Speak to Me! - Speech Synthesis with Early Home Video Games

When considering the evolution of video game audio, of the three components of audio, sound effects, music and speech, those components were introduced into video games in that order.  The earliest video games generated simple tones and noise to produce simple sound effects.  Music chips were well developed by the late 1970s, bringing a slightly more sophisticated method of sound generation to video game players.  Speech, which requires the utilization of more complex sounds to be intelligible, tended to be brought to home consoles and computers in the form of specialized speech chips.  In this article we will trace some of the lineages of speech in early video games.  

Atari Flashback 2 - The Only Flashback Worth Anything

While browsing in one of my local thrift stores, I encountered an item I had been wanting for a long time, the Atari Flashback 2.  This mini-console with its built in games had interested me ever since it first game out.  Even though I already had a light-sixer 2600 and a Harmony Cartridge, I still wanted one of these.  The box was marked at $24.99, but the seal seemed to be still intact, so the purchase was a no-brainer for me.  In this blog post, let me describe the system, its capabilities and talk about its included games and its legacy.  This review may be 12 years too late, but I could not let this opportunity pass without comment.

From Adventure to Zelda - Influences and Common Themes

When Atari released Adventure in 1980, most players had never seen anything like it before.  Seven years later when Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda, again it seemed that most players had never seen anything like it before.  But when you start to compare the two games, there are many common design elements in both.  In this blog entry, we will take a look at them.

Cartridge Bankswitching Outside the NES

Bankswitching in cartridge based games is most famous on the NES, especially its Japanese version, the Famicom.  The NES, Famicom and their unofficial clones were popular in many parts of the world, but the inherent limitations of its 8-bit CPU required software developers to devise ever more complicated systems to increase the amount of memory the system could address.

But the NES did not invent bankswitching.  Most, but not all, 8-bit home consoles, home computers and handheld systems had cartridges with extra hardware to allow the system to address more memory.  In this article I will trace the evolution of that hardware outside the NES and give links to sites and documents where the user can find more technical information.

Boulder Dash on the Atari 2600 - Beginning or Continuing a Long Journey

BD2600 - Title Screen

In late 2011, a new homebrew cartridge was announced for the Atari 2600.  This would be a port of Boulder Dash, the classic computer game originally developed on the Atari 800 home computer by Pieter Liepa and Chris Gray.  Their game was bought by First Star Software, which published it for the Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, Apple II and IBM PC & PCjr. computers in 1984 as well as for the Colecovision.   FSS also published the sequel, Boulder Dash II : Rockford's Revenge and Boulder Dash Construction Kit.  FSS's other well-known game series is the Spy vs. Spy games.

Boulder Dash was very popular, with the game being ported officially or unofficially to many different platforms.  The Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro, Epoch Super Cassette Vision, Game Boy, MSX, NES, PC-8801 and ZX Spectrum all received officially licensed ports. Except for a period from around 1991 to 2001, there has rarely been a year gone by without a release or re-release of Boulder Dash in some officially licensed form.  Today it can be purchased on mobile platforms.

Sixty Atari 2600 Classic Games (and a few Others)

The Atari 2600 had many classic games as befitting the first really successful home video game console.  However, it has a lot of not so classic games and a lot of derivative games.  I have devised a list of must have games.  The games on this list are generally easy to pick up and play, provide some of the most fun gameplay on the console.  Moreover, there are no holy grails on this list.  If you want to actually collect the cartridges, as opposed to playing them on a Harmony Cart, none should break the bank.

If you are going for a pure cartridge route, note that four of these games will require a Starpath Supercharger.  A Supercharger is a very wise investment because almost every game is really good.  Moreover, you do not even need the original cassette tapes to play the games.  You can run the binary files through a digital to analog program like makewav and output the audio signal from your computer to the Supercharger.

There are a lot of direct arcade ports on this list.  I have highlighted them in yellow.  Some of the early 2600 games like Indy 500, Combat and Video Olympics are more of the embodiment of a series of arcade games (the Indy, Tank and Pong series), but I consider them the official home port of these arcade system lines.  Some arcade ports like Stargate and The Official Frogger are truly amazing.  If you want to obtain the cassette before playing The Official Frogger, the Parker Bros. cartridge is good enough to fill the void.

You will note a fair number of paddle games on this list.  The paddle controller is the second most used controller for the 2600 and I tried to give a sampling of the best games that support it.  Warlords is a great four player game, an essential addition to any 2600 library.  Indy 500 uses driving controllers, which are far more precise than paddle controllers and are always responsive.

Most of these games are essentially pick up and play, but there are a few exceptions.  You will need the manual and overlay for Space Shuttle, which uses every switch on the console.  Dragonstomper, the only true RPG for the 2600, requires a read of the manual before sitting down with the game.

A 2600 game does not need advanced hardware to earn classic status.  Of the sixty games on this list, thirty one do not require any additional hardware.  Of the 8K and 16K cartridges, only six require extra RAM, noted in blue background :

Game Title	Publisher	Size	Notes
Communist Mutants from Space	Starpath	1 Tape Load
Fireball	Starpath	1 Tape Load	Paddle Controller
Frogger, The Official	Starpath	1 Tape Load
Pitfall II: Lost Caverns	Activision	10.2K	Unique Hardware
Crystal Castles	Atari	16K
Dig Dug	Atari	16K
Jr. Pac-Man	Atari	16K
Midnight Magic	Atari	16K
Millipede	Atari	16K
Road Runner	Atari	16K
Secret Quest	Atari	16K	Has a password save system
Solaris	Atari	16K
Bowling	Atari	2K
Boxing	Activision	2K
Combat	Atari	2K	Two players required
Fishing Derby	Activision	2K
Freeway	Activision	2K
Frogger	Parker Bros.	2K
Indy 500	Atari	2K	Driving Controller, two players highly recommended
Kaboom!	Activision	2K	Paddle Controller
Video Olympics	Atari	2K	Paddle Controller, four player support
Dragonstomper	Starpath	3 Tape Loads
Adventure	Atari	4K
Atlantis	Imagic	4K
Berzerk	Atari	4K
Chopper Command	Activision	4K
Circus Atari	Atari	4K	Paddle Controller
Cosmic Ark	Imagic	4K
Demon Attack	Imagic	4K
Dolphin	Activision	4K
Enduro	Activision	4K
Haunted House	Atari	4K
Megamania	Activision	4K
Missile Command	Atari	4K
Pitfall!	Activision	4K
Q*bert	Parker Bros.	4K
River Raid	Activision	4K
Seaquest	Activision	4K
Space Invaders	Atari	4K
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back	Parker Bros.	4K
Super Breakout	Atari	4K	Paddle Controller
Warlords	Atari	4K	Paddle Controller, four player support
Wizard of Wor	CBS Electronics	4K
Yars' Revenge	Atari	4K
Asteroids	Atari	8K
Battlezone	Atari	8K
Beamrider	Activision	8K
Centipede	Atari	8K
Frogger II: Threeedeep!	Parker Bros.	8K
H.E.R.O.	Activision	8K
Joust	Atari	8K
Jungle Hunt	Atari	8K
Moon Patrol	Atari	8K
Ms. Pac-Man	Atari	8K
Pressure Cooker	Activision	8K
Robot Tank	Activision	8K
Solar Fox	CBS Electronics	8K
Space Shuttle	Activision	8K	Has an overlay for 4-switch and 6-switch consoles
Stargate	Atari	8K
Tapper	Sega	8K

