Experience Points – Memories of a Lifelong Gamer is a series of blog posts that I’ve undertaken to record some of my fondest memories of nearly 40 years of gaming.
Christmas Morning, 1987
My mom was good at surprising my sister and I on Christmas, and in 1987, she pulled off a doozy. It was something I wasn’t expecting and that I don’t even remember asking for, but also something I couldn’t have been more excited about.
My very own Atari 2600.
I couldn’t believe it! I wouldn’t have to visit a friend’s house to play Atari any more. In fact, I could have friends over to MY house to play Atari! Woohoo! This Atari was the 1986 Atar 2600 Junior model, which had been redesigned to be smaller, more inexpensive and to look similar in style to Atari’s 5200 and 7800 consoles, which had departed from the wood grain look of the late 70’s.
Now, I know what you may be thinking. By Christmas of 1987, the Nintendo Entertainment System had been released in the US. In fact, Christmas of 1987 was one of the biggest years for NES sales. Wouldn’t I have much rather had an NES? Wasn’t I disappointed with the Atari? To top it off, I called one of my school friends later that day and told him excitedly about getting the Atari, while he rather quickly dismissed it and told me excitedly about his brand new NES. Shouldn’t I have been green with jealousy?
Well no, not at all. Quite honestly, I simply wasn’t paying much attention to the NES. I saw the commercials for it here and there and for some of the games, but it just didn’t register. I had no clue that Atari’s biggest days were behind them, that the entire video game industry had crashed in 1983, and I was only dimly aware that the Atari 2600 had competition from the Intellivision and the Colecovision. Nobody I knew had either of those. I was still in the thick of playing Atari games, and now I had one of my own, and it would be my main video game system at home for the next 6 years. That’s right. I played the Atari until 1993.
Another Reason Why My Atari 2600 Was Awesome
There’s something more to this story. Something that I wouldn’t know for many years. Yes, it was 1987 and I was getting an Atari 2600 when millions of others were getting their NES. What I didn’t know is that the affordability of the Atari 2600 Jr. was one reason my mom was able to get it for me.
I come from a family of modest means. In fact, just a handful of generations back, it was outright poverty. But my parents were always able to provide my sister and I with what we needed. We never had to worry about having enough to eat. There was always plenty. We always had new clothes when the school year began, even if it wasn’t “top brands” (and I paid so little attention to such things I’d have never known the difference). We always had a roof over our heads, were warm in the winter and we were safe, felt loved and cared for. Who can ask for more than that? My childhood was enviable, as I look back on it.
What we didn’t have was enough money for the latest and greatest technology. We didn’t have a computer until 1998 when it was clear I would need one for college. In high school and my first year of college I wrote my papers on a Brother Word Processor. Our first “Second TV” was a 19″ black and white TV that we kept in the kitchen. Our cars were always used. We rented VCR’s to watch movies for years before we bought our own. And video game systems were an expensive luxury item that I was doing just fine without.
What I didn’t know was that in 1987, my mom worked extra throughout the year to save up for Christmas. My Atari 2600 was the result of my mom spending hours cleaning houses as a side job so she had the extra money to spend on our Christmas gifts. I also learned that my mom was quite proud of the Atari 2600 that year, and that the conversation with my friend who got an NES crushed her a bit. See the new Atari 2600 Jr. had a price tag of $50. That’s $100 less than the NES was at the time. That was a very big difference for our family.
Mom, if you’re reading, you need to know this: I was far more excited about that Atari 2600 than I would have been with an NES. No matter what my friends were getting that Christmas, your pride in that gift was well placed. You knew me well, paid attention and got me the most exciting gift I could have asked for. You nailed it that year, and don’t forget it.
Discovering New Games
I was now set to enjoy five years of Atari 2600 gaming goodness. My mom had also purchased several games, including DEFENDER, OMG YES DEFENDER!!!!
For you younger folks, you know that excitement you got when you were eagerly waiting for the next Pokemon, Fallout, Dragon Age, or Elder Scrolls (or pick your exciting game)? That is exactly the sort of excitement I felt when I unwrapped that Defender cartridge that Christmas morning. There were several other games too, including Missile Command, Space Invaders, Pac-Man and E.T. The Extra Terrestrial.
E.T. Didn’t Suck. Your opinion does.
Okay, let’s talk E.T. The legacy of the Atari 2600 “E.T. The Extra Terrestrial” is now legendary, and practically a video gaming trope. The trope is that this game is the worst Atari game ever made.
It is not. Full stop.
