Ah, Yordle, the yellow dragon. While not the most challenging dragon out of the three in Atari Adventure, he was the most obnoxious. What an epic pain in the ass he was.
Atari released Adventure in 1980 and speaking for myself, I was damned grateful to have it. We were a lower-income family then, and having an Atari was a gift, even if my sister and I, as kids, didn’t fully understand that at the time. Adventure was one game that appeared under the Christmas tree, the same year I discovered there was no Santa Claus. I loved Adventure. I’m sure I begged for it endlessly after playing it at my uncle’s house.
The graphics and gameplay are simple and perhaps even substandard by today’s criteria. But in 1980? Every kid I knew wanted it. Every Gen-X kid knew about Atari. If you weren’t fortunate enough to own one, you knew someone who did and probably spent time at that friend’s house playing endless hours of simple games that one could never beat. Well, we could beat Adventure. But not games like Space Invaders, Asteroids, or Yar’s Revenge. Like most arcade games, gameplay got faster and harder until you died. Just like real life. Only a very few had win scenarios. In fact, I can’t think of any from that era, with the exception of maybe Dragon’s Lair, and it took master-level skills to accomplish that. If you know of one, sound off below, and we’ll hash it out.
If you’ve never played Adventure or don’t recall it clearly, here’s the breakdown.
Adventure introduced new elements to console games; a play area spanning multiple screens and enemies that continue to roam when offscreen. You, the player, controlled an on-screen square. Roaming enemies populate this world, including three dragons that can eat your square avatar and a bat that randomly steals and hides items around the game world. Your quest was to explore an open-ended environment in search of the Enchanted Chalice and return it to the Golden Castle, where the game begins.
Pretty simple, right? Only after one mastered the game. If one’s never played it, it’s not quite as easy as it sounds, especially at difficulty level three.
The entire kingdom is made of thirty rooms with various obstacles, enemies, and mazes in and around the Golden, White, and Black Castles. Three dragons guard the kingdom. Their primary directive is to protect (or flee) various items and attack the player’s avatar. You’ve already met Yordle, the yellow dragon. He’s backed by Grundle, the green dragon, and the worst of the three, Rhindle, the red dragon.
There’s also this majorly annoying bat named Knubberrub (honestly, that sounds like a euphemism for masturbation, but whatever). He roams the kingdom freely, carrying an item or sometimes a dragon. But wait! There’s more! Good ole’ Knubs has two states. Agitated and non-agitated. When in an agitated state, the bat either picks up or swaps what it currently carries with an object in the present room. Eventually, Knubs returns to a non-agitated state where he’ll not pick up an object. Knubs will continue to fly around even offscreen, swapping objects at random.
As stated, the player’s avatar is an on-screen square and moves between rooms with the standard Atari joystick. Each screen represents a single room. Along the way, one finds valuable objects, including keys that open the castles, a magnet that pulls items toward the player, a magic bridge that one can use to cross certain obstacles, and a sword that can defeat the dragons. The caveat is that one may only carry a single object at any time.
If a dragon eats a player, they can resurrect the beaten avatar versus restarting the game from the beginning. The avatar reappears at the gate of the Golden Castle while all objects remain where the player left them. Fair enough, right? But wait…the reset game resurrects all slain dragons. The ability to restore the avatar without resetting the entire game is one of video games’ earliest examples of a “continue game” option. This…was nice. Granted, it meant fighting all those damned dragons again, but the games saved the progress of retrieved and moved objects.
The game offers three different skill levels. Level 1 is the easiest using a simplified room layout. It also doesn’t include the White Castle, bat, Rhindle, or invisible mazes. Level 2 is the standard version of the game. The gameplay objects appear in set positions at the beginning of the game. Level 3 is like Level 2, but the game randomizes objects and their locations, creating a more significant challenge. Players may set other difficulty levels via the Atari console’s difficulty switches. One switch controls the dragons’ bite speed, while the other causes them to flee when the player carries the sword.
If you’d like to play it free, you can do so here.
