1978 arcade title Avalanche is a game I’d not heard of prior to encountering it on Atari Flashback Classics for Nintendo Switch, and it’s entirely possible you might not have come across it either.
The reason for this is that its official home port (developed by the creator of the arcade game, Dennis Koble) only came to Atari 8-bit computers rather than the popular 2600, and even then only through Atari’s “Atari Program Exchange” system, whereby community-developed games and software would be published by Atari.
Meanwhile, Activision, seeing a good concept that wasn’t being leveraged as much as it could be for the home market, decided to release Kaboom! for the Atari 2600 in 1981, and as a result, the idea of paddle-controlled platforms catching falling things at an increasingly unreasonable tempo tends to be credited to them rather than Atari.
You now know the truth! Shout it from the rooftops!
You see, this right here is why compilations can be great; you get exposed to works you otherwise wouldn’t have known existed. As you say, Avalanche looks like an upgraded version of Kaboom!, which definitely got hectic on higher difficulties. It’s certainly a game that would be a true test of one’s reaction times.
Yep, absolutely. It’s one reason I love them so much. And there are some great things in this compilation, including 2600 prototypes and one unreleased arcade game that apparently only has two working machines existing in the world!
Mind. Blown! One of my favourite games on the 8bit and 2600 is Kaboom! and so learning that there was a precursor to it is really neat. 🙂