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Harem Atari 2600

Atari 2600 Complete Game List

Harem Atari 2600 Play

Atari 2600 Complete Game List

In short: if you're looking for an ordinary Atari 2600 ROM set, look elsewhere. It can be found almost everywhere on the Internet without too many problems. If you're looking for the most genuine and best documented Atari 2600 ROM collection in the world, then look. Welcome to the all new 'The What Are We Fighting Four'. One part Let's Play, one part podcast. The What Are We Fighting Four is Travis, Joan, Josh, and TV Di.

- A -

Adventures of Max

Little is known about this title other than it was part of the game development deal Atari made with Axlon during the late 80's. According the former Atari programmer Steve DeFrisco

'This was one of the “Designed by Nolan” games, which was never finished. It was to be set in Medieval times, the player is a knight with a sword. That’s pretty much all we had. John moved on to another company and the game was never finished. The opening sequence of the character running and jumping into the hole, and falling to the bottom worked, but that’s it.'

Bagman

This port of the 1982 Stern coin-op was programmed by Steve Hostetler for Atari. According to Steve he was almost finished with the game when they laid him off. Steve sent all his materials back to Atari after he was laid off, and it is unknown what happened to them.

Ballblazer

Previously thought to be only a rumor, programmer Tod Frye recently confirmed that this game was indeed once in development. Although the technically challenged 2600 was woefully underpowered to produce the split screen scrolling required by Ballblazer, Tod apparently had a demo up and running (various reports put it somewhere between 30% and 60% complete). The whereabouts of this demo are currently unknown.

Battle of the Sexes

Developed by Michael Case for Multivision. Multivision president Eugene Finkei talked about this game in the October 1983 issue of Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated: 'Battle of the Sexes is played simultaneously by 2 players. It's very innocent. Each player has surrogate partners scrolling across the screen. Each player must score with as many surrogates as possible while trying to knock out the surrogates of the other partner. There are different skill levels & variations: it can be played by 2 guys with girls scrolling across the screen or by women with men scrolling across the screen. To score, the player directs the figure to bounce together with the surrogate for a fraction of a second. No genitalia. And you don't shoot the other's surrogates, you merely get them out of the way.' This title was long thought not to have even been started, but the programmer recently confirmed in a 2007 interview with Digital Press that the game was actually completely finished: 'Battle of the Sexes involved male and female figures coming together from the top and bottom of the screen, to either shoot each other or screw each other. The owners kept the only copy. It wasn't as good (as Harem). It was basically like Pong. I knocked it out in a few weeks so we could say we had two games when we approached distributors.' The whereabouts of the one and only prototype are currently unknown.

Bird Programmed by David Lamkins, after he departed Parker Brothers for Activision. David worked in Activision's short-lived Boston office. During that time, he worked on a 'bird game' which was never published. He discussed the game in a 2002 article that appeared in issue #74 of the Atari 2600 Connection: 'I spent my time at Activision working on a 2600 game I called Bird. I’ve heard that Rex (Bradford) later described it as “a pterodactyl on a bombing run”, which is pretty good as a brief description. My inspiration for Bird came party from the Heavy Metal movie (the scenes with the girl riding the bird into battle), and partly from Activision’s Battlezone clone, Robot Tank (the point-of-view perspective of the playing field). The player piloted a bird which had a limited endurance that was affected partly by the intensity of the player’s maneuvers and partly by damage incurred from missiles fired by ground-based hostiles somewhat reminiscent of Dr. Who’s Daleks. The Bird game was really based around subtlety and survival. The player had to be sparing in his moves in order to make it to the next round. It was a shooter game, but not so much an aggressive game. It had kind of a Zen quality to it – probably way too cerebral for the market. I was recently contacted by Activision’s Ken Love, who is in the process of putting together a definitive collection of Activision games, including all the unreleased and prototype games. Ken wanted to acquire a copy of Bird. If any such copies exist, it’s either on a 20-year-old hard drive in some Activision storage locker, or in a dusty prototype cartridge in someone’s closet. That’s kind of a shame. I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing it one more time…'

Blow Out

Developed by Mattel, Blow Out was a party game that had 'Two roller-skating dancers drop darts from a scaffold onto rising balloons. An easy enough task, except these rude guys keep bumping into each other and knocking each other off the scaffold. When the music stops, that's the signal for the next players to take the controllers.'

According to the Blue Sky Rangers website 'David Akers only worked on the game briefly in June 1983 before being pulled off to work on higher priority projects.' It is unknown how far along this game got before being cancelled.

