ever brought an Intellivision over to our house. 

I'm tempted to find some joysticks and hook this up to the TV, but I'd have to find some kind of converter to make that possible; the inputs the Atari used don't exist on most modern television sets. 

Atari 8-Bit Cartridge Inventory, Continued

(Ignore my incorrect voiceover; this was 1982, not 1980). 

Thanks to Sean, here are a few more Atari 8-bit cartridges we owned back in the day: 

Dig Dug
Tunnel through the earth and use your pump to blow up monsters! Another excellent arcade port. 

Astro Chase
This is one of the few Atari 8-bit games with a cinematic opening of a sort, along with a really decent, if repetitive, soundtrack. You flew around the earth, using your joystick to fire laser beams in four directions. Very fluid and fast moving. 

Choplifter
This was one of our favourites. Choplifter was a 2D side scroller; you flew your helicopter behind enemy lines to rescue hostages. By holding the joystick down for a second, you could rotate your chopper to face toward you and shoot missiles straight down, good for blowing up tanks, or, if you were sadistic, shooting the hostages you were supposed to rescue. 

Q-Bert
Yet another arcade port, in this one you hopped around "painting" the tiles on a faux-3D pyramid while avoiding a purple snake and other hazards. Famous for "swearing" when Q-Bert dies. A fun, accurate adaptation.

Fight Night
I barely remember this one, and Sean thinks it may have been the last game he purchased for the Atari 8-bit (by that time, the 130XE). Here's a video:

Robotron: 2084
A fast-pace, frenetic shooter, the arcade version sported two joysticks: one to control your movement, and the other to fire in any direction. Rather than doing things the lazy way and combining those functions into one joystick, Atari packaged the Atari 8-bit version in a box that allowed you to sit two Atari joysticks side-by-side so you could replicate the way the arcade version played. Sean still has the box! 

Jungle Hunt
Swing through the jungle on vines without missing, swim through the crocodile-infested river, and run up the hill as boulders roll down at you, all so that you can rescue your beau from, well, a rather insensitive portrayal of jungle cannibals. Eek. Swinging on the vines was a lot of fun, though. 

Atari BASIC
Not a game but a programming language, Sean and I learned a lot about computers by fastidiously typing out programs from books and magazines and then experimenting with the commands we learned to create our own programs. 

Super Breakout
A game that's still fun to play today, bounce a ball against a slowly descending wall of colourful bricks in the hopes of smashing them all. 


Moon Patrol
Whimsical but repetitive, in this one you drive a dune buggy--or rather, a moon buggy--across the moon's surface, avoiding craters and the like. Not terribly memorable. 

Centipede
As in the arcade version, you control a little ship at the bottom of the screen, shooting at the centipede winding its way toward you. Mushrooms get in the way, and spiders complicate matters. Fast-paced and entertaining. 

Jumbo Jet Pilot
A very, very primitive flight simulator with terrible graphics. Not very good at all--a waste of money at the time, I remember thinking. 

Qix
This game was almost like impressionist  abstract painting--create squares on the playing field by drawing enclosures with lines while avoiding "sparx" and the Qix itself, a floating bundle of neon-coloured sticks. Great game. 

Frogger
Why did the frog cross the road? To earn some quarters. Another excellent arcade port. 

Protector II
A Defender rip-off, but I remember it being almost as good as the original arcade classic. Fly your ship horizontally over a cityscape and rescue people from alien invaders.

Speedway Blast
A driving game where you drive a race car through a small town while avoiding a really creepy giant snake-like thing with a quasi-human head. 

Ms. Pac-Man
Even better than Pac-Man, in terms of gameplay and fidelity to the arcade version. House of fun. 

Desert Falcon
This might have been the last XE cartridge I purchased; it was a diagonal side-scroller aircraft shooter with a vaguely Egyptian theme. 

Zaxxon
Another side scroller, with good 3D fakery (you could move up and down and side to side to avoid obstacles) and a science fiction theme. 

Shamus 
You're a shamus slinging shivs in an endless labyrinth, dodging robots and looking for clues to escape. Sean and I both really enjoyed this one, despite never winning. I don't think you could, really - there weren't a lot of games you could win in those days. 

Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator
It wasn't the greatest port of the arcade version, mainly because once again the original used vector graphics, but it was still a lot of fun tooling around the galaxy blowing up Klingons and Nomad. 

Atari 8-Bit Cartridge Inventory

Sean and I were wondering last night, over text, if we still had any of our old Atari 8-bit cartridges. I don't think they're here, and I believe (or hope) that Sean has them. He's not sure either. 

That conversation has made me wonder if I can remember all the cartridge we had. Here's a list of what I remember: 

Pac-Man
One of the two games Mom and Dad gave us along with the Atari 400 for Christmas back in, I think, 1982 or so. A very faithful adaptation of the massively popular arcade game, plenty of fun.

Galaxian
The second cartridge we received that Christmas, another faithful, colourful adaptation of the space shooter. 

Donkey Kong
Sean bought this in Seattle, I think. Another excellent arcade-to-Atari translation. Excellent graphics and sound effects that stand the test of time.

Donkey Kong Jr. 
A few years later, one of us picked up (or was gifted) this charming sequel, in which you, as Donkey Kong Jr., climb vines to save Donkey Kong from Mario, a clever reversal of the original game's objective. 

Missile Command
A very faithful adaptation of the famous arcade game in which you have three missile silos to shoot down wave after wave of nuclear warheads plummeting toward you. You always lose in the end, just like in real nuclear war. 

Claim Jumper
Unlike Atari's plain brown cartridges, Claim Jumper was a semi-translucent red. The game itself was an original, not an arcade adaptation; it was a two-player wild west shoot 'em up. Each player controlled a cowboy and had to avoid tumbleweeds or snakes, and the other cowboy's bullets, while collecting gold and depositing it in the bank. While the gameplay sounds simple, it was utterly chaotic in practice in the best way; the cries of frustration were glorious, whether you were shot just before depositing your gold in the bank or zapped by a tumbleweed or snake at a crucial moment. 

Joust
Players control a knight riding a flying ostrich (?) and attempt to well, joust in midair while collecting eggs and avoiding lava, among other hazards. This is another arcade translation, and an excellent one. 

Eastern Front (1941) 
Another original, this is an abstract, strategic wargame where you control Nazi units invading the Soviet Union during World War II. You control infantry, armour, and air support in the drive to Moscow, but you have to pay attention to supply lines, morale, the dangers of being flanked or encircled, and other complexities of war. The game was tremendously difficult, but on the upside, it's never a bad thing when Nazis lose, which I think they always did . . . at the very least, I don't remember winning the game on anything other than the ridiculously simple Novice level, which pits one German unit against one Soviet unit. 

Asteroids
The arcade version of Asteroids used vector graphics, so the raster graphics of the Atari 400 couldn't possibly support a visually authentic adaptation. Still, it was fun flying around in a little white triangle while blasting space rocks in rainbow colours. 

Pitfall II: Lost Caverns
"Finding the golden rope is Pitfall Harry's only hope." Sean and I spent hours on this underground exploration game, rescuing Quickclaw and Rhonda more than once, but never quite finding the correct route to the golden rope and escape. We had a lot of fun trying, though. 

Miner 2049er
One of the classic original creations for the Atari 8-bit computers, in Miner 2049er players lead Bounty Bob through four levels of treacherous mines, "painting" the floors by walking across them while avoiding radioactive mutants. The level design was great, as were the death animations; you could die by touching a mutant, falling, or using too much dynamite in the cannon level and blowing yourself to kingdom come instead of the top of the screen. 

Caverns of Mars
In this vertical scroller, you control a spaceship flying through the titular caverns, avoiding the walls and rockets while shooting fuel tanks to keep you flying. Once you set the reactor at the bottom of each cavern to explode, you have to fly out safely again before the big boom. Simple and highly entertaining.

Basketball
Even though Atari's Basketball supported only a maximum of four players shooting hoops, Sean and I still had great fun running around the 8-bit court, fighting over the ball. I don't remember ever playing with four players, maybe because we rarely had four joysticks working at the same time. 

Blue Max
This was a diagonally-scrolling, World War I-themed shooter. Dad was a big fan of the George Peppard-led movie. 

Star Raiders
Possibly the best game ever released for the Atari 8-bit line, or at the very least the best game not based on an arcade title. It's a first-person spaceship simulator with a galactic map to navigate, front and rear views and torpedoes, a variety of enemy spaceships to hunt, and space stations for repair and refuel. A wonderful game. 

