I’m talking about “true classics.” While not the earliest examples of their type, these games – ones that existed within the cycle of arcade, 2600, ColecoVision, and other formats – are certainly the earliest “household names” commonly summoned up from the sediment of our collective long term memory. They’re less often examined nowadays because they appear so rudimentary to your average person, but their worth has not changed. This is some serious, actual oldschool shit, and it’s time for the whippersnappers to sit up straight and start taking notes. We’re gonna do a grab bag on the solid gold oldies.

NOTE: In this article, since I’m talking about games that were released when video gaming was still in its formative (even primitive) stage, I won’t spend much time talking about graphics or sound. It’s a safe assumption that these aspects will be very basic in any game from the era, but if one of them is exemplary for its time in a particular case, I’ll mention it.

Pitfall!

Activision/David Crane, 1982

glug glug glug.

Part of what I really like about Pitfall is that it’s not only a great game, it was part of Activision basically saying “fuck you” to Atari for assuming it’d established some kind of imperial monopoly on

game development. Activision grabbed talent from Atari and other sources over time by offering game designers something Atari absolutely refused to: credit for their work. Eventually, the popularity of the titles developed at Activision pressured Atari to start licensing them. A victory against the Eternal Asshole. Hallelujah.

Anyway, Pitfall gives you control of a dude named Harry, and you have 20 minutes to navigate a decidedly unfriendly environment in order to get some sick loot. The game itself is a very early example of an action platformer, and it even gently tugs on the RPG line, at least in my view. At the very least, it’s got one of the common tropes of that genre: you’re risking your entire ass to poke through a terrible place to find something of value.

The action is pretty damn knuckle-biting for its time, and is one of the reasons Pitfall is considered a classic. There is a constant level of tension and sometimes your decisions boil down to “which horrible risk do I want to take?” High adventure at its finest. My personal favorite is the crocodiles. I love how harry just kind of disappears vertically into them, into some pocket dimension in their lower jaw or something. Regardless of that, Pitfall is a lot of fun to play on any of the systems it was licensed for, and proof that a game with a simple premise and good design is timelessly and universally worthwhile.

BurgerTime

Data East/Mattel, 1982

the egg’s not even that into this. Peer pressure at its worst. That pickle though… it’s pissed. It’s really decided to put everything into this conflict. IT WON’T HEAL THE WOUNDS INSIDE PICKLE

It is known to a few sages of the obscure and the forgotten that the word “BurgerTime,” in the language of the Ancients who sailed across the great astral sea of space to seed our world with the components necessary for abiogenesis and new life, means something akin to “Thunderdome.”

In other words, You don’t just exit BurgerTime. You have to fucking fight your way out.

They can smell your fear. Your fear, and the alluring aroma of sizzling ground beef.

In another simple premise typical of the era, in BurgerTime you are a dude named Peter Pepper who has one job to do: knock some fucking burgers together so you can clock out. The problem is, there are anthropomorphic eggs, hot dogs, and pickles all over your burger scaffold doing their best to stop you from achieving your burger-stack goals. Whatever their problem is, they’ve apparently decided that Peter’s the cause. Fortunately, you can fight back by using pepper not unlike pepper spray, as well as smashing the bad guys under a falling burger part or getting them to stand on it just as you make it drop. Not terribly clever are these rogue ingredients, despite their lust for your blood. The game gets harder as you go, requiring more burgers per stage and throwing more pissed off eggs and pickles into the mix.

I have been an enthusiastic fan of this game for a longer time than a lot of other games that came out before I was born, mostly because I have fond memories of playing it on a beat-up cabinet at a local pizzeria during my childhood. More importantly, it stands alongside Circus Charlie as a video game that reinforces an important concept: conflict, despite its unpleasant nature and ultimately harmful effects, is a perpetual and omnipresent phenomenon. There can never truly be total peace.

Not while those pickles and eggs have a fuckin’ attitude, anyway.

