#Atari 800

[pixelfireplace]

Atari 400 & Atari 800

[80sheaven]

Atari 400 and 800 home computers

[yodaprod]

1983

[gameraboy2]

1982 Atari 800 ad

[arconinternet]

The Manes-Somerson BASIC Type-In Books (Books, Stephen Manes & Paul Somerson, 1984)

You can read them here.

Co-created by the creator of How to Be a Perfect Person in Just Three Days.

[atariforce]

Atari BASIC cartridge photograph by Jacob Joaquin

[stone-cold-groove]

Touch the future. Atari computer ad - 1979.

[histonics]

[sgt-shivers]

"Heaven" From Dandy - John Howard Palevich - Atari 8-bit computers (1983)

[liminalmindcore]

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[pixelfireplace]

Atari A.N.A.L.O.G. Magazine - No. 5 (1982)

[80sheaven]

Warhawk theme, Atari 8-bit music by the legendary Rob Hubbard. One of my favourites!

[everygame]

The Eidolon (Atari 8-Bit)

Developed/Published by: Lucasfilm Games / Epyx Released: 12/1985 Completed: 07/04/2023 Completion: Beat the final dragon. Trophies / Achievements: n/a

The Eidolon is one of the very first games I got for my Amstrad CPC. Mind those mail order club “eight CDs for a penny” scams, where you’d get a bunch of things for free as long as you give the company “implied license” for them to send you things at full price in future unless you can work your way out of it? Well, we definitely did one of those when I got my Amstrad CPC and my dad definitely managed to get out of it ahead… somehow. 

Of course, it depends on your definition of “ahead.” I was given full freedom to select the games I wanted for the Amstrad, and considering I was a tiny child it’s not like I had any (literally any) critical faculties. So I know we got the Amstrad CPC conversion of the original Star Wars Arcade machine. And outside of that, I know we got Inflitrator and I know we got The Eidolon.

Strangely, I’ve already written about Infiltrator once in passing, and in a write-up of one of Lucafilm’s “launch” releases, Rescue on Fractalus (the other, Ballblazer). With Infiltrator, I could never get the bloody helicopter to take off because I was a tiny child. With The Eidolon? The disk almost never worked.

So maybe we didn’t come out ahead, even for our penny. As far as Infiltrator, I remember getting the helicopter to take off once. With The Eidolon, I remember getting it to load once, or twice, being confused by what was going on, possibly seeing the first dragon that I’d looked at for so long on the back of the box, and giving up because I had no idea what to do.

Well, it’s 2023 and I have to say that with the manual to hand, the entire interne on offer, and “being an adult” it took me a bloody long time to understand what the fuck you’re supposed to do in this. 

To not get ahead of ourselves, let’s start with what The Eidolon is. It’s one of Lucasfilm’s second “wave” of releases from the end of 1985, which amounted to The Eidolon and Koronis Rift. These titles begin the “forgotten” era of Lucasfilm between Rescue and Fractalus/Ballblazer and Maniac Mansion, and are almost totally unheralded (although some people do seem to like Koronis Rift a lot.) Oddly–and I don’t have my copy of Rogue Leaders to hand, nor offhand knowledge if it even covers this–the unfettered creative hotbed of early Lucasfilm knocks out two games entirely built around the fractal landscapes of Rescue on Fractalus at once, which… well, I guess it’s efficient.

The Eidolon’s take is to just “flip” the mountain landscapes of Rescue on Fractalus to turn them into caves, which is, to be fair, a decent use. The problem is, unfortunately, the game designed around this. Designed by Charlie Kellner–who doesn’t seem to have stuck with video games after 1994’s the Page Master–the game was originally intended to be a narrative where the player plays as the dragon versus a knight, but due to the limits of what they could do with the Atari 8-bits they ended up sanding things off until all they had were, well, caves to walk around, and thanks to Charlie’s interest in HG Wells, the game suddenly became about an inventor of a mysterious craft being transported to the depths of his own mind which just happened to look exactly like a bunch of samey grey caves.

To be fair to Charlie, there’s a couple of firsts or near-firsts here. The Eidolon, in some respects, one of the earliest “first person shooters” considering that it’s the main way you interact with the world (even though, as I’ll go on to explain, not in a way you’d expect); Maze/Maze War from 1973 is definitely earlier, but there’s a dearth of examples in between, and this is (as far as I can be arsed to research) the earliest with smooth 3D movement. And The Eidolon is probably the first steampunk video game. Sure, the genre feels embarrassing now. But not if you were first!

Anyway. The Eidolon has a beautiful manual, written from the perspective of the inventor, that (unfortunately) it takes real effort to understand the intended play for, so I’ll summarise it here.

There are eight levels.