It’s possible you saw a video on the internet about how much it sucked. Or maybe you played it for 5 minutes and laughed at how terrible it is, without really understanding how the game worked. But your opinion is probably wrong, or at the very least misinformed.
E.T. does have some problems. The Atari 2600’s collision detection is pixel perfect, so this resulted in falling down more holes than you intended. That is if you didn’t learn the game. See, I learned how the game worked. I only fell into pits when I wanted to. I took the time to explore the game and understand it. I read the f’ing manual (RTFM, right?). It also had some annoying FBI agents and Scientists who could mess up your adventure very quickly, and you spent more time running away from them than solving the game. That is, until you learn how the game works (RTFM). Then you find strategies for avoiding the Humans. Some things also didn’t correspond with the movie, but in the early 80’s, how many games did? So it’s not without its flaws, but they aren’t major.
I could go on about why I loved E.T. and why it is actually one of the best Atari 2600 games rather than the worst, but in this case, others have done this job as well as I could, so I will let these authors speak on my behalf for those who are interested:
So Many More Games!
After that Christmas, I started my own Atari 2600 game collection. Every so often my mom would find one for me, or I would even find one myself. See, one of the best parts of buying an Atari 2600 in the late 80’s after the big crash in 1983 and the release of the NES in 1986, was that Atari games were CHEAP. We’re talking nothing was more than about $20. So it was easy building a nice little library. And this was how I was to find what may be, after all is said and done, my favorite Atari 2600 title of all.
Solaris.
If you read my first article, you’ll remember that one of my early discoveries was a fantastic 8-bit Atari computer game called Star Raiders. This was a technological achievement by a brilliant programmer named Doug Neubauer. This game is well worth your attention, and it even has a fascinating history as told by the author himself.
Star Raiders Trivia and Remembrances by Doug Neubauer
I found my copy of Solaris practically by accident. I actually can’t even remember what store it was, but I can tell you this: it was not a department store or electronics store. It was some kind of discount store where I found a few new games, including the strange shooter Desert Falcon and the magnificent pinball game, Midnight Magic.
As soon as I started playing Solaris it immediately reminded me of Star Raiders. What I didn’t know was that it was by the same author as Star Raiders, so the similarity was not a coincidence. Solaris was Doug Neubauer’s sequel/successor to Star Raiders, and the quality shows. It is a worthy successor for sure. It’s also no coincidence that I loved it from the start. It’s a first person space shooter with a simulated 3D environment and a galactic map, only this time it had many different “sectors” (galactic maps). The goal of Solaris is to find and rescue the Federation planet that bears the name of the game. To get there, you have to navigate a labyrinth of sectors, fight off enemy units, travel through wormholes, destroy enemy planets and rescue Federation citizens, all while managing your fuel and surviving in a terrifying space battle against minefields, large cruisers, tie-fighter like ships and the vicious Cobra ships.
I spent lots of time mapping Solaris, showing how each sector connected to others. Even this was challenging, as it took a lot of practice just to survive long enough to explore more sectors. Solaris is not an easy game, especially considering the need to conserve fuel and re-fuel. If the Xylons destroy your Federation planets before you get to them, you can’t refuel there any more.
I did find the planet Solaris once. Only once, and I can’t tell you how excited I was just to see it. But the sector has to be entered from a particular direction. When I entered it I had to leave it the way I came in or by an exit that took me out of the sector. I was SO CLOSE. I was also very low on fuel and had only one life left. I died shortly thereafter.
I never did finish Solaris, but writing about it now is inspiring me to give it a shot once more. Perhaps I’ll write a future post about it.
Borrowing Atari Games from Friends
Another great thing about getting an Atari in 1987 was that some of my friends who were now playing games on the NES or computers like the Commodore 64 were more than willing to let me borrow their Atari games.
I had made other friends in town and in school who also had Atari systems. There were two in particular whom I had made friends with in the mid to late 80’s. One was a friend my age named Mike who lived in my small town. We used to spend hours at the community playground playing basketball, home run derby with an aluminum bat and a tennis ball, trading baseball and football cards (sometimes for posters of Alyssa Milano, Debbie Gibson, Paula Abdul and Tiffany) and talking about girls (I would have been in 5th-6th grade by now).
I would also visit his house where we would read Hardy Boys novels, watch classic TV shows like Dragnet and the Adam West Batman, swim in his family pool when the weather was hot, or would play touch football games with other kids in the neighborhood. We also traded
But sometimes we would play video games. I really want to stress how as much as we loved video games, they were not our central activity. They were something we did on the side, after we were tired from running around outside or if it was raining. There was just so much more to do that we would miss out on if we had spent the day playing video games.