Candyland Surfing

According to former 20th Century Fox programmer John Marvin 'There was a surfing game where you surfed a rainbow. That was taking advantages of something you could do cheaply with the VCS, each scan line you could change the color and you got this great rolling rainbow on the screen. It was more a screensaver than a game, the problem was there wasn't a lot of gameplay in it.'

Circus Charlie A port of the 1983 Konami/Centuri coin-op. Parker Brothers announced Atari 2600 VCS, ColecoVision, and Commodore 64 versions of this title, and prototype boxes were shown in a CES press kit. According to a Parker Brothers internal marketing release schedule, this game was scheduled for a September 1984 release. The C64 version was actually completed but never released by Parker Brothers (it was eventually released by Konami in 1987). According to Phil Orbanes, former Senior VP of Research & Development at Parker Brothers, the VCS version received 'some coding' at the very least, and may have been completely finished. The programmer is unfortunately unknown, and as yet no prototypes of this game have surfaced.

Computer Corridor

Developed by Mattel. According to the Blue Sky Rangers website 'This game started out as an original concept by Ron Surratt and Jane Terjung called Computer Revenge. At the same time, Spring 1983, Russ Ludwick was working on an Intellivision game called Moon Corridors, inspired by the arcade game Battlezone. In mid-1983, Marketing began an agressive campaign to release titles on as many different game platforms as possible. Noting similarities between Computer Revenge and Moon Corridors (mainly a 3-D grid effect), they decreed that the two games should be mooshed into one - Computer Corridor - and released on both Intellivision and Atari. By the time they tested and approved the idea, though, Russ was no longer working at Mattel Electronics and no one else was available to pick up the Intellivision version. A couple of months later Jane also left Mattel, killing the project altogether.'

It is not known how far along this title got before being cancelled.

Count's Castle

Also known as the missing CCW title, this would have a been a math title based on the Sesame Street Count character. An internal Atari memo puts the game at 80% complete, but the game was never finished. Apparently the original programmer left and there was no one available to finish the game.

Cryptogram

According to David Crane he developed this word game after moving to Activision from Atari. The game would display a scrambled phrase that the player would then have to unscramble in the quickest time possible. Players could also enter their own phrases if they didn't want to use one of the built in phrases. This game used a programming technique called 'Filled Venetian Blinds' which alternated the scanlines used by the regular Venetian Blinds technique every frame, making the image look more solid (no more lines) but also slightly transparent due to only half the image appearing on each frame. Unfortunately the game was deemed to be of 'limited interest' and Activision feared it wouldn't sell well enough to consider releasing so the project was abandoned.

Cumulus

According to the Blue Sky Rangers Website 'Cumulus was an original Atari 2600 idea by Jeff Ratcliff. His idea was to take a relatively simple game but use the extra memory available on a Super Cartridge to create spectacular visual effects not seen before on Atari - mainly really cool explosions. He worked on the game briefly in August 1983, programming a demonstration screen showing a high-resolution cloud with an enemy ship above it. While the game was listed on the weekly in-house status reports, it never received the four-digit product number that made a project official.' Sims 4 buying groceries.

A screenshot exists.

David and Goliath

Programmed by Rick Harris for Enter-Tech Ltd. Enter-Tech Ltd. did some Christian themed games for Sparrow who released Music Machine for the 2600. David and Goliath consisted of two stages: On the first David had to herd sheep and on the second David had to fight Goliath. Unfortunately the contracting company ran out of money and the game was never finished.

Dazzler

Port of the 1982 Century Electronics coin-op. Developed by Enter-Tech Ltd. for the Unitronics Expander system (which also went unreleased). The game was on a cassette and not a cartridge.

Dual Scrolling

Based on a programming effect developed by David Akers in which the screen was split in two with each half scrolling a background independently of the other. Although there was no game designed to use this technique marketing apparently loved it and decided that a game could be designed around it.

According to the Blue Sky Rangers website 'After determining the same effect could be created on Intellivision, Marketing put the still-to-be-determined game - temporarily called Dual Scrolling - onto the official release schedule. That was December 19, 1983. Exactly one month later, Mattel Electronics closed. Although no game concept had yet been thought of, Dual Scrolling was one of the few games officially still in development for the Atari 2600 when the doors were shut.'

Flapper

Developed by Mattel. Flapper was to be a unique game where 'You control the Flapper to rescue baby Flappers from an underground maze. The maze is filled with snakes, bats and ghosts. Cave-ins and landslides keep opening and closing the tunnels. Luckily, the Flapper is a unique fellow: he has three types of beanies - chopper for flying, gun for shooting, umbrella for protection - and four interchangeable types of legs: flying, jumping, running and walking. You have to find and change the appropriate beanie and legs for him to overcome the obstacles and rescue the babies!'

