Experience with the games on the back of the Atari 7800 box

[DracIsBack]

As a kid, I originally wanted the NES in 1987, but it was sold out everywhere. My Coleco Gemini had started failing and so the Atari 7800 caught my eye because of the backwards compatibility. Also, some of the games caught my eye as they seemed to have NES/Commodore 64 style graphics (I called them "cartoon graphics" as a kid) that were a big step up from the Atari 2600 games I'd been playing on the Gemini. Many of the titles caught my eye for various reasons, though the reality of the Tramiel executions didn't always play well with me in the end

 

This was my experience as I went from being excited about the library on saw on the box to playing the actual games.

 

 

The Non Super Games

 

Pole Position II - This looked really good - similar to the arcade game. Was genuinely impressed with it visually over my 2600 library and played it a lot

 

Xevious - Loved the look of the boss creature. I didn't play Xevious in the arcade, but I'd seen it and thought it looked faithful. Was my second 7800 game after Pole Position II and I loved it

 

Ms Pac Man - I had this as one of those table top arcade games in the mid 1980s and it was a hit in my family. I bought it later on sale and gave it to the biggest addict (my mother) as a Christmas gift. Great translation

 

Centipede - I had little interest in this. Looked like something from the early 1980s and I wasn't going to buy or show off. Bought it later for cheap from O'Sheas.

 

Joust - When Toys R Us was clearing out 7800 titles, I got this for cheap. Never was too into the arcade game, but it was fun and a good translation. My floormate in college and I had a lot of tournaments with this

 

Desert Falcon - of all the non-super games, this one caught my eye the most. The graphics looked terrific. I loved the Sphinx shot especially. When I got it home, I maintained my view that it looked and scrolled great. Music was ok. I was disappointed you couldn't explore the Sphinx and I found it got repetitive. I revisited it when AtariAge published their various combos. Mid tier game for me in reality.

 

Choplifter! - I also thought this looked cool and bought it at the same Toys R Us sale. In practice, I found it got boring quickly and was really limited. Scroll along a little playfield, rescue solders and fly back. Hated the pinkish look. But mostly I thought you'd be able to do more and see more.

 

Deluxe Asteroids - Same as above, bought at Toys R Us. Was never a big Asteroids fan and so I didn't get it till it was cheap. It looked quite good (meatballs in space haha), I just couldn't get over my normal bleah feeling of Asteroids

 

The Super Games

 

Now these excited me as a kid. My friends all had Commodore 64s and Apple IIs and were always raving about Epyx games and Broaderbund and Electronic Arts games. We had an IBM XT with internal speaker sound and ugly CGA 4 color graphics displaying through a monochrome yellow monitor. Bleah.

 

I couldn't afford a computer of my own (I dreamed of getting an XE too) so I was excited that this new console could play all these games I heard about and read about. But as history has shown, the Tramiels didn't always do the best conversions.

 

Karateka. I played this at my friend's house all the time on his Apple II and it was the first 7800 title I wanted to buy. It ended up following Xevious because it was out of stock forever. When I plugged it in, I couldn't believe how awful it was. Truly my greatest disappointment in all of video games.

 

Simplified graphics. Missing game elements. The worst controls imagineable. Six guards vs. random guards. A falcon that looked more like a drunken duck. At least it had the intro.

 

My friend later came over to check out this new Atari system (He also introduced me to the NES) and he swore the entire time he tried Karateka. "Why did you buy this shit?" "This system is awful". He later changed his mind a bit because he liked Pole Position II and Xevious but kept talking about how horrible Karateka was.

 

I thought for a while that all "super games" were going to be slow. That the 'extra memory' Atari talked about meant there would be Joystick latency. Little did I know this was really just a marketing term.

 

Winter Games. I actually owned the 2600 version of this. I loved the graphics on the box and I thought that when I plugged in the 2600 cart, it would magically transform from the 2600 graphics I knew to the beautiful picture on the back of the 7800 box since the game was advertised as "for the 2600 and 7800".

 

Wrong! What a letdown!

 

Years later, I got it at Atari USAs big "Buy ten 7800 games for $7.50 each" sale and I enjoyed it. It looked good and seemed to be a solid conversion

 

Skyfox. This was my second most wanted 7800 game. Those graphics looked freakin' amazing to a kit in the 1980s. I couldn't wait to fly over tanks and blow them up. We'll never know because it was never released. I've never even seen the alleged simple demo to know how it was shaping up.

 

Bleah.

 

Impossible Mission. I read about this in one of Compute Magazine's articles about the "greatest video games of all time". It sounded right up my alley - puzzles to solve, a big underground layer to explore, great animation, digitized sounds. I busted my ass lugging flyers to save up to buy this game from Atari Canada Corp, which was the most expensive 7800 game they carried at $50.

