Video games are such a ubiquitous part of people’s lives now, being played on phones, tablets, consoles and computers. Their variety and complexity are such that it’s easy to forget that for members of Generation X, playing a video game usually meant a trip to the arcade to play simple games like Space Invaders and Galaxian.
Home video games did exist in the 1970s, but they tended to be of the of the Pong variety. Some featured variations that imitated tennis, squash, football and so on. My cousin had one that also included target shooting with a light gun and several motorcycle-themed games where you controlled the throttle with a knob. All were great fun, but they didn’t really match the excitement of the arcade games.
The Atari Video Computer System (VCS, later rebranded as the Atari 2600 after its catalogue number, CX2600) was launched in 1977 and used interchangeable, plug-in cartridges to allow a wider range of games to be played.
The game-changer, no pun intended, came in 1980 when Atari acquired the rights to adapt Space Invaders for the VCS. Finally, people could play the arcade favourite in the comfort of their own home and without carrying a pocketful of 10p pieces.
In this blog post, I’m going to take a look at the first four arcade adaptations that I played on the Atari VCS, how they compared to their arcade counterparts and reflect a little on what it was like to be able to play arcade favourites at home.
First of all, let’s remember what the arcade version of Space Invaders looked like:
Ah yes, the grand-daddy of all video games! In case you’ve never played it, the object of the game is to shoot down all the invaders, avoiding their bombs as they march back and forth across the screen. The aliens descend by a row each time they reach the screen’s edge. If they reach the bottom of the screen, all is lost. It’s a simple game to learn to play, but it gets tougher as the number of surviving aliens decreases and they start marching faster.
The Atari VCS version of Space Invaders looked like this:
The Atari VCS’s hardware was very limited compared to that of an arcade machine, so compromises had to be made in terms of sound and graphics. There are fewer aliens on screen, and the sound effects are different; the descending four-note riff is gone, replaced by the sound of marching feet. However, it was still absolutely recognizable as Space Invaders and the gameplay was the same as the arcade version. Plus, the Atari version had a whopping 112 game variations, including one- and two-player games, invisible invaders, zigzagging bombs, moving barricades and more to keep players interested.
The game turned around the fortunes of Atari and the VCS, which at the time was not a strong seller. Suddenly, people were buying a VCS just so that they could play Space Invaders. It became an early example of a “killer app” (a piece of software that justifies the purchase of the hardware) and went on to sell six million copies.
Space Invaders was the reason that I wanted an Atari VCS, and I ended up getting one for Christmas in 1981. I remember many enjoyable hours of playing Space Invaders both alone and with friends. It didn’t stop me going to the arcades in South Shields to play other games though!
The next arcade conversion I played on the VCS, though I didn’t own it, was Asteroids. This was an iconic early game in the arcades with its beautiful black-and-white vector graphics, including bright, spark-like missiles. You control a spaceship trying to survive in a field of drifting asteroids and enemy flying saucers. It was a challenging game, demanding the proficient use of five buttons to steer the spaceship and fire its missiles. You had to juggle buttons to rotate the ship left and right, thrust to move forwards, fire the missiles and, in case of emergency, jump to hyperspace, which placed you somewhere else on the screen but came with its own risks of explosion on re-entry.
Here’s how the arcade version looked:
Lewins, a shop in my local shopping centre, had a video rental section and used to rent out Atari cartridges in addition to video tapes, so I got to try out the home version of Asteroids for myself. Once again, the home version looked rather different to its arcade counterpart:
As you can see, the wire-frame vector graphics have been replaced by solid, multi-colour shapes. The sound on Asteroids for the VCS is pretty close to that of the arcade version. Controlling the spaceship was done via the joystick, which in some ways made it easier to handle – move the stick left and right for rotate, push forward to thrust, pull back for hyperspace and of course the red button to fire. Once again, the Atari home version captured the essential gameplay of the arcade version and was extremely enjoyable to play. The 66 game variations on the cartridge included 2-player mode and also a nod to Asteroids Deluxe, a newer version of the game that allowed you to erect a forcefield around your ship to avoid collisions with the asteroids.
With today’s embarrassment of riches in terms of computing power it is easy to look back on these arcade conversions with some disdain for the limited graphics and sound available at the time (though given the limitations of the hardware that Atari’s developers were working with, some of these games represent amazing feats of programming). However, for us, the thrill of being able to play these arcade games at home more than made up for any shortcomings. I cannot stress this enough, especially before we move on to the second arcade conversion that I owned.