According to the Blue Sky Rangers website Flapper was never finished, although some coding did take place. 'While the game was listed on the weekly in-house status reports, it never received the four-digit product number that made a project 'official.' Steve worked on Flapper briefly in August 1983 before being pulled off to work on higher priority projects.'

Flashlight

Not really a game, but another 'cool programming technique' for the 2600 that Mattel thought they could design a game around. Programmer Stephen Roney had developed an interesting programming effect on the Intellivision where a moving circle of light could illuminate the background and any objects within the circle. Another Mattel programmer, Ron Surratt, was asked to duplicate this effect on the 2600. Once it was shown that it was indeed possible Mattel tried to come up with a game to fit the effect, but closed their doors two months later.

Flesh Gordon

This was to be Wizards final game entry, but was never released. Based on the 1974 soft-porn movie of the same name, Flesh Gordon was long thought to have never been even started until the programmer of the game kindly set the record straight.

'Flesh gordon was finished. It sucked, sometimes literally if you know what I mean. It was a horrible game with a lot of sex and the payoff was the ability to hump using the joystick. There was nothing cool or interesting but then wizard video wanted what they wanted. There came a time when they stole a copy of the final or near final version which was sent for their approval. They refused to pay and they went to publish the game using the rom we sent them to approve. It was just about finished but it needed some finishing touches. We never did them. They never officially released it as I understand and that was no loss.'

What happened to the prototype that was sent to Wizard is unknown. Rumors over the years have surfaced that some collectors have access to the rom, but this has never been verified and is highly suspect.

A picture of the box exists.

The Impossible Game

Developed by Telesys, but never released. The Impossible Game was shown at the January 1983 CES show, and mentioned in an interview with Alex Leavens in the Aug/Sept. '83 issue of Video Games Player magazine. According to Alex 'It's a puzzle game, sort of like Rubik's Cube. You don't blow anything up and nobody gets hurt--it's strictly a mental challenge.'

Other than this short interview, the only other information we have on this game comes from Leonard Herman, who actually played the game. According to Leonard, the object of the game was to 'successfully navigate through six levels of 36 squares that are randomly chosen by the computer.' On the first level the player only had to pick one square at a time, but on each new level the amount of squares the player ahd to pick increased (2 on the second level, 3 on the third, etc.).

For more information on The Impossible Game, check out to Leonard's personal write up of the game.

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James Bond: As Seen in Octopussy

Before Parker Brothers decided to turn it into a crappy version of Moon Patrol, the James Bond game went through two different iterations. Originally starting out as James Bond in Octopussy, this version would have taken place on a train and be based on only one movie (rather than a series of movies like the final game). In this game James would have to shoot at and dodge bullets from two armed men as they ran around on a train cart. This version of the game was seen by more than one person at various game shows and was advertised in at least one PB catalog. It is highly likely that this game was completed, but dropped in favor of the 'Moon Patrol' version.

A screenshot the actual prototype running exists.

James Bond: Moonraker Demo

According to programmer Charlie Heath, he did a one screen demo of a James Bond game based on the movie Moonraker. Sadly it appears that the demo has probably been lost forever.

'I'd prototyped a 'James Bond' scene during my first first few weeks, to see what I could do with a VCS: you're in space orbiting earth in the space shuttle, chasing bio-terrorist pods to shoot them down before they break up in the atmosphere, while your shuttle and the pod are being buffeted about by reentry. You see something that looks a bit like a spinning earth bobbing about at the bottom of the screen. If you watch the movie Moonraker, it's one of the climactic scenes, but Parker wasn't interested in it for the Bond license because they wanted to do something that was more along the lines of Pitfall - little guy running around with various spy gadgets.'

'It wasn't much beyond a concept, but it was a pretty functional single screen 1st person perspective shooter. Not up to the level of Star Raiders gameplay, but I thought the pseudo-orbiting-world view was pretty cool and unique at that time. I didn't keep a copy of the code when I left Parker Brothers. It might be buried on a backup tape somewhere at Parker Brothers, but more likely the tape was reused for cereal inventory or something like that.'

