I had Auto Racing as "Rally Speedway" on the C64. Tons of fun, played it with my brother a lot. That "Ahead/Penalty" mechanism made for specific tactics, and it really paid off to know the course well. That version also had a track editor and funny crash animation.

Here's what I find interesting... Omnigamer has proven that a 5.51 isn't possible, but yet Activisions Newsletter 1983 shows that at least 3 people were capable of achieving the time. So either Activision is lying or Todd Rogers was telling the truth.

Hey, I loved this game and I'm about to buy a 2600+ so I can play it and a few others.

20:11 - Regarding the "short musical tune" of Star Voyager, rather than it being based on the Close Encounters tune, isn't it based on Zarathustra of 2001 Space Odyssey? That's what I always thought.

In Auto Racing the shadows of the buildings and the rooftops still look realistic

Is Alan Miller to blame for all of us thinking the stars would fly past us if we traveled through space?

¡Excelente estuvo este pequeño documental sobre el magnífico juego The Empire Strikes Back! Todavía lo conservo con su caja y manual en buenas condiciones, desde que me lo regalaron para mi cumpleaños en 1982... ¡Saludos cordiales!

Man cant wait for the star raiders episode

Thank you as always for tbe great videos ...i could listen to these all day

Missile Command arcade cabinet had the best track ball ever, and maybe the first... first one I recall ever seeing, anyway.

please make a video about the history of River Raid, i'm looking forward to watching it.

Poker & Blackjack had to be the most boring pack-in title ever. Atari got Combat, which was fun. Intellivision kids got a boring adult game. And how is gambling fun without real money on the line?

I noticed you briefly mention Gene Landrum. That the same one who later helped Atari and Nolan Bushnell invent Chuck E Cheese later?

We played a game like this during lunch in the 1970s. We called it Bagels. Fermi for a number in the right spot. Pico for a number in the wrong spot. Bagels if you get skunked.

That smile… That bomber’s smile…

When i was initially looking up old Atari games to research on my own (clarificaiton: i was born in the mid-80s, so Atari is before my time), I always gravitated towards the more original games rather than ones that seemed to be variations on popular arcade games. This game is pretty neat and its a real treat to know for once that there is a plethora of information about a game (and early game company) than the usual big nothing. Excited for the Demons to Diamonds video! That's definitely not a favourite game, but there's so little about I know about it, I'm curious what the comments and you will have to say. I'm sure it has some people who love it, but I haven't met any. ;)

MAN did I love Space Wars in the arcade! The only problem I had was finding someone to play against, unless my father had taken me that day. He loved it almost as much as I did, and that lasted as my family got a VCS and Dad and I would play head-to-head Combat almost non stop even though we got much better games as time went on, it was the 2-player fun that bonded us, same as when I got a C64 as a teenager and got Dad addicted to Archon and Adept, especially the latter. Never even SAW this VCS cart for sale, strangely enough. I am sure Dad would have gone for it had either of us found it in a store or advertised. Great video!

I've tried twice now to watch this video and both times it gets stuck loading at 0:55. All other youtube videos play fine. Just thought you should know.

its like chopper command

It didn't have longevity ( though cranking the difficulty up helped) but I really liked this game back in the day. This seems to have inspired Jeff Minter quite a bit with his camel game series.

I don't care about Star Wars, but I care about this series, and it's a good episode.

Always loved the auto-fire on this game.

I have this game and I ludicrously love it.

I was waiting for you to get to this one! Excellent work, as always. I'm curious -- have you seen the Parker Brothers Toy Fair 1982 video here on KZbin? I was a little surprised you didn't include some of it, but there's plenty of other good stuff to make for that. Also, some fun trivia I learned from a Heritage Auctions marketing email, of all things: Empire and Frogger were together the first video games ever advertised in comic books.

You could have called this game Bird vs. Camel and NO ONE would have argued with you.

The Atari version definitely looks faster-paced. I imagine I'd prefer that one.

After 40 years, this is the first time that I learned about the smart bombs! When I saw them in this video, I thought that you were playing a hack of the game. I never owned this myself, so I never read the manual. And I always enjoyed playing game 1 lol.

Thanks for the shout-outs! There was more in that interview than I realized. A real VCS classic, this one. Well worth playing.