Atari employee Warren Robinett designed and programmed Adventure and was the same dev who gave us Slot Racers, an early Atari game. Generally, Atari gave their programmers complete control over their games’ creative direction and development cycle. This required devs to plan for their next game as they neared completion of their current one. Atari encouraged this practice so their devs would stay productive.
As Robinett completed work on Slot Racers in 1978, his housemate Julius Smith gave him the opportunity to visit the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. While there, he discovered the 1977 version of the computer text game Colossal Cave Adventure. Several hours of gameplay inspired Robinett to create a graphical version of the game, which would become Adventure.
The road to Atari’s release of Adventure was as perilous as the gameplay itself.
The first revolved around memory issues. The Atari system has only 128 bytes of RAM (Random Access Memory) for program variables. Atari cartridge ROMs (Read Only Memory) have only 4096 bytes. That’s a mere 4KB! In layman’s terms, there wasn’t enough memory space for Robinett to do a graphical version of Colossal Cave Adventure, which used hundreds of kilobytes of memory. The final version of Adventure used nearly all the cartridge’s memory (including five percent of the cartridge’s storage for his Easter egg) with only 15 unused bytes from its ROM capacity.
The other peril involved Atari’s upper management. During Adventure‘s development, Atari, now owned by Warner Communications, hired Ray Kassar as General Manager of their Consumer Division. In December 1978, Kassar was promoted to CEO and president of Atari, Inc. Interesting fact: The game designer for 1981’s Yar’s Revenge, Howard Scott Warshaw, got the name for Yar and his planet Razak from reversing Ray Kassar’s name. Warshaw claims the game was based on “Ray’s revenge on Activision.”
Why Activision? Well, four former Atari game developers began Activision after game dev David Crane voiced complaints to Kassar that their paychecks were paltry and didn’t reflect the effort that contributed to Atari’s success and millions of dollars. They wanted small commissions based on the success of the games they designed. Kassar replied to Crane, “You are no more important to that game than the guy on the assembly line who puts it together.”
Crane and three other game developers, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller, and Bob Whitehead, resigned from Atari and formed Activision, the first-ever third-party developer of Atari games. You’ll remember them for classic games like Pitfall, Kaboom, Megamania, and Stampede.
The video game business in the early 80s was far more cutthroat than the average person understands. It was one factor that led to the video game crash of 1983 (the subject of a future post). Trust me when I say as much as I love Atari, they were not the victim in the Crane/Kassar dispute.
When Kassar became CEO of Atari in 1978, he rarely interacted with the programmers and treated their contributions with indifference, which should’ve been clear in his treatment of Crane. Robinett’s supervisor, George Simcock, discouraged Robinett from working on Adventure. Simcock claimed the ambitious game couldn’t be done on the Atari based on its memory limits. Within the month, Robinett developed a working prototype that impressed Atari’s management team. They encouraged Robinett to continue working on the game.
Management later tried to convince Robinett to make Adventure a tie-in for the upcoming 1979 Superman movie. Not coincidentally, Superman was a Warner Communications-owned property. Robinett remained committed to the initial Adventure concept. Instead, Atari dev John Dunn agreed to take Robinett’s prototype source code to make the tie-in Superman game. It was the next Atari game to use multiple-screen gameplay.
By the end of 1978, Robinett completed the second prototype for Adventure. It contained only eight rooms, one dragon, and two objects. He admitted the game was boring but had achieved his design goals. Robinett put the game aside for a few months and came back with additional ideas in June 1979. Those ideas became the game we know today.
Interestingly, Robinett included the magnet object, which pulled other game objects toward the magnet holder because sometimes game objects would get ‘stuck’ inside a wall. As a computer developer, I must assume this was clearly a limitation of the game design due to the lack of cartridge ROM space. Making a wall ‘solid’ as it applies to other objects in the game would have required additional code. Robinett must’ve just…run out of space.
Developing the plot of Adventure came from a collaboration with Steve Harding, the author of nearly all the Atari game manuals. Robinett states Harding came up with the names for the dragons and offered a friend’s suggestion for naming the bat “Knubberrub.”
