Long Lost Title "Spacehunter"

[SpaceHunter]

Hey Atari Friends,

 

I wrote a BASIC game, "Spacehunter" on my Atari 800 some time ago, back in 83-84. I submitted my game to COMPUTE! magazine hoping they would accept it in their magazine. Not only did they acknowledge my letter and accept my entry, I was awarded $400 for my prize which was an absolute surprise for a 14 year old back then. I never got to see it published and to my knowledge the game never made it in any COMPUTE! publication that I have reviewed.

 

Anyhow, I was thinking/hoping someone here on these forums may have better resources than I do that could verify that my game did make the COMPUTE! publication or provide any information about it.

 

Thanks,

-Joe

 

[miker]

Hi Joe and welcome to AtariAge.

 

It doesn't probably help much, but you may try to check archive.org links:

 

https://archive.org/details/compute-magazine?sort=-date

 

and

 

https://archive.org/details/compute-gazette?sort=-date

 

Maybe they put the game somewhere there.

Edited April 24, 2015 by miker

[+Stephen]

I GREPed my entire collection for spacehunter. I came up empty. My GREP did include my entire floppy collection from when my original machine was in service and BBS happy (if ya catch my drift).

[AtariGeezer]

I checked my collection of 600+ floppies and no Space Hunter found either...

[SpaceHunter]

Thanks for the 2 links Mike. Thanks for taking a look Stephen and AtariGeezer.

 

I know I have a printed listing of the code somewhere in my house. Maybe one day I will stumble on it.

[miker]

It would be nice! Every lost piece of software is highly appreciated.

[russg]

Thanks for the 2 links Mike. Thanks for taking a look Stephen and AtariGeezer.

 

I know I have a printed listing of the code somewhere in my house. Maybe one day I will stumble on it.

I searched. Found 'Space Hunt' .atr and xex.

I know this isn't it, not a BASIC and the author isn't right.

Space Hunt.atr

[kenjennings]

Weird. Compute handed out money for it and never published it? 1983-1984 was still well before publishers abandoned Atari 8-bits. Really strange. Perhaps it was for another Atari 8-bit book that was never published??

 

Maybe Compute! renamed it when they printed it?

[FifthPlayer]

I have a similar story to tell.

 

As a teenager in 1982 or thereabouts, I wrote a graphics utility in Atari Basic, called "Superplot", which I sent to Compute! as an article submission. I wrote the text of the article using SuperScripsit on a TRS-80 Model III, because my school had printers and I couldn't afford one.

 

Compute! accepted the article and paid me about the same amount of money - $350 maybe? It was a fortune to me at the time. I used it to purchase my first disk drive, a 1050. I never got word from them when they intended to print it. I checked the magazine for months after that, but my article never appeared.

 

Eventually, the article did appear, as part of one of their book anthologies. Compute!'s Atari Collection, Volume 2 ended up carrying my article. What's interesting is they chopped the text of the article in half, dropping the customary description of what lines of code did what.

 

So I recommend checking all their books as well as the magazine itself. They definitely ran articles in the books which never appeared in the magazine.

[SpaceHunter]

Thats what I thought kenjennings. Why would they pay me for the game but not include it in their magazine? Maybe there was a conflict of interest with the movie Spacehunter? At the time I didn't care, I used the money to get connected online by purchasing the 850 interface and 830 acoustic modem. Fun times for a young teenager!

 

Good stuff FifthPlayer, very similar stories. I'll definitely check out books by compute.

[CrazyChris]

You might have to recreate it!