Racing the Beam : the Atari Video Computer System - Index of

For Two Players
Combat imitated the coin-op games Pong and Tank, and the home versions
of these games, in an important way: it was a game for two players, as the
cartridge label clearly stated. Instead of providing simulated opponents
of some sort, as many later games would do, Combat offered a playing fi eld
and a means by which two players, sitting side by side, could compete
against one another.
It was common for an arcade machine to provide a one-player challenge.
Pinball and skeeball games did this, pitting the player against
diffi cult terrain. Later arcade games like Lunar Lander and Space
Invaders would offer a similar challenge for a single player. But another
concept involved something like a table tennis setup. With this scheme,
instead of having a challenging landscape to traverse or a simulated
opponent with artifi cial intelligence, human players provide the skill
and intelligence that make the game enjoyable. Very early computer
and video games, such as Tennis for Two, Spacewar, the games of the
Magnavox Odyssey, and Pong, were designed along these lines.
Of course, a single player can toy with a two-player game. A common
experience among many young VCS players was that of “one-player”
Combat, in which a single person takes one of the joysticks, goes after an
inert tank or cruising plane, and pummels the unconscious enemy with
repeated fi re. Although such a practice does not represent the height of
videogame experience, this mode of interaction does allow players to
explore the different variations and learn something about how tanks and
planes function in each. It also offers something to do with the title when
a second human player isn’t around.
A player using the left joystick and progressing through the twentyseven
games included in the Combat cartridge, alone or with an opponent,
fi nds that the games vary in several signifi cant ways. There are six game
categories. Tank, the fi rst category, has tanks fi ring either a straight or
guided missile in one of three types of terrain. Shots do not rebound off
the walls in the tank games, but they do in games in the next category,
Tank-Pong. In some of these games, a “billiard hit” (a shot that rebounds
at least once) is required for a kill. There are also Invisible Tank and Invisible
Tank-Pong games, in which one’s tank can only be seen when it fi res
or is hit.
The remaining categories of game are the two plane games, Biplane
and Jet, which can be played with or without obscuring clouds. The
biplanes, which appear in profi le, climb when the joystick is pressed
down and dive when the joystick is pressed up. Moving the joystick to
2 Combat [31]