Atari arcade games

Atari’s coin-op division released Pong in 1972 and was still making arcade games, as Atari Games, at the end of the 1990s. The table below lists the main Atari cabinets from 1972 to 1989 in order of release, with the display each one used and what it introduced. The history of the company behind them, from Kee Games to Namco, Time Warner and Midway, is told in a history of Atari’s arcade division.

The main Atari cabinets, 1972 to 1989

Years are those given by the sources listed below; Atari, Inc. made the games until 1984, and Atari Games from 1985.

Game	Year	Display	What it introduced or was used for
Pong	1972	Raster, black and white	The first product sold under the Atari name: table tennis for two players
Space Race	1973	Raster, black and white	Atari’s second coin-op, a race through meteors for one player against the clock or two head to head
Gotcha	1973	Raster, black and white	A maze chase, played with domed joysticks
Gran Trak 10	1974	Raster, black and white	A driving game with steering wheel, gear shift and pedals, engineered at Cyan Engineering in Grass Valley
Tank	1974	Raster, black and white	A two-player tank battle, sold under the Kee Games name
Indy 800	1975	Raster, color	A Kee Games race for eight players around one large cabinet
Breakout	1976	Raster, black and white	Billed as “the ultimate in Pong” on the archived AHS page
Night Driver	1976	Raster, black and white	First-person driving at night, with a sit-down version
Sprint 2	1976	Raster, black and white	Called Atari’s first mass-produced microprocessor-based game on the archived AHS page
Atari Football	1978	Raster, black and white	Atari’s first game with a trak-ball
Lunar Lander	1979	Vector, black and white	Atari’s first vector game, on the Digital Vector Generator
Asteroids	1979	Vector, black and white	Developed on Lunar Lander hardware; 70,000 sold by late 1981, according to a federal court opinion
Missile Command	1980	Raster, color	Missile defense aimed with a trak-ball
Battlezone	1980	Vector, black and white	A first-person 3D tank game on the Analog Vector Generator and Math Box, later adapted for the US Army
Centipede	1981	Raster, color	Co-designed by Ed Logg and Dona Bailey; used the smaller 2.5-inch trak-ball
Tempest	1981	Vector, color	The first game on Atari’s Color QuadraScan monitor
Pole Position	1982	Raster, color	A Japanese racing game that, according to Warner, was helping to turn the coin-op division around at the end of 1982
Star Wars	1983	Vector, color	A flight yoke derived from the Army Battlezone controller, in upright and cockpit cabinets
Marble Madness	1984–85	Raster, color	The first System I game, with two trak-balls and stereo music
Paperboy	1985	Raster, color, high resolution	The first System II game, steered with a bicycle handlebar
Gauntlet	1985	Raster, color	Four players at once, with one coin mechanism per player
Hard Drivin’	1989	Raster, color, 3D polygons	A sit-down driving cockpit, with polygon graphics drawn by a TMS34010 graphics processor

The Atari Compendium dates Marble Madness to 1984, while Atari Games presented it to operators as a new System I game in its spring 1985 newsletter.

Vector monitors: from black and white to Color QuadraScan

Atari called its X-Y monitor QuadraScan. Instead of scanning the whole screen line by line like a television, the beam draws each line of the picture directly. Atari’s vector hardware went through three stages, as described by Jed Margolin, an engineer who worked on several of these games:

• Digital Vector Generator. Designed by Howard Delman for Lunar Lander and used again for Asteroids and Asteroids Deluxe. Delman said the vector concept came from Atari’s research group in Grass Valley.
• Analog Vector Generator. First used in Battlezone and Red Baron, with a “Math Box” built around AMD 2901 bit-slice chips to do the 3D arithmetic.
• Color. An Atari document of September 24, 1981 describes how the black-and-white QuadraScan was redesigned around an in-line color tube with three Z amplifiers. Tempest came out on it in October 1981. Margolin notes that the Wells-Gardner color monitor had no pincushion correction, so that circuit was put on the Tempest board.

Space Duel (February 1982) kept the pincushion correction circuitry, and Star Wars (1983) also drove a color monitor. Margolin lists Major Havoc (November 1983) and The Empire Strikes Back (March 1985, a conversion kit for Star Wars) as the last X-Y games produced.

The trak-ball

Atari Football, released in October 1978, was Atari’s first game with a trak-ball; Taito and Sega had sold trackball games before it, according to the Atari Compendium. The 4.5-inch Trak-Ball, designed by Jerry Lichac, was also used in Basketball, Baseball, Soccer and Missile Command. A smaller 2.5-inch version went into the cocktail and cabaret Missile Command and then into every Centipede cabinet; a black version followed in 1982 in Millipede, Liberator and Quantum. Crystal Castles was the last trak-ball game before the 1984 split. Atari Games used a pair of them, one blue and one red, on Marble Madness, and its last trak-ball game was Shuuz in 1990.

Seats and cockpits

Several Atari games put the player in a seat:

• Hi-Way and Night Driver. The archived AHS page calls Night Driver (1976) Atari’s second sit-down game, after Hi-Way.
• Red Baron and Star Wars. Both had cockpit versions. The production list transcribed by Scott Evans gives 504 Red Baron cockpits and 2,450 Star Wars cockpits.
• Hard Drivin’. Michael Current’s timeline of Atari Games dates the deluxe cockpit version to February 1989 and a compact upright to June 1989.

System I and System II

The spring 1985 issue of Atari Games’ Coin Connection newsletter announced two hardware platforms: System I, launched with Marble Madness, and System II, launched with Paperboy. System I carried more than one game. Current’s timeline records two titles of July 1985, Peter Pack Rat and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, that were sold either in System I cabinets or as conversion kits for System I units already in arcades.

Flyers, manuals and the Coin Connection newsletter

Atari’s coin-op division sent operators and distributors a newsletter, Coin Connection, which the International Arcade Museum dates from January 1976 to April 1985. The museum has scanned issues from 1978 onward, along with many Atari sales flyers and service manuals. An archived Atari Historical Society page also documents the restoration of a production Pong with serial number ZZ-001, shown in New York in May 1999.