My favorite computer in the world isn't a gaming PC from today, as much as I enjoy covering them on ExtremeTech. Instead, it's still the Atari 800, my first computer and the one I grew up with. I got mine in 1982, and I used it to play games, learn to program, get online, and eventually, run my own bulletin board system (BBS). I even got a second one so that I could keep using it while the first one ran the 24-hour BBS. The Atari 800 has informed everything I've done over the years, including stints in information technology, music recording, video game production, and, for the past 20 years, technology journalism.
Back in 2014, I decided to write a computer history book that focused on this amazing machine. Many people had written about it during its heyday, of course, and numerous articles and books have paid heed to it in the years since. But at the time, no one had written an entire book that focused on what amounted to the world's first real gaming PC, with its graphic coprocessors and hardware sprite animation and scrolling. I wanted to dive deep into the Atari 8-bit's peripherals, software, and most importantly, its games. I wanted to celebrate the heck out of this thing.
After enduring numerous twists and turns to get it produced and published, Breakout: How Atari 8-Bit Computers Defined a Generation was released in March 2017. Since then, I've met lots of wonderful enthusiasts who were also fans of the platform. Many of these enterprising hardware modders and software developers continued to create amazing new things for the machine.
So much has happened in the intervening six years, in fact, that it was time to revisit the topic. The result is a second edition, fully revised and expanded with new mods, add-ons, emulation techniques, and a more comprehensive survey of the websites and podcasts out there covering this terrific computer. It also includes detailed write-ups of many more games, plus more images than before.
Breakout: How Atari 8-Bit Computers Defined a Generation (Second Edition) is now available as of today in paperback and Kindle format from Amazon, and it will soon be available for order in retail stores the world over. Here's a free excerpt featuring eight games—starting with a stunning new homebrew that came out 25 years after the platform was discontinued.
Breakout: How Atari 8-Bit Computers Defined a Generation (Second Edition)
By Jamie Lendino
Pages 259-267
Scramble (Homebrew, 2017)
Defender fast became all the rage in 1981, but one of my favorite early coin-ops that I could never find quite often enough in the arcades of the day is Scramble, a similar coin-op that was the first forced-scrolling shoot-’em-up with multiple stages. It’s been copied and iterated on countless times since. Atari computers never saw a proper port until 2017, when Paul Lay released this near-perfect conversion. If you’ve played the coin-op, you won’t find much off here.
As in the arcade, you must pilot your spaceship through six continuous stages, battling with your forward-firing laser cannons and dropping bombs on ground targets. Each stage features different terrain and enemies, and the mountain colors often change within each stage. The starting music sounds the same, the background scrolls quickly and smoothly, the mountains are outlined around the edges in an extra color, the enemies and fuel depots are as plentiful and colorful as they are in the arcade, and the pace is relentless.
Sure, you can pick nits: This version isn’t 60 frames per second like the arcade, some enemies move in simpler patterns, and the shots and explosions sound different. But when your ship explodes, it’s better looking in this version. And the star background twinkles, whereas the coin-op version just makes different clusters of stars appear and disappear. Just make sure to use a controller with at least two Fire buttons, as the standard Atari joystick won’t cut it unless you set the auto-fire to on.
Lay’s version lets you configure the number of lives you start with, the width of the tunnels, the size of your ship, and the rocket speed. You can also choose from two difficulty levels. Boxed cartridges in Atari 8-bit and 5200 versions were sold out on AtariAge at last check.
Sea Dragon (Adventure International, 1982)
This underwater, Defender-like romp with big sprites and chubby fonts puts you in control of a massive submarine in the ocean’s depths. You must navigate your nuclear sub through underwater passages and past mountains while avoiding scores of explosive mines that rise from the seafloor. Laser Bases and Supershooters pose additional threats, while surface destroyers send depth charges your way; you can’t vanquish any of these, so you need to just avoid them at all costs.
Plus, you must watch your air gauge and periodically rise to the surface to replenish your life support system’s supply. Sometimes, it won’t be possible to do this right away, as you’ll be navigating through a passageway that prevents you from reaching the surface.
The joystick controls the direction the sub is headed. You can fire up to two torpedoes at once with the Fire button. You earn points by destroying tethered, stationary, and rising mines, plus depth charges and force fields. The Master Mine is worth 5,000 points. Sea Dragon offers four difficulty levels, represented by colors at the top of the screen—you get more points at the higher levels. Once you reach and destroy the Master Mine at the end of some 30 screens worth of underwater passages, you’ll advance to the next difficulty level.
Unlike in most horizontally scrolling shooters, it pays to be closer to the right edge of the screen. This way, you can drop back whenever rising mines or depth charges come your way. The beeping sonar, hissing torpedo shots, and booming explosion whenever you die—complete with a shaking screen—all contribute to a lonely, otherworldly atmosphere that separates this submerged shooter from the usual games in the genre with spaceships and fighter jets.
