What if I told you this was the first first person shooter? Since I’m never going to print more than ten copies of this or even attempt to market it in any real meaningful way that would make me any cash I don’t bother to do any research beyond “shit I kind of remember reading on wikis the last time I tried a project like this when I should have been doing anything else more productive” so maybe that is wrong but I’m very willing to pretend I’m right about it, and I hope you are too.

In Star Ship you are, brace yourself for this shocker, a pilot of a star ship who needs to blast some things. There are a couple star ship related game modes here but they are all just similar takes on the concept, and sadly none of them are about Grace Slick trying to dose Nixon with LSD. That reference would have fucking killed in the 70s. What didn’t kill in the 70s was Star Ship, I mean the game not Jefferson Starship the reference I, a millennial, am too young to be making and you, most likely a Fortnite Zoomer here with a Youtube algorithm full of videos from a Pewdiepie or PepeGamer1488 video, are definitely too young to get. It didn’t do well contemporarily with most people saying that it looked great and, uh, yeah I can see that, but that the game play and modes were lacking, and since the first person aspect was for whatever reason not seen to be all that groundbreaking even though now we look back at it and go ‘hey neat’ it didn’t have much of a shelf life. They were mostly right, as its an interesting oddity in the early console catalogs but if it didn’t keep anybody interested in 77 it doesn’t have much of a chance to in Hell Year 20XX.

Look, is this a fun or challenging chess game? No, no not really, but is it an actually interesting technical achievement on the Atari? Yeah actually.

Its funny to think that of all the things people thought were possible and impossible during Atari development, chess games were firmly in the impossible camp. But think about it, the amount of code needed, and the space to hold that amount of code, to have an AI play a human being at chess in a functional way would have been wild back then, and nobody really thought you could make that happen on this weird little brown box that pre-Reagan era kids and Carter-era stoners were hooking up to their TVs. But they did it. On 4kbs.

Its way fun to believe this technical achievement happened not because of a corporate desire to push technology forward but instead because Atari didn’t want to get sued for false advertisement since they put a chess piece on the console’s box art so I won't be fact checking that possibly apocryphal tale. Sure its a little buggy and the hardest difficulty theoretically takes the computer 10 hours to take a move which I assume nobody has ever verified because lord knows I’m not going to, but its a chess game from 1978 that you could play in your freshly wood paneled conversation pit while feeling excited for the future before your dumb parents decided to start putting us on a irreversible path of decline that your generation would perpetuate and that you would most likely blame on your children.

Yet another first run Atari game that is more notable for who made it - Warren Robinett of “the first graphical Adventure game, Adventure, as well as the first person to insert an easter egg in the game to force Atari to credit the designer since that used to be a thing that video game publishers used to not do and frankly would probably love to not have to do now” fame - than it is on its own merits.

Its a two player car combat game where you move through a maze trying to hit your opponent with missiles that you control. The gameplay doesn’t feel particularly fun, the controls aren’t really equipped for what you are trying to do here, and there are only four maps with three of them being way too cluttered for an Atari screen, so you can see the problem here. Also the vehicles either look like wizard hats or dongs depending on how messed up your brain is. Mine is dong levels of messed up personally.

ARE YOU READY FOR AN EXPERIENCE TANGENTIALLY RELATED TO THE GAME OF FOOTBALL! This was one of those games that obviously now we look at and go “oh there isn’t much to this” but people went completely wild for the arcade version and a little less wild but still relatively wild for the home console version during the 78 handegg season.

One of the things I am going to try to do with this is equally balance contemporary opinions and modern opinions so you end up seeing Pitfall keep its place on my inevitable Top 10000 Or Whatever Games list even after games are modernized, but even with that said this is a rough one. The limitations of the console make a playable game of football near impossible, with sprite limits meaning your players, all three of them, flicker endlessly as they move across the field which just is not pleasant to look at, and while there are sort of rudimentary plays you can choose from which seems ahead of its time, those plays are all mostly the same as soon as the square gets hiked. The rules of football are barely followed but you can punt so thats something. Pat McAfee would be happy at least.

“Why didn’t they follow their previous naming conventions and just call this Baseball” you may ask? Well, person who mistakenly clicked on this link while thinking they were going to get useful information about a 40 year old game and actually isn’t asking anything, its because this is not baseball. Its barely a vague approximation of it. You pitch from second base, you can curve the ball like a bullet in that shitty movie where you could curve bullets, there are no fly outs, every homerun is deep center, you have to tag the runners because there is nobody to throw the ball to on the bases, but, get this, they all look like they are wearing hats. And you can throw bean balls. Baby steps.

Oh this was also a Bob Whitehead game but honestly just assume that every game I talk about from Atari until 1980 was programmed by one of the Activision guys and it will save us both time.

the original reference here for the physical zine was 'person who picked this up because someone else left it on the seat of a rattling SEPTA trolley'

This is a port of an absolutely legendary game that was created in the 60s by Steve Russell and is best known now less as the first multiplayer game that was created before Eric Clapton formed Cream and more as That Game That Piracy Scene Groups Use to Bootstrap Cracked Games Through the Steam API.

What it actually is is a two player rudimentary space combat action game. Its funny that by 1978 this game felt so dated even on a system that launched with such groundbreaking titles as BOUNCE BALL and FAST RUNNING. It is not a great port, it is easy to break and its single player mode is next to useless, but it gets a point or two for still being Space War under all that.

Codebreaker was one of the first games in the second wave of Atari titles in '78. It’s actually made up of multiple games, Codebreaker and Nim being the main draws, the former being a game about figuring out numerical sequences and the latter being a strategic version of hot potato. Both games are simplistic but not simple, but neither are very exciting in digital game form. At least not in 1978.