In June 1979, Robinett submitted the Adventure source code to Atari management.
Soon after, Robinett left Atari.
Atari released Aventure in early 1980.
It’s worth noting that Adventure popularized the concept of Easter eggs in video games. Easter eggs are a “message, trick, or unusual behavior hidden inside a computer program by its creator.” I should know; I wrote a few back when I authored shareware.
As you’ve read, Atari didn’t treat their developers very well. After Warner Communications acquired Atari in 1976, a culture clash emerged between the executives from New York and the California programmers who were more laid back. Atari removed the names of game devs from their products to prevent competitors from identifying and recruiting them. Atari management also used this to deny game devs bargaining chips in negotiations. And thus, the exodus of Crane, Kaplan, Miller, and Whitehead from Atari due to a lack of recognition and royalty payments.
During the development of Adventure, and unbeknownst to anyone else, Robinett embedded his name in the game. It came as a hidden and virtually inaccessible room that displayed the text “Created by Warren Robinett.” Rumors of The Beatles hiding messages in their songs inspired Robinett to do so. This secret is one of the earliest known Easter eggs in a video game.
Robinett once cited his frustration with Atari as part of the decision to incorporate his Easter egg. He claimed the message was a means of self-promotion, noting that Atari only paid him around $22,000 per year, minus royalties. Atari would sell over one million units of Adventure at $25.00 apiece, totaling 25 million dollars. Robinett’s salary wasn’t even .1% of what Atari made from Adventure. Can you blame him or the other Atari game devs for their anger and resentment? All those guys were the heart of Atari, and in my opinion, management didn’t treat or compensate them adequately.
After Robinett quit Atari, the secret of his Easter egg remained undiscovered for over a year, even unknown to Atari employees. After Atari released the game, fifteen-year-old Adam Clayton from Salt Lake, Utah, discovered it and sent Atari a letter of explanation. They tasked other developers to locate the responsible code. They did, but after some research, Atari determined that refactoring the game would cost them around $10,000. In 2023 terms, that’s close to $35,000. To remove or change Robinett’s Easter egg was more money than they wanted to spend. The director of software development of the Atari Consumer Division, Steve Wright, argued for retaining the text message. He countered to management that it gave players an additional incentive to find it and play more Atari games. He said, “These are like Easter eggs for players to find.”
Atari eventually relented and decided not only to leave Adventure‘s message alone but also dubbed such hidden features as “Easter eggs,” claiming they’d add more such secrets in later games. Wright then made it official Atari policy that all future games should include Easter eggs but limited to the initials of the game developer.
One of the first was Howard Scott Warshaw’s Yar’s Revenge which involved the appearance of Warshaw’s initials.
If one day you decide to dust off your old Atari (you have one, don’t you? I do..and it works perfectly…paddles too) and want to see the original video game Easter egg, you can watch the method here.
Adventure was the first action-adventure game, the first console fantasy game, and established its namesake genre on video game consoles. It was also the first game to use a “fog of war” effect in its catacombs, obscuring most of the gameplay except for the player’s immediate surroundings.
Many polls voted Adventure the best Atari 2600 game and noted it as a significant step in the advancement of home video games. Entertainment Weekly named Adventure one of the top ten games for the Atari 2600.
Atari announced an Adventure sequel in early 1982. However, the planned sequel evolved into the Swordquest series of games. Atari released four of them. The gameplay was complicated, clumsy, and made little sense. A player needed to navigate the joystick and the paddle controls using intricate timing to traverse different screens.
In 2010, 1up.com wrote that Adventure is “a work of interpretive brilliance” that “cleverly extracted the basic elements of exploration, combat, and treasure hunting from the text games and converted them into icons,” but also conceded that it “seems almost unplayably basic these days.”
In 2014, Atari Headquarters scored Adventure eight out of ten, noting its historical importance. They did, however, pan the sound and graphics concluding that Adventure was “very enjoyable” regardless of its technological shortcomings.
I ask you, Avid Reader, having explored this slice of Gen-X history, the question we heard many times in our youth, “Have you played Atari today?”