Serpentine (Brøderbund, 1982)
A maze game with several twists, David Snider’s wildly addictive Serpentine puts up a screen full of snakes on your Atari computer. The game is set in an age where mighty serpents have learned to dominate humans and now “rule the decaying corridors and pathways of our vanishing civilization,” which isn’t at all bleak. You control one of three “good” blue serpents. You must eliminate all the “evil” red and green serpents by chasing them around and eating their tails one segment at a time. Fortunately, blue serpents are the fastest, although you’re outnumbered on each board.
You control your serpent with the joystick, and you must survive long enough to lay eggs and raise young. If you bite off enough segments of a red serpent to make it shorter than you, it turns green, and then you can eliminate it in one fell swoop from the front and grow your serpent. Never approach a red serpent from the front, though, or it will kill you—and if it chases you, it can also devour your tail segments one at a time. Sometimes a frog appears; eat it and you’ll grow, possibly giving you an advantage over the red serpents. But they can also eat the frogs, and when they do, you’ll be in even more trouble.
All serpents max out at seven segments, and eggs are especially vulnerable to all serpents and frogs. Once you eliminate all the red and green serpents on a board, you’ll return to the pen and start the next level, and any existing eggs will hatch serpents that go to their respective corners as well. It’s tempting to call this derivative of either Pac-Man or Centipede, but it’s nothing like either. I never played this one as a kid; Retro Gamers Hub host Philippe Lafortune was kind enough to send me a copy, and I became hooked.
The Seven Cities of Gold (Electronic Arts, 1984)
The Seven Cities of Gold puts you in the guise of a Christopher Columbus type—and the natives in America may not be especially welcoming. It’s an open-world historical game where you balance exploration with diplomacy and trading. The game generates the world randomly each time. You start with four ships, 100 men, and some goods, and can buy more in town before setting sail for the New World. The ocean contains many perils; you must monitor your speed and the depth of the water and make sure you have enough food for your men to make the trip. Once in America, you can explore and interact with the natives, and either peacefully trade with them, slaughter them, or convert them.
Developer Dani Bunten said in a January 1985 interview with Antic that she didn’t want to preach morality to the player, but instead wanted to give them an opportunity to get in touch with themselves about how they feel. “The peaceful approach really works best. I have not used a totally depraved approach and won. You’ve got to have some friends somewhere. If something goes wrong, you need a friendly mission where you can go back and not have to worry about an insurrection or something. A place you can return to and know that there will be food, for example. You need a series of these relatively safe places even if you are going on a conquest mission… If you continually abuse the natives you will eventually see a message from the king saying ‘Don’t treat the natives so badly. But keep the gold coming.’ This double standard is straight out of history.”
Bunten has also spoken about the difficulties of programming games in the early-to-mid 1980s: “Our biggest frustration with [The Seven Cities of Gold] was that it was developed in the days when you had to write a number of different versions since no platform was pre-eminent. There were Atari 800, C64, Apple, Mac and IBM PC versions of the game put out, but the only ‘full’ version was on the Atari. On the others we did the best we could with what we had.”[1]
The Seven Cities of Gold is a true original. This early open-world title led to others, most famously Sid Meier’s games, including Pirates! and Civilization, and The Sims—which developer Will Wright dedicated to Bunten’s memory after she passed away in 1998.
Shadow World (Synapse Software, 1983)
This brilliant space shooter developed by the great Mike Potter is another unmistakably Synapse game, with its excellent graphics and fantastic gameplay exclusively on Atari computers. It’s also a little more complex than your average shooter, and the instructions don’t help, as they refer to some of the same in-game objects with two or even three different names. I’ll do my best to clear it up.
In Shadow World, the precious substance tricasmium powers starships, defense systems, and replicators. You’re the guardian of a tricasmium mining colony. Using your Space Hornet and its plasma cannon, you must defend the colony against the Rigillians, who want the tricasmium and mining colony for themselves. The Rigillians drop seeds into the atmosphere that develop into giant mother crystals with pulsing deflector shields, which cycle through the crystal lattice structures. The mother crystals slowly descend to the planet looking for tricasmium.
You must destroy all the mother crystals by shooting through each one’s deflector shield and destroying the nucleus. Dozens of guardian drones swarm around the crystals and attempt to crash into you while you’re doing this. When the mother crystals land, they mutate into colonizers and establish bases on the surface to overrun the mining colony. Destroy all the mother crystals and mutated colonizers, and you’ll move on to the next wave. Starting in wave 3, the guardian drones speed up noticeably, making it much tougher to shoot through the crystals.
The colony is semi-protected by vertical energy pulses that no one can shoot through, including you, although it’s not enough to keep the crystals from descending. You can also retrieve tricasmium nuggets by touching them with your ship; their presence nearby makes your ship glow. Complete the wave like this and you’ll earn an extra Space Hornet. A striking two-player cooperative mode splits the screen, which Potter drew from his experience developing Nautilus; player one controls the Space Hornet while player two controls the Heli-Interceptor.
