Actionauts - Lost Atari 2600 Game W/Robot Programming?
October 7, 2007 4:03 PM | Simon Carless
The ever-helpful Atari Age has a post revealing Rob Fulop's 'Actionauts' for Atari 2600, for which they explain: "If you've spent any time playing classic Atari 2600 games, then you're likely familiar with Rob Fulop's work. While working for Atari, he created Night Driver and Missile Command." He then went on to make an unreleased title called Actionauts in 1984, based around controlling an onscreen robot.
However, according to the site: "Rob has recently decided to sell the only known physical prototype of the game and after the sale of the prototype he plans to produce a limited run of 250 Actionauts cartridges. You can learn more about Actionauts over at Rob Fulop's Blog and sign up here to receive information about the upcoming release of the game."
Guessing this one will be a hot ticket! And the gameplay sounds interesting/different, too, as Fulop explains in his weblog piece on it: "The main play screen features a single robot in a simple playfield maze, a “target”, in this case a piece of cheese, and a vertically scrolling command display at the bottom of the screen.... The play challenge in the game comes primarily from “debugging” .. with the player needing to remember what the robot last did, what went wrong, and find /fix the appropriate command (s)."
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5 Comments
As the Roboto-chan column guy, I have to tell you that this style of "gameplay" isn't totally new. Carnage Heart on the PS1 required you to build a robot's AI for battle, with an unnerving amount of commands to deal with different situations. The fact that something such as this could be done on the Atari does surprise me, however.
TOLLMASTER | October 7, 2007 5:32 PM
Yeah, Carnage Heart is a really interesting game - I sometimes feel like more Western titles should try that 'remote programming' gameplay concept.
simonc | October 7, 2007 7:17 PM
It would be even better if the robot thingy could be programmed using -say- Atari Basic... Still, an impressive achievment.
gnome | October 8, 2007 1:56 AM
TOLLMASTER: You're saying that a classic-era Atari 2600 game isn't totally new because a PS1 game did it, uh, "first?"
Well in point of fact, Corewar did it long before Carnage Heart, and competitively, so nyaah.
And even if add in the limitation that we're talking about simulating a physical robot, Robot Odyssey is pretty old.
John H. | October 8, 2007 2:40 AM
And while we're on the subject of programmable robot movement... Hey, anybody remember Big Trak? It wasn't a video game, but a robot tank toy from the early 1980s that you could program to move around in different directions in a series of steps. It made some cool noises too. I still have mine in my closet. :)
Benj Edwards | October 10, 2007 9:22 AM