Star Raiders II
A few years later we picked up Atari's sequel to Star Raiders, which I recall as also fun, but not as compelling as the original. In this one, you're bombing targets on a planet. 

RealSports Tennis
I don't know how they did it, but Atari found a way to make it really feel like you were in control of the ball, even though you were wielding a joystick instead of a racket. Mom and Dad liked this one, too. 

Pole Position
8-bit port of the arcade game, faithful and fun, very colourful. Doesn't quite hold up today, though, unlike a lot of other games on this list. 

Rally Speedway
Now this was a racing game! It supported two players racing against each other, with a top-down view of the treacherous curves. If you crashed, sometimes your driver would burst into flames and stop, drop and roll to put himself out. 

We had more games than this, and I feel like I must have missed a few. Perhaps more tomorrow? 

Reviving the Atari 800XL

Photos from Revive Machines. 

Here's a crazy idea that might appeal to GenXers with fond memories of the Atari 8-bit line of computers: a Polish company called Revive Machines is working on a brand-new 800XL. Here's the twist: This 800XL may look almost exactly like the original, but it comes with connectivity for legacy Atari AND present-day peripherals and monitors. You can even plug in your classic Atari joysticks (or modern controllers)! 

In other words, if you have old Atari peripherals, you could use this as a replacement for your ancient Atari XL; but if not, you can still enjoy the 8-bit magic by using the modern USB and HDMI connections. Anyone who has kept their old 8-bit Atari game cartridges might find this too tempting to resist . . . 

No word on the price or release date yet, so this could be vapourware in the end. But boy, what an exciting possibility! 

Have You Played Atari Tomorrow?

Straight from the fall of 2077, it's the retrofuturistic Atari 9400 gaming console with nanofibre controls and quantum relay tunneling. Tomorrow's games--yesterday! 
 

Random Thoughts on Cloak & Dagger

Richard Franklin's Cloak & Dagger (1984) is certainly a lot more violent than I expected from what seems to be a film targeted at kids. Our tween protagonist (played by Henry Thomas of E.T. fame), hunted by spies after he accidentally winds up with an Atari 5200 cartridge that has top secret military blueprints hidden within, is directly or indirectly responsible for at least four deaths (bad guys, but still), gets stuffed in a trunk with the dead body of an adult friend (shot through the back of the head a few minutes earlier), sees his girl friend kidnapped, gets held at gunpoint more than once, and thinks for a moment his dad's been blown up. There's also an uncomfortably realistic moment where some innocent airport worker gets shot in the leg at close range; his agonized reaction is incredibly effective. Great acting from a bit player! 

According to Wikipedia, Atari and Universal were working on an arcade game and a film, respectively, called Agent X. When the creators of the two projects got wind of each other, they agreed to cooperate, changing the name of the game/film to Cloak & Dagger. Atari supplied graphics from the arcade game, though in the guise of a (never-released) 5200 version of the game. There's also a ton of Atari project placement in the movie, concentrated in the computer store where the two kid protagonists hang out. 

A strange movie from a strange era. I don't believe I ever played, or even saw, the arcade game. I wonder if it's any good . . .

Atari Binder

During its all-too-brief golden age, Atari produced some pretty evocative artwork for its hardware and software products. The most visually arresting art was found on their video game packaging and instruction manuals, but even the staid 400/800 documentation binder was designed with the same art style. 
 

A Game of Khafka-esque Proportions

Caverns of Khafka took seemingly forever to load on our Atari 410 Program Recorder, but it was worth waiting for the software to load from magnetic tape. Your goal in this diabolically difficult game was to make your way through a deadly maze overflowing with different traps, monsters, lava pits, and other obstacles. Sean and I played this game until the cassette wore out. That was a sad day. 
 

An XElent Computer

We retired the Atari 400 after several years of yeoman's service, replacing it with the more powerful Atari 130XE in the summer of 1987. This was the computer that carried me through my first two years of study at the University of Alberta, and it was also the computer that, combined with the Atari XM301 300-baud modem, pulled me into the world of electronic bulletin board systems, or BBSes. Before the Internet became a mainstream service, BBSes were the destination for early adopters of the world of online communications. Edmonton's BBSes were limited to discussion rooms and primitive file sharing, and most of the ones I visited could only support one visitor at a time, since most people back then had only one phone line. 

