Classic Colors: Atari Game Manuals

I came across a lovely little ‘Atari Game Manuals‘ flickr set from Joe Kral the other day and thought it would be a perfect addition to the wonderful collection of nostalgia inducing color palettes.

While technology may have limited the color palettes of some of the first, and most popular, video games, their colors are no less influential on modern game design and culture as a whole, and an important part to any design is its packaging. The game manual art on many Atari games may have been a bit exaggerated and deceiving leaving the gamer wishing the game looked more like the picture on the box, but are nonetheless full of classic color palettes.

Another sports title from Activision, Boxing presents a top-down view of a boxing arena, pitting you one-on-one against another boxer. You have two minutes to either score 100 points and win the fight or finish with the highest score at the end of the round. Your goal is to target your opponent’s nose with either a left or right jab, and a successful hit causes your opponent’s face to reel back. You can choose to fight against a computer opponent for a single player game or against a friend for a two player bout. This is old school boxing with no white towel and no referee, so keep your guard up and your wits about you and never give up!

Galaxian expanded on the formula pioneered by Space Invaders. As in the earlier game, Galaxian featured a horde of attacking aliens that exchanged shots with the player. In contrast to Space Invaders, however, Galaxian added an element of drama by having the aliens periodically make kamikaze-like dives at the player’s ship. The gameplay was relatively simple. Swarm after swarm of alien armies attacked the player’s ship that moved left and right at the bottom of the screen. The ship could only fire sparingly by default, but rearmed instantly when an enemy was hit.

In David Crane’s Laser Blast you are a spaceship blasting away at enemy bases, which appear in intervals of three, while they blast right back at you. This is a game that requires speed, accuracy and a long attention span. While Laser Blast has a reputation as a repetitive and not terribly challenging game, the game select switch allows the difficulty to ramp up very quickly. Back when Laser Blast was released, if you managed to score 100,000 points or higher you could receive a Federation of Laser Blasters Patch. A score of a million points, which would turn your on-screen score into “!!!!!!”, would earn you a patch adorned with those same exclamation marks.

Armor Ambush is a two player game, where each player is in command of two tanks (one at a time), and they must try to destroy each other. The battlefields contstantly change, so no battle is ever the same. Tanks move at average speed on grass, fast on roads, slow through trees, and slowest through water. Tanks will explode after three direct hits. The Harder game mode adds ricochet shots.

This is the Atari version of the Intellivision game Astrosmash. There is a bug in the original release of this cartridge – when two controllers are plugged in and moved simultaneously, unpredictable graphic effects can occur, and the joysticks may stop operating until the game is reset. The bug was fixed in later productions of the game.

A sequel to Atlantis, your mission is to gather specimens from different planets aboard your cosmic ark, which contains survivors from the city Atlantis. In the game’s first screen, you must fend off waves of meteors from all four sides of the screen, pushing the joystick in the direction you want to fire. The second stage requires you to pilot the small ship from Atlantis’ ending scene to the surface of a plent, using its tractor beam to pick up life forms from the surface. While you’re near the surface, planetary defenses will be firing at you. If your ship is hit, a creature will be returned to the planet’s surface from your shuttle, and you’ll need to navigate the ship back to the surface again. If you take too long on the planet, a warning of renewed meteor activity will sound and you must return immediately to the ark to defend it.

Bowling is, of course, a bowling game which can be played by one or two players. Gameplay is from a side view of the bowling alley; using the joystick, you need to try to bowl the highest score possible by knocking down the pins on the right side of the screen. There are several game variations available; in the easier variation, you can use the joystick to control the direction of the ball on it’s way towards the pins. In the harder game, once the ball is released you no longer can control its direction. There are also two difficulty levels which control how difficult it is to get a strike.

Asteroids was inspired, in a roundabout way, by the seminal Spacewar!, the first computer-based video game. In 1977 a stand-up arcade game version was produced as Space Wars, which included a number of optional versions and added a floating asteroid as a visual device. Asteroids is essentially a one-player version of Spacewar!, featuring the “wedge” ship from the original and promoting the asteroids to be the main opponent. The game was conceived by Lyle Rains and programmed and designed by Ed Logg. Asteroids was a hit in the United States and became Atari’s best selling game of all time.

About the Video Game Crash of 1983: The North American video game crash of 1983 (sometimes known as the video game crash of 1984 because it was in that year that the full effects of the crash became apparent to consumers) was the crash of the US video game market in the early 1980s. It almost destroyed the fledgling industry and led to the bankruptcy of several companies producing home computers and video game consoles in North America. The crash brought an abrupt end to what is considered the second generation of English console video gaming. It lasted for two years and during that interval, many business analysts expressed doubts about the long-term viability of video game consoles.

About the Video Game Crash of 1983 (cont.): The video game industry was revitalized a few years later, mostly due to the widespread success of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), which was released in North America in 1985 and became extremely popular by 1987. There were several reasons for the crash, but the main cause was oversaturation of the market with dozens of consoles and hundreds of mostly low-quality games. Hundreds of games were in development for the 1983 release alone, and this overproduction resulted in a saturated market without the consumer interest it needed.

Space Invaders (スペースインベーダー, Supēsu Inbēdā?) is an arcade video game designed by Tomohiro Nishikado in 1978. It was originally manufactured by Taito and licensed for production in the United States by the Midway division of Bally. Space Invaders was one of the earliest shooting games and featured two-dimensional graphics. The aim is to defeat waves of aliens with a laser cannon. In designing the game, Nishikado drew inspiration from popular media: Breakout, The War of the Worlds, and Star Wars. To complete it, he had to design custom hardware and development tools.

Pac-Man (パックマン, Pakku man?) is a Japanese arcade game developed by Namco and licensed for distribution in the U.S. by Midway, first released in Japan on May 22, 1980. Immensely popular in the United States from its original release to the present day, Pac-Man is universally considered as one of the classics of the medium, virtually synonymous with video games, and an icon of 1980s popular culture. Upon its release, the game became a social phenomenon that sold a bevy of merchandise and also inspired, among other things, an animated television series. It also inspired two songs.

The player controls a green stick-figure, representing a “humanoid.” Using a joystick (and a firing button to activate a laser-like weapon), the player navigates a maze filled with many robots, who fire lasers back at the player character. A player can be killed by being shot, by running into a robot or an exploding robot, coming into contact by one of many electrified walls that make up the maze itself, or by being touched by the player’s nemesis, “Evil Otto.” The function of Evil Otto, represented by a bouncing smiley face, is to quicken the pace of the game. Otto is unusual with regard to games of the period, in that there is no way to kill him.

About Atari

Atari Inc. was a video game and computer company founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Primarily responsible for the formation of the video arcade and modern video game industries, the company was closed and its assets split in 1984 as a direct result of the North American video game crash of 1983.

The Atari 2600, released in October 1977, is the video game console credited with popularizing the use of microprocessor based hardware and cartridges containing game code, instead of having non-microprocessor dedicated hardware with all games built in. The first game console to use this format was the Fairchild Channel F. However, it was the Atari 2600 that made the plug-in concept popular among the game-playing public.

The Atari 5200 SuperSystem, or simply the Atari 5200, is a video game console that was introduced in 1982 by Atari Inc. as a replacement for the famous Atari 2600. The 5200 was created to compete with the Intellivision, but wound up more directly competing with the ColecoVision shortly after its release. A number of design flaws had a serious impact on usability, and the system is generally considered to have performed poorly on the market.

Most game descriptions from Atari Age

Header image by Jason Santa Maria

All other images © Joe Kral