Atari Casino

Adventure is a video game for the Atari 2600 video game console, released in ca. late 1979–1980. In the game, the player controls a square avatar whose quest is to explore an open world environment to find a magical chalice and return it to the golden castle. The game world is populated by roaming enemies: three dragons that can eat the avatar and a bat that randomly steals and hides items around the game world. Adventure introduced a number of innovative game elements to console games, including a playing area that spanned several different screens and enemies that continued to move even when not displayed on the screen.

Adventure was conceived as a graphical version of the 1977 text adventure Colossal Cave Adventure. It took developer Warren Robinett approximately one year to design and code the game, during which time he had to overcome a variety of technical limitations in the Atari 2600 console hardware, as well as difficulties with management within Atari. In this game, he introduced the first widely known video game Easter egg, a secret room containing text crediting himself for the game’s creation. Robinett’s Easter egg became a tradition for future Atari 2600 titles.

Adventure received mostly positive reviews at the time of its release and has continued to be viewed positively in the decades since, often named as one of the industry’s influential titles. It is considered the first action-adventure and console fantasy game, and inspired other titles in the genres. More than one million cartridges of Adventure were sold, and the game has been included in numerous Atari 2600 game collections for modern computer hardware. The game’s prototype code was used as the basis for the 1979 Superman game, and a planned sequel eventually formed the basis for the Swordquest games. The Easter egg concept pioneered by the game has transcended video games and entered popular culture.

Asteroids is an arcade space shooter released in November 1979 by Atari, Inc. and designed by Lyle Rains, Ed Logg, and Dominic Walsh. The player controls a spaceship in an asteroid field which is periodically traversed by flying saucers. The object of the game is to shoot and destroy asteroids and saucers while not colliding with either or being hit by the saucers’ counter-fire. The game becomes harder as the number of asteroids increases.

Asteroids was one of the first major hits of the golden age of arcade games. The game sold over 70,000 arcade cabinets and proved both popular with players and influential with developers. It has since been ported to multiple platforms. Asteroids was widely imitated and directly influenced Defender, Gravitar, and many other video games.

Asteroids was conceived during a meeting between Logg and Rains and used hardware developed by Howard Delman previously used for Lunar Lander. Based on an unfinished game titled Cosmos and inspired by Spacewar! and Computer Space, both early shoot ’em up video games, Asteroids‘ physics model and control scheme were derived by Logg from these earlier games and refined through trial and error. The game is rendered on a vector display in a two-dimensional view that wraps around in both screen axes.

Black Widow is a vector arcade game developed by Atari released in 1982. The player takes the role of a Black widow spider defending a web from invading bugs. The player must move the spider around the web while simultaneously shooting/avoiding various bugs and collecting the bonuses that appear after the enemies are eliminated. The game is a twin-stick shooter in the vein of Robotron: 2084 by Williams, but with fewer enemies on-screen.

Black Widow was offered as a conversion kit for Gravitar, which met poor commercial success. The kit used the original Gravitar PCB with a few small modifications and a new set of ROM chips. Many factory-built Black Widows were produced using unsold Gravitar cabinets with Black Widow sideart applied over the Gravitar sideart.

Centipede is a vertically oriented shoot ’em up arcade game produced by Atari, Inc. in 1980. The game was designed by Ed Logg and Dona Bailey. The player defends against centipedes, spiders, scorpions and fleas, completing a round after eliminating the centipede that winds down the playing field.

Pong is one of the earliest arcade video games and the very first sports arcade video game. It is a table tennis sports game featuring simple two-dimensional graphics. While other arcade video games such as Computer Space came before it, Pong was one of the first video games to reach mainstream popularity. The aim is to defeat an opponent in a simulated table-tennis game by earning a higher score. The game was originally manufactured by Atari, which released it in 1972. Allan Alcorn created Pong as a training exercise assigned to him by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell. Bushnell based the idea on an electronic ping-pong game included in the Magnavox Odyssey, which later resulted in a lawsuit against Atari. Surprised by the quality of Alcorn’s work, Bushnell and Atari co-founder Ted Dabney decided to manufacture the game.

Pong quickly became a success and is the first commercially successful arcade video game machine, which helped to establish the video game industry along with the first home console, the Magnavox Odyssey. Soon after its release, several companies began producing games that copied Pong‘s gameplay, and eventually released new types of games. As a result, Atari encouraged its staff to produce more innovative games. The company released several sequels that built upon the original’s gameplay by adding new features. During the 1975 Christmas season, Atari released a home version of Pong exclusively through Sears retail stores. It was also a commercial success and led to numerous copies. The game has been remade on numerous home and portable platforms following its release. Pong has been referenced and parodied in multiple television shows and video games, and has been a part of several video game and cultural exhibitions.

Star Raiders is a space combat simulator video game for the Atari 8-bit family of computers. It was written by Doug Neubauer, an Atari employee, and released in cartridge form by Atari in 1979. It was later ported to other Atari computer and game platforms.

The game simulates combat in 3D between the player’s powerful ship and an invading fleet of alien “Zylon” vessels. Star Raiders was distinctive for its graphics, which (under most conditions) represented an out-the-cockpit, first-person view from a fictional combat spaceship traveling through a streaming 3D starfield in pursuit of enemy spacecraft. The game’s attract mode, a simple streaming star field, was a common sight in computer stores of the early-1980s to show off the Atari computers’ graphics capabilities. The game is commonly referred to as the platform’s killer app.

While there had already been simple target-shooting games using this perspective (including 1977’s Starhawk), Star Raiders had considerably higher quality graphics and more complex game play. As a result, it inspired both imitators throughout the 1980s and later-generation space combat simulation games. Notably, it is one of the games that inspired the seminal title Elite, and thus the Wing Commander and X-Wing series. It is also one in a series of first person space shooters (including 1977’s Starhawk and 1979’s Star Fire) that appeared in the late-1970s and were arguably predecessors of the later seen first-person shooter genre.

In 2007, Star Raiders was included as #2 in a list of the 10 most important video games of all time, as compiled by Stanford University’s History of Science and Technology Collections.

Atari Casino – The Game

For the real Atari fans you will know that AtariCasino is not the first Atari casino… as they games company brought out a video game called “Casino” way back in 1978. This was a very very basic top down casino game originally released on the Atari 2600 games console and controlled by up to four Atari games paddles.

There were two different blackjack games, five card stud poker and a poker solitaire game.