.
Near
the top of the list of my most fondly remembered early-1980s games (right beside Realm
of Impossibility, perhaps), would be Caverns of Mars (1981).
I
had never heard of the game before my father -- the vice-principal of Mountain
Lakes High School in N.J. -- brought it home one day on a floppy disk. At the time, I believe the school was going
whole hog into computers and Atari in particular, and he had a friend, Frank Pazel, who was
constantly shipping us home new games in either cartridge, cassette, or floppy
format.
We had an Atari 800 as I’ve
written about before, and many of these games were amazing. I remember enjoying a lot of them, including Murder
on the Zinderneuf, and Temple of Aphsai.
But Caverns
of Mars was
designed by a high school senior named Greg Christensen in 1981, and it quickly became a smash-hit for Atari. An 8-bit game,
it positions the player aboard a small spaceship that travels down a vertical
shaft, into the red planet’s rocky interior.
Along
the way, the ship must destroy other ships, fuel depots and the like. The longer you play, if memory serves, the
faster your rate of descent, so that soon it becomes insanely difficult preventing
your ship from getting pulped on the rock face.
It’s
a basic game by today’s standards, I suppose, but as an eleven and twelve year
old, I found it highly addictive. I would play the game for hours, and it
really got the adrenaline going.
I
showed some images of the game to Joel at one point and he told me, with apologies, that it
looks “derpy” by modern standards.
In this case, I think he may be wrong. Some of the games with basic graphics today, like Undertale thrive on elements not directly related to visual definition, it seems to me.
Caverns of Mars may not be in the same league, but it was a great game for its time, and a key memory from my first
days with the Atari 800.
Hard to believe it was more than thirty years ago that I
first encountered it…
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