It was New Coke before there was New Coke. Gameplay oddities aside, the oversized Formula One cars are wonderfully detailed, with brilliant use of color and animated spinning tires. The shaded color objects were the centerpiece of the design, as programmer David Crane said in a interview. The way TIA works, the would normally just make the car sprite begin to reappear on the opposite side of the screen as it disappeared from one side.
The effect is smooth and impossible to detect while playing. The car accelerates over a fairly long period of time, and steps through simulated gears. Eventually it reaches a maximum speed and engine note, and you just travel along at that until you brake, crash into another car, or reach the finish line.
The courses bear no resemblance to the real ones; each game variation is simply longer and harder than the last. The tree-lined courses are just patterns of vehicles that appear on screen. Whenever you play a particular game variation, you see the same cars at the same times unless you crash, which disrupts the pattern momentarily. The higher three variations include bridges, which you have to quickly steer onto or risk crashing. During gameplay, you get a warning in the form of a series of oil slicks that a bridge is coming up soon.
This game set the stage for more ambitious offerings the following year. And several decades later, people play games like this on their phones. Activision soon became the template for other competing third-party developers.
The company had a total of nine employees at the outset. Imagic games were known for their high quality, distinctive chrome boxes and labels, and trapezoidal cartridge edges.
As with Activision, most Imagic games were solid efforts with an incredible amount of polish and were well worth purchasing. Another company, Games by Apollo, beat it to the punch by starting up in October and delivering its first mediocre game, Skeet Shoot, before the end of the year.
At first glance, the visually striking Demon Attack looks kind of like a copy of the arcade game Phoenix, at least without the mothership screen something it does gain in the Intellivision port.
But the game comes into its own the more you play it. Birdlike demons dart around and shoot clusters of lasers down toward you at the bottom of the screen. Your goal is to shoot the demons all out of the sky, wave after wave. The playfield is mostly black, with a graded blue surface of the planet along the bottom of the screen. A pulsing, beating sound plays in the background. It increases in pitch the further you get into each level, only to pause and then start over with the next wave.
The demons themselves are drawn beautifully, with finely detailed, colorful designs that are well animated and change from wave to wave. Every time you complete a wave, you get an extra life, to a maximum of six.
On later waves, the demons divide in two when shot, and are worth double the points. You can shoot the smaller demons, or just wait—eventually each one swoops down toward your laser cannon, back and forth until it reaches the bottom of the screen, at which point it disappears from the playfield. In the later stages, demons also shoot longer, faster clusters of lasers at your cannon. There are also variations of the game that let you shoot faster lasers, as well as tracer shots that you can steer into the demons.
After 84 waves, the game ends with a blank screen, though reportedly a later run of this cartridge eliminates that and lets you play indefinitely. If I were still nine years old, I could probably take a couple of days out of summer and see if this is true. The company that made the hardware also sold the software.
In some cases, the engineers who designed the hardware even wrote some game cartridges. But the authors of several popular Atari games grew unhappy. They were writing popular titles and outselling their peers, but they all got paid the same, and none of them got credit on their releases.
Other software companies existed, of course, but Activision was the first third-party developer for game consoles. That started a flood. Some were established companies like 20th Century Fox and Parker Brothers. Many were upstarts. Over companies produced titles for the Atari , and some of them were good. A lot were junk, and as various companies left the business, their titles changed hands. There were a few instances of the same game getting a new title under a new publisher.
More frequently, the title kept its name under a new publisher, especially if the game had some name recognition.
The arcade version came out in , but the port for the Atari was released in , the same year as the infamous video game crash. The poor sales due to the crash is seen as a major reason for its rarity. This simple shoot 'em up is worth well over 30 thousand dollars with the complete package. This is partly due to the curious T-shape design of the cartridge. Even in an incomplete state, just the cartridge itself has been known to sell for about three thousand dollars.
Less than five transactions of this game have taken place, making it the veritable holy grail for collectors looking for truly valuable Atari games. The story behind this game is as mysterious and magical as the biblical event that inspired it.
Only one hundred copies were made, and they all disappeared without a trace. Only within the past ten years have copies popped up, often selling for exorbitant sums. The real kicker is the coloring book that accompanies the game. If the two were sold together, the value would be exponentially higher. Do not confuse this one for the infamous video game adaptation of E. This game was made by a small family who wanted to take advantage of the video game craze, but came in just a little too late.
Production was finished by the programmer after the market had crashed as a result of the aforementioned adaptation. To try and salvage their money, the game was reportedly sold door to door locally, with only one hundred copies produced. This game and its rarity did not come to light again until , and now it is worth 80 thousand dollars. However, the most expensive copy bought went for sixteen thousand.
The idea of Birthday Mania involved people sending money to the company and receiving a personalized copy of it for either themselves or the birthday person. For reasons known and unknown, I somehow got hooked on Atari again. I then entered the world of collecting. And being a former collector of vintage Star Wars toys of which I have everything I decided I wanted to own a copy of every game. So I began to research the matter and figure out just how many games existed.
I soon discovered there are an endless amount of theories as to this question. Do you include alternate titles? Do you count the Sears versions? What about prototypes? What about PAL games?
And good lord, what about label variations? Where does it end? Where do you draw the line? So what are my parameters? I decided to limit my definition of a game to represent unique individual games that were released in North America as NTSC games between and , and are available to be purchased on various auction websites or can be dowloaded to play on your computer today.
So what does that all mean? That means you won't find the Sears games on my list. What about Zellers games? They're just knock-offs of other games with perhaps slightly-altered graphics. They are not orginal! Those were apparently original PAL games. How about Panda games?
Because I included it under the Froggo games. And yes, I know that Froggo didn't release any original games. But they were "official" hacks released back in the day by the respective companies that made the orginal game they were hacked from. Who cares anyway. This is my list and I think they belong! I believe this list covers all the games that were released "back in the day. If you think there's a missing game, it's most likely because I have it listed under an alternate title for a different company.
I feel I need to mention three other titles. However, one of the users on this board actually found an NTSC version of the game - also released by Bit Corporation. This makes absolutely no sense. But nontheless, it apparently exists. I'm chalking that up to a total fluke.
How it happened is a mystery. The bottom line is, I'm not including it. After all, the game wasn't released in Norh America. The former was available as a personalized mail-order game. The latter was apparently a religious game that found its way into some religious bookstores and such. To date, only one copy of each has surfaced. And their respective owners have chosen not to release the roms.
So since they're not available to be downloaded, I'm not including them either.
0コメント