Atari’s 1982 conversion of Pac-Man is simultaneously Atari’s best-selling game cartridge (over 8 million sold!) and widely reckoned to be one of the worst video games of all time, which in itself is quite an achievement when you think about it!
Pac-Man is again such an iconic game I hardly need to describe it here, but in case you have never played it or one of its variants, here’s what the arcade version looked like:
Your job is to steer Pac-Man, essentially a yellow, chomping mouth, around the maze, gobbling up the dots and avoiding the four ghosts, whose touch is deadly. Eating one of the larger, flashing dots causes the ghosts to temporarily turn blue and run away, during which time they can be eaten for bonus points. Further bonuses are earned by eating the fruit which periodically appear on the screen. Like all good video games, Pac-Man is simple to learn, using just a four-way joystick to steer, but difficult to master.
As a little bit of video game history, it could be argued that Pac-Man was the first video game to feature recognisable characters in the shape of the titular protagonist and the four pursuing ghosts. The characters featured in funny “cut scenes” shown periodically between rounds. Interestingly, Pac-Man was also the first video game to garner significant appeal from women players.
Such a cute and distinctive-looking game was unlikely to be done justice by the Atari VCS’s limited memory and hardware. Here’s how Atari’s conversion looked:
Very different, thanks not only to the aforementioned system limitations but also Atari’s policy at the time that only space-themed games could use a black background, necessitating a totally different colour scheme to the arcade version. The game has a square, blocky look compared to the smooth lines of the original, and the fruit have been replaced by “vitamins” – a square block. Other issues that this screen shot does not show are that Pac-Man does not turn to face the direction he is moving when he moves vertically and, most importantly, the four ghosts flicker noticeably as they move around the screen.
The sound, which contributes greatly to the excitement of the arcade version, also suffers badly in this conversion. The music at the start of the game is gone, replaced by a blaring, four-note “fanfare”, and most disappointingly, the characteristic “wakka-wakka-wakka” sound of Pac-Man chewing up the dots has been replaced by a monotonous “bong-bong-bong”. Other sounds familiar from the arcade version have also been replaced by various generic beeps and boops. The cut scenes, needless to say, are not present in this version either.
The foregoing description might make it sound like I hated the game, but far from it. We played the hell out of Pac-Man and enjoyed every minute of it. I think in our way we understood that the graphics and sound were never going to match up to the arcade version, but the ability to play something even resembling what we saw in the arcades was good enough. Some reviews of the game by the press at the time were less than complimentary, if not downright scathing, and in modern retrospective reviews it is still considered a poor conversion of an arcade classic.
If Pac-Man represented a mis-step for Atari in some ways, the conversion of the company’s own Missile Command shows that when Atari got it right, they really got it right. Missile Command is an excellent adaptation of the arcade original, possibly improving on the original in some aspects of gameplay.
Feeding on the Cold War paranoia of the time, Missile Command puts you in control of three missile launching bases, defending six cities from a barrage of missiles falling from the sky. The 1980 arcade original, which was Atari’s first game to use a colour screen, uses a track-ball to control your missile sight and three buttons to launch the missiles from the three bases. Here’s how it looks:
Once again, Atari had to simplify the gameplay to suit the hardware, so the number of missile bases was reduced to one, with the sight controlled by the joystick and missiles fired by pressing the red button, but they managed to do a very faithful conversion of the original. Here’s the VCS version, released in 1981:
This is another game that I didn’t own, but rented from Lewins on a few occasions. (Incidentally, there was a girl, I think a year or two older than me, who worked on Lewins’ video rentals at the time. I had such a crush on her, but she probably thought I was a total nerd for renting Atari games!)
Missile Command is a fantastic adaptation. The sound, graphics and gameplay are all extremely close to the original, with the colour-scheme of the game changing for every round. The joystick controller works well, and the end-of-game explosion when all of your cities have been destroyed is suitably cataclysmic. Lots of fun to play, and I would probably have owned it if cartridges hadn’t been so expensive at the time.
The fact that the Atari VCS allowed you to play arcade games at home really was a huge deal in the early 1980s, and the system had a huge impact on the development of home video gaming. Atari would go on to release adaptations of many other arcade games. Most were good, some were excellent. Eventually the emergence of more advanced systems and the growth of the home computer meant that the VCS’s star would fade, but there was a time when if you wanted arcade action at home, Atari was only one real choice.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this trip down video game memory lane with me. I had to stop myself at four games for the sake of length! Did you play the Atari VCS back in the 1980s or afterwards? What were your favourite games? Let me know in the comments – I’d love to hear from you.
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