THE RETRO GAMER GUIDE TO…

BY USING ITS CONTACTS IN THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTOR AND FORMIDABLE MARKETING CLOUT, PARKER BROTHERS BROUGHT TITLES LIKE STAR WARS: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, SPIDER-MAN AND FROGGER TO THE ATARI 2600 AND ITS RIVALS. RETRO GAMER HIGHLIGHTS THE FIRM’S BEST RELEASES

Words by Rory Milne

From its earliest releases onwards, Parker Brothers set its stall out as a producer of licence-based videogames. Parker started 1982 with convincing Atari 2600 adaptations of the hit Konami coin-ops Amidar and Frogger. Its other titles for the year included the hugely successful Star Wars shooter for the 2600 and Intellivision The Empire Strikes Back, and a popular videogame adaptation of Spider-Man.

1983 saw Parker bring Nintendo’s arcade platformer Popeye to the Atari 2600 and a raft of other platforms, and in the same year the firm built on its earlier successes with arcade and Star Wars licensed titles. To this end, it published home versions of coin-ops such as Nintendo’s twitch reactionbased Sky Skipper, Konami’s side-scrolling helicopter shooter Super Cobra and Gottlieb’s smash hit cube colourer Q*bert. On the Star Wars side, Parker brought Star Wars: Jedi Arena to the 2600 and Return Of The Jedi: Death Star Battle to a number of different systems. Parker then tweaked this proven approach during 1984. Its only Star

Wars releases of the year were its highly successful ports of Atari’s arcade game adaptation of the first movie, while other notable 1984 Parker titles included home versions of Konami’s arcade shooter Gyruss, its home-exclusive sequel Frogger II:

ThreeeDeep! and its original platformer Montezuma’s Revenge.

Parker Brothers was then bought over and renamed in 1985, but before the sale it had one last hurrah in the form of Atari 2600 and ColecoVision adaptations of the coin-op sequel Q*bert’s Qubes.

AMIDAR 1982

ATARI 2600, VARIOUS

Surreal narratives in videogames were far from unusual in the early Eighties. In Amidar, we get some stages where gorillas are chased by warriors and others where paint rollers get harassed by pigs. Of course, there’s a lot more to Parker’s conversion of Konami’s coin-op, starting with its playfield of interconnected rectangles, each of which your great ape or sentient decorating product is tasked with colouring in. In either protagonist’s case, this is done by moving around the sides of each rectangle, all while avoiding the attentions of the aforementioned warriors and pigs. The snag here is that these opponents can move faster than the game’s unlikely heroes, but a clever mechanic allows you to employ some strategy. When an enemy is moving towards you, as long as there’s a corner between you and them then they will take that corner rather than continuing in a straight line, leaving you unharmed. Put another way, as long as you can keep putting right or left turns between you and your aggressors then you get left alone.

A second, slightly cruder, defence allows you to temporarily turn your enemies into shadows, which lets you walk right through them. Last, but not least, when you’ve coloured in the last of the four corner rectangles on a stage your foes turn into chickens and the tables are turned, meaning that you can chase and catch them for points for a short while instead of fleeing from them. In terms of how Parker’s Atari 2600 adaptation stacks up to the arcade original, there are some obvious concessions with its audio and visuals. There are very few sound effects and the music from the coin-op is missing, but in all honestly that can be quite grating.