Keystone Cannonball (Keystone Kapers II ver #1) Dan Kitchen worked on two unreleased sequels to Keystone Kapers. This first version involved Officer Kelly chasing the crook across the rooftops of a train. 'I had also done a sequel to Keystone Kapers, which was the Keystone cop on a train. And that was actually a neat thing because I was able to pull off some interesting software kernels where I had eight rotating wheels on the bottom of a train where you could normally only have 2 or 6 It was a very cute game. From screen to screen, from boxcar to boxcar fighting and trying to defeat the character from Keystone Kapers, who was the runaway criminal. That was a very huge game as it had non-symmetrical play and had a really nice, large engine at the front of the game and a very large caboose at the bottom of the game.' According to Dan the game never got to a playable state and was only around 20% done before being scrapped for unknown reasons. Recently Dan found his prototype which featured the train and officer Kelly running on top of the cars. You can see a video of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u60o2nYEXM Keystone Kapers II ver #2 Dan Kitchen worked on two unreleased sequels to Keystone Kapers. This second version was a vertically scrolling game similar to Crazy Climber and involved Officer Kelly climbing a building while Harry Hooligan threw objects at him. According to Dan this version got to a playable state, but was cancelled for unknown reasons. - L - The Levee Game Programmed by Dan Kitchen for Activision. According to Dan: 'Keystone Kelly appeared in a yellow rain slicker running around ladders and platforms repairing cracks that would appear in a background Hoover Dam-style image complete with warning lights and a beautiful sun setting on the distant reservoir . The screen kernels were written such that I could change the background color on every scan line so the entire screen would slowly fill up with water if the player couldn't cement the cracks in time. There was also a mechanic to 'empty' the water on the player's side of the dam to keep the game going.'

- M -

M*A*S*H II Programmed by David Lubar for Sirius Software. This alternate version of M*A*S*H developed at Sirius was ultimately scrapped in favor of another version developed internally at Fox by Doug Neubauer. Programmer David Lubar describes what he remembers of the game: 'I know I had Klinger at the top of the screen, on guard duty. Once in a while, he'd try to run off, and the player had to stop him. Beyond that, I think the game involved taking supplies to different surgery tents.' 20th Century Fox had announced a M*A*S*H II game and it is believed that this version may have been planned for release as a sequel. A prototype of this game is rumored to exist in the hands of a private collector, but nothing has been released to the public as yet.

Mission Omega

Mission Omega was a space shooter developed by Commavid. According to an interview with some ex-Commavid employees, this game was finished but sent back to the programmer for some 'fine tuning'. The game was never re-finished in time to be released.

Mission X

Port of the 1982 Data East Coin-Op of the same name. Although released for the Intellivision, the 2600 version was never finished before being cancelled for 'unknown reasons'. It is not known how far along the game was before being cancelled.

Monkey Business

Designed by Mattel, Monkey Business was to be one of the few unique 2600 games designed by Mattel (all others were ports of existing Intellivision games). Although not completed, Monkey Business was fairly far along before being cancelled.

A description of the game found on the Blue Sky Rangers website reads as follows 'In the zoo, things have gone awry. Billy the Chimp has escaped and is up to no good. As any curious monkey would, he has managed to free the elephants! It's up to you, as Mike the Zookeeper, to return the elephants to their cages.

Once you have restored order in the elephant section, you must quickly run to the next section of cages. Perhaps you'll have to capture the loose Koalas. Maybe you'll have to avoid soaring hawks, battle fierce tigers or try to grab the slippery penguins. Along the way, you'll find items which will be of help to you, such as a bag of peanuts or a net. So grab your hat and stop this monkey business!'

- P -

Penetrator

Programmed by Bill Heineman for Avalon Hill. This game is not believed to have been advertised or even announced. According to the programmer: 'The game itself was a lot like Activision's Megamania. It was a simple drop from the sky shooter. It was unfinished because I left Avalon Hill to work for Time/HBO on a playcable system for the 2600. The game was probably 50% complete. My source to Penetrator was lost many years ago when the 5 1/4 floppy it was stored on simply went bad. The only EPROMS made were almost certainly erased to make way for Death Trap, etc, because we only had a few dozen and they kept dying on us because we burned EPROMS so many times. Only three dev cards were made, so all the other programmers had to write code, and test on an EPROM.' Avalon Hill's stay in the market was short-lived and it's unknown if any further work was done on this title, or if it was simply erased.

Pepper II

Port of the 1982 Exidy arcade game that was released on the Colecovison. It has recently been confirmed that the same programming team that was responsible for the Atari 2600 version of Turbo was indeed working on this game, but it was never completed (or even reached a playable state) due to the collapsing game market. A prototype case was found for this game, but it was empty as it was just a mock-up used for advertisements. Artwork sheets for the game graphics also exist.

Incidentally, there is no Pepper I. The II in the title referred to the fact that the character had two personalities (angel and devil) and not that it was a sequel.