Digital Eclipse's Lammasoft collection has a video segment that details how Jeff Minter was inspired to make Attack of the Mutant Camels after playing this in a shop and reading a magazine article that made the camel comparison. Also found out that Video Review magazine had a review of the game written by none other than Harlan Ellison. It's about as cantankerous, combative and cynical as one would expect from that grumpy old bastard.

What a great start for a publisher, but damn, I'm not going to enjoy seeing the story of their hubris playing out over the next few years. ESB is a simple enough concept that it strikes that classic maxim of being easy to play, but tough to master. The little details of the design do impress - and make for some tactics I'll have to try next time I give it a bash.

I think I heard about the handheld electronics game crash in another video, maybe one of these. It's interesting to hear that people at Parker Bros. expected such things. Whether it's because kids moved on to the next thing, or market saturation, they don't say. There were so many good ones (I had a 1 & 2-player football), and also-rans that this topic would make good videos, too. 12:07 $10M to advertise is something else (reminds me that studios don't include ad budget in movie production costs). But those companies that advertised on TV and in print in 1982 usually sold some games. But if games retailed at $30, then that would take an incredible amount of sales, almost 2/3 of a million just to pay back the ad budget. Of course they weren't just advertising one game, but their brand, and maybe some of this went to Frogger? According to Wikipedia there are 27 games for the Atari that sold over 1M copies, including Frogger (4M+) and Star Wars the Empire Strikes Back (1M+). With so many good games (presumably sales=good, with a couple exceptions), one wonders how much kids wanted an older game in 1983-4 instead of something new at full price? It's funny that I didn't pay much attention to parallax scrolling in this game. We would see it again in Jungle Hunt (1983) and Moon Patrol (1983). Someone was saying the graphics of the latter wasn't worth much, but I disagree. Also sounds and music was important to these titles plus Empire. My only complaint is that there's not a shield generator at the far right of the map before you wrap around. When it comes to Frogger, will you do the Parker Bros. version and the version for the Arcadia/Starpath Supercharger together, or save the latter for just dealing with the Supercharger?

love getting more insight about these old games

*You could've called this game...*

Finally, the first Parker Brothers game. Parker Brothers might be my favorite third-party publisher, yes, even above Activision. I had this as a kid, and I played it a bunch. I never had the manual, so I just played the first variation every time.

You could have called this game “Bird vs. Camel,” and _no one_ would have argued with you.

Great information! Thanks for such a well presented video.

Wow, I actually just picked this game up last week, label was not attached but that was an easy fix. It is an overall solid game and fun for a quick play.

Another great episode.

The Atari 2600 version of The Empire Strikes Back looks impressive. 😀👍🎮

I remember my friend getting this on his birthday and we had a sleepover at his house based entirely around this game. Same happened when I got Star Wars Arcade on Colecovision at Christmas. PB SW games were awesome. I love JonTron calling it Bird vs. Camel. 😂

This is it! Hold on to your butts! Super nostalgia for this one. While I never owned this, my grandfather had Empire on betamax and my 84 summer vacation in California was visiting him and watching Empire over and over then going to my cousins and playing this game.

I’m trying to get the last two patch scores for this game. Edit: Make that the last patch score for this game.

I have a weird amount of nostalgia for this game despite not having played it a TON. I'm grateful for the explanation because god knows when I was young, I had NO idea about how ANY of the mechanics worked!

Parker Brothers was definitely a good 1980s video game publisher, which would have good VCS games, and would later be a publisher on NES and the Master System. Empire Strikes Back is good for what it is, and it does capture the feeling of the Battle of Hoth, even if it's missing elements due to cartridge space.

GOOD GRAPHICS!!!

Summer, 1980 You, your girl, a 2600 and Space Invaders cart You had to be there

Baseball and Hockey were my fave INTV titles

The name Walter Bright made my ears perk up. He was the designer of the old mainframe game Empire: Wargame of the Century in 1977. He credits 3 other people, two of which worked at Mattel as well (Mark Stroberg and David Rolfe), Sid Meier credits Empire as a major influence for Civilization. He also created the D programming language, several C++ compilers, did software work on the Boeing 757, plus several other games. The guy is amazing and is still at it. Wow.

Imagine Dragons.

As a younger Atari owner, someone who was born after the system's lifespan, the biggest treat with the Space Invaders cart was its two player simultaneous play modes. Quite a rarity on the system for a shooter. Worm War 1 is another great two player shooter.