Shamus (Synapse Software, 1982)
Shamus is kind of derivative of Berzerk, but the gameplay is quite different. You must traverse a 128-room, persistent-world maze to find the Shadow’s Lair, collecting important items along the way. The Lair is broken up into four levels of 32 rooms each: black, blue, green, and red. Each level is faster than the last. Various robots try to destroy you as you go, including whirling drones, robo-droids, and fast snap-jumpers. Just as in Berzerk, the walls are electrified. You must collect all the color-coded keys necessary to open locks throughout each level.
Anyone who played Shamus probably still remembers the music, which was a rendition of “Funeral March of a Marionette,” a classical piece written by Charles Gounod for piano in 1872 that’s often remembered today as the theme for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. (Video games had yet to garner the attention of the music and movie industries in 1982, so although this piece was already public domain, copyright was generally ignored with abandon.)
In the January 1983 issue of Softline, a review of Shamus said, “To know it is to love it, play it constantly, and not get enough of it. In an industry where attention span is everything, Shamus has the imagination and depth that demand repeat play.” Developed by Cathryn Mataga, Shamus became highly successful; in an interview in the April 1983 issue of Antic, Synapse cofounder Ihor Wolosenko said that after Shamus, the “ball really started rolling for the company.”
Shamus: Case II (Synapse Software, 1983)
Mataga’s sequel to Shamus came out a year later, and it’s a completely different game. In Shamus: Case II, the Shadow is on the loose again and safely ensconced in his underwater fortress, surrounded by drones, serpents, and mutant fish. You must fight through chamber after chamber, climbing from one to the next and avoiding spiked pits while shooting up swarms of enemies. Reach the top chamber and you’ll confront the Shadow in a final battle. It’s glorious chaos, a sped-up mix of a platformer, a shoot-’em-up, and even hints of Breakout all rolled together.
The control scheme changes depending on the kind of room you’re in. If you’re in a passageway, on a ladder, or in a gravity pit room, you move the joystick in the direction you wish Shamus to go, and the Fire button jumps. But in the main chambers, you can move all around the lower portion of the screen, and the Fire button shoots a plasma detonator in whichever direction you push the joystick. Mostly, that direction should be up or diagonally up, as that’s where the waves of mutants come from. You can shoot up to two plasma detonators at once; shoot a third while the first two are present and one will disappear.
A “Bird Ally” isn’t much of one, as it also attacks you, but hit it three times and you’ll turn it into an energy ball that helps you destroy the mutants. Lob a plasma detonator past the rows of enemies above and it will bounce around like in Breakout, all while you’re still being attacked from multiple directions below. A Commodore 64 port arrived the following year, but Shamus: Case II screams Atari 8-bit, with its lightning pace, vibrant color palettes, and complex sound effects and music. It also has good game balance, and it’s the rare “sequel” to deliver a new and exciting experience instead of just more of the same.
Both Shamus and Shamus: Case II hold up well today, are worth playing, and remain significant examples of original Atari 8-bit games that pushed the limits of the system.
Sinistar (Atari, 1984 prototype)
In Sinistar, you control a craft in open space; you must create “Sinibombs” by shooting at asteroids and collecting the crystals they release. Meanwhile, enemy ships work on building the giant enemy Sinistar. It was downright scary to me as a kid whenever Sinistar himself was fully formed, courtesy of then-new voice synthesis: “Beware, I live!” You then use the Sinibombs to destroy Sinistar.
Sinistar was one of my favorite arcade games. The Atari 8-bit conversion of the Williams coin-op classic is fantastic, and even contains the voice synthesis—quite a feat for the limited memory available. Unfortunately, the game was never released because of the video game crash; management canceled it in 1984. And according to AtariProtos.com, the circumstances were even worse:
Apparently marketing decided the game wasn’t going to make enough money and canceled the project... without telling the programmers! Jeff [Milhorn] and his team continued to work on the project for almost two months after it was canceled, due to lack of communication between [the] marketing and programming departments. Incidents like this were not uncommon, and just goes to show how badly out of touch the managers were at the time of Atari’s collapse.[2]
As has been a running theme here, copies of the completed Sinistar made their way out onto warez BBSes and were traded back and forth. Given the arcade game’s popularity at that moment in time, enough people knew to look for it. It would have been a big seller for Atari if it had come out. The game appeared in various retro bundles for Sega, Sony, and Nintendo consoles throughout the 1990s and 2000s. But it’s intriguing to see even now how close Atari got to the arcade coin-op with this 8-bit computer conversion.
Notes:
“The Seven Cities of Gold,” Atarimania. www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-seven-cities-of-gold-_s4599.html
“Sinistar,” Atari Protos. www.atariprotos.com/8bit/software/sinistar/sinistar.htm
Jamie Lendino is the editor-in-chief of ExtremeTech. He's also written numerous other books, including Attract Mode: The Rise and Fall of Coin-Op Arcade Games and Adventure: The Atari 2600 at the Dawn of Console Gaming.
