Combat
1977 · Tank Shooter · Atari 2600
Overview
Combat (1977) was the two-player duel packed in with most Atari 2600 consoles for five years: tanks, biplanes and jets trading shots in rounds just over two minutes long.
Deep Dive
Two players face each other on one screen, each steering a vehicle with a joystick and firing at the other. The cartridge offers three kinds of battle. Tank games are played from above, with variations that add obstacles, shots that bounce off walls and tanks that turn invisible. Biplane fights are seen from the side, and jet battles return to an overhead view. A round lasts two minutes and sixteen seconds, and whoever scores more hits wins. The whole game fits in two kilobytes of ROM, and it grew out of Atari's 1974 arcade game Tank.
Developer Story
Combat was programmed by Ron Milner, Steve Mayer, Joe Decuir and Larry Wagner, and Mayer was already working on it by late 1975, when Atari bought his consulting firm Cyan Engineering. It shipped as a launch title for the Atari Video Computer System in 1977.
Did You Know?
- Combat was bundled with most Atari 2600 consoles from 1977 to 1982. Sears' Tele-Games version of the console came with Air-Sea Battle instead, and sold Combat under the name Tank Plus.
- A sequel, Combat Two, was announced in 1982 but never released. A prototype surfaced in 1999 and was later included on the Atari Flashback 2 and Atari 50 collections.
Sources & further reading
- Combat (1977 video game) — Wikipedia
