Magazine ad for the Vectrex console and the game MineStorm.
Image Credit: Schiffer Publishing
The next time you grumble about bad ports and too many consoles to buy, be thankful you don’t live in 1977.
Above: Cover for the book 100 Greatest Console Video Games: 1977–1987 by author Brett Weiss.
Image Credit: Schiffer Publishing
The years 1977 through 1987 were a decade of now dusty old consoles: the Atari 2600, the Vectrex, and the ColecoVision are just a few. If you haven’t heard of them, chances are you’ve also never played some of the classic games that populated arcades and homes around the time of the big video game market crashes.
These were the days of Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda (those you may know) — but also Jawbreaker, a Pac-Man-like game about candy stores, toothbrushes, and chomping teeth. In other words, older consoles had some crazy weird games.
Author Brett Weiss has collected this little chunk of history in the book 100 Greatest Console Video Games: 1977–1987, available from Schiffer Publishing. Flipping through it is like discovering nostalgia you never knew you had.
Take a look at some of our favorite titles in the gallery below:
One of the better games for the Magnavox Odyssey2 was Attack of the Timelord! from developer NAP. Today, the “slide-and-shoot” genre (think Space Invaders) is all but gone: Players move a laser cannon along the bottom of the screen to fire at enemies above. In Timelord!, they move in different patterns and deploy a variety of weapons such as missiles and antimatter mines. Between levels, the skull creature Spyrus the Deathless, Time Lord of Chaos, would appear. If you owned the Odyssey2 speech and sound expansion module The Voice, he would shout phrases like “Your planet is doomed.”
Communist Mutants from Space, with a working title of “Galactic Egg,” operated with the Starpath Supercharger peripheral for the Atari 2600. Since the games for the device came on cassettes, they were a lot less expensive than the cartridges and offered more room for programming code and RAM. For Communist Mutants from Space, that meant more moving objects and crisper graphics onscreen. In this slide-and-shoot game, the evil Mother Creature was filled with “irradiated vodka” that transformed slaves into mutants.
Another Supercharger cassette game for the Atari 2600 was DragonStomper, originally called “Excalibur.” It was a role-playing game that spanned all of three levels (hey, this was 1982): the Enchanted Countryside, the Oppressed Village, and the Dragon’s Cave. DragonStomper programmer Stephen Landrum once said that “nobody had done a real fantasy role-playing game on the 2600 up to that point,” discounting Atari’s own Adventure. Some dubbed it “a thinking man’s game,” and in 2005, Forbes magazine called it “the best title ever made in the history of U.S. video gaming.”
That may or may not be an exaggeration.
The Atari 2600 title Escape from the MindMaster was a rarity for the era: It used a first-person perspective and featured pseudo-3D graphics. Players navigated a maze in search of colored pegs, which they’d place in different holes to unlock the doorway to the next area. An overhead map even helped players keep track of their position. Of course, progressing wasn’t as easy as matching shapes. Obstacles included sliding force fields and the dreaded creature known as the Alien Stalker. Each maze also contained a minigame (another unusual addition) that tested skills like agility and reflexes -– no shooting, though.
For the Vectrex came Fortress of Narzod, a non-scrolling shooter that featured a boss character called Mystic Hurler in a time when bosses were rare. (You never actually got to fight Spyrus the Deathless in Attack of the Timelord!, for example.) The game consisted of three zigzagging mountainous roadways that led to a fortress at the top, and bullets and enemies would ricochet off walls. These features and the ability for players to move up, down, and side to side made it one of the more interesting shooters on the console.
It’s hard to think you could get a game as simple as Pac-Man wrong, but it happened: The Atari 2600 version stunk, which made Pac-Man-alikes like Jawbreakers (mentioned in the opening of this article) so welcome. To make up for it, Atari followed the good Ms. Pac-Man with the even better Jr. Pac-Man — the lesser-known entry in the Pac-Man family. A port of the Bally/Midway arcade game, this 1987 version featured the ghosts Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Tim, who replaced Clyde. Jr. Pac-Man also contained toy-shaped candy like tricycles, cats, and root beer instead of the normal candy. OK, you can drink root beer, but you probably don’t want to munch on the other two.
Even if you’re familiar with the non-scrolling space shooter MineStorm for the Vectrex, you may not know that MineStorm II existed. The manual for MineStorm said that players could “enter a new type of universe” after completing the first 13 minefields, but a bug actually skipped players ahead to minefield 15 and sometimes caused the game to crash altogether. If you wrote to developer GCE to report the issue, it would send you a bug-free version called MineStorm II. The original MineStorm was built into the Vectrex console.
The side-scrolling shooter Moon Patrol for the Atari 5200 sat players in a moon buggy that moved along the ground (as opposed to up in space, which was more common) and had them shooting at UFOs overhead. The legendary Takashi Nishiyama, who helped create Street Fighter for Capcom, designed the game. However, its arcade version is a bit more famous than the port for consoles. It was the first game to feature parallax scrolling, where the background moved differently from the foreground to produce more realistic distance. It was also first to let you continue playing by inserting more quarters into the arcade machine.
Released for arcades, Mr. Do! was basically a clone of Dig Dug, the maze game that had players burrowing underground and defeating enemies as they went. The ColecoVision version of Mr. Do! starred a clown who would dig tunnels, gobble cherries, and hurl power balls at bad guys. Instead of dropping rocks on enemies, a knock on the head with an apple would put them out. Mr. Do! for arcades was the first commercially successful conversion kit, which transformed an older, dedicated cabinet into a new game. It was also the seventh best-earning title for 1983, surpassing Galaga, Q*bert, Donkey Kong Junior, and other popular releases.
Worm Whomper for the Intellivision is a cross between the shoot-’em-ups Centipede and Missile Command. Players lead Felton Pinkerton around his farm, spraying pesticide over nasty horned caterpillars, red slugs, and other invaders all while protecting his precious rows of corn. It’s an example of the “panic” genre that had players firing as fast and widely as they could. Its box cover and cartridge art was a riff on Grant Wood’s famous painting “American Gothic.” Another fun fact: Todd Rogers, the world recorder holder for Dragster (an Atari 2600 game) once played Worm Whomper for 72 hours straight. Right after he took a Polaroid of his 26 million points, his friend bumped into his TV and wiped out his game. Good friend.