Porkys

Not the same game that was released by 20th Century Fox, but rather a game based on the cartoon pigs that were seen on the electric sign in the movie. Former TCF programmer John Marvin remembers seeing this game while he worked at the company. According to John 'The game made no sense at all.' It is unknown what happened to this prototype after it was rejected.

- R -

Real Time Chess Real Time Chess (working name) was a strategy game developed by Greg Easter while at Atari. According to Greg: “You commanded one piece and tried to capture other pieces one at a time without stepping on any of the squares they could land on. In simple mode, all of the squares the other piece could move to were lit up. In expert mode, you had to keep that in mind yourself. So it was also a training aid for playing chess, sharpening your mind to keep track of different pieces. That game was about 90% done when I was told Atari would not be releasing any more games no matter what, so there was no point in my finishing it.” Greg said that that several test carts were made, but it is unknown where they currently are.

The Rescue of Emmanuelle Alan Roberts (designer of X-Man) talked about this game in the October 1983 issue of Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated: 'We are currently working on The Rescue of Emmanuelle, based on the famous Emmanuelle character. It is a male-oriented action game where one has to rescue Emmanuelle, the rewards being that, if you are skillful enough to save her, she is going to thank you, bestow her kindness on you. It's a climbing game. It takes place on the Eiffel Tower. The hardest part in designing the game is that the tower doesn't fit well on the TV screen. We're working on a scrolling system.' It is not known how far this game made it into development before being cancelled.

Robotron: 2084

A Proposed title for the ill-fated Atari Graduate add-on computer. A WIP version of this game was shown at at least one show before being cancelled (along with the Graduate). According to one eye witness, it was 'The most flickery thing I'd ever seen'. This isn't surprising considering the amount of objects that would be needed to be shown on the screen at one time was well beyond the poor 2600's capabilities. A picture of the title screen exists showing some pretty nice graphics for the 2600.

Sharp Shot

Port of the Intellivision game developed by APh Technologies. Mattel decided not to release the 2600 version of this game after it was widely criticized on the Intellvision as being 'too easy'.

Shove It! was a two player game being developed at CBS which would have used a special cable to communicate between two 2600s. According to programmer Bob Curtiss: 'Shove It! was my original concept for a two-player 2600 game that used two 2600 systems, each with their own TV of course. The idea was that someone would take their 2600 over to a friend’s house to play this game with them. A bit far-fetched at the time, but to CBS’ credit they were open to these kinds of ideas. The game was simple – there were 9 rectangular objects, sort of like long pieces of wood or metal, displayed in a 3D view, that you could ‘push’ or ‘shove’ away from you, and they would move toward the other player on their screen. They in turn could shove them back toward you. The two 2600’s communicated via serial data transfer with a serial cable connected to one joystick port on each machine. Did you ever imagine that you could send data from one 2600 to another via the joystick ports? You’d use the joystick plugged in to the 2nd joystick port to select which object you wanted to shove toward the other player, and the push the button to shove it. I had a functioning prototype working within 3 months.' Shove It! was cancelled after CBS decided to get out of the video game business and closed down their Atari 2600 development unit. Stomp it This port of the Bally Midway coin-op (which was also unreleased) was done by Alex Nevelson at Bally Midway but went unreleased. There is no information on how either the arcade game or home version would have played.

Sky Blazer

Sky Blazer was a multi-level air combat simulation game by Broderbund, similar to CBS's Wings. Although shown at the 1983 Summer CES show, the game was never released.

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Snark

Programmed by John Dunn for Atari, but ultimately unreleased. John would later go on to do Superman before leaving Atari. Snark was a combination Maze solver and shooter. Each game generated a new maze, and you were set upon by critters that you had to shoot in order to negotiate the maze.

According to John, Snark 'was my first game for Atari. It was not published while I was at Atari, and perhaps never was - I didn't track it. It had a video spin mode that caused the screen to color cycle really fast, and release was held up because there was some worry this would cause people to have seizures (I know, it's bogus - but this was the early days of video games, and that kind of intense color cycling was unknown territory).'

