In late spring, we took the kids on a week long beach trip. When I checked the weather, it seemed likely to rain for half of it, so I thought it would be good to have a few indoor activities on deck. I considered packing a tablet, but that would end up being solitary and anti-social, so I thought, “Why not Atari?”
I packed a Video Computer System, two joysticks, the required cables and some carts (a baker’s dozen) and away we went.
It turned out we did get a fair share of rain and with a bit of luck, the circa 1977 console hooked up fine to the modern flat screen TV in the condo, even if the bullets in Space Invaders were very blurry.
Both of my sons – aged five and eight – humor me from time to time by playing Atari with me. My oldest saw the movie Pixels – a very dumb film that nevertheless captured a bit of truth about 80s arcades – and he will ask to play Q*bert or Centipede on occasion. My youngest likes Atari, particularly if we play two-player games where I can take it easy on him or we can just be silly. I figured with a captive audience at the beach, we might have some fun.
I brought a mix of two-player games (Air Sea Battle, Boxing, Combat, & Freeway), decent arcade ports (Berzerk, Centipede, Dig Dug, & Space Invaders) and some of my favorite Activision titles (Crackpots, Enduro, Megamania, River Raid, & Seaquest). In hindsight, I probably could have skipped the Activision games that weren’t two-player.
Boxing, Combat and Freeway were a hit. Boxing, being basically a fancy version of Rock‘em Sock‘em Robots, is kind of the platonic ideal for a fun Atari game for all skill levels. In Combat, we mostly stuck with the Tank Pong variants, the best parts of the game. Freeway gets a bad rap for being a poor man’s Frogger, but it’s a fun two-player game in its own right with great sound, and since it restricts movement to up and down, Freeway is well-suited to younger players. Air Sea Battle was more of a bust, and I’m not sure why.
In the arcade group, we tried Space Invaders first. They gave it a proper go, including simultaneous two-player, but it proved to be too frustrating, most likely due to the blurry bullets. Berzerk was also a bust, even the kids’ variation, but we found Dig Dug fun on easy – particularly once we made our own game of “Clear all the Dirt”. Centipede was the clear winner in this lot, as both kids enjoyed playing the game. My older son really stuck with it and was getting good at clearing multiple boards by the end of vacation.
My favorite Activision games were mostly duds, which makes sense in hindsight, as I tend to like their games that require constant movement and dodging from the player. That’s a lot to ask of kids with small hands who are not used to Atari joysticks. The exception was Crackpots. The novelty of dropping flowerpots onto crawling bugs added a bit of theatricality compared to the usual spaceships, blocks and stick figures of typical Atari games. Add movement that is limited to the left and right and add gameplay that is more about timing and pattern recognition versus hand-eye coordination, and Crackpots proves to be just kid friendly enough to hold their interest.
There was some frustration and fighting due to the different ages and skill levels, but overall, I’d call it a successful sharing of dad’s old junk on a few rainy days.
– Ben