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Aug 17, 2023 · Here's a free excerpt featuring eight games—starting with a stunning new homebrew that came out 25 years after the platform was discontinued.
- Jamie Lendino
Apr 3, 2017 · In this chapter, he looks through a few of his favorite Atari games and brings the memories flooding back of long weekends spent twirling joysticks in the rising dawn of computer gaming. There’s...
- Culling The List
- Building An 8-Bit Ecosystem
- Which Version Was First?
- A.E.
- Agent USA
- Alley Cat
- Alternate Reality: The City
- Archon: The Light and The Dark
- Archon II: Adept
- Asteroids
Some games by design don't offer an appreciably different experience on the Atari 8-bit than they do on other platforms. Case in point: interactive fiction, which, because of its text-based nature, works on all computing platforms. Infocom is arguably the most famous of text adventure game developers, with even its early titles consisting of sophis...
While Atari refused to credit its own developers, some game programmers from this era gained fame nonetheless. Bill Budge, Bill Williams, Philip Price, and Scott Adams were four of the biggest, while programmers developing across multiple platforms like Richard Garriott and Dani Bunten also became famous to Atari users. Eventually, an entire health...
Timing the releases also gets a bit tricky. A developer could program the game on the Atari 8-bit first—usually because that was the computer they already owned—and then port it to other platforms. Or, as was often the case, a developer targeted the Apple II first, and then ported it to the Atari—games with limited color palettes and sound capabili...
Anyone reading Atari magazines circa 1982 or 1983 will likely remember the full-page color ads for A.E. The Eugene, Oregon–based Brøderbund Software was known early on for its excellent games, and was reported to search overseas to find the best programmers. "'The Japanese are by far the best at this. It's their attention to detail,' said [cofounde...
"Somewhere in America, this dangerous FuzzBomb™ is on the loose!" (I have no idea if the word FuzzBomb is trademarked, but it sure looks like it needs one.) So goes the beginning of Agent USA, a terrific romp through America in the guise of a sci-fi B-movie. The FuzzBomb is turning people into wandering balls of fuzz (FuzzBodies), which are traveli...
This exclusive Atari 8-bit title—which was later ported to MS-DOS in a horrendous cyan-and-magenta CGA-compatible version—is one of my favorite games. John Harris started work on it, but handed the project to Bill Williams after being unhappy with his one-screen prototype version. Williams first developed Salmon Run (see below), then Alley Cat and ...
One of the best and most distinctive games ever to be developed for the 8-bit is Alternate Reality: The City. It was intended to be the first in a six-part series by Philip Price: The City, the Arena, The Palace, The Wilderness, Revelations, and Destiny. Sadly, only the first two games were ever written and released—and they were originally suppose...
Archon is a game of violent chess—and I mean that as a compliment. Each side has a leader: the Wizard on the Light side, and the Sorceress on the Dark side. The game takes place on a nine-by-nine-square grid with alternating colors. It otherwise looks like a chessboard, albeit with so-called power points at the top, bottom, left, right, and center....
Archon II: Adept changes up the main board layout and mechanics. This time around, instead of a chess-style design, the game is arranged in bands around the four elements of air, earth, fire, and water. You control one of four wizards (adepts) on each side, either Order or Chaos. The five power points are still vital to the game, maybe even more so...
In the early 1980s, you couldn't have a home computer platform without some version of Asteroids, and Atari needed to move heaven and earth to build up the Atari 8-bit's cartridge library in the beginning. Yet even this brain-dead-obvious choice for a port of an existing 1979 Atari coin-optook more than a year to arrive on the 400 and 800. Unfortun...
Apr 22, 2017 · both MSX and Atari have their positive and negative aspects. I used them all for a couple of years. Nowadays , I only use my Atari 800XL/130XE for gaming and some small programming once in a while. concerning the MSX: It was not only popular in Japan, but also in the Netherlands (thanks to Philips).
Jul 31, 2024 · Atari chose the popular 6502 microprocessor for their 8-bit computers and clocked it at about 1.8 MHz. With ROM cartridge slots and four front-mounted joystick ports, they were clearly designed...
Jun 27, 2022 · My Atari 800 computer and 2600 game console (Image: Jamie Lendino) On June 27, 1972, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney incorporated Atari in Sunnyvale, California. And it's safe to say that if...
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Jun 14, 2018 · Due to its long lifespan, developers (often indie ones) released thousands of incredible games for the Atari 800 platform. Thanks to having an Atari 800 in my family from an early age, many...
