A sequel to #653: The Reset King (Music and Gaming and other stories)

RECORD STORE TALES #1074: Have You Played Atari Today?

The Atari 2600 might have been the dominant video game system in our childhood lives in the early 80s, but it was far from “the best”.  Intellivision offered better graphics.  Colecovision was also impressive, and had a pretty good home version of Donkey Kong.  Atari had a greater breadth of games available, though its graphics were pitiful by comparison.  Atari boasted the blockiest graphics on the market!  Did we care?  Well…yes!  We did care about graphics, but we also wanted all our favourite games on one system:  Pac-Man, Asteroids, Defender, Space Invaders, Centipede, The Empire Strikes Back, Frogger…all of them.  Though it should be noted, it was the parents who chose the video game systems in the neighbourhood, and price was also a major factor.

Domo arigato, parents of Owen Avenue, for spoiling the shit out of all the kids.

We had a 2600.  The Schippers had a 2600.  The Szabos had a 2600.  George Balazs had a 2600.  The Morrows had a 2600.  The only kids that didn’t have a 2600 were the weirdos (just trust me) across the street, the uber-religious Dolph family, who had a Commodore Vic 20.  With so many families in the neighbourhood owning the same systems, borrowing games was commonplace.  The typical length of a game borrow from a neighbour was three days.  Just enough time to get pretty good at a game, and often enough, to get bored with it as well.

No, those old Atari games didn’t have a lot of longevity.  Most of them got a little monotonous after a certain number of plays.  The games barely had any memory at all, so things tended to get…repetitive, shall we say.  Most Atari video games just got faster as you played, repeating the same screens and obstacles.  Eventually, you got fed up and died.  Then you pulled out the cartridge to put in something else, because you were sick of that game!

The truth is, as iconic as the Atari was, we were often disappointed with their actual adaptations of the games.  We did our research.  We read reviews in video game magazines, and we watched reports on TV.  We all knew in advance that we would be disappointed in E.T the Extraterrestrial well before we received it for Christmas in 1982.  But we tended to get the games anyway, because we liked to try the games ourselves…and sometimes the choices weren’t really all that great!  Occasionally, the low rated games like Combat and Adventure were our favourites.  E.T., not so much.  I know we received E.T. for Christmas….

Christmas!  Atari and Christmas…they went hand in hand.  Every Christmas, my uncle and aunt from Stratford would come to stay over.  There was a nice finished room in the basement with a pull-out couch bed.  Unfortunately…the Atari and TV were also down there!  Which meant, when my sister and I inevitably woke up at, like, 5 AM to see what Santa got us (Atari games), we had to wait and wait to go downstairs to play them.  Often we’d wake them up by constantly checking to see if they were awake.

So many disappointments back then!  Pac-Man?  That goes without saying.  Beyond minor things like the annoying clangy sound effects and messed up colours, they also changed the layout and orientation of the maze.  Usually Pac-Man’s escape tunnels are on the sides.  Atari put them on top and bottom of the screen, which really felt wrong.  It wasn’t…terrible…I mean, Pac-Man was still eating pellets, being chased by ghosts, before chasing them after eating a power pill.  Same idea just…really poorly executed.

E.T. was all but unplayable at anything but the easiest difficulties, without agents and doctors chasing you.  It was also extremely annoying, as you searched a large multi-screen play area for your phone’s pieces and the location of your spaceship’s eventual landing pad.  The landscape was dotted with pits.  Aren’t they all?  Common problem in the suburbs.  E.T. constantly falls in these pits, costing him energy when he levitates out of them.  What, you don’t remember that scene from the movie?

Here’s the thing though.  It was ironic that even though actor Henry Thomas was pictured on the box for E.T. the Atari game…Thomas himself was contracted by rival Intellivision, selling their system in TV ads!  This irony was not lost on my dad, who thought we should have bought the system that Elliott himself was hawking on TV.

Indiana Jones’ Atari adaptation fared marginally better.  Now this was a game we were able to beat, thanks to a detailed step-by-step instruction booklet.  Yet…the game had no relation whatsoever to the movie.  Oh sure, your character kinda looked like Indy with a brim-hat shaped head, but…when did Indy need to find a grenade to throw at a wall exposing a cave?  When did he need to retrieve an Anhk (Vinnie Vincent fan?) to…oh shit, you know what?  I cannot remember the convoluted plot to this game!  There were caves with weird cells you could get trapped in.  There was a cliff over a jungle, filled with thieves and tsetse flies.  There was a black market where you could buy bullets and the all-necessary shovel to eventually dig for the Ark of the Covenant.  There was also a “lunatic” there who would kill you instantly if you passed him.  Eventually you find the map room, which has a narrow walkway you must not fall off, and if you are in the right spot at the right time with the right item activated, eventually the sun will come out and illuminate a specific mesa on a map that is concealing the Ark!  You remember the mesa scene in the film, right?  Indy must jump from mesa to mesa using his whip, an annoyingly frustrating task.  Then, he must parachute off the mesa, and maneuver past an annoying treebranch, into a little hole in the side of the mesa.  There, you must…dodge aliens…and go to the bottom of the screen where there is a mound of dirt.  If you have acquired a shovel, then you can dig for the Ark.  Just like in the movie.

