Rampage is one of Midway’s best arcade games from the late 1980s. Its popularity resulted in it being a hot license when it came to producing home versions, which is why it’s on every console and computer format of the era. This particular ad is for the Atari 7800 version, which is not very good.
The video above will show you all you need to know to get a taste of VCS goodness.
Via Retrospekt
The newly-formed mobile division over at Activision is revisiting the old Activision classic Pitfall!
Originally released back in 1982 for the Atari 2600 (and ported to just about everything else 8-bit), Pitfall! was a big success – it was the second highest selling game for the Atari 2600 and is adored by fans still to this day.
“We’ve been working on Pitfall since earlier in the year when we set up and it has been really good to revisit that and bring it to a modern audience” Activision’s Martyn Brown told MCV, keen to dispel last week’s rumours that a Call of Duty for smartphones was underway instead. “Pitfall for smartphones is a fresh take” he continued, however no details as to what this entails have yet be provided.
Pitfall! turns 30 in September of this year – 3 months ahead of me. We are old.
Pixar’s worst film, A Bug’s Life, also happens to be a subpar video game. What a surprise!
Activision Classics is a compilation of 30 of the company’s biggest 2600 hits. It’s not quite as fully featured as later Activision collections, but it was one of the biggest compilation titles when it was released.
An early entry into Activision’s plan to establish themselves as a major force in Windows gaming, HyperBlade was an ultraviolent future sport not unlike that seen in the film Rollerball combined with ice hockey. One particularly amusing part of the game was that the rok (the ball) could be replaced with decapitated heads if one were to execute their opponent mid-match.
River Raid is one of Activision’s most popular releases for the Atari 2600. It was also the first game to be indexed by the BPjM in Germany, due to the game’s war theme being considered harmful to minors. Creator Carol Shaw is believed to be the first female video game programmer.
Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz was the 1981 follow up to the highly successful text adventure Zork. The series was the crown jewel of Infocom’s output, and continued for several games after the company was purchased by Activision. Just don’t mention the short-lived freemium MMO.
The one that started a real turnaround for superhero games.
Spider-Man is the nineteenth (I believe) game based on Marvel’s most popular comic book character, and the first to be published by Activision, who still holds the license to this day. The game was developed by Neversoft using the same tech from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.
Out of seemingly nowhere, a port of the 1997 classic Australian-developed real-time strategy game Dark Reign has appeared on the Xbox Live Indie Games service.
For 400 points, those of you that can actually play Xbox Live Indie Games can enjoy this excellent real-time strategy game. Those of us who live in Australia and don’t have secret US Xbox Live accounts will have to go without.
The port appears to have been done as a technology test by a studio called Magnetar Games.
