Leadfoot
sharke
Leadfoot
In 1983, I had an Atari 800XL, a 5" floppy drive, and a dot matrix printer. I even had the Atariwriter program, the word processing cartridge that Alan Alda did the TV commercial for. Anybody remember that?
I don't remember that but I had an Atari 800XL at one point, lovely machine. It was a nice change from my C64 because its BASIC had dedicated graphic and sound commands, unlike the Commodore which required you to POKE values into memory to access the hardware. Lots of classic games on the Atari - I spent many long hours with friends playing things like Solo Flight, Rescue On Fractalus and Ballblazer (I could listen to its fractal theme tune for ages).
Man you blew my mind with Rescue On Fractalus! I forgot totally about that game. When I first played it I freaked out when the astronaut that I thought was running to my ship suddenly popped up in front of the window as an alien! I also used to play Joust for hours...flying around on ostriches. Who in the world thought that game up? And yeah, I can remember sitting there with my BASIC manual, and making the Atari do little tricks that seemed so cool at the time.
I believe Rescue on Fractalus was made by Lucasfilm Games and the hype at the time was that it was the first video game to use a fractal based landscape (hence the name). They followed it up with The Eidolon which had similar graphics but was set in some underground caves. I have a vague memory of it but it involved some kind of colored crystals and scary dragons would jump in front of your craft and scare the bejesus out of you.
These games had an atmosphere and a feel to them which is missing from today's multi-million dollar productions. This was largely because the technological limitations of the machines meant you had to use your imagination to fill in the gaps that were left by such low resolution graphics. This took you into a kind of weird, abstract world in your head. Kids aren't getting this any more because every last detail of the world is set in front of them in glorious technicolor which doesn't leave anything to the imagination.
Another reason why these early games were so cool is because they were either written by lone coders or by very small teams. They were full of the personality and quirks of individuals in contrast to today's games which feel like they were designed by a committee. There were some genuinely quirky individuals out there churning out code and they all had their own cool personality. In the UK we had the likes of Jeff Minter, who was obsessed with llamas and Pink Floyd and whose drug-influenced psychedelia made its way into some wonderfully quirky games (Attack of the Mutant Camels etc), and Andrew Braybrook who made some beautifully bizarre and fabulously original games like Gribbly's Day Out and Paradroid. These guys were also very accessible to the video game media and would frequently give cool interviews or write game design diaries for computer magazines. I'm pretty sure I called up Jeff Minter when I was a kid to tell him that Pink Floyd Live In Pompeii was on TV