There are several games, that while not bona fide classics, have such a historical impact or made in such large numbers that they may deserve to be on any list regardless of quality.  This includes the unholy three of the 2600, Defender, Pac-Man and E.T. the Extra-terrestial.  Defender is fairly disappointing compared to Stargate, Pac-Man's reputation is well-known and E.T. status is legendary.  However, the first two are pick up and play.  E.T. requires reading the manual and avoiding the worst of the bugs (do not stop levitating until every pixel of E.T. has cleared the pit.)  Breakout and Star Raiders are OK, but Breakout pales in comparison to Super Breakout and Star Raiders is best played on the Atari 8-bit and 5200 systems. Donkey Kong from Coleco is also extremely common but only has two of the four levels from the arcade and is rather lacking.  The Swordquest games are not very fun and the third is rare.  But if you really want to explore garbage on the 2600, you could try the adult games available for that system, starting with the execrable Custer's Revenge.

With this post, my 257th, one can no longer number the number of blog entries on this blog in an 8-bit number!

Atari Hardware Explained

The Atari 2600 is a very compact system, even though this may not be reflected in the standard woodgrain case in which it is housed.  Inside each system are three chips, the CPU, the Television Interface Adapter (TIA) and the RAM, Input, Output & Timer (RIOT).  These three chips work together along with a cartridge, switches and a controller to display games to a TV.  Lets discuss how the design of these chips influences the games that were produced.

CPU

First, lets start with the CPU, which is a MOS 6507 (a.k.a. C010745).  The 6507 is a budget version of the 6502 an in the Atari 2600 it runs at 1.19MHz (1/3 of the NTSC color clock frequency).  It is a fully-functional 6502 in a 28-pin package.  The full 6502 comes in a 40-pin package.  As a result of the size reduction there is no support for hardware interrupts and the 6507 only has 13 (of a maximum of 16) address lines.  This limits the amount of addressable memory that the CPU can access directly to 8KB (kilobytes).  Unlike the NES's 6502 variant, the 6507 has a functional binary-coded decimal mode.  The TIA is connected to the CPU's RDY line, so it can halt the processor.

RIOT

Next comes the RIOT chip, which is an MOS 6532 Peripheral Interface Adapter (a.k.a. C010750).  This 40-pin chip contains a programmable timer, 128 bytes of RAM and two 8-bit parallel input and output ports.  It has 9 registers, some of which are read only, some write and some can do both.  The timer counts down an 8-bit value by one of four orders of magnitude.  128 bytes of RAM substantially limits the complexity of games because that is where all a program's variables must live.  In addition, this RAM is also used by the stack.  The stack is vital for subroutines, which can be many in a game.  On the plus side, the RAM is located in the 6507's zero page, so accessing it will be fast.

One of the I/O ports is exclusively used for input from the five switches on the console, one bit for each switch.  Each bit of the second I/O port can be set to be an input or an output.  As an input, it reads the four directions from each joystick (one direction per bit), the paddle button from each of the four paddles or the position of the driving controller.  As an output, it strobes the keyboard controllers.  This I/O port can also be used to write to and read from more modern port peripherals like the AtariVox.

TIA - Input and Sound

Finally we come to the TIA, the most complex chip in the system.  This is a custom 40-pin Atari chip C010444D which Atari strangely never got around to patenting, leading to cloned chips from Mattel and Coleco later in the 2600's life.  It was never an off-the-shelf chip, unlike the 6507 and 6532.  The TIA handles all graphics and interfacing with the TV, all sound and handles the remainder of the inputs.  It is also mapped into the zero page of the 2600's memory map.  It contains 45 write-only registers and 14 read-only registers.  Let's discuss its features in inverse order of complexity.

The TIA has four input ports, each dedicated to the input from a single paddle.  Paddles are read in a way similar to how a joystick is on the IBM PC.  A write to a certain register discharges the a capacitor and the position of a connected potentiomer dictates how long it takes to charge the capacitor.  The length of time it takes the capacitor to charge dictates the position of the paddle.  These registers also are used to read the keyboard controllers.  Essentially the keyboard controllers act like paddles set to a specified resistance value.  It also has two ports for reading the state of the joystick switches or the driving controller buttons.

Sound on the 2600 is geared more toward creating interesting sound effect than music.  Each of the two audio channels can emit a pure square wave tone, but there are only five bits to divide the frequency. The range of the 2600 is from 30,000Hz (divide by 1) to 937.5Hz (divide by 32).  Even the less than impressive TI SN 76489/96 has 11-bits of frequency control.  There are 4-bits of volume control, but the 2600 is just not very musical.  Even so, some games like Gyruss, Mountain King and Supercharger Frogger have impressive music.  The noise is based off a polynomial counter tweaked by various settings. There are 16 combinations (10 unique) of tone and noise to choose from in the 2600, and they are much more geared to sound effects.  You can hear what each selection and frequency sounds like here : http://www.randomterrain.com/atari-2600-memories-batari-basic-music-toy.html

TIA - Graphics

Most of the CPU's time is spent drawing the graphics, line by line.  The 2600 does not have a frame buffer and it does not have dedicated video memory.  More modern game consoles write the graphics data into a frame buffer and into sprite memory and let the video display chip take care of drawing it to the screen.

Atari 2600 graphics have to be fed into the TIA each and every line that the TV draws.  Whatever time is left over during horizontal blanking (the time it takes for the TV's electron beam to return from the right side of the screen to the left) is spent on setting up the graphics for the next line.  This is what is called racing the beam.  The vertical blanking period, (the time it takes for the beam to return to the top left portion of the screen from the bottom right) is typically used for game logic, sound and input reading.

The Atari 2600 is capable of displaying 128 colors, 8 of which are solely grayscale from black to white.  The remainder are spread across the NTSC color wheel with a great variety of variation.  The horizontal resolution of the Atari 2600 is always 160 pixels.  The vertical resolution of the Atari 2600 is not fixed but typically is 192 lines.  It is up to the programmer to start the vertical retrace period.