 

Except that they list it and never bothered stocking it. When I ordered it, the fuckers wouldn't return my money order (no credit card as a kid) and made me pick a different game. I ended up choose Fight Night (what a stinker) and then they sent me another joystick to make up the difference.

 

I ended up buying it for $29 on a trip to Florida.

 

I actually thought it was quite fun. Lots of rooms to explore. The animation was great. Except, I could never solve any puzzles. Like many of you, I read in Atarian how the game was solveable and "I just must have missed something somewhere."I also missed the digitized sound, but by that point, I knew what 7800 sound was like and thought the system simply couldn't do digitized speech. Jinks corrected me years later.

 

Eventually I gave up trying, only to learn the game really was impossible.

 

One on One Basketball. I don't like sports games and didn't like the look of this or play it on the computer. Thought the annoyed Janitor was cute when I bought it from O'Sheas for completion's sake years later. My second least 'interested' Super Game.

 

Summer Games. I thought it looked cool, but because I don't like sports games, I didn't get it until the Atari Corp $7.50 sale years later. It turned out to be fun, though i was pissed the XE version had more events. I thought they needlessly crippled the 7800 version to make the XE game look better.

 

The reality was probably that they had the XE source code handy, but they didn't want to pay a developer to do an expensive 7800 conversion so they cut events.

 

 

Ball Blazer. This is sacreligious to some, but I had no interest in Ball Blazer at all. None. I had never played the computer game and I thought it looked stupid in the screen shots ... pink and green shapes. One of the gamer magazines later said something about the sound being enhanced because the cart had a sound chip.

 

I bought it for $5 when Toys R Us cleared it out.

 

Was I ever blown away when I plugged it in. The beautiful Lucasmfilm logo. The random pokey music. The stunning 3D animation on an 8bit console.

 

I remember having NES loving friends over who laughed at me having an Atari system still. One of them saw Ballblazer and said "Holy shit. I take back what I said" and then they had tournaments on it all night.

 

I was wrong. In a good way.

 

Hat Trick. Another game I had no interest in (sports title). It looked a lot like the Hat Trick in the arcade, but the arcade had no interest for me. Bought it as well from O'Sheas years later for completion's sake and maybe played it twice.

 

 

[Trebor]

Great write-up, and great recollection!

 

We share a similar experience...

 

Winter Games. I actually owned the 2600 version of this. I loved the graphics on the box and I thought that when I plugged in the 2600 cart, it would magically transform from the 2600 graphics I knew to the beautiful picture on the back of the 7800 box since the game was advertised as "for the 2600 and 7800".

 

Wrong! What a letdown!

 

I bought the 2600 port new, BITD, reasoning along the same lines...Too funny.

[+save2600]

Meatballs in space! That's exactly what this version of Asteroids looks like to me too.

 

Neat write up. Particularly fun to read memories like this closer to the time of its release, since I was oblivious to the 7800 until the early 90's.

[TrekMD]

Great write-up, and great recollection!

 

We share a similar experience...

 

 

I bought the 2600 port new, BITD, reasoning along the same lines...Too funny.

 

You guys were not the only ones to think that way. I can't remember it was that I got thinking the same magic would happen. Not such luck! I think this is why later games stated "on the 7800 in 2600 mode."

[BassGuitari]

I never played an Atari 7800 until around 2001 or 2002 when my girlfriend in high school (now wife, aww) bought one on eBay (she was into the oldies a bit; her older brother had a couple of 2600s, a Coleco, and a Commodore 64 BITD). When I was growing up, it was all about the NES, Genesis, SNES, and later PlayStation and N64 (I knew one kid who had a Saturn)--I never even heard of the Atari 7800 until EGM had a little blurb about it in an article about retrogaming in the late '90s. I'd obviously seen the NES, and even a little bit of the Master System (courtesy of the neighbor kid with the Saturn; he also had a Genesis--guess they were a Sega family!). I was still fairly new to classic gaming, but I knew the 7800 slotted in around those systems, and I had been diving headlong into the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Intellivision, and Odyssey 2, so I had some context there, as well.

 

We had most of these games right off the bat, as they were included with my wife's system:

 

Pole Position II It didn't make any particularly strong impression on me either way. I thought it was a neat enough game, certainly playable, but somehow also sort of generic and bland, and an odd choice for a pack-in title (yeah, I'd done my homework before we fired this up ).

 

Xevious Loved it. It's still one of my favorite 7800 games. This should have been the pack-in.

 

Ms Pac Man Great version of the game, but apart from the smoother animation and gameplay, didn't seem like an appreciable step up from the Atari 5200 (that would be a common refrain with many of these games).

 

Centipede Awesome version of the game even if it didn't have simultaneous two-player...which it does. Still think I'd take the 5200 version with the Trakball over this, though.

