The Game: Relive exciting arcade action on your Gameboy Advance with the latest game pack from DSI Games. Millipede, Super Breakout and Lunar Lander, three classic games from Atari, are waiting for you! (DSI Games/Atari, 2006)

Memories: DSI Games‘ latest game pack consists of three games, Super Breakout (1978), Lunar Lander (1979), and Millipede (1982). DSI has a consistent track record of offering gamers two newer games (Gauntlet/Rampart, Paperboy/Rampage, Spy Hunter/Super Sprint) or three classic games (Pong/Asteroids/Yars’ Revenge, Centipede/Breakout/Warlords) per pack. This pack contains three classic Atari games, although none of them will hold your attention for long.

Super Breakout is the sequel to Breakout, the spiritual successor to Pong. As Mitch Hedburg once said, “The depressing thing about tennis is that no matter how much I play, I’ll never be as good as a wall. I played a wall once. They’re relentless.” The same goes for the miles of bricks waiting for you in Super Breakout – eventually, you’ll lose. Other than Pong itself, there is really no more simplistic game. In Super Breakout you control a paddle and must bounce a ball against a wall of bricks. DSI’s port plays exactly like the original arcade version, which is no technical feat of wizardry as most cell phones can do the same thing.

No more technically impressive but slightly more entertaining is Lunar Lander. In Atari’s first vector game, you must land the Lunar Lander on one of several landing platforms, varying in size and difficulty. Each thrust of your engine uses some of your fuel (which cannot be replenished), so you’ll want to make adjustments sparingly throughout the game. In the arcade you could buy more fuel throughout the game by inserting additional quarters, but that’s not an option here. There are several different difficulty levels to choose from, but a finite fuel supply guarantees your game will be over in just a few minutes.

Millipede, the newest game included in the pack, is the sequel to Atari’s Centipede. Millipede these days would be called Centipede Part II or, at best, be a free downloadable expansion pack. Back then, though, a couple of program tweaks equalled an entirely new game. In Millipede, gamers must defend themselves from waves of centipedes, this time backed by an army of inchworms, beetles, mosquitos, spiders and even earwigs. Yes, earwigs. There are also now DDT bombs on the playing field, which release bug-killing clouds of poison when shot.

None of the three included games originally used a joystick. Lunar Lander handles the best with the GBA’s control system. Millipede is (at best) “okay” – while it’s difficult to be accurate, at least it’s not as frustrating as Super Breakout is to control. Which, in its defense, is no worse than playing any other game designed for paddles with a joystick and/or D-pad. My average game length in Super Breakout is about 37 seconds. Lunar Lander games last upwards of two to three minutes, which makes a five minute session of Millipede seem like a marathon. In all three instances, my interest level lasted about the same length as the games did.

While the games are technically perfect, all three have lost a bit of their appeal over the years. Even hardcore retrogamers may find these ports too simplistic to enjoy for long.

The Game: Two players control one car each, careening freely around an arena filled with zombies. Faced with zombie-fication at the pedestrian crossing of the undead, the drivers have only one option: run over their opponents! Each zombie that’s squashed leaves a grave marker behind that becomes an unmovable obstacle to zombies and cars alike. Whoever has run over the most zombies by the end of the timed game wins. (Exidy, 1976)

Memories: Death Race, which didn’t even come within shouting distance of having anything to do with the movie of the same name, was the arcade game that sparked the very first protests about violence in video games. Those protests go on to this very day, with games like the latest iteration of Grand Theft Auto and Bully drawing fire for depicting various kinds of real world violence. Compared to those much more recent games, it’s almost laughable to think that the abstraction of Death Race was where some parents first drew the line. Why? Because Death Race was the first person to put stick figures - a representation of a human being - on the screen and let you do something nasty to them. (more…)

The Game: You’ve got a mobile paddle and - well, frankly, balls. But you don’t have a lot of balls at your disposal (am I the only one becoming a little bit uncomfortable discussing this?), so you have to make the best use of them that you can to knock down the rows of colorful bricks overhead. Missing one of your precious balls - and we all know how painful that can be - forces you to call another ball into play. Losing all of your balls, as you’ve probably guessed by now, ends the game. So, in essence, Breakout is a metaphor for life from the masculine perspective. (Atari, 1976)

Memories: The year was 1976, and Atari’s founder, Nolan Bushnell, had an idea to revive the overmined “ball and paddle” genre: turn Pong into a single-player game, almost like racquetball, in which players must smash their way through a wall of bricks with a ball without missing that ball on the rebound. Bushnell was sure the idea would be a hit. (more…)

The Game: Up to four players control markers that leave a solid “wall” in their wake. The object of the game is to trap the other players by building a wall around them that they can’t avoid crashing into - or forcing them to crash into their own walls. Run into a wall, either your own or someone else’s, ends your turn and erases your trail from the screen (potentially eliminating an obstacle for the remaining players). The player still standing at the end of the round wins. (Ramtek, 1976)

Memories: If you’re a fan of the “Light Cycle” concept made popular by Tron (both the movie and the game), this is where it all started, with an obscure game from a relatively obscure manufacturer. But that obscurity isn’t earned by a game that essentially launched and entire genre. (more…)