The graphics are made up of seven elements, a background color, a playfield, two players, two missiles and a ball object.  The background and the playfield make up what would be known in later consoles as the background graphics and the player, missile and ball objects would later be known as the sprite graphics.

Combat - Note the reflected playfield and the two players.  Each player fires a missle with the same color

The background color a single color that is set for the entire TV area, unless changed on a particular scanline.  When the color is changed it can be masked by the playfield.  Air-Sea Battle has frequent changes of the background color.

The playfield consists of 20 bits per line.  If a bit is on, the playfield color is displayed.  If the color is off, then the background color is displayed.  Each bit of the playfield is four pixels wide, giving the backgrounds to Atari 2600 games a characteristic low resolution look.  Additionally, those 20-bits only cover the left side of the screen, so the right side of the screen displays a duplicate or a mirror image of the left side of the screen.  This tends to give the backgrounds a symmetrical look in many Atari 2600 games.

Combat - Note the second copy of Player 2, the repeated playfield and that the playfield has priority over the players

When you see counters or scores on the top of the screen, these are usually playfield graphics.  But as I mentioned, there is only enough room in the playfield registers for half the screen, so what happens when one side's 0 turns into a 1?  You can time your writes to the playfield registers in mid scanline so you get a different playfield on the right side as opposed to the left side.  You can also set the colors of each side to the colors of the player 1 and player 2 objects.

Video Olympics - The ball object is used, and the scores are playfield bits changed in midscanline

The ball object is a one pixel object that can be placed anywhere on a scanline.  It uses the same color as the playfield on the same scanline.  The ball was intended to make Pong games like Video Olympics possible on the 2600.

The player objects are up to eight pixels wide, with a 1 bit showing the player color and a 0 bit showing a background or playfield color.  Two players, two colors.  Each player has a one pixel missile object associated with it which is the same color as the player.  Each player and missle object can also be placed anywhere on a scanline.  Multi-colored objects are accomplished by changing the color of the player object each line.  These graphics are best suited for Tank-line games like Combat.

Space Invaders - The player cannon is stretched, and each invader is a player copied twice, the copy is removed when shot

Ball and missile objects can be stretched to 2, 4 or 8 pixels.  Each player object can have one or two additional copies spaced at set intervals.  This is what makes Space Invaders possible.  The player can be stretched 2x or 3x horizontally and be reflected (to face left instead of right).  Players and missiles are typically displayed over the playfield graphics, but can be set to have the playfield graphics displayed over them.

In many games like Space Invaders and Ms. Pac Man, you will see a serrated series of lines across the left border of the screen.  These lines are used to delay the start of the graphics drawing, giving the programmer more time to write graphics to the next line.  In the 2600, you always have to be one line ahead of the raster. In fact, the standard Activision practice was to blank out the entire left column of the screen for 8 pixels or so.

Pitfall - Player, missile, ball and playfield graphics all combine on various scanlines to make a complex background

In Video Checkers, there are four pieces per row, three of which are provided by a player object and one provided by a stretched missile object.  Lucky for Atari standard checkers is played with a maximum of four pieces per row.  However, the same effect is insufficient for Chess.  Atari used a Venetian Blinds effect used in Video Chess.  This is necessary because each player object can only draw three objects on a line, and you need eight in chess.  So in Video Chess, they alternated the drawing of the chess pieces every other line. This eliminated flickering.  They also had to alter the player graphics in mid-frame in order to make the king's row pieces distinct for each side.

Yar's Revenge - The Neutral Zone is a visual representation of the game's code

Color cycling was one of the hallmarks of Atari graphics, from the Chalice in Adventure to the Neutral Zone in Yar's Revenge.  The color registers are often updated many times per second.  In Yar's Revenge, the bit pattern of the code in ROM was used to give a pseudo-random appearance to the Neutral Zone.  Color cycling was also done for many of the early 2600 games because this was believed to reduce screen burn-in if the TV and the 2600 were left on.

Video Checkers - Each Player has two copies and stretched missiles make up the fourth checker on each row

Scrolling the screen was uncommon on the 2600 because there were no scrolling registers, everything had to be done in software.  Vertical scrolling was easier due to the line-based nature of Atari graphics and because the programmer could tell the TIA when to stop drawing scanlines.  Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jr. Pac-Man and Haunted House all have vertical scrolling.  Horizontal scrolling was a bit trickier, but it could be done.  Mountain King, Stargate/Defender II and Dragonstomper all do it well.

Video Checkers - Each piece is a Player object is staggered compared to the next and drawn every other line.  The background is very large to give the programmer more time to update the individual pixel patterns without flickering

There are hardware collision registers for each combination between the six objects.  Reading a register will tell you if there was an intersection between player 1 and missile 2, for example.  While this saves the programmer from having to determine the collision by having to compare the position values of the two characters, it can also lead to too-strict hit control.  If a missile hit a non-visible player pixel, it will still register a hit.

The Stella emulator can turn on and off each of the objects at will.  If you ever wonder how so few objects can make up the screen, try turning off some.  Collisions can be disabled as well, people tend to use this to cheat.

Cartridges and Memory

Standard Atari 2600 Cartridges contain a 2KB or 4KB ROM chip.  4KB is the maximum amount of ROM the 2600 can address without any bankswitching hardware.  To address more ROM, you had to include additional hardware in the cartridge to handle the swapping.  Most bankswitching schemes reserve certain addresses.  When you write a value to the reserved address, it swaps in another 4KB section of the ROM. Some schemes are more complicated, but this is the general idea.

Asteroids was the first commercially released game to use more than 4KB.  Approximately 20% of Atari 2600 games used more than 4KB of ROM, and almost none used more than 16KB.  However, most Atari 2600 games did not have title screens because they always require precious space in ROM to program.  The title on the cartridge should have been enough for everybody, or so the thinking went.  Also, if you wanted to know what the differences between the various game options are, you have to look in the manual or figure it out through observation.  There was no space for the game itself to explain options.

Some Atari 2600 Cartridges also include additional RAM, usually 128 or 256 bytes.  This RAM is mapped somewhere into the cartridge space and one set of 128 or 256 byte addresses is used for reading and a second set is used for writing.  This is because there is no read/write line sent to the cartridge slot.

