Thus each game would have two releases, and the names would not be the same but the ROMs would be identical. Sears' actual contribution are three games Atari never released under its own label. In addition to the Sears license, Atari kept most of its early titles in circulation with corresponding differences in labels. Space Invaders has a text, picture, silver and red label, but it should always be counted as one game.
Pepsi Invaders and Atlantis II are variations on the originals and were provided only to a select few, so I consider them as to prototypes, and they should not be counted in an official list of a system's games.
However, there are several other extremely rare games like CommaVid's Video Life, only available to people who purchased the MagiCard. Essentially it would have been purchased only by the few of the few. And then there were games like Birthday Mania, sold only in a limited geographic area and so rare that the ROM has not been dumped.
While there are several games that are very rare, they were at least available to the general public, usually only via mail order. However, even if included, the final number would not significantly change.
Two issues with a list of North American Atari games is that games only released in PAL territories must be weeded out. Periodically, a piece of fruit appears at the center of the screen. You can eat it for bonus points, and the kind of fruit denotes the level you are on cherry, strawberry, orange, and so on.
After securing the rights to the game from Namco, Atari gave programmer Tod Frye just five weeks to complete the conversion. The company had learned from its earlier mistakes and promised Frye a royalty on every cartridge manufactured not sold , which was an improvement.
But this was another mistake. Atari also required the game to fit into just 4KB like older cartridges, rather than the newer 8KB size that was becoming much more common by this point.
That profit-driven limitation heavily influenced the way Frye approached the design of the game. To top it all off, Atari set itself up for a colossal failure by producing some 12 million cartridges, even though there were only 10 million consoles in circulation at the time. The company was confident that not only would every single existing owner buy the game, but that 2 million new customers would buy the console itself just for this cartridge.
We all know how it turned out. The instruction manual sets the tone for the differences from the arcade early on. Every time you complete a board, you get an extra life. Pac-Man himself always looks to the right or left, even if he is going up or down. The video wafers are long and rectangular instead of small, square dots. Instead, you get the aforementioned vitamin, a clear placeholder for what would have been actual fruit had there been more time to get it right.
The vitamin always looks the same and is always worth points, instead of increasing as you clear levels. The rest of the scoring is much lower than it is in the arcade. Gobbling up all four ghosts totals just points, and each video wafer is worth just 1 point.
The ghosts have tremendous amounts of flicker, and they all look and behave identically, instead of having different colors, distinct personalities, and eyes that pointed in the right direction. The flicker was there for a reason.
Frye used it to draw the four ghosts in successive frames with a single sprite graphic register, and drew Pac-Man every frame using the other sprite graphic register. It gets worse. The janky, gritty sound effects are bizarre, and the theme song is reduced to four dissonant chords. The horizontally stretched maze is nothing like the arcade, either, and the escape routes are at the top and bottom instead of the sides.
Years later, when Frye looked at the code for the much more arcade-faithful Ms. Interestingly, the game itself is still playable.
Once you get past the initial huge letdown and just play it on its own merits, Pac-Man puts up a decent experience. Many an Atari fan turned on the platform—and Atari in general—after the release of Pac-Man. Although the company still had plenty of excellent games and some of the best were yet to come, the betrayal was immediate and real and forever colored what much of the gaming public thought of Atari.
But the conversion of Pac-Man gave the fledgling game industry its first template for how to botch a major title. It was the biggest release the Atari had and would ever see, and the company flubbed it about as hard as it could. It was New Coke before there was New Coke. Gameplay oddities aside, the oversized Formula One cars are wonderfully detailed, with brilliant use of color and animated spinning tires. The shaded color objects were the centerpiece of the design, as programmer David Crane said in a interview.
The way TIA works, the would normally just make the car sprite begin to reappear on the opposite side of the screen as it disappeared from one side. The effect is smooth and impossible to detect while playing.
The car accelerates over a fairly long period of time, and steps through simulated gears. Eventually it reaches a maximum speed and engine note, and you just travel along at that until you brake, crash into another car, or reach the finish line. The courses bear no resemblance to the real ones; each game variation is simply longer and harder than the last. The tree-lined courses are just patterns of vehicles that appear on screen. Whenever you play a particular game variation, you see the same cars at the same times unless you crash, which disrupts the pattern momentarily.
The higher three variations include bridges, which you have to quickly steer onto or risk crashing. During gameplay, you get a warning in the form of a series of oil slicks that a bridge is coming up soon. This game set the stage for more ambitious offerings the following year. And several decades later, people play games like this on their phones.
The bottom line is, I'm not including it. After all, the game wasn't released in Norh America. The former was available as a personalized mail-order game. The latter was apparently a religious game that found its way into some religious bookstores and such. To date, only one copy of each has surfaced. And their respective owners have chosen not to release the roms. So since they're not available to be downloaded, I'm not including them either.
If it's impossible to have a complete collection without them, then they don't belong. My thanks to Romhunter and the incredible database on his Atarimania website.
And my thanks to him personally for answering several questions I asked of him. So here we go. Here's my list. As far as I'm concerned there are Atari games. That's what I said - That's my story. And I'm sticking to it. Enjoy the list. And if you find an error or feel I need to add something, please let me know. And a few things have changed since then. A run of reproduction cartridges was made. But cartridges were made.
And they are out there. That ROM is readily available. Were there original games released in other countries? The answer is yes. Like the North American games, a lot of these games were also released by various other companies in other countries. Some were pirated and put out under a different name. Some were slightly hacked and released with subtle differences. There are also catalogs that mention other games — games that have yet to be discovered. Or perhaps they do exist. The American company Zimag took four games from overseas and sold them in America.
Four additional games were apparently in the planning stages, as NTSC prototypes for each have been found. There are eight other games which I believe were original PAL games released overseas.
But they are not included on this new list because they actually did get a North American release sometimes under alternate titles and were included on my original list. But no one knows for sure. And the cartridge has a finished label on it. Nonetheless it did.
So it's included here also. COM for his help. My goal is to simply have a cartridge of every game, so I can play it at home. So there you go. With the additional 49 titles, the final Atari game list stands at unique games. For now anyway…. It's been over 10 years since I posted this original blog entry. And it's been about 5.
So why am I here today? We need to update this list once again! I picked up my copy personalized with my name and played it for the first time last night - which was very cool!
So with the addition of Birthday Mania, we now have games that were released in North America, as well as 49 games that were released in other countries. So if you're looking to collect a copy of every single game that was released between and , the total stands at Of the North American games, I've personally collected of them.
I had carts made of the other 22 since they were too pricey to find or collect. I also had 49 NTSC carts made for the 49 games that were released elsewhere.
So I've got an individual cart for all games. Let me know how many you have!
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