Snowplow Developed by VSS, Inc. for Sunrise Software. According to Leonard Herman, this game was shown at the 1984 Winter CES (along with Glacier Patrol, another Sunrise title that went unreleased). Leonard described the gameplay in his book 'ABC to the VCS': 'You operate a snowplow which must clear the eight horizontal rows of snow. Snow is cleared by merely moving your plow through it. Somewhere in each row you'll uncover a car which will then move across the row that it is in and must be avoided at the risk of losing a turn. When all the snow has been cleared, one of the six cars will flash on and off and you must get to it before time runs out while still avoiding the other cars. When the car has been reached, another car will begin to flash. After all six cars have been retrieved, you'll move on to a harder screen where you must again clear the snow.' After Sunrise Software folded, the rights to their 2600 catalog were apparently acquired by Telegames, who eventually released Glacier Patrol and reissued Quest for Quintana Roo in 1989. Yet for some reason, Snowplow was never released. What happened to the prototype that was shown at CES is not known, and thus far the game has never turned up in any form.

Solo

Solo was a 3-D flight simulation game by Broderbund. Although shown at the 1983 Summer CES show, the game was never released.

Super Pac-Man

According to an internal Atari memo preliminary coding was started on the 2600 version of Super Pac-Man. The memo lists the game as only being 5% complete, so it is doubtful a playable version of the game exists.

Tarzan

Port of the Colecovision game of the same name. Tarzan was developed by Wickstead Design (the same team behind the unreleased 2600 Pink Panther game). The game finished, but was unreleased due to it requiring a special chip for extra memory. A prototype of the game may exist with one of the programmers. An in-game screenshot, picture of the box, and a manual all exist.

Tank Blitz

Was to be the third and final game in the Milton Bradley Power Arcade series. Tank Blitz was shown at the 1984 Toy Fair along with its Armored Commander controller.

A picture of the cartridge with its controller can be seen here (thanks to Rom Hunter)

Target Omega Target Omega was a submarine simulation developed by Greg Easter for Atari. From Greg: “Another game which was only barely started was an extremely ambitious submarine simulator. There were three choices of views - periscope, radar and instruments. Your goal was to find enemy ships and sink them, as you would in most sub games, only there were additional complications of needing to keep track of fuel, battery power and sustainable pressure. I don’t remember too much of it now.” Given its early stage of development, it is unlikely that any copy of the game survived Those Little Buggers

Developed by Enter-Tech Ltd. for the Unitronics Expander system (which also went unreleased). The game was on a cassette and not a cartridge.

Treasure Hunt

Developed by Enter-Tech Ltd. for the Unitronics Expander system (which also went unreleased). The game was on a cassette and not a cartridge.

Underworld

Was to be a D&D type game by Commavid. A tape labeled Underworld is known to exist, and is believed to contain development source code. The current whereabouts of the tape are unknown.

Untitled Motorcycle Game #1 (real name unknown)

David Crane mentioned working on two unreleased games for Activision that involved riding a motorcycle. The first version was similar to Atari's Stunt Cycle where the player controlled a motorcycle that would jump over buses and other obstacles. According to David the game was abandoned because he ran out of objects (Player/Missile sprites) and couldn't display the buses properly.

Untitled Motorcycle Game #2 (real name unknown)

David Crane mentioned working on two unreleased games for Activision that involved riding a motorcycle. The second version was to be a motocross style game with a large segmented motorcycle that would realistically move up and down over the terrain. Like the first motorcycle game it was scrapped after David ran out of objects (Player/Missile sprites) due to the large realistic motorcycle.

- W -Wacko Port of the 1982 Bally Midway coin-op. This port was done by Tom DiDomenico while he was at Bally Midway but went unreleased.

Zookeeper

Perhaps one of the most famous missing prototypes, Zookeeper was a port of the 1982 Taito arcade game. Zookeeper was finished enough to have have been playable, and may have even been completed. The music/sound effects code for this game (by Robert Vieira) has been found, and is nearly arcade perfect. A video showing the graphics for this game has also surfaced.

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misscrawfords · 7 years

Note

11, 12, 16

Sorry for the delay in answering @cinquespotted and thank you for asking! :) Been a manic couple of days and I needed to think about non-fiction books about classics because that’s not so easy to answer when I haven’t been in academia in the subject for almost ten years. (Yikes…)

11. recommend a piece of non-fiction about the classical world

I was thinking about this on and off for a couple of days and then the answer hit me. Adam Nicholson’s The Mighty Dead. I’m not sure that “non-fiction” is quite the right way to describe this utterly brilliant book. It’s a lyrical, imaginative, semi-fictional investigation of Homer’s influence and power, as simultaneously oblique and direct, beautifully written and πολυτροπος as one of Homer’s heroes.

