KABOOM!
1981
◼︎ Although catching and defusing falling bombs may seem humdrum, when this happens at speed in
Kaboom!
it represents the very purest form of twitch gaming.
DAVID’S MEMORIES
Larry Kaplan loved Atari’s Avalanche, so he made a similar game on the Atari 2600 with Pong-like balls dropping from the ceiling to be caught by Pong-like paddles. It was fabulous – by far the best twitch game ever made for the 2600, but it was a giant leap backwards graphically. Activision was recognised as having the best-looking games in the business, and we wanted Larry’s game to reach that graphic standard. So I added the Mad Bomber dropping bombs instead of Pong balls, and water buckets to catch and extinguish them in place of Pong paddles. For fun I gave him facial expressions based on the gameplay.”