The Game: You control a dot making its way through a twisty maze with two exits - one right behind you and one across the screen from you. The computer also controls a dot which immediately begins working its way toward the exit behind you. The game is simple: you have to guide your dot through the maze to the opposite exit before the computer does the same. If the computer wins twice, the game is over. (Midway, 1976)

Memories: Not, strictly speaking, the first maze game, Midway’s early B&W arcade entry The Amazing Maze Game bears a strong resemblence to that first game, which was Atari’s Gotcha. Gotcha was almost identical, except that its joystick controllers were topped by pink rubber domes, leading to Gotcha being nicknamed “the boob game.” Amazing Maze was just a little bit more austere by comparison. (more…)

Taking Atari’s lead for the first time, the Odyssey 300 – in its bright yellow shell – saw the console abandoning the trio of horizontal/vertical/English controls that had been in place since the original Odyssey. In addition to mimicking the all-in-one controls of Atari’s Pong, Odyssey 300 – still boasting the standard Tennis, Hockey and Smash variations of its predecessors – introduced digital on-screen scoring. The Odyssey games were no longer reliant on the honor system: at 15 points, one player won the game.

The secret behind this quantum leap forward in the series of dedicated Odyssey consoles was the General Instruments AY-3-8500 chip – a single chip designed from the ground up to play Pong and several similar games. This made the Odyssey 300 the first Magnavox video game to feature on-screen digital scoring and the simplified control scheme.

But for some reason, the next game in the series took a technological step backward.

Above: Hockey and Smash on the Odyssey 300.

Talk about upscale. The Odyssey 200, released not long after the Odyssey 100, added an extra game to the mix, bringing the machine’s built-in game total up to three. In addition to Tennis and Hockey/Soccer, the Odyssey 200 adds Smash, essentially a vastly simplified game of racquetball. (Magnavox seemed to feel that the extra game – and the slightly more sedate paint job on the casing – merited a whole new unit and model number.)

Other than that, the Odyssey 200 is much the same as its immediate predecessor: black and white graphics, sound provided by the console itself and not the TV, and scoring kept with two sliders on the console itself…though the days of trusting the honor system to track video game scoring would end – at least temporarily – as the next console to bear the Odyssey name would start to take the first major steps away from the original Ralph Baer Brown Box design in the Odyssey series.

Above: Smash and Hockey on the Odyssey 200.

The Game: A simple version of video ping-pong; players use three knobs, one to control horizontal movement, one to control vertical movement, and a third to control the “English” or spin of the ball. (Magnavox, 1975)

Memories: Caught flat-footed by the success of Atari’s Pong home console, Magnavox found itself struggling to hang onto the very market that Ralph Baer’s original Odyssey console had created in the first place. Perhaps not surprisingly, Magnavox turned back to the Odyssey, not just for inspiration but to - at least in a limited fashion - put the machine back on the market. (more…)

The Game: Grab yer guns and draw, sonny! You face off against another player, with only six bullets and plenty of obstacles in the way - a pesky cactus or two, a roaming covered wagon, and so on. Whoever lines his opponent’s belly with lead first wins the round, and the final victory goes to whoever wins the most rounds. (Midway, 1975)

Memories: Originated in Japan as Gunman, Gun Fight holds a very special place in video game history - it’s the first arcade game with a microprocessor chip at its core. But that innovation didn’t start in Japan - it started when Dave Nutting, the brother of Bill Nutting (whose Nutting & Associates took one failed shot at arcade success with the first coin-op, Computer Space, in 1971), licensed Gunman from Taito. When originally manufactured by Taito, Gunman’s guts were strictly analog, just like every arcade game that had come before in either country. Nutting had already been experimenting with implementing a game program through microprocessors, and decided to completely remake Gunman from the ground up. (more…)

The Game: Two players each control a fearsome armored fighting vehicle on a field of battle littered with obstacles. The two tanks pursue each other around the screen, trying to line up the perfect shot without also presenting a perfect target if they miss. In accordance with the laws of ballistics and mass in the universe of Saturday morning cartoons, a tank hit by enemy fire is bounced around the screen, into nearby wall or mines, spinning at a very silly velocity, and battle begins anew. (Kee Games [Atari], 1974)

Memories: In the early 1970s, arcade distribution was a closely-guarded, exclusive thing. And to an ambitious guy like Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, this represented a problem. Atari wasn’t an old-school pinball outfit like D. Gottlieb & Co. or Bally, and was bucking the system just to land a deal with regional distributors across the country anyway. The distribution system - which allowed one distributor to represent Gottlieb games exclusively in his area, while a competitor would be the only game in town for Bally/Midway fare, for example - was created in the pinball era; many arcade operators would deal exclusively with a single distributor, and of course there were franchise arcades owned by companies like Bally, such as Aladdin’s Castle. It was entirely possible, and not uncommon, to see some manufacturers represented only at one or two arcades in a given area, and their rivals represented only at others. Which was fine with pinball manufacturers, but Bushnell wanted to place Atari’s video games everywhere. (more…)