Frostbite

About Frostbite

Frostbite (1983) is Steve Cartwright's last Atari 2600 game for Activision, in which Frostbite Bailey hops across drifting ice floes, turning them blue to build an igloo before the temperature drops to zero.

Frostbite in Depth

Frostbite Bailey must build igloos by jumping across four rows of ice floes, collecting a block of ice each time he lands on a white floe, which turns it blue, while avoiding falling into the sea. Killer clams, snow geese, king crabs and polar bears all threaten him, and passing fish can be caught for 200 bonus points. A falling temperature acts as the timer, and if it runs out he loses a life. Once the igloo is built and he goes inside, the remaining temperature and the number of rounds completed earn bonus points. Players start with three reserve lives, earn another every 5,000 points, and can choose Regular mode from level one or Advanced from level five, alone or with two players taking turns.

Cartwright had to stop players hopping back and forth between two floes forever, so blocks can only be added once all the floes are the same colour. He said Frostbite was one of the games most heavily tested before release, as it sped up until objects wrapped around the screen so fast that they sometimes seemed to move backwards, "like those old Westerns where the wagon wheels appears to be turning slowly in the opposite direction".

Making Frostbite

Cartwright joined Activision in 1982 and released Barnstorming and Megamania that year, then Plaque Attack, Seaquest and Frostbite in 1983. He found memory and screen timing difficult, something "extremely easy with higher programming languages, but" a real problem in 6502 code. Released in October 1983, it divided critics: The Video Game Update called it "cute, but kind of dumb" yet hard to stop playing, and Video and Computer Gaming Illustrated's Jim Clark said its design "is so well done, you feel the chill", while his colleague E.C. Meade called it "another step in the company's surprising decline", and Video Games found it a throwback next to Robot Tank and Enduro. Brett Weiss later found its arcade-style action very satisfying, though less colourful than most Activision games, and Retro Gamer said it would be wrong to call it a Frogger rip-off, praising its new mechanics and tight controls. It was re-released in Activision Anthology in 2002.