 

Joust I wasn't much of Joust fan at the time, so I didn't really play this, or any other version. I've come around a bit in recent years, though, and this is easily the best version for an Atari system.

 

Desert Falcon We didn't have this one originally. I did have the 2600 version, though (sidebar: I miss Telegames). I got the 7800 version a couple years ago, and I've got to say I think it's an interesting and underrated game.

 

Choplifter! Don't like it. Didn't then, don't now. I mean, it's okay. But I had the excellent Atari 5200 version, with its smooth analog control. This was...something else. Classic case of "graphics aren't everything."

 

Deluxe Asteroids I wasn't a huge Asteroids fan; I thought the classic 2600 version was a little underwhelming and overrated, and for some reason the genre just wasn't resonating with me. Fortunately I've rectified that in the years since and am able to recognize this as a really good game. I was initially a little let down that the game didn't try to mimic a vector graphic style, as some homebrews have now done, but it was fine. It was definitely a step up from the 2600 version, and about 7 steps up from the 400/800 version...but it was still Asteroids. Kinda couldn't help but wonder at this point why Atari kept rehashing the same old games when Nintendo had Contra and Gradius and stuff (the answers would be revealed upon subsequent research).

 

 

Karateka. Unplayable.

 

Winter Games. A really cool game. We had a lot of fun with the ski jump and biathlon events.

 

Skyfox. N/A since it never came out.

 

Impossible Mission. Don't really have an opinion on this one. In the first place, we didn't pick up a copy until fairly recently. I had/have it for Commodore 64, though, and it never really did anything for me, so I never felt compelled to sit down with the 7800 version. Especially since it's actually impossible.

 

One on One Basketball. Not a big basketball guy (apart from Basketball on the VCS, and the "Basketball" games on the Video Olympics cartridge, and occasionally NBA Jam), so this one never got much love from me. It struck me as a lot slower and clunkier than a basketball game should be anyway. It was cool to see the likenesses of actual players in the game, though. Didn't see that too often in games from that era.

 

Summer Games. Alas, I still don't have this one.

 

Ball Blazer. I guess someone's got to be sacrilegious here, might as well be me: this game is overrated as f@#$. It's stylized first-person soccer with essentially no depth of play. It's a tech demo. #sorrynotsorry

 

Hat Trick. I thought Activision Hockey blew this away. The Hockey games on Video Olympics were better IMO.

 

 

Unfortunately, my first impressions of the Atari 7800 were basically that it amounted to little more than a suped-up 2600, which really dissuaded me from getting into the system for quite a while. I've come to appreciate it much more in recent years.

Edited April 10, 2018 by BassGuitari

[SINGLE TOOTH]

This was a system I never even knew about. We had a 5200, but got rid of that when I got a NES about 1987. I would have been about 5 then. I didn't find out about the existence of the 7800 until the internet age. Nobody I knew had one.

 

Even in the wild, I've only seen about two at thrift shops. They seem to be more rare than even the 5200.

[FroggoGamer]

This is based on my experience growing up with the 7800. I really didn't have too many 7800 games. Besides those listed below I discussed having, I only had Dig Dug (awesome), Food Fight (awesomer), and F-18 Hornet (loved it but I sucked at it, never completed a mission in my life). Even with my 7800, I only had 10 actual 7800 games out of my 100 game collection, the rest were 2600 games. My only other gaming experience at that time was arcade games and a few games on the school Apple IIe green screens. I received my 7800 as a Xmas gift in 87, it wasn't until 1990 I received a NES, but I still played my Atari on occasion until controllers became hard to find outside flea markets.

The Non Super Games

Pole Position II - I suck at driving games but I feel this was a great pack in game for the system.

Xevious - My absolute favorite Atari 7800 game of all time. Dungeon Stalker's battling for the Title, though.

Ms Pac Man - I only wished it had fast Ms Pac but I played this a lot.

Centipede - I liked it but enjoyed Atari 2600 Millipede more than this.

Joust - I hated the arcade game and thus never bothered with the home version

Desert Falcon - One of my favorites growing up.

Choplifter! - I liked it, managed to get a perfect score as a kid once, wish I could replicate that for my highscore.com profile.

Deluxe Asteroids - I asked my mom for the 7800 version, she got me the 2600 version instead. Heh.

The Super Games

Karateka. I never got into fighting games until Street Fighter 2. Never even heard of this one as a kid, but I would have pronounced it kuh-rot-ick-uh, not kare-a-tee-kah like the ad.

Winter Games. The game that broke my 7800 Prolines, relegating me to using a trackball for weeks before I could afford new controllers. I had a lot of fun with it (my mom bought it for me as a get well gift for the flu I got when the Calgary olympics was on TV, so it got me excited for the game), and in head to head, I could probably kick your butt at Biathalon.