But we did play them. By this time, Mike already had an NES and a Commodore 64. These were usually hooked up and ready to go, but Mike’s family also had an Atari 2600 and a nice collection of games in the basement. We hooked it up and played for a bit one day, but then Mike simply offered to let me borrow some of the games and we could just play at my house.
Mike had a great collection of games I’d never seen, including a bunch of really fun titles, such as:
- Megamania (Activision’s Space Invaders clone)
- Boxing (Activision)
- Cosmic Ark and Atlantis (Imagic)
- Haunted House
- Seaquest (Activision)
- Stampede (Activision)
- Chopper Command (More Activision, and I’ll be focusing on this one in a future article)
Lots of Activision games there. But the game from Mike’s collection that I spent the most time with was Raiders of the Lost Ark, a game developed by Howard Scott Warshaw, the same who developed E.T. and the legendary Yar’s Revenge.
Raiders is one of the best adventure games on the Atari 2600 by far. You have to explore various areas of the world, discover secrets, deal with black market shops, escape from dungeons, and defeat spiders, spies and other enemies. Just like in the movie, you have to find the headpiece of the Staff of Ra and take it to the map room. When the sun comes up it will reveal the location of the Well of Souls where the Ark of the Covenant is buried. This means you also need a shovel.
Where it differs from the movie is that the Well of Souls is in one of many mesas in a mesa field. So yeah, that’s a little inaccurate, but it serves the purpose. You have to find and use a grappling hook to move from mesa to mesa, then parachute off the edge and land in a cave in the side of the mesa, where you will dig for the Ark.
Yes, I have just described an Atari 2600 adventure game. It is complex, difficult, mysterious and even requires the use of BOTH joysticks. One of them is used to manage your inventory while the other is used to move Indy and use items, such as the whip to take care of those snakes.
Snakes…. why did there have to be snakes?
It took me weeks to solve the game, and I would say it was the first game I was ever addicted to in any way.
Quick digression. Remember how I said Mike and I liked to play basketball? Well that summer I was enrolled in a two week long basketball camp where I would go to a local school for two hours every morning. See, Mike and I both had aspirations of making it to the NBA some day.
Yes, you heard that correctly. There was a time that I loved sports and loved watching professional sports on TV. I paid attention to it and cared about it. At the time, I loved the NBA and I think it truly was in one of its best periods. It was the era of Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, Isaiah Thomas, Dennis Rodman, Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul Jabbar and many other legendary players. It was highly competitive and extremely fun to watch. I was a big LA Lakers fan, and I hated Bill Laimbeer of the Detroit Pistons.
It should come as no surprise then that my 11-12 year old self really wanted to shoot three pointers for the LA Lakers some day, just like Kurt Rambis. So I signed up for any basketball camp or workshop I could. Every morning for two weeks in the early summer of 1988 (or was it ’89?) I went to my basketball workshop. And every day when I was done, I would get home, have lunch and play Raiders of the Lost Ark. Of course I was starting it over every day because saving games didn’t exist yet. I finally finished the game and found the sacred Ark of the Covenant, just days after basketball camp ended that year.
Another friend I had gotten to know in those days was Bart. He and I went to the same school and the same church, so our families knew each other too. He lived on an awesome farm outside of town and some of our church youth group events were held there since it was such a great space. They were and are a great family and some of the best kind of people you could hope to know. I always had a great time at Bart’s house, whether it was with the youth group or just as a group of friends. In the big snowstorm of 1993 where it had snowed almost two feet in a single night, school was canceled and a group of friends went to Bart’s to play in the deep snowdrifts that had collected on his property. We were literally able to dig tunnels in the snow, and it was as awesome as it sounded. In the same snowstorm, kids from all over my small town had what felt like a village wide snowball war. We gathered at a battlefield that seemed to be made of over three large town blocks with few homes and large fields of snow. We built forts, made allies and teams, built up a supply of snowballs and waged a fierce battle for… well, just for fun really. It seemed to go on all day, the younger kids falling out due to attrition earlier and the older kids lasting until it started to get dark. One of the high points of the day was when a girl I had previously had a crush on and still liked as a friend, totally blasted me with an enormous snowball. It was awesome.
It was the type of snowball fight spoken of only by minstrel poets and in hushed tones by grizzled old men; where each survivor has their tale to tell, their own experience in the white storm, unique from everyone else’s. That is my tale.