Q*bert

Warren Davis/Jeff Lee, 1982

Gottleib’s most successful title, Q*bert is one of those early arcade games that became a readily recognizable property readily seen as a symbol of the video game.” I even remember the younger of my two older sisters, who didn’t give half a shit about video games at all, having a Q*bert button on her backpack in high school. While the little snoot-dude doesn’t even remotely approach Mario or Pac Man in terms of being a household name, during the early 80s he made quite a name for himself. That’s because his game is actually pretty novel for its time, not to mention fairly fun to play.

Already all kinds of fucked.

As Q*bert, you’re trying to jump all over a set of isometrically drawn cubes, changing the color of them when you land on them. This sounds like a pretty easy thing to pull off, until you consider that snakes, monsters, and all kinds of shit are chasing you around while you do this, trying to preserve what I guess they see as the cube color status quo of the iso-pyramid. Shit can get a little heated, especially since the green monsters can change back the cubes you’ve touched. Things can quickly dissolve into bullshit.

Even cooler than any of that, and something I’ve not been able to personally experience in full since I use emulators for most of this, is the level of effort that went into the Q*bert cabinet. Not only was a speech synthesizer used to create the sound Q*bert makes when he gets caught by a bad guy, but pinball components were even included into the machine to create certain sound effects. The digital sound components use 128 bytes of memory to to their job, which is quite a bit for ’82. I personally find this to be the most impressive part of Q*bert, especially since I’m really shitty at the actual game.

Pitfall! – 7/10 (It’s really fun and involved for a game of its time, and if you can appreciate games this old at all, then it’s even exciting.)

BurgerTime – 8/10 (it can be a real motherfucker, but it’s an early example of Data East not shitting the bed with the lights on while designing a game, so I’m very fond of it.)

Q*bert – 7/10 (A lot of innovation took place when this game was unleashed on the world, and it’s faded from prominence a bit, but it’s not to be overlooked.)

Alternate Title: “Why I’m Glad They Buried E.T. Out In the Desert”

If you asked a ton of people when console gaming really started, they’d reflexively tell you, “When the Nintendo (NES) came out.” While they’d be wrong, they’re less wrong than we’d like to admit. The NES didn’t start console gaming, but what it did do was swoop into Hades on white-feathered wings and pluck it from damnation.

What this article will attempt to do is illustrate a sequence of events that nearly caved in the concept of video games forever in North America. It’s a tawdry tale featuring cutthroat economics, desperation, stagnation, and E.T. The Extraterrestrial.

Too Much of a Good Thing

In 1982-1983, the Atari 2600 was the done thing in console gaming. Homes across the United States were playing Atari. Some weren’t, but they had something… a ColecoVision, a Commodore 64, a Vectrex, or maybe the Odyssey 2 (which was pretty good for its time). In fact, You could say that there were so many choices, the market was flooded.

Since most of us attended school back when they still taught basic economics, we know that if you flood a market with supply, the demand goes down and so does the price point. Well, there were no less than (and probably more than) twelve (12) consoles on the market by 1983, with more planned for ’84 by many of the same companies.

The Magnavox Odyssey2 (that 2 is supposed to be superscript), a pretty good little game machine, but part of a flooded swamp of a market.

Overabundance can lead to rot and stagnation. Guess what? It did.

Home Computers Muscle In

One of the gaming systems I mentioned up there was the Commodore 64. Now, the C64 wasn’t designed just for gaming. It was meant as a home computer. If you were one of many up-and-coming go-getters in the 1980s, you could use this thing to write business reports, organize your finances, send a letter to your mom, or even play a game.

And you could buy all this functionality for about $499, plus a modest investment in some software.

Out Run for the C64. The graphics alone blow the Atari 2600 out of the water. Not to mention that you can use this very same machine to do your taxes or write the great American novel.

Since the first gaming consoles did very little (if any) third-party licensing to start with, the independents of the day would often work with computer platforms. This led to many of them having more diverse game libraries than some consoles did. You know what else these rogue programmers loved about working with platforms like the C64? The graphics capability was miles above anything in console gaming, not to mention overall processing capability.

So why buy a system you can only play games on, that no one else is allowed to write programs for, and doesn’t want to anyway?

