Atlantis (video game)

Atlantis is a fixed shooter video game released by Imagic in July 1982 for the Atari 2600. It was written by Dennis Koble who also wrote Trick Shot for Imagic. Atlantis was ported to the Atari 8-bit computers, VIC-20, Intellivision, and Magnavox Odyssey 2.

Atlantis was a video game competition in which players of the Atari 2600 version were encouraged to mail photos of their high scores to Imagic to receive a special edition of the game named Atlantis II.

Gameplay
The player controls the last defenses of the City of Atlantis against the Gorgon invaders. The city has seven bases, which are vulnerable to attack. Three of these have firepower capabilities to destroy the Gorgon ships before they manage to fire death rays at one of the settlements. The gun bases have fixed cannons; the center base fires straight up, while the far left and far right bases fire diagonally upwards across the screen. The center cannon also creates a shield that protects the settlements from the death rays, so once the center cannon is destroyed, the remaining settlements become vulnerable to attack. The enemy ships pass back and forth from left to right four times before they enter firing range, giving an ample opportunity to blow them away. Lost bases can be regained by destroying enough Gorgon ships.

Regardless of the player's efforts to avert the tragedy, Atlantis is doomed. The only way the game can end is when all bases are destroyed. However, a tiny ship then rises from the rubble and speeds away.

The Intellivision version adds two gun turrets with a movable cursor that can be aimed onto enemy ships. There is also a deploy-able ship to take on enemies one-on-one. The game features day, dusk, and night settings, with the night setting limiting visibility to two moving searchlights.

Development
Atlantis was designed and coded by Denis Koble. It was made for Imagic, a company made from ex-Atari and Mattel employees in 1981. Prior to making Atlantis, Koble made Trick Shot for the company, a game he said gave him anxiety attacks as he had difficulty getting the physics correct for the game. Atlantis comparatively was described by Koble "a pleasure to work on and we were a very cohesive team [...] I have lots of positive memories."

For the games theme, Koble said he wanted to do a game themed around Atlantis for a long time and knew exactly what he wanted it to be and that the game "turned out to be 95 percent of what I imagined." When asked about influences for the game, Koble said he was a huge fan of the Atari game Missile Command (1980) and said "I'm sure it inspired me but not consciously." Koble credited Bob Smith a coding technique to Bob Smith which allowed for more moving objects on screen than the hardware originally intended.

The ports of the game have vary in differences. The Atari 8-bit computers version plays similar to the Atari 2600 game while the VIC-20 version has only two-outer bases with enemy attacks changinge to compensate. The Magnavox Odyssey 2 version is pared-down with only five parts of the city to defend with. The Intellivision game was very different from the original, the game uses crosshairs and features launchable pods to fight enemies and features night levels with searchlights to fight enemies. The Odyssey 2 version was designed by Jeff Ronne some graphics assistance from Michael Becker.

Release
Atlantis was released in August 1982 for the Atari 2600 and for the Intellvision in October 1982. The Odyssey 2 and VIC-20 versions were released in May 1983.

Atlantis was a financial success for Imagic, being the second highest-grossing game for the company after Demon Attack (1982). Koble recalled that it sold two million copies.

A competition was held in 1982 which led to a trip to Bermuda for the top four high scorers of the game, which Koble went on as well. He recalled that the players could "pretty much play indefinitely" leading him to create a harder version of the game called Atlantis II. The contest winners would receive this version of the game which features the same cover and cartridge art as Atlantis but with a white sticker on the box labeled Atlantis II. The game features faster enemy ships worth fewer points.

Reception
Reviewing the Atari 2600 game, a reviewer in The Video Game Update stated that along with Cosmic Ark, the two Imagic games featured arcade-quality graphics and original gameplay which they declared to be "quite refreshing in this day of so many copy-cat games".

Reviewing the Intellvision version of the game, Phil Liswell of Video Games said that Imagic had enhanced the original game for the system just as they had done with Demon Attack, declaring it a great shoot-'em-up for the system. A review in The Logical Gamer had its reviewers find the Odyssey 2 version lacked the crisper graphics of the Atari 2600 version, but was far superior to anything produced for the system.

In 1983, at the Fourth Annual Arcade Awards, along with Starmaster (1982) it won a "Certificate of Merit" in the "Videogame of the Year" category. Demon Attack (1982) won the main award.

From retrospective reviews, David Crookes wrote in Retro Gamer that Atlantis was one of the defining games from Imagic that cemented its reputation as a talented third-party developer.

Brett Alan Weiss of the online game database AllGame praised the Atari 2600 version of the game for its sound and graphics and while finding it fun, wrote that it lacked the speed, freedom of movement and the varied amount of strategies offered from Missile Command. Jonathan Sutyak of AllGame reviewed the Intellivision version, calling it a "fantastic cartridge with a good amount of variety." The review said the release would be "near-perfect" and only lamented that it featured an alternating two-player option instead of the cooperative version.

Legacy
Atlantis features an end sequence where survivors of the devastated city escape in a giant spaceship. Koble said that was supposed to be the "Cosmic Ark" which was the title of Rob Fulop's follow-up to Demon Attack called Cosmic Ark (1982). Koble said that during development of both games, both him and Fulop tossed around the idea of the survivors from Atlantis showing up in Cosmic Ark.

Imagic closed its office in 1986. Koble continued in the industry working on games such as Sonic Spinball and the PGA Tour Golf series. Koble would work the director of software at Electronic Arts, and later as the vice president of technology at Universal Studios, the chief operating officer of Mineshaft Entertainment and the owner of Illogical Software where he was a consultant to the videogame industry.