The most unique game device for the 2600 was the Starpath Supercharger, which transferred binary data played on cassette tapes to a large cartridge which contained 6KB of RAM and a ADC.  I have discussed this device's operation in more detail elsewhere : http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2014/06/arcadiastarpath-supercharger-cassette.html

The B&W switch on the 2600 does nothing if the program ignores it.  If the program responds to the B&W switch as it was meant to be used, it will set the graphics to use colors that will show up better on a B&W TV.  B&W TVs only understand the eight levels of luminance the Atari 2600 provides.  However, there is nothing special about the B&W switch or any of the other non-power switches, and the B&W switch was used for other purposes on occasion : http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-forgotten-switch-atari-2600s-b.html

Enhancements

The TIA contains two audio channels that operate identically but are mixed together outside the chip.  The 2600 was originally planned to be a stereo console with two speakers installed in the 2600's case, but this idea was scrapped as being too costly.  Some of the earliest games (Combat) and a few homebrews (Medieval Mayhem) support stereo audio, but you have to modify your system to hear stereo audio.

The Atari 2600 outputs RF video only, which is less than desirable in the year 2015 for many people.  The chip outputs the color, c-sync and three luminance levels on separate lines.  The luminance levels are mixed and balanced with an R2R network and mixed with the other signals and sent to the RF modulator.  Composite and S-Video mods have existed for years.  However, S-Video is the best you can get from the TIA without substantial additional hardware.

There is an Atari 2600RGB adapter which will provide RGB video. It requires removing the TIA chip and inserting it into a custom board.  The board has an FPGA that will take the values in the color registers and translate them into RGB values.  It will also provide S-Video and Composite Video output.  Because there are only six graphical objects and the background color and four color palettes to keep track of, the FPGA can keep track of this by snooping on writes to these color palette registers.  In order to keep track of the objects as the pixels are displayed, each set of objects is assigned a different black and white palette and intercepts all writes to the palette registers.

Because of the non-standardized method (every game can do it differently) the 2600 uses to indicate that it is time to do vertical blank to the TV, some games may have some trouble when upscaled with an X-RGB Mini Framemeister. The original Warlords is one such game and there is a patch available.

Will the Real Successor to the Pitfall Legacy on the NES Stand Up?

There never was a game called Pitfall III.  David Crane programmed the original Pitfall for the Atari 2600 in 1982 while working for Activision, a company he co-founded.  Two years later he released Pitfall II: Lost Caverns for the Atari 2600.  Thereafter came the great Video Game Crash and Crane left Activision in 1986 to co-found Absolute Entertainment.  While there would be other games in the Pitfall series, this blog entry will discuss three games released or were to be released during the third generation of home video game consoles would could compete for the right to be called the successor to the Pitfall Legacy.

In the Beginning: Pitfall and Pitfall II: Lost Caverns

Pitfall essentially made David Crane as close to a household name as video games got before the Crash and cemented his reputation as a game designer worthy to be inducted into The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences' Hall of Fame.  This game was a massive success in its day, selling over four million copies and ported over to all the major consoles and many of the popular home computing platforms of the day.

Starting Screen with Stationary Log

Pitfall is one of the first platforming and side-scrolling games, even though the Atari 2600 hardware did not accommodate scrolling and this game only used static screens.  This game was inspired by Raiders of the Lost Ark and invited players to explore a large, non-randomized world.  In fact, Pitfall is actually far more popular than the official 2600 Raiders adaptation because Crane was able to pare the exploration concept to the basics while still maintaining a sense of fun.  You can just pick up and play Pitfall, Raiders requires reading the manual and a lot of trial and error in order to make any sense out of it.

Swinging over a crocodile lake

There are many dangers in Pitfall : tar pits, lakes (both of which can expand and retract from what appears to be solid ground), crocodiles, scorpions, snakes and campfires that can kill your character, Pitfall Harry.  Logs can steal points if you collide with them, vines can allow you to cross over dangers, you can jump on the crocodile's heads to get over water, ladders and holes allow you to go underground and the underground passages allow you to "warp" a few screens, if there is no brick wall in the way to block you.  Multi-colored "sprites", a relatively detailed background and catchy sound effects and jingles make the game a visual and aural treat for the 2600.

Swinging over a tar pit and rolling logs

Finally, there is plenty of challenge in that you have to locate 20 treasures strewn across 256 screens in 20 minutes with 3 lives.  You will need to map and plan carefully and identify useful warp passages if you want a good chance of finishing the game.  Important to note that unlike most other Atari 2600 games this game will end (it just stops) if you find the twentieth treasure.

Camping out

One other important theme to note here is that Pitfall Harry has no way to kill any of the enemies which he encounters.  In Pitfall, you have to jump over or otherwise avoid all obstacles, including animals.  This aspect will be maintained in the other games Crane designed and discussed in this article.  Ultimately finding non-violent solutions is a recurrent theme throughout almost all the games Crane has designed.

I forgot to bring my tambourine

Two years after Pitfall, Crane released his sequel, Pitfall II: Lost Caverns.  He did not reinvent the wheel or take the series into a radical new direction.  Some sprites and mechanics were taken from the previous game and the two games are visually similar.  However, he expanded the concept by taking the basic exploration theme of the original game (which only used the horizontal plane) and expanded it into the vertical plane.  There are eight horizontal screens and twenty-seven vertical depth levels which you can explore.  In other words instead of having 255 screens stacked together horizontally, you have a grid of 8x~8 screens, adding an extra dimension to the world.

Starting Screen with Checkpoint and Eventual Goal

Now Pitfall Harry can swim in water and has checkpoints to start at if he is "killed". You do not die in this game, you just get sent back to the last checkpoint.  Nor is there a time limit.  There are several new enemies, like electric eels, frogs, vultures, bats, the rat and the return of the scorpions.  The  vultures and bats travel in a repeating pattern across the screen.  In addition, each time you enter the screen they may start from a different position than the previous time you entered the screen.  This makes it hard judge when you can run underneath them, but you have to run past them to make progress in many areas.  At one point you will need to catch a balloon to progress further in the game.  

Bat and Rat

You can find typical gold brick treasures for points, but the object of the game is to find your pet Quickclaw, your girlfriend Rhonda and a diamond ring.  The game ends when you obtain all three with Harry doing some victory jumps before the game stops.  You loose points by colliding with enemies or falling and landing after a certain height.  The screen scrolls vertically as you descend and explore the "lost caverns".  The look of the game is still very much in line with Pitfall, and like Pitfall, the only thing you can do is climb and descend ladders, walk left and right or jump.

Scorpion, Swimming and Treasure

Crane designed a special hardware chip for the cartridge called the DPC.  Because of this chip, Pitfall II was undoubtedly the most complex cartridge ever to be released on the Atari 2600 during its lifetime.  The DPC chip allows bankswitching up to 10KB of ROM (Atari carts are only 2K or 4K without bankswitching; Pitfall is a 4K game), a hardware random number generator, hardware to assist with graphics processing and hardware to generate the data to feed into the internal 2600 audio to create three additional channels of sound.  There was not enough space to put the Adventurer's Edition second quest into the 2600 original that was present in the Atari 5200, 8-bit and Commodore 64 versions of the game.