Your goal on each level is to defeat the dragon you’ll find somewhere in the maze. You can’t get to the dragon until you collect the associated crystals required to awaken in.

You collect the crystals by killing monsters, all of whom are sleeping in dead-ends in the maze until you wake them up by walking up to them.

You defeat monsters by shooting energy balls at them, usually the red ones. You’ve got four types of energy ball to fire: red (damaging), gold (only useful against some dragons, I think?), blue (freeze enemies), green (transform enemy into something else. Doesn’t transform dragons.)

Sometimes there are red energy balls flying around that will damage you; fire a red energy ball at them to turn them into a harmless gold energy ball.

Everything you do costs energy, but handily there are energy balls floating about all over the mazes and you can capture them.

When awoken, dragons will also fire energy balls at you, but you can capture those too!

You’ve got a time limit to finish the game, and only get a couple minutes added for each level you beat, so you can’t dawdle and need to accept you’ll have to map the mazes to actually finish the game (or *cough* find a map online *cough*).

You die when you run out of energy.

That’s about it, basically. It is not especially deep, and I have to admit once I’d finally worked it all out I was pretty disappointed it was this slight. While moving around the maze is breezy enough, the technical limitations make most of the action, at best, clumsy button bashing. Every enemy is just standing in a corner, basically waiting for you to walk up to them and fire just enough fireballs at them to kill them (it’s amusing that contemporary reviews complained “why can’t you talk to the monsters”) and combat with the dragons locks you into the space so you basically just have to hammer the “fire energy ball” and “capture energy ball” buttons as fast as you can to get it over with as quickly as possible. There’s supposedly some tactics to it, but fireballs are on screen for a handful of frames making it almost worthless to try and time it out.

In fact, playing this rather brutally aggravated my wrists as the final boss is a marathon of button bashing (I read one forum poster stating that they had to put their Atari on the floor to mash the spacebar with their foot!) and it leads to one of the most hilariously baffling ending sequence where (spoilers!) Robert Goulet hands you a pterodactyl egg. It is… not worth it.

I hate to say it but the problem with The Eidolon is that it’s not really… anything. It’s a collection of things, for sure, but they don’t actually add up to a video game. The only thing I really thought was that interesting was having to use the “transform” energy ball on certain enemies so you could defeat them, but that’s… not much.

It’s a real missed opportunity, too, because the smooth scrolling cave represented a perfect opportunity to push the CRPG forward. Yes, Ultima IV had really only just come out, but Wizardry had been kicking since 1981, and the tech here is good enough that it’s not like you have to do anything nearly as complex. Just a simple dungeon crawler would have been pretty incredible, but it’s possible I’m asking a bit much. I mean… if you really get down to it, Wolfenstein 3D is less complex than this, so it may simply be that this was the right seed of an idea at the wrong time technologically, and as soon as things moved forward a bit both Wolfenstein 3D and Ultima Underworld would be possible. The Eidolon just doesn’t really manage to be a forefather of either.

Will I ever play it again? I won’t. I did think about playing through the CPC version of this instead of the original, which is a bit more colourful if a touch slower. But I was worried it wouldn’t load properly. Some things stick with you..

Final Thought: Above I mentioned this was from Lucasfilm’s forgotten era, and I really do mean it: it’s quite remarkable how little information is about this game online despite being from one of the most beloved developers probably ever, and I do think it’s a shame, dead-end or not. I mean I’m very glad I finally played it. I got my dad’s penny worth. Support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up a digital copy of exp. 2600, a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.

[gameraboy2]

Robert Ludlum for Atari, 1981 ad

[gamesthatwerent]

XMAS UPDATE 7 - Unseen Dropzone 2 assets, International Karate prototypes and IK graphical assets

Check out never seen before screens from the lost Dropzone 2 on the #Atari and #Commodore64, along with a strange Arcade edition of Dropzone for A8. Also various International Karate prototypes and IK+ graphical assets from the late Archer Maclean:

https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/2024/12/archer-maclean-a8-prototypes-and-unused-assets/

We have also produced a video which showcases the recoveries and findings of Dropzone 2, Dropzone Arcade and the various International Karate prototypes and IK+ graphical assets from the late Archer Maclean:

It is with huge thanks to Chris Wilkins (https://fusionretrobooks.com/) for kindly allowing Archer's disks to be preserved and for us to showcase materials from his archive.

[atariforce]

Retro Game Spotlight 094: Ghostbusters (1984)

Publisher: Activision Platform: Atari 400/800 Designers: David Crane, Glyn Anderson

Trivia: Activision completed the programming for Ghostbusters in only six weeks by incorporating driving segments and car building scenes originally meant for a game David Crane already had in production which was to be called Car Wars.