After enjoying the Atari 5200 adaptation of Star Raiders a few weeks back, I thought it was probably time we looked at its most well-known and well-loved incarnation: the original Atari 8-bit release from 1979.
Regarded by many as the “killer app” for the Atari 8-bit home computers, at least on its original release, Star Raiders is an all-time classic — and a genre-defining game that helped to establish first-person, real-time space combat games as a viable genre. It’s been one of my favourite games ever since I first played it, so let’s celebrate it the way it was always meant to be enjoyed.
The Atari 8-bit community is still alive and well — and many of the folks involved with it are just as active today as they were back in the good old days!
One mainstay of the community for all these years is Paul Lay, who put together some fabulous machine code games as type-in listings for Page 6 magazine all those years ago, and is still putting out top-notch software for the platform today. Here’s Runner Bear, programmed with the intention of being the first Atari 8-bit game of 2020.
Sometimes, you just want to raid a pyramid. Because it might have treasure in it, of course! That’s Yucatan Sam’s thinking, anyway; somewhere in Quintana Roo are riches beyond his wildest dreams.
Quest for Quintana Roo is a peculiar action adventure game in which you explore the aforementioned pyramid in the hopes of tracking down some mysterious stones that will open the way to great fortune. It’s become known as a somewhat obtuse game where it’s not super clear what you’re supposed to be doing, but it can be figured out with a bit of effort!
Early takes on the racing game genre often seem quite primitive by today’s standards — but some of them still had some ambitious ideas.
Epyx’s Pitstop for Atari 8-bit is a good example. While its game structure is fundamentally flawed if playing solo and its racing action is nothing special, it was the first game to not only incorporate pit stops as part of a race, but also to allow you to take control of your pit crew and actually perform the pit stop yourself.
As we’ve seen a few previous times on this series, the development scene for the Atari 8-bit is, like with many other ’80s home computers, alive and well.
Ocean Detox, the game we’re looking at today, was the winner of an annual software competition run by the Atari Bit Byter User Club, or ABBUC. This competition attracts some of the most talented Atari 8-bit developers from across the world every year, and everything produced for it is always both high quality and well worth your time.
After the relative disappointment of the Atari 2600 version of Star Raiders, it’s time to take on the proper version.
More accurately, it’s time to take on the Atari 5200 version, which tweaks a few things about the original Atari 8-bit version and adds proper analogue control, which is nice. It’s still an all-time classic, though, and if you can get your head around the controls in the Atari Flashback Classics port, there’s hours of fun ahead.
Video games have always had a budget sector — and much like low-cost digital download games are often highly creative today, the same was true for the straight-to-cassette budget sector for the Atari 8-bit.
Zeppelin Games was one of the more noteworthy budget specialists, in that they consistently produced high-quality games and then released them for pocket money prices. Sure, you had to wait more than 15 minutes for them to load on the Atari 8-bit’s excruciatingly slow tape drives, but it was usually worth it!
Here’s Ninja Commando, just one example of Zeppelin’s excellent output for the platform. Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!
A longstanding favourite of Atari 8-bit fans is platformer Montezuma’s Revenge, a game with an interesting story behind it.
I actually grew up with a copy of what turned out to be the unfinished 48K “preliminary version” of the game rather than the 16K version that eventually made it to commercial release, but both incarnations of the game are well worth checking out; truly classic platforming action, and an early example of open-structure 2D exploration gameplay.
Lode Runner is an all-time classic of gaming that is still going strong today, thanks at least in part to its popularity in Japan.
The original game has quite an interesting story behind it — and the Atari 8-bit version was part of that initial story. It’s a stark reminder of how far we’ve come in gaming when you consider that “the ability to move a pixel at a time” was considered to be a selling point for a programmer trying to pitch their game to a publisher!
The 8-bit home computing era played host to some great single-screen platform games: Donkey Kong, Miner 2049’er and Jumpman, to name but a few.
I hadn’t come across Karmic Caverns before. There might be a good reason that people haven’t talked about this much over the years — but it does have a few interesting ideas, most notably with how it’s more of a mobility puzzle than an action platformer.