I also pulled out my undergraduate dissertation bibliography which was the last time I read classical scholarship seriously and I remember being blown away by some of the things on it. (Unlike many students, I absolutely adored writing my dissertation - I was very lucky.) Here are a few of the academic books I read which I recall enjoying even at the distance of 9 years:

- Chew, Kathryn. “The representation of violence in the Greek novels and martyr accounts”- Frye, Northrop. The Secular Scripture: A study of the structure of romance (not classical per se but brilliant and influential - I read more Frye for my masters and I’m a big, big fan)- Konstan, David. Sexual Symmetry- Loraux, Nicole. Tragic ways to kill a woman- MacAlister, Suzanne. Dreams and Suicides: The Greek novel from Antiquity to the Byzantine Empire

Yep, my dissertation was basically about sex and death. (What else is fiction about?) No, I didn’t do it on purpose…

12. who is your favourite poet? why?

(Oh how nice, this meme was created by someone writing British English. How delightfully unusual!)

Am I allowed to cheat and give two - one Greek and one Roman? Good! :P

On the Greek side, I have to go with Homer. I mean, I honestly feel he (he? As if we know!) might be my favourite author. Or at least sit up there alongside Austen. I guess at the moment I’m in more of a Homer mood than an Austen mood. Polite tea drinking and elegant sniping in a ball room really isn’t cutting it for me at the moment. (YES I KNOW THERE IS MORE TO AUSTEN THAN THAT. SHE’S MY FAVOURITE AUTHOR AND I’VE WRITTEN A DAMN MASTERS DISSERTATION ON HER. I’m just having a reaction against that kind of writing atm. I don’t know why. I don’t know what to do about it. I feel sad. But that’s another post.)

HOMER

I mean, where does one start? I’ve always loved The Odyssey from reading Book 6 for Greek GCSE and tittering over Odysseus covering his naked manhood with a fig leaf (lines inexplicably missed out from the Bristol Classical Press’ edition for fear of offending the sensibilities of school children, clearly not realising that by missing them out there is no indication that Odysseus isn’t stark naked in from of Nausicaa the entire scene lololololol). I did a final year paper involving reading the whole poem in Greek (spoiler: I failed, but I read about 2/3rds of it missing out the many books of recognition in Ithaca and it was a wonderful experience reading 100s of lines of Homer and getting a feel for the vocabulary and the rhythm of it all. I wish I had been a more dedicated student and had actually completed the whole thing.) It was my favourite paper. Professor Simon Goldhill (who looks and sounds like Zeus) opening the lecture series by booming, “The Odyssey is all about how to be a MAN”. ανδρα μοι εννεπε. First line of the poem. I get shivers thinking about it. Odysseus - his character. WHAT A GUY. (I don’t mean to say you have to like him or approve of him - that’s not what appreciating fiction is about, you clodpoles, but you have to admit he’s an amazing, amazing character and concept.) We actually had Professor Edith Hall come to my school today and she gave a talk on Odysseus as a hero and ngl I actually almost teared up at one moment. I just can’t believe such a great character exists and over 2000 years later, he still speaks to us and we can trace SO MUCH in Western culture back to these texts. Actually, while I was nursing a raging crush on Odysseus (I was 20 okay), it was Penelope who was the revelation to me in that paper. Did Penelope know her husband was back before the recognition scene? This had never occurred to me before and I was plunged into debates on the stability of the text and characterisation and feminism and narratology. I mean, it was just amazing! And whatever nitty gritty you might go into with it, I was just struck by this wonderful, admittedly overly romantic idea, that Penelope was absolutely Odysseus’ equal. That in this ancient epic, we had a woman who bested a man at his own game, that she was playing him - and he loved it. These two tricksters, separated for too long, finally getting their happy ending. And I know it’s not about that. But it also is. Emotionally, that’s what I got. And it made me so, so happy. Because, honestly, I don’t have a problem studying works written by, for and about men if they’re good, but there are SO FEW opportunities studying classics (at least traditionally; the approach is changing now which is great) to grapple with amazing female characters or figures - and here I had Homer’s hero and Homer’s heroine. I mean, there are many other things I love about the Odyssey but this is already long enough.