Skyfox. Never had it for obvious reasons. Still better than Slippy the Choad from that other "Fox" game.

Impossible Mission. Thankfully I didn't have this one. At least you can't claim Impossible Mission was false advertising since it is actually impossible.

One on One Basketball. I suck at Basketball, be it on Atari or real life, I just played it to smash the backboard and watch the grumbling janitor with the pushbroom and the marching broom stache.

Summer Games. I didn't own it

Ball Blazer; Played it an awful lot, got so good, I could kick Droid 9's ass with the 2600 Trakball in under 2 minutes

Hat Trick. I didn't have it as a kid

[SINGLE TOOTH]

Never heard the term Super Games before. So those are the games with bigger ROM sizes?

"Games never before playable on a home video game system"

 

Uh, Ballblazer was on the 5200....Winter Games was on the 2600!

[DracIsBack]

the thing that always bummed me out about Impossible Mission is that - unlike Karateka - it's actually a really good, playable conversion. It's really just a stupid bug introduced at the last minute that makes the game "so close, yet so far"

[Stevaside]

I can still remember seeing this commercial for the 7800 for the 1st time

...& it making my Dad & I impressed at how much better the games seemed compared to the 2600. But I really wanted an NES. It must have been Christmas 1988, my parents got me the 7800 instead & I was honestly let down. My cousin got an NES for his gift that year, and after witnessing it over his house I distinctly remember crying in the backseat on the ride home that I never got one & was stuck with the 7800 lol

But I learned to appreciate it & although I had a 2600 & played it previously, the late 80's is kind of where I was old enough to have a much clearer memory of that decade, and I have lots of fond memories of playing the 7800 with my sister & toddler brother at the time playing some of his first games on it. Even though the only games we had were Choplifter, Food Fight, One On One & the pack in, Pole Position II, it is one of my most nostalgic consoles, along with the NES I wound up getting after all the following year

The Non Super Games:

Pole Position II

Compared to the racing games I had played before, this seemed pretty advanced for the time (Can't say that without laughing to myself now a bit) All other games back then I would sit on the floor to play, but for this one I used to like pulling up a kitchen chair & pretending I was in the driver's seat while I played it, it felt even more realistic to me doing that lmao

Xevious

Fun shoot em up, it looked amazing in that commercial to me too

Ms Pacman

Great port of the timeless classic, but along with other Pacman games, including the awesome Super Pacman homebrew I own, it unfortunately doesn't get much action because playing them with 8 way sticks/pads are too frustrating

Centipede

Had the 2600 version around same time & this was a little step above, simple but still fun

Joust

Another game I just had the 2600 version of in the late 80's, but lots of fun with sister playing it & the 7800 version is much better, still play it from time to time

Desert Falcon

Looked pretty cool then, picked it up when I began collecting in late 90's, but the controls put me off & I gave up quickly on it. Fast forward 20 years later & a week or 2 ago I gave it another chance, got used to controls more & now I'm liking it

Choplifter!

One of the 4 games I had at the time. The mall had the Sega arcade game & I was let down that it seemed so stripped down (Not knowing then that the Sega version was more of a remake of the original on the Apple II) But still I really loved it & still do, lots of memories...there's even a family VHS video taken of us playing it at a birthday party? & my 2-3 year old brother pointing out & describing all the enemies to my relatives hahaha

Asteroids

Played the 2600 version over my Grandparents in the 90's a bit, but was never too crazy about it, nor the 7800 version

The Super Games:

Karateka.

This looked awesome, but if I only knew haha

Winter Games.

Another we had the 2600 version of instead in late 80's. Had lots of fun with family playing it, the 7800 looked much better, but sucks it lacks some of the events

Skyfox

Sure, that screenshot that WASNT EVEN FROM A 7800 looked cool

Impossible Mission

Seemed cool, but yea, good thing I never had to torture myself with trying to beat a game that was unbeatable. No internet then either, so I would have never even known

One on One Basketball

Loved it, and sure it's primitive by today's standards, but still kicked any 2600 basketball game's ass. Breaking the backboard & having the swearing janitor come out was one of my most memorable moments in gaming history. Me & my sis were SHOCKED & AMAZED...after couple months or so of playing it, this happens out of nowhere so unexpectedly haha

Summer Games

Looked great, only played it few times since I got it for my collection tho. Never took the time to learn the controls..but might some day

Ball Blazer

Looked cool at the time, but like a few others said, it never did much for me at all & seemed over rated..still have yet to play a 2 player game tho, I could see that being more appealing

Hat Trick

MEH. Might have inserted it in my 7800 once since I got it 20 years ago

Edited April 14, 2018 by Stevaside