It took us forever to beat some of these games.  Of course, most Atari games back then didn’t have endings.  Most just kept going on, getting faster and faster until you “died”.  Some that did have proper endings included Adventure (another bizarre and primitive quest game), Haunted House, and E.T.

Despite the numerous…ahem…pitfalls of trying to find a decent Atari 2600 video game, there were some exceptions:  A handful of truly great games on that primitive system.  Many of these were made by another company called Activision.  Activision typically made the best 2600 games, and had a really cool unified line of box art.  Best of all, their video games were original concepts. Pitfall was one of the best games for any system of the era.  A huge side scrolling adventure and treasure hunt, this game saw “Pitfall Harry” seeking gold and diamonds in the jungle, trying to navigate a series of obstacles such as fire, scorpions, rolling logs, quicksand, and alligators.  You could try taking a shortcut through the tunnels below, but you’ll get there eventually just by falling through a pit!  Activision really had a hit with Pitfall, but there were so many more.   Chopper Command had you piloting a really cool helicopter, taking out both ground and air enemies in a side scroller where you had full control.  River Raid scrolled upwards without any control on the player’s part.  You had side-side freedom of movement, and a lethal forward gun.  The necessity of stopping for fuel was a unique and challenging aspect.  There was a clever game called Dolphin that involved the concept of sonar, and listening for tones to know your next move – which you must make in an instant.  Many of these games came out later in the Atari’s life.  That system really had legs.  We were still playing it into 1986.  Eventually, the Nintendo NES supplanted it.

Graphics and simplicity aside, the Atari 2600 had one weakness we don’t often hear about.  It is generally said that the Atari had the superior controller over the Coleco and Intellivision systems.  Intellivision had a sleek controller with a directional disc instead of a joystick,  Coleco’s joystick was stubby and uncomfortable.  Atari’s was just right.  It fit perfectly in your hands, with a smooth-moving rubber-covered stick and a single “fire” button.  Definitely the easiest, if simplest, of the controllers.  But it was not sturdy.  Inside that rubber outer shell was a fragile plastic skeleton.  It only took my cousin, Captain Destructo, one visit to destroy two controllers.  They were never the same after that.  You could try to fix them, glue the inner frames back together, but the joystick’s response became mushy, as the frame flexed more easily in the weak spots.  Eventually they’d break again.  I think we went through six joysticks in total, including some third party models.

The Atari didn’t just have joysticks.  It also had paddles – basically a wheel and a button.  These paddles were wired in pairs, so some paddle-based games could have up to four players.  Warlords was one such Atari game.  The paddles were used for rapid side-to-side motion necessary for pong-like games such as Breakout.  There was an addictive variant called Circus that was a lot of fun as well.

Then we had Star Raiders, the game I saved and saved and saved up to buy.  The first cheque I ever wrote might have been for Star Raiders.  It was expensive because it came with a third controller:  a number pad.  We always imagined what Atari could do with that number pad in new games going forward…but they never did.  Star Raiders was a first person shooter that had you defending yourself from TIE Fighters and “Zylon” (Cylon) Basestars (I’m not kidding), while managing your shields, and warping in and out of different zones.   As you take on damage, your shields, weapons and sensors can malfunction.  Hopefully you have enough energy to warp to homebase and get repairs, before the enemy fleets destroy it!  Though the combat scenes could be difficult, and annoying asteroids were frequent, it was an immersive game.  The hum of your engines, the glow of your shields…the game did the best it could for what the Atari 2600 was capable of.  In many respects this was a highpoint for the whole system.

The many hours and Christmases spent in the basement playing Atari peaked at the end of 1984.  December 26th, in fact.  While playing Atari in the basement, my best friend Bob “The Reset King” Schipper introduced me to something new called Iron Maiden.  Life was never the same after that.  Video games took a sudden back seat to cassette tapes.

Still, even after music took over, Atari had a comeback later in the 80s when I acquired Activision’s excellent simulator, Space Shuttle.  By this time, I was in highschool.  This intricate little game was impossible to win without paying exact attention to the instructions, and taking the precise steps in the correct order as needed.  Just like a real shuttle launch.  Landing it was even harder!  Once you got the hang of it though, you couldn’t help but beam in pride at landing a space shuttle!

Even though Atari’s successor, Iron Maiden, taught me not to waste my time searching for those wasted years, I don’t look at those days in the basement playing Atari to be wasted time.  While my skin may have grown pale playing Armor Ambush in the dark, I had a damn good time.  And what’s wrong with a kid having fun and creating good memories in his own way?

Absolutely nothing.  Have you played Atari today?