Watertfall and Electric Eel

Frogs, Ladders and Multiple Levels

Thanks to the DPC chip, Pitfall 2 has music playing throughout.  There are four pieces of music, the treasure theme, the return to checkpoint theme, the default theme and the balloon theme.  This music plays according to what happens during the game.  Multi-channel music as heard in Pitfall 2 is difficult to pull off on the 2600, but when coupled with an advanced game engine like Pitfall 2's, it needed hardware assistance.

Multi-level Madness

Vultures

A Boy and his Blob

Title Screen

Start Screen

The 2600 was too long in the tooth when David Crane was developing A Boy and his Blob, the 7800 and the Sega Master System did not have the market share and the Commodore 64 was dying in the US.  Having left Activision, he had no more right to create a Pitfall sequel than I would.  He ended up creating A Boy and his Blob for the dominant platform of the day, the NES.  A Boy and His Blob to me feels like Pitfall III and in addition to having its creator at the helm, let me explain the design similarities between this game and its Pitfall predecessors.

No money, no healthy food

A subtle way to inject the production team into the game

The Boy in the title is less capable than Pitfall Harry, he can only move/run left and right, he cannot jump unaided.  However, he has a companion, the Blob, which functions as a puzzle solving device.  Using different flavored jelly beans, the Blob can do different things.  Need a ladder, feed him the licorice jelly bean.  Want to drop down to the next level, turn the Blob into a hole with the punch jelly bean (you can do this multiple times for one bean).  While you have 15 flavors to choose from, your supply of jelly beans is limited and you need to use them wisely.  The Blob and jelly bean mechanic represents an evolution over using the character's own abilities to get past obstacles.

Treasure and Subway Serpent

Don't try this in real life

Like Pitfall 2, this game requires exploration of caverns beneath the surface.  Similarly, the game is structured in a grid of non-scrolling horizontal screens.  Unlike Pitfall 2, the screens do not scroll vertically, despite the superior NES hardware.  I do not believe this was done because David Crane could not figure out NES scrolling but because the levels were so vast and less structured than Pitfall 2 that it would have made map making much more difficult.

Cinnamon & Spice

The caverns have many dangers, including subway serpents, falling rocks, spider webs and stalactites and stalagmites in the water.  However, unlike Pitfall 2, the omnipresent danger is death by falling.  If you fall more than one and a half screens (without a device that can ease your fall), you die.  You start off with five lives in this game and no continues.  Also, your Boy moves a lot looser than Pitfall Harry, so you may run into something you cannot avoid and cannot turn back quickly enough to lose a life.  You cannot swim but the Blob can help you with that.  Finally, if you lose a life you will start at the point where you found your last treasure similar to Pitfall 2's checkpoints.

That Blob is very strong

But running under those subway serpents is still tricky

Mind your height

The goal of the first half of the game is to find treasures and escape the caverns.  There are 22 treasures located in different areas of the underground caverns, similar to Pitfall 2.  At the bottom of the caverns you will find an underground lake just like in Pitfall 2.  These treasures allow you to buy vitamins that you will need on the Blob's home planet, Blobolonia.  The second half of the game is a shorter experience where you have to dodge more enemies and defeat the evil, sweets-loving emperor.  Ultimately, gameplay is the key focus of this game.  The graphics are drab and backgrounds are mostly black underneath the subway.  It is quite easy to get lost because screens often look alike.  Music is limited to one basic piece of music for the game (in addition to the title screen music) and a few sound effects and ditties that play at certain times.

You will need to do this very often

Super Pitfall

Title Screen

I am aware that there is a game for the NES called Super Pitfall, but that is an abomination that David Crane had nothing to do with.  It is a port of a Japanese PC-8801 game by Pony Canon where is was called Super Pit Fall. Post-founders-era Activision licensed the title and published it as one of its first NES games. Activision may hold the rights to the Pitfall brand, but that does not mean it earns a place here considering its pedigree.

Spider and Bat Enemies and Water

Super Pitfall is a stripped down port from programmers who did not quite get the NES.  Scrolling is choppy, graphics are barely NES-worthy, the music is a 15-second piece intended to give you an idea of what hell feels like and there is quite a pause as the level loads.  You can now duck and shoot a gun with limited ammo and there are a couple of bosses, which pretty much sums up the evolution of this game over Pitfall 2.  Hit detection is unfair.  Even the manual states that the gun will feel useless at times, which is refreshingly honest. You can see glitches with sprites not infrequently.  The gun mechanic does introduce an element foreign to Crane's Pitfall games.  Also, items are invisible, so you have to jump in certain places to make them appear.  The game is filled with cheap deaths, in fact if you go down the first ladder in the game you will almost certainly die.

Bats and Frogs

Like Pitfall 2, you have to obtain the diamond, the pet and the girlfriend to win the game, but there are more obstacles to overcome. The world is huge (270+ screens) but you only have three lives and no continues, so it will be difficult to get a feel for it.

Waterfalls, Spikes and Treasure

Super Pitfall 2

Title Screen

There was going to be a game called Super Pitfall 2 released for the NES, but was canceled.  There is a prototype ROM floating about.  Super Pitfall 2 was a port of another Japanese game, this one a Famicom game called Atlantis no Nazo (Mystery of Atlantis) by Sunsoft.  The prototype appears to differ from the Japanese original only in its title screen.

1st Zone

Unlike Super Pitfall, Super Pitfall 2 is competently programmed.  Sunsoft was willing to hire competent programmers, Pony not so much.  The graphics are still bland but the music is pretty decent and the control is not quite as frustrating.  Your weapon is a bomb that you can throw, but it detonates when it wants to and can kill you if you are in its (short) blast radius.  The jumping could use more polish (you cannot change your trajectory in mid jump like Castlevania) and the game will get frustrating very quickly.  The bats dropping guano as a weapon is a nice touch.  The shell crabs will hide in their shells if they perceive a bomb coming, so killing them is a bit tricky.  Still, the violent solution is out of place in Crane's Pitfall games.  

2nd Zone

Ultimately, Super Pitfall 2 is really a horizontal side scroller.  The level progression is fairly linear and it does not feel like a Pitfall game at all.  You can find doors that will take you to a small portion of a later zone, but the game is still linear.  Even Super Pitfall was better at conveying an open world.  Pitfall's influence on the game is still present.  The enemies appear to be mostly of the natural variety and there are treasure chests you can open for points.  Between its lack of a real Pitfall feel and its rather long-in-the-tooth status for 1989 when Activision was considering porting it, it is no surprise that it eventually went unreleased.  An optimist may wish to believe that Activision saw that its former founder had released a Pitfall-like game in the same year and did not want to compete with him, but my idea is probably the more likely reason.