I always joked about the fact that I managed to get a classics degree from Cambridge without having ever studied the Iliad. (Ikr, it’s crazy!) And youthful, hubristic me was okay with that. I was an Odyssey girl through and through. I’d read the Iliad and it was all battles and death and the catalogue of ships. YOU FOOL. So the first time I really had to deal with the Iliad was when I found myself teaching it to A Level Classical Civilisation. And it was an absolute revelation. I’m teaching it for the third time at the moment and it’s not getting old. Every time I see something different, every time the students find something new, every time I cry quietly in class when we are reading. The places vary but the moments that are guaranteed to set me off are Achilles’ grief over Patroclus, him putting on his armour and his final unbending towards Priam. Why the armour? I’m not entirely sure. I think it’s something to do with this sense of inevitability of the approach of the end, of imminent climax (somehow more significant than the climax itself). It’s like how the lighting of the beacons in LotR is such a powerful scene. It’s not that the thing itself is particularly full of pathos but because of everything it signifies. I can’t altogether explain it but it always really affects me. When my uncle died the other year, I was reading the death of Patroclus with my class at that time and my mum came to visit. I didn’t know how to talk to her or talk about my uncle’s death and we had this absolutely awful walk around a country park in the rain (I am never going to be able to go back there for the memories it triggers) but somehow the only way I could articulate something of what I felt was by clinically and factually describing Achilles’ anguish and explaining to my mother how the ancient world mourned its dead and what Patroclus had meant to Achilles and what blinding grief and rage would drive him to do. And she gripped my hand and we both wept, silent tears, and we walked on in the rain talking about the Iliad. I’m actually crying again, writing this, right now. I am not sure there is ANYTHING in literature more powerful than Achilles’s rage and anguish.

If Odysseus is the hero of romance and comedy, a clever hero whose very wiliness makes my heart sing and my academic brain bounce up and down looking for mythic parallels, Achilles does something else altogether. I’ve been thinking about him a lot recently - partly because I’m teaching the poem and once again we’ve got to Book 16 and Achilles’ tragedy is becoming the focus of the remainder of the poem (if it wasn’t before) so it’s literally my job to think about his character - but also in the context of my recent obsession with SW, Reylo and Kylo Ren’s Episode 9 possibilities. I’m not trying to be trivial here but it saddens me SO MUCH that people have the nerve to police interest in that character, one of the most fascinating and complex to grace the screens of a fantasy blockbuster series in - well, honestly, I can’t think of another one. What a treat we have. Nobody has a problem loving Achilles’ character and weeping over him (and making soft pastel shipping graphics of him and Patroclus…) but he was objectively speaking an awful person in many ways. A violent, unpredictable, psychopathic overgrown adolescent who holds an awful grudge. But of course, that isn’t the full story and it’s not the purpose of this post to educate the internet on the nuances of Achilles’ character and his profound tragedy. I’ve got emotional enough, but honestly, we NEED Achilles. We need that larger-than-life expression of all our deepest fears and regrets and violence and destruction - and also wit, compassion, sense of justice and deep love and loyalty. I think someone once said that everyone should read the Iliad at least once in their life. Whether they did or not, it’s true: everyone should.

Okay, so I was also going to talk about how much I love Ovid too but that would be literally going from the sacred to the profane, the sublime to the ridiculous and I have spent way too long on this already. So, yeah, I really love Ovid as well.

16. Cicero - love him or loathe him?

I unironically love Cicero.

Okay, so I started along this journey from the worst of reasons. The first guy I ever liked in high school was obsessed with Cicero. At the time, I’d never read anything by him, so I decided to like him because liking the same things as your crush is an A+ way of getting him to notice you and like you back. (Spoiler: it failed.) Along the way, I got really inspired by Cicero’s wife Terentia. My first internet handles were Terentia. (I WONDER IF HE KNEW I HAD A CRUSH. lol he did. it was awful. I cringe.) Anyway, Terentia was fabulously wealthy and responsible for financing Cicero’s political career, married twice more after Cicero’s death, including to the historian Suetonius, and died aged 103. What a BAMF.

So first off, I love Cicero’s Latin. He’s my favourite Latin prose author to translate. Even if his speeches are sometimes on the dull side (we had De Imperio as an AS set text a couple of years ago and it was such a snooze-fest), the actual style of writing is so lucid and balanced and satisfying I can forgive him the content. I love all the rhetorical devices and how you can still see them at work in (good) political speeches today. I just get tremendous pleasure from translating him. It annoys me no end that the prose unseen author at A Level at the moment is Livy. I have no patience for Livy’s Latin; it doesn’t thrill me at all.

But I also kind of like Cicero the man. He lived at one of the most fascinating periods of history and although you can’t altogether trust his bias, he was a really important figure in that history and documented so much of it. I wish we had more sources to sit along side as I think he definitely puffs himself up, but nevertheless he’s invaluable. I even quite like his arrogance. He’s the ultimate self-made, intellectual man in Rome and I think he has reason to be proud of what he achieved. He must have been formidable to listen to.

Thank you for letting me ramble on about classics and literature like this. I miss writing on tumblr and not just reblogging pretty things.

Ask me about classics (or anything else obviously)

#classics #homer #the odyssey #the iliad #cicero

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