But anyway, back to Atari games. Aside from amazing snow banks, Bart also had the best Atari 2600 collection I had ever seen. I was familiar with many of them but he had some real gems that I had never played before, and was thankfully able to borrow some of them, including:
- Jungle Hunt
- Summer and Winter Games
- California Games (My favorite of the Epyx sports titles)
- Joust
And what may be my favorite Atari 2600 game of all time next to Solaris.
Pitfall 2!!
I didn’t even know it existed until I saw it at Bart’s place and played it myself. Pitfall 2 was an AMAZING successor to the original, and is in my opinion, the precursor to the Metroidvania style of platform game.
Instead of collecting treasures in a certain amount of time, in Pitfall 2 you had to find only three major treasures: The Raj Diamond, Pitfall Harry’s nice Rhonda, and his pet mountain lion, Quickclaw, who had been lost in the caverns. But this was no easy task. Pitfall 2 features a labyrinth of horizontal and vertically scrolling caverns, pits, poison frogs, electric eels, bats, scorpions and condors. There are checkpoints that help the player keep up their progress.
As with Raiders, it took me several weeks before I finally finished Pitfall 2. The game map can be roughly divided into four main sections. You can find Rhonda and the Raj Diamond near the 3rd section, but to find Quickclaw, you had to progress through the 4th and most challenging section. It is a column of caverns two screens wide, where you have to perfectly dodge bats and condors, flying in two different sine wave patterns. Then, at the very end you had to jump three scorpions (not easy) and avoid a poison frog at the top of a ladder. It was tremendously challenging for my 11 year old self, and I can remember how close I could get without being able to make it, and how frustrating it was to die with Quickclaw one screen away.
I remember the day I finally finished it. My hands were sweaty, I was nervous and I’m not sure I had had anything to drink for a while. My heart was pounding as I jumped the last scorpion, climbed the ladder, got past the poison frog, went right to collect the rat and then left to rescue Quickclaw.
I did it. I beat Pitfall 2. It was glorious. It was rewarding. I now knew that feeling of finishing a video game, and I was hooked already.
Games that Actually Sucked
There’s one more topic I want to talk about before wrapping this up. I’ve already said that I don’t think E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial is anywhere near the worst game on the Atari 2600, and that I in fact think it is quite good. But there is a dark, ugly side to Atari 2600 games. See, one of the reasons that the video game market crashed in 1983 was because literally anybody could develop and publish a game for the Atari 2600, no matter how unskilled you were at development or design. There was a glut of poor quality Atari games out there and this disappointment contributed to the downfall of the industry.
I owned one of these games. My mom had purchased it on a whim when she found it at a store. I certainly don’t blame her, by the way. Game reviews were a little hard to come by in the late 80’s. The game is called “Cruise Missile“, by Froggo games.
Your player was this little spaceship and the game screen had two sections, above ground and below ground. You started above ground and the game scrolled to the right. Your goal was to shoot the towers above ground and after you had shot enough of them, holes opened up to get below ground. You had to aim properly and get below ground then start shooting the unidentifiable enemies there. It was like a cave and there were enemies above and below. Touching the cave “walls” killed you. Touching the towers killed you. Getting shot by the towers killed you. Getting shot by the… whatevers underground killed you. If you missed the hole to get underground it killed you. Once you killed enough enemies below ground, holes opened back up to get back above ground. And that’s it. Aside from the underground cave getting narrower as time passed, nothing changed. It was boring. I tried to like it but it just never took. It was a game I chucked into the system once every few months for a few minutes when I tired of the others.
But this isn’t even the worst game that was ever released for the Atari 2600. That honor, in my opinion, goes to Fire Fly by Mythicon. This game is so bad, so utterly pointless, so poorly done, that it is worth playing. I’m not going to describe it, I’m just going to link to a web page where you can play it and let it speak for itself.
One of the hallmarks of success for the NES was the “Nintendo Seal of Quality”, as well as a lockout mechanism to ensure that Nintendo would have to approve of any games developed for its console. This allowed Nintendo to lead the charge in reviving the video game industry in the US.
And yes, at some point, the NES got my attention. My friends had them, and I was starting to see the games. It was inevitable that it would catch my attention. That will be the topic of Exerience Points Level 3. But before we get there, I’d like to go on a wonderful side quest.
What was the worst game you ever played on the Atari 2600? Feel free to post any memories you have of the Blizzard of ’93 and your favorite Atari games And if you liked E.T. and aren’t ashamed, please use this as a safe platform to let your voice be heard.
All of this is before my time, but Solaris rocked. If there’s a game from that console that still kinda holds up by today’s standards, it’s that one.