3rd Zone

The Atari 2600 Adventure Lineage

When I think of adventure games, we think of exploration, interaction, puzzle solving and occasional danger.  Adventure games first appeared on mainframes and typically used lots of memory and caused time sharing schemes no end of annoyance.  The first video game consoles were vastly inferior computing products.  However, they were capable of all the features I mentioned above which define adventure games, in a much more rudimentary capacity.  In this blog entry, I will be focusing on my characterization of adventure games released by one company, Atari, for one video game console, the Atari 2600.

The Atari 2600 consists of three chips.  The first is a 6507 CPU running at 1.19MHz.  This cut-down 6502 CPU has no support for interrupts and can only address 8KB.  The Atari can access 4KB of ROM in a cartridge without extra hardware in the cartridge itself.  The second chip is the TIA, which can generate a 160 pixel by a (typical) 192 line resolution graphics display.  The TIA can only support the equivalent of five (single color) sprites and a low resolution 2-color background layer.  It does support a rather large number of colors for the time, 128, and the sprites can have their colors changed every scanline or two.  It also supports 2 channels of square wave sound with crude (5-bit) frequency control or various methods of producing noise.  The third chip is the RIOT chip with provides a timer, 128 bytes of RAM and input for the console switches and (with the TIA) the joysticks and other peripherals.

Input for the Atari 2600 was generally by a joystick with a single fire button.  Alternatively, paddles or a 12-button keyboard controller could be used.  The two controller ports supported either two joysticks, two keyboard controllers or four paddle controllers.  None of the games described below use anything other than a joystick.  With this hardware background, let's introduce the games.

Superman
1978 - Johnathan Dunn

Power-On Start

Superman is the first true adventure-style game released by Atari.  It has a plot, characters, enemies and an ending.  The plot is simple, Lex Luthor and his five henchmen have blown up a bridge in Metropolis and scattered the three pieces throughout the city.  As Superman you must catch Lex and his henchmen and bring them to jail, find the pieces and put them back where they belong and change back into Clark Kent and go to the Daily Planet to file your story.  Lex sent out some Kryptonite that will rob you of your ability to fly and to capture the villains and the bridge pieces, in order to restore your powers you need to find Lois Lane.  There is a helicopter also flying around that can randomly transport people, krypton satelites and bridge pieces.  Superman has the ability to view neighboring screens with his X-ray vision (push the fire button and a directional).

Fleeing from the Scene of the Crime

Subway Entrance

This game solely emphasizes the aspect of collecting.  In order to win, you need to collect bad guys and bridge pieces.  Those rectangles and square (for Luthor) show the number of bad guys still at large.  Unusually, the four digit number on the right shows the time taken, you are racing against the clock to beat the game, not trying to achieve a maximum score.  Your super powers are innate to the character and can only be temporarily lost.

Found a Bridge Piece

More Metropolis

Even More Metropolis

Unfortunately, Superman has not held up very well over the passing decades.  This game has three problems.  First, graphics become a flickery mess the moment more than two objects are on the screen.  Second, most of the main screens have nondescript backgrounds, making it very difficult to navigate the game world.  Third, the game world itself is not easy to get around.  There is no readily discernable pattern with the subways and the city screens.  There are 26 unique screens.

Inside the Daily Planet

Inside a Subway Station

Adventure
1980 - Warren Robinett

Power On Start

Adventure is one of the classic games for the Atari 2600.  Warren Robinett decided to take a minimalist approach to the game's design.  Instead of a multi-colored Superman sprite, your player was just a square. The dragons look more like ducks.  Virtually every other object in the game was also a single colored sprite.  Flickering does not begin unless three objects are on the screen, compared to two for Superman.  Backgrounds were either empty rooms, simple castles or mazes with clean lines and good contrast between the colors.  The object of the game could not be more simple, find the Golden Chalice and bring it back to the Golden Castle.

Golden Castle

Grundle and the Black Key

While the game's graphics would not impress anyone, the gameplay was inspired.  Your square can move in eight directions, you pick up an items by touching it and the fire button drops items.  However, the items your character could or needed were three keys, a sword, a magnet, a bridge and the chalice.  The sword kills the dragons, each colored key open the gates to the corresponding castle.

Being chased by Grundle in the Catacombs

This game adds the element of puzzle solving to exploration.  The three keys (White, Black and Gold) are needed to open the corresponding castle gate.  The magnet and the bridge are helper items that allow you to get to places or items you otherwise could not reach.  The sword kills the dragons, but since you can only carry one item at a time, you can't count on having it when the dragons come by.

White Castle Maze and Bridge

The enemies consist of the three dragons and the Black Bat.  The dragons have names, different colors and distinct personalities, Robinett seemed to come to this idea independently of Pac-Man.  Yorkle, the Yellow Dragon, is the slowest and runs away from the Gold Key.  Grundle, the Green Dragon, is faster can be found guarding many items.  Rhindle, the Red Dragon, is the fastest but typically is not seen until you get to the final maze.  However, the Black Bat is by far the most terrifying enemy in the game.  The Dragons will kill you but the Black Bat will constantly frustrate you by stealing and replacing objects throughout the game world.  Sometimes you can grab the bat, but you can't keep him.  Unfortunately, the Bat can deposit necessary items in places where you may not be able to reach.

White and Black Keys

The mazes in this game may feel intimidating at first, especially when dragons are around.  However, the exits to the maze are always predictable and soon the player can figure his way around without mapping.  The maze between the Gold and White castle is called the Catacombs and only gives you limited visibility.  There is also a limited visibility maze after the Black castle.

Eaten by Yorkle in the Blue Maze

Adventure brought skill settings to the fore.  The game starts up with the skill level number on the screen.  Skill level 1 is the beginner's game where only one maze and two dragons are present.  Only fourteen rooms are accessible.  The bat is not present.  Skill levels 2 & 3 add the bat, the red dragon, more screens and three more mazes.  In Skill level 2, the items and dragons are in fixed places, but in Skill level 3 they are randomized.

This game was built around the number three.  There are three skill levels, three castles, three keys, three dragons.  The map is also an improvement over Superman.  Even at 29 screens, it is easy to keep track of where you are (except in the mazes).  Of course, no mention of Adventure can go without the Easter Egg Warren Robinett hid in the game unbeknownst to his superiors at Atari.  Frustrated with the total lack of public recognition and credit for his work, he inserted a graphical "Created by Warren Robinett" into the game if the player found a hidden dot in the maze after the Black Castle that allowed him to enter a room otherwise blocked by a solid line.  Robinett was also responsible for BASIC Programming and Slot Racers, but this was his true claim to fame.