My favourite games supported by this computer probably would have been Rescue on Fractalus, Ballblazer, Preppie, Karateka, and Star Raiders II. 

Sean and I retired almost all of our Atari hardware a couple of years ago to help create more space at Mom and Dad's place. I rescued this manual, among other Atari detritus. I was going to recycle it, but Sean will take the materials into his care instead. They're certainly fascinating artifacts of a lost era. 

Few Finer Than Miner 2049er

Miner 2049er was a top-tier game for the Atari 8-bit line of computers. Sean and I and our cousin Darwin poured hours and hours into this charming platformer. You control Bounty Bob, a Mountie who must reclaim an abandoned mine by touching all the platforms on each level of the mine. Simply walking over the platform tiles does the trick, but you have to avoid deadly radioactive monsters, falling from heights, being crushed by pulverizers, beaming into a monster while using the teleporter, and accidentally blowing yourself up by using too much dynamite for the level with the cannon. Bounty Bob's death animations were particularly satisfying and cartoonishly gruesome. 

Where the Horror Lurked

 

The Lurking Horror also included this double-sided map of the catacombs beneath G.U.E. Tech. Beware all ye who enter here...

Paperclip

Here's the manual for the software that got me through the first two years of university: Paperclip. Paperclip was pretty primitive compared to modern word processors, but it did precisely what I needed it to do: made it possible for me to type and print my assignments instead of writing them longhand, which would have surely doomed my chances at graduation. 

Paperclip came with a unique form of copy protection: the Paperclip Key, a small grey dongle you plugged into the Atari 130XE's joystick port. Without the dongle, the software wouldn't operate. It took me years to wonder idly if the key was just an electronic switch that made the computer think a joystick button was being held down. So I pulled out the key, plugged in a joystick, held down the fire button, and lo and behold the software worked. A determined pirate could have copied the software, plugged in a joystick, and held the button down with electrical tape. Still, they wouldn't have gotten the manual, and for all the bother why not just buy the software...

Autoduel Manual

Here is all that remains of Sean's copy of Autoduel for the Atari 8-bit computers. It's a thick manual rich in complexity and lore, back in the days when computer games often included not only really well-produced manuals, but also maps, keyboard or joystick inserts and attachments, reference cards, and, best of all, little tokens and toys that represented something you might encounter in the game. 

Autoduel itself was a fantastic game, based on Steve Jackson's popular Car Wars strategy game. The premise is simple; you start out with $2000 and need to buy a car to start "auto duelling" in the arena or on the highways of the northeastern USA. Sean and I played that game for years, until at last the disc stopped working. 

The road to fun with this game got off to a rocky start, however. Sean bought the game with birthday and Christmas and allowance money he'd saved for quite some time, and the first copy we bought was defective. Sean and I returned to the computer store in Heritage Mall where he'd purchased Autoduel, and the proprietor refused to help, claiming we were returning it under false pretenses and had pirated a copy of our own before returning it. 

This is one of the few times I've gotten really, really angry in public. All I remember saying is "He's ten years old," in quiet fury. The man behind the counter grumbled and muttered a little more, but in the end he exchanged the defective copy of the game for a fresh one. Thankfully, the new copy worked. 

Incidentally, Sean and I recently Kickstarted the latest edition of Car Wars, so at some point in the future, when COVID-19 is no longer a threat, we'll get together to reignite the spirit of a game we really loved back in the 80s. 

Crazy 80s Games Plays Caverns of Kafkha

Sean and I used to play this game for hours in the early 1980s, waiting patiently for the game to load from the cassette-based Atari 410 Program Recorder into our 16K Atari 400 computer. Good times. 

When You See It...

When I recommended the Crazy 80s Games channel, I had high hopes for quality content. My expectations have already been exceeded. 

Unicorn Horn as Played by Crazy 80s Games

YouTube user Crazy 80s Games has uploaded what I hope is the first of many gameplay videos of obscure Atari 8-bit computer amusements. My brother and I played a lot of Atari 8-bit games back in the 1970s and 1980s, but we never got wind of Unicorn Horn, which looks pretty darn trippy.