You could use the keyboard controller to play it which was neat, and reviewers at the time found it passable and challenging enough as a proto-strategy game which I agreed with at first, but due to limitations within the uh lets call it a ‘game engine’ repetition sets in almost immediately. It also isn’t particularly hard when you figure out its just different levels of process of elimination. Like a lot of these early Atari games, the box art is cool as hell though. Sorry, I don’t have a high school story to pad this one out like with Basic Math. This is about the level of analysis you can expect until we get to the late 80s. SPOILER ALERT I am absolutely going to quit on this misguided idea to be a one man All Game Guide (RIP) before we get that far.

It’s Blackjack! … Okay, okay, fine I already ran that bit into the ground. So more details, uh, its certainly a functional if boring blackjack game that more adequately emulates the source than that god awful Slot Machine did with its own basis and, hmm, well Bob Whitehead programmed it, and since I already mentioned Kaplan in a different review I may as well mention one of the other four programmers who banded together and rightfully left Atari to form Activision after realizing their labor was being exploited by the bloodsuckers in seersuckers in the company.

Of course, that labor at the time was creating a simplistic digital blackjack game but it was a simpler time and workers of the world unite etc etc regardless. In an attempt to not alienate the three people who accidentally stumbled upon this accidentally I won’t go in depth about how deeply ironic it is that a company started by four workers who felt they weren’t being compensated adequately for their labor has turned into an egregious union buster that pays noted antagonist goblin Bobby Kottick 40 billion double dollars. DeathgripsGuillotine.mp3

I like the Atari games that are just named exactly whatever general concept they are supposed to represent are but somehow this one ends up being misleading. Its less Mini Golf and more Pong with obstacles. Obstapong. Shockingly, golf without any physics sucks, and Miniature Golf sucks more than you’d expect. Worse of all, the hole layouts are boring which is sort of important when it comes to mini golf. Its just throwing a square block at other square blocks until it gets in the right spot on screen. Trying to do a golf game before consoles could handle the advanced shape of round was just too ambitious.

Another memory game from Atari. Its funny to see the real simple trends in these early days before anybody really knew what the hell a video game could or should be. Right now its basic match-two memory games, later on it’ll be mazes, and eventually it’ll be grimdark shooters starring caucasian dudes with stubble and gruff demeanors.

Hunt & Score is slightly better than Brain Games because its uh…. Lets say flashier? I guess? Maybe its actually worse because it does this annoying thing where it flashes everything at you for some reason. I guess the graphics were just too demanding for the Atari 2600.

Brain Games is an early title from programmer Larry Kaplan, and the reason we know his name from an era when most game designers were either legendary weirdos we still talk about to this day or complete nobodies who were treated as replaceable cogs by an unfair system is because Larry would go on to make Kaboom, have great timing on leaving Atari, and become one of the original founders of an obscure little start up company named Activision. Humble beginnings here though eh Larry?

This is a cart made up of a number of memory type games with varying degrees of difficulty and sort of horny names like “Touch Me” and “Play Me.” None of them are very fun. Its really only notable for Kaplan’s involvement and the very entertaining theory that Ralph Baer stole the idea of Simon from Touch Me as revenge for Nolan Bushnell stealing the idea for Pong from him. Allegedly, of course.

When I was a junior in high school I failed Algebra II thanks to one of the rare truly awful teachers. Don’t get me wrong, I’m also math dumb, but until that point I’d gotten through solely because I’m the exact kind of smug underachiever teachers loved to give extra time to in order to unlock my potential or whatever, but this teacher was more content with just drawing the numbers on the white board and telling you to figure it out, none of that pesky teaching shit from them! So I failed Algebra II and had to retake it my senior year, no big deal right? Wrong, because in my state you had to complete three math credits to be eligible to graduate during the Lionel-Hutz-business-card-esque "No, Child Left Behind!" era. And since nobody in the office would believe me that this teacher was awful, I would be stuck with her for Algebra II, would inevitably fail, and would be forced to repeat and miss out on the dizzying excitement of community college.

The way I solved this problem was first trying to take pre-algebra, which lasted one class before the teacher realized she had me for geometry two years before which means I had to have passed Algebra I which means I couldn’t take Pre-Algebra. It was in the rules. But what I found wasn’t in the rules was that someone who already passed mainstream math classes couldn’t drop down into Basic Math, the remedial course. So thats what I did over the protestations of the school administration. Then, over the course of the year, what started off as a class of five ‘troubled’ sophomore kids and me, a troubled senior kid that wasn’t classified as such probably because I’m 'suburban' or at least good at manipulating authority figures, ballooned to include ten other seniors who didn’t want to risk being held back. The school finally noticed, and while I heard they closed that loophole for the next year, they also let the teacher go before they met tenure.

What does me pied pipering a bunch of schoolmates into a basic math course and getting a teacher canned right before an economic recession because I didn’t want to have to apply myself have to do with the Atari game Basic Math? Pretty much fucking nothing, I just wanted to go off on a tangent because I’m already regretting this ‘try and talk about every video game ever made’ gimmick. What the hell are you supposed to say about some of these early titles? Its a game where you do math. You solve equations against a solid colored background and get a beep sometimes. It might be the first uh math game? I’m not bothering looking that up. For the record, people thought this sucked contemporarily too which is hilarious because there were only three video games then.

Flag Capture is Minesweeper before Minesweeper except everybody hated it. You have a grid of squares and have to find the flag behind them without triggering a bomb, you do this by using the numerical and directional clues the game occasionally gives you. It was notable to reviewers at the time for having bad graphics and terrible sound which, hah, I mean okay I guess they had to draw the line somewhere. Reviewers back then must have had a hard time padding out what they had to say about these games too, solidarity with them from 40 years in the future.