Haunted House
1981 - James Andreasen

Power On Start

Haunted House has been called either the first survival horror game or one of the most prominent precursors to survival horror games.  Your character is essentially a pair of eyes roaming around in the dark of a four-story house looking for three pieces to an urn.  Once the urn is collected, you must exit the house through the exit on the first floor. You can walk over these pieces as you explore the haunted house or press the action button to light a match for a few seconds.  There are three types of enemies, the ghost, the tarantulas and the bats.  Similarly to Advenutre there are helpful items, the scepter and the master key.  The master key unlocks doors and the scepter provides invulnerability to the enemies (except the ghost on some of the harder difficulty levels.  However just like Adventure you can only hold one item or the urn at a time.  The fire button also allows you to drop items like Adventure.

First Floor, Difficulty Level 1

First Floor and Bat, Difficulty 2+

The map is deceptively simple.  The house has four floors, and each floor is arranged in a grid of 3 horizontal rooms by 2 vertical rooms.  The floors are connected by multiple stairwells and the rooms by corridors.  Cleverly for the 2600, each floor scrolls vertically.  The game has nine difficulty levels. On the easiest difficulty level, you can see colored walls, but otherwise they are black and only illuminated when you are near a portion of the wall with a lit match or when lightning strikes.  On the higher difficulty levels, certain rooms have locked doors requiring the master key to open each time you pass through the corridor.  Also, as the difficulty levels get harder, some of the enemies can pursue you through locked doors.  The locked doors are in the same place in the middle difficulty levels, on the highest difficulty level they are in different places.

Second Floor

The game has a status bar, showing the number of matches used, the current floor number, the picture of the currently carried object and the number of lives you have.  Fittingly, you start with nine lives.  When you move, the pupils of your eyes will look in the direction you are moving.  Helpfully, the manual gives you a map of the floors, doors and stairwells used for the intermediate difficulty levels.  Even though the enemy designs are a bit goofy, the eerie sounds make this quite a memorable game.

Third Floor and Ghost

Swordquest Earthworld
1982 - Dan Hitchens

At last, a Proper Title Screen

Up to this point, adventure games on the Atari have been pretty-much a pick up and play experience.  You can easily beat them with no more information than contained in this blog.  Most people can figure them out just through trial and error.  Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for these later games.  All the previous games were 4K games.  The next five games hereafter are 8KB games.  They require the manual in order to really figure out how to play or how to go about beating these games.  The Swordquest series was perhaps the most elaborate set of games ever released for the 2600 during its lifetime.  Each game was tied to a contest and came with a comic book to give necessary hints to the puzzles and progress the official storyline.

Your character in a Room

Unfortunately, the underlying games were just not that great.  Dan Hitchens programmed ports of Berzerk, Gravitar and Mario Bros. for the 2600 and all are better games to play than this game or its sequels.  All three games have your character walk through a series of connected rooms.  These rooms in Earthworld are identical in shape but have different colors.  To progress through the game, your character needs to pick up items in one room and use them in another room.  Putting the right item(s) in the right room will give the player a clue which he could combine with other clues to write in his entry to the contest.  Sometimes using an item gives your player an action sequence to complete.  These action sequences are very frustrating.  There are four altogether.  One of them, the Aquarian Rapids, is like the river portion of Frogger with all the fun taken away.  Two are virtually identical and the fourth will test your sense of timing and patience.  Fail at any point on any of these puzzles and you are sent back to the beginning.

Action Sequence - Sagittarius Spears

Earthworld has the most impressive graphics of the three games.  The player sprite is multicolored and the game makes good use of cycling color graphics.  Fireworld and Waterworld are much more plain by comparison.

Action Sequence - Rafts in Aquarian Rapids

The map is based on the twelve signs of the zodiac.  There are twelve rooms and the player can cycle through them by going up or down.  The left and right exits often do not work.

Swordquest Fireworld
1982 - Tod Frye

Copyright Notice, In a Room

Fireworld was programmed by Tod Frye, infamous for the 2600 version of Pac-Man.  Fireworld is the worst of the Swordquest games in terms of graphics, sound and gameplay.  The player is single colored, the objects during the action sequences are often hard to see and there are no fancy color cycling effects.  Sound is abysmal.

Action Sequence - Flying Fire Goblins

The map consists of twelve rooms based on the Tree of Life. Unlike Earthworld or Waterworld, a room can lead to more than one or two rooms.  There is not any particular reasoning behind which exit leads to which room.  However, unlike Earthworld, at least each exit leads somewhere.  A special item called the chalice will help you uncover more exits.  The rooms have obstacles in them to make them look less generic.

Action Sequence - Deadly Snakes

There are a lot more action sequences in Fireworld than either Earthworld or Waterworld.  There is only three basic action sequence types, but variations on them bring the total to ten.  Every time you attempt to access the items in a room, you must face a action sequence.  You do not need to achieve perfection in the puzzle to access the items, just make a sufficiently decent showing.

Action Sequence - Flaming Firebirds

Raiders of the Lost Ark
1982 - Howard Scott Warshaw

Title Sequence

Raiders was Warshaw's second assignment after his first, Yars' Revenge became a big hit.  Raiders is as close to a personal computer graphical adventure game like King's Quest for the Atari 2600 as Atari ever got.  There is a set path to go through the game.  In every game you have to detonate the grenade against a particular wall, for example.  Raiders is a complex game with many inventory items you can use.  In fact, it requires two controllers to play, with the second controller allowing you to select inventory items to use.  Unfortunately, handling two joysticks is very distracting and there are enemies that can kill you on most screens.

Entrance Room

Marketplace

Mesa Side

Inventory items include a whip, revolver, flute, coins, Staff of Ra headpiece, Ankh, grenade, timepiece, shovel, key and parachute.You get three lives to find the Lost Ark of the Covenant, and you must face snakes, an enemy agent, tiny thieves, deadly spiders and fatal falls.  The game has thirteen areas which you must traverse, and some of the areas scroll vertically.  A first for Atari, you also get to interact with merchants and search for items and paths to get to your goal.  It may not have the interactivity of Dragonstomper, but Dragonstomper is a far more ambitious game.  There are several places points where you have to wait a lengthy period of time in order to progress in Raiders.  Raiders the movie was known for its unusual intelligence combined with white knuckle action.  While this game may have something of the first, it has nothing of the last.

Valley of Poison & Thief

Entrance Room, after a Grenade

Temple Entrance

Room of the Shining Light

E.T. the Extra-terrestrial
1982 - Howard Scott Warshaw

Title Screen

Warshaw's final published game for Atari is the legendary E.T. the Extra-terrestrial.  People have endlessly criticized this game for its obtuse goals and mechanics, buggy pit falling mechanics and even the color of your character. Of course, if you read the manual you can actually have some fun with this game, it is far, far from the worst game on the Atari.

Landing Zone

Washington D.C.