Inflation Craps All Over the Dollar

Signs of inflation had started not long after the Bicentennial, with the value of a dollar slowly dropping. While it can be said that the economy improved in some areas in the early 80s, Many amusement and arcade interests lobbied for a smaller dollar coin in 1979 since the spending power of a quarter was a joke by this point. The end result was the Susan B Anthony coin, worth $1 but around the size of a quarter (and thus more manageable for things like vending machines or arcade cabinets). It was this very similarity to the US quarter that made it a flop; some machines would reject the coin, others would simply treat it as a quarter. Neither result was desirable for arcade owners. This hurt video gaming in the States along with everything else happening.

Even Susan looks pissed. “HOW COULD YOU SCREW THIS UP?” Despite failing to solve any of the problems it was meant to solve, the coin was minted again in 1999, when those problems were long gone for various reasons.

Activision Leads the Way to Freedom

We’re going to take a detour for a moment, into the history of Activision. You know that company now as one of the biggest media companies, let alone video game companies, in the world. It’s a well-known name. Activision has its roots in the time period we’re exploring; in 1979, it was founded by programmers who’d left Atari over a lack of credit given – a lack of true meritocracy. You see, programmers of Atari games were never credited, as there WERE no credits in those games. To boot, there was no kickback if a game you developed sold well. You got no cut, just a (rather modest) salary. Activision was the first third-party development firm in video game history, and it DID credit its developers. Atari attempted to sue and do all kinds of other things to block sales, but eventually even they had to eat humble pie and knuckle to the third party wave. Mattel, maker of the Intellivision, stubbornly held out… and never did much in video gaming after the Intellivision.

When Activision made games like Pitfall, Atari pretty much had to bend over and take it. Activision rubbed Atari’s face in it to the tune of 4 million copies worldwide.

My point here is that, because of how they ran their ships, these captains had regular, quiet mutinies as Activision and other new developers soaked up their talent and directed it elsewhere.

E.T. Phones it In / The Mass Grave in Alamogordo

E.T. The Extraterrestrial is frequently cited as the absolute worst game ever created for a console. It was developed in five and a half weeks, left approximately 3 million copies unsold, and was universally panned by video game critics of the era (as well as modern ones who’ve bravely re-examined it). At the exact moment Atari filled trucks with the E.T. Game cartridge, slapped the backs of them, and shut the gate, they had officially shit the bed with the lights on. They just didn’t know it yet. 

The game was so bad that Atari found itself woefully below their bottom line, with three and a half million unsold cartridges out of four million produced. Not only was Atari in serious financial trouble, but flubbing a sure-ticket licensed game like E.T. Made them look like a draft horse with a shattered leg; anyone they did business with was now considering putting them down out of sheer mercy. Atari also had, well, a metric shit-ton of cartridges to offload somehow. They also had no help doing this; Warner Communications had sold them off. Mommy wasn’t around to clean this mess up.

Alamogordo is a very pretty little town in the Chihuahuan Desert in New Mexico. The scenic Sacramento Mountains border the town to its west, and to its east can be found the White Sands National Monument. Its features include a nearby Air Force base, an amazing zoo, and the corpses of some 700,000 Atari cartridges.

The overwhelming majority are copies of E.T. The Extraterrestrial.

Both he and Elliot look suitably sad. Even remorseful.

Throughout September of 1983, Atari dumped approximately 700,000 cartridges into the dump on the town’s south side. On the 29th of that year, to counter scavenging that had been taking place despite an ordinance banning such, the dump poured a layer of concrete over the buried and crushed games.

They were trying really hard to bury the industry’s biggest turd. But that’s not how the world works. A 2014 documentary, Atari: Game Over, shows the excavation of the long-buried games.

The Aftermath and Epilogue

1983 through 1985 were hard times for video gaming in the US, but the market in Japan was still a fertile ground for ideas. Looking west, companies like Nintendo and Sega had seen what too much “MORE” and not enough “NEW” could do. When Nintendo released the American-market version of their popular Famicom system, the NES… they went gently at first. When soft-launches in NYC and other major markets looked good, the NES (and its contemporaries) waded across the sea to change American gaming forever.

Oh, mighty Saviour!

An era was over, and an era had begun.