The goal of the game is to find the three pieces to a phone so E.T. can phone home for a transport.  These pieces are randomly hidden in the 20 pits in the game.  The game world is simple, you have only six screens.  The game's map is in the shape of a cube, with the landing zone on the top, the four pit areas on the sides and the Washington D.C. screen on the bottom.

Pit Area 1

Pit Area 2 & Reeses Piece

Pit Area 3 & Reeses Piece

Pit Area 4 & Reeses Piece

There are two notorious pit bugs.  The first is when you just climb out of a pit and see the map screen, never push up.  You can push left, right or down to totally clear the pit, but if you press up you will be sent back into the pit.  Every pixel of E.T. must clear every pixel of the pit.  The second pit bug is that exiting right from the landing zone or left from Washington D.C. will always send you to the bottom of a pit.

In a Pit, nothing to see here

In a Pit with Phone Piece

Except for the easy game, standing in the way of E.T. are two foes.  The first is the scientist, who capture E.T. if he touches E.T. and bring him straight to his lab in Washington D.C. for study.  The scientist is merely a hinderance.  The F.B.I. agent is much, much more annoying.  If he touches you, he will take a piece of your phone away.  The F.B.I. agent is akin to the Bat from Adventure and the inspiration is obvious.

Unlike the three lives of Raiders, E.T. has a health meter that starts at 9,999 units and runs down to zero.  The health meter runs down if you are walking, and runs down faster if you are running or using a special power.  If your health meter runs to zero, Eliott will come and revive you three or four times with 1,500 health.  You can also restore health by eating the Reese's Pieces found on the pit screens.  Otherwise, you can save them for points at the end of the game.

E.T. can use special powers, but only at various areas of each map screen.  If you walk into a power zone, you can teleport to another screen, call your ship, call for Eliott to give him Reese's Pieces for points at the end of the game, eat a Reese's Piece for energy or see whether any of the pits on that screen has an item in it. In a pit, you can extend your neck to levitate.  In the landing zone, you have to find the area on that screen where the transport capsule will land, otherwise you won't get picked up and will have to call the ship again.

So, beating E.T. is far simpler than Raiders or any of the Swordquest games.  You find the three phone pieces, find the area on one of the pit screens to call your ship and find the area on landing zone screen where your capsule will pick you up.  This is another game that revolves around the number three, there are three phone pieces, three types of screens, three structures on the Washington D.C. screen, three characters in the game other than the player, three (usually) chances to continue, and three principal tasks to accomplish.

Swordquest Waterworld
1983 - Tod Frye

Copyright Notice & Action Sequence - Sea of Sharks

In the last Swordquest game to be released, things have been toned down quite a bit from Earthworld and Fireworld.  In this game there are only seven room based on the Chakra, and unlike Earthworld the last room does not wrap around to the first.  The action sequences are much less annoying this time, and you encounter them not by using items but by entering rooms.  They are still of the "touch an enemy, miss a jump, return to the start", but are much easier than Earthworld or Fireworld's action puzzles.  Only the Ice Floes action sequence is annoying, just like its Earthworld counterpart Aquarian Rapids.  If you cannot finish a puzzle after a set period of time, the game will let you progress into the next room anyway but one of the items in that room will be unavailable.

In a Room with Items

Waterworld may not be as flashy as Earthworld, but its does have some color cycling.  The sound effects and musical cues are undoubtedly the best of the series, but there is not a great deal of variety to the sounds. Frye had definitely improved his presentation skills this time around and was working on Airworld, the final game in the series, before Atari shut the whole project down.  There were contest winners for Earthworld and Fireworld, but the Waterworld contest was never held due to Atari Inc.'s implosing from the Video Game Crash of 1983.

Action Sequence - School of Octopi

Action Sequence - Ice Floes

Secret Quest
1989 - Steve DeFrisco & Nolan Bushnell

Title Screen, Enter your Initials to Proceed (and don't forget them!)

During the Atari 2600 revival of the late 1980s, the Tramiel-led Atari Corp. looked for companies who were willing to develop for their console.  One such company was called Axlon, headed by Nolan Bushnell and it programmer Steve DeFrisco made three of the best quality games released late in the Atari's lifecycle, this game, Motorodeo and Klax.  This is among the most ambitious of Atari 2600 games, using 16KB for ROM and containing an additional 128 bytes of RAM in the cartridge.

In game - Finding a Weapon

Secret Quest uses a top down view, but the character's sprite has different graphics for moving in each direction, unlike Adventure and Haunted House.  In this sense, it plays like an Atari 2600 version of The Legend of Zelda would play.  The object of this game is to blow up eight space stations.  Each station has multiple rooms and most have multiple floors.  One or more codes will be scattered throughout the floors in particular rooms.  There is a room where you enter the code to destroy the station.  Once you enter the code you have 20 seconds to get to the teleporter or you will go down with the station.

First enemy encountered

Secret Quest has sparse rooms but colorful sprites.  Note that no more than one enemy is on the screen at any time, this helps reduce flicker to a minimum.  A new enemy gets teleported into the room as you beat an old enemy until you clear the room.  Enemies do not respawn in a room once it is cleared.  There is a constant background tune that lasts for 18 seconds that plays constantly once you start a game.  Sound effects are pretty basic.

Second enemy encountered

Secret Quest is almost unique because it is only one of two Atari games that has a password system.  Survival Run had a twelve character code, and it sensibly used numbers 0-9.  Secret Quest's passwords also use a twelve-character code, but overdid it.  Instead of using letters and numbers like most other games, Secret Quest's passwords consist entirely of "futuristic" symbols.  They are not the easiest to jot down quickly as one wants to end his game.  These symbols are also used for the self-destruct codes in the game.  You also need to remember the initials you entered when you started the game, as they are tied to the passwords generated.  The password will allow you to start not just at the level where you received it, but it will also recall the Energy and Oxygen you had, the items you picked up and your score.

Status and Password Screen

Secret Quest is rather different from any of the above games.  The game is much more focused on combat.  You can pick up three weapons during the game, with the later weapons being more powerful and consuming more energy than the first.  There are no puzzle items except sonic keys, which open a door.  When you clear a room of enemies, they will drop an Oxygen Bottle or an Energy Pod.  Oxygen functions as your life bar and the Energy bar allows you to use weapons.  It will be a constant struggle to keep these meters above the empty mark.  The Oxygen bar will be depleted if an enemy hits you and also decreases as you explore.  In this sense, Secret Quest is similar to Gauntlet.

There is no real puzzle solving in this game.  However, it qualifies as an adventure game because there is exploration and collection like in E.T., Superman and Haunted House.  It is the need to scour the space stations for the codes, the self-destruct room and the teleporter that separate this from a pure top-down action game like Dark Chambers.