Phosphor Dot Fossils

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Welcome to one of the web’s oldest and most-respected repositories of information and critiques on classic video games: Phosphor Dot Fossils. You’ll find hundreds of reviews here, covering vintage arcade games, classic console games and long-forgotten early home computer software. The reviews here judge these games not by what technology has made possible since then, but by what was possible at the time of the game’s release. The articles here attempt to put each game into the context of its time; even more context can be gleaned by viewing the entire timeline, placing everything in a wider pop-cultural and historical context; the timeline can also be browsed by any day of the year, or by any year.

Browse Games By Year

1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979

1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987

1990 2000

Phosphor Dot Fossils covers all hardware platforms, but special emphasis is placed on arcade games, which set the standards to which home consoles and computers had to at least attempt to rise, often with far more limited resources for memory and graphics. More than a few still-thriving franchises were born in massive plywood cabinets that took our quarters and our time in the 1970s and 1980s.

Phosphor Dot Fossils We frequently follow these arcade hits home, where they appeared on numerous consoles and computers that were underpowered compared to their coin-op counterparts. But despite memory and hardware limitations, consoles – and their brilliant game designers and programmers – found ways to excel at games that simply weren’t suited to the arcade environment, where a never-ending stream of quarters was more important than a “deep” gaming experience that might last for more than a few minutes. There was room for both kinds of games back then – and there still is.

Browse Games By System / Hardware Platform

Phosphor Dot Fossils covers arcade, console and computer games – as well as, to a slightly lesser extent, non-programmable dedicated game consoles and handheld and portable games. In some cases, where classic game franchises have continued to emerge through the 1990s and the 21st century, we follow those games too, whether they’re “greatest hits” collections of classic games, or complete remakes with modern graphics and sound. We also cover imported games never released in North Phosphor Dot Fossils America, newly-programmed “homebrew games” for classic systems, and even games that never saw the light of day.

Along the way, there is a single narrative being told by this multimedia study of classic games: it’s the creation and rise of an industry that now dominates the entertainment landscape, and the advancement of multiple technologies whose effects can be felt far beyond our living rooms. Controversies have come and gone, but the medium of the video game is here to stay.

This is how it all started, and how it evolved from there.

Welcome to Phosphor Dot Fossils.

Stay and play.

Computer Space: The Soylent Green Machine

In the spring of 2007, amid some controversy and skepticism from the collecting community, a machine identified as the one and only white Computer Space cabinet, manufactured specifically to serve as a prop in the movie Soylent Green, went up for auction on eBay. The seller contacted me to ask me to spread the word, which I did in a few places. I think he was wondering if I was interested in being a potential bidder, but with a baby on the way at the time, this Computer Space was a bit much for me. I did, however, see an extremely important opportunity to document the machine in question, and asked the seller if he could provide some photographic documentation of the machine, and any paperwork that would effectively serve as a paper trail to prove that this was, in fact, the Soylent Green prop.

Sadly, he admitted that he had received no such paperwork when originally purchasing the machine. This seller was not an arcade collector or a member of the hardcore retrogaming community, and had originally sought the Computer Space machine as – more or less – a futuristic sculpture. That being said, only the eventual buyer of the machine knows for sure; given what we do know about how the unique casings for this machines were made, however, it seems like it would be an extremely difficult thing to fake. Inasmuch as I could possibly tell without inspecting it in person, I personally believed this machine was the real deal – an incredibly rare piece of both video game and classic SF movie history. An incredibly rare arcade cabinet that, in all likelihood, had happened to share screen time alongside Charlton Heston was sitting in this guy’s living room.

Presented below are the pictures he shared with me. Whether or not you’re skeptical of the machine’s origins, this is an extremely rare look at the innards of an extremely rare machine, and I appreciate the time and effort he took to document it for me.

– Earl Green (is people)

Soylent Green Computer Space machine

Odyssey 100

Odyssey 100 The Game: A simple version of video ping-pong; players use three knobs, one to control horizontal movement, one to control vertical movement, and a third to control the “English” or spin of the ball. (Magnavox, 1975)

Memories: Caught flat-footed by the success of Atari‘s Pong home console, Magnavox found itself struggling to hang onto the very market that Ralph Baer‘s original Odyssey console had created in the first place. Perhaps not surprisingly, Magnavox turned back to the Odyssey, not just for inspiration but to – at least in a limited fashion – put the machine back on the market.

Odyssey 200

Talk about upscale. The Odyssey 200, released not long after the Odyssey 100, added an extra game to the mix, bringing the machine’s built-in game total up to three. In addition to Tennis and Hockey/Soccer, the Odyssey 200 adds Smash, essentially a vastly simplified game of racquetball. (Magnavox seemed to feel that the extra game – and the slightly more sedate paint job on the casing – merited a whole new unit and model number.)

Odyssey 300

Taking Atari’s lead for the first time, the Odyssey 300 – in its bright yellow shell – saw the console abandoning the trio of horizontal/vertical/English controls that had been in place since the original Odyssey. In addition to mimicking the all-in-one controls of Atari’s Pong, Odyssey 300 – still boasting the standard Tennis, Hockey and Smash variations of its predecessors – introduced digital on-screen scoring. The Odyssey games were no longer reliant on the honor system: at 15 points, one player won the game.

The Amazing Maze Game

The Amazing Maze Game The Game: You control a dot making its way through a twisty maze with two exits – one right behind you and one across the screen from you. The computer also controls a dot which immediately begins working its way toward the exit behind you. The game is simple: you have to guide your dot through the maze to the opposite exit before the computer does the same. If the computer wins twice, the game is over. (Midway, 1976)

Memories: Not, strictly speaking, the first maze game, Midway’s early B&W arcade entry The Amazing Maze Game bears a strong resemblence to that first game, which was Atari’s Gotcha. Gotcha was almost identical, except that its joystick controllers were topped by pink rubber domes, leading to Gotcha being nicknamed “the boob game.” Amazing Maze was just a little bit more austere by comparison.

Barricade

Barricade The Game: Up to four players control markers that leave a solid “wall” in their wake. The object of the game is to trap the other players by building a wall around them that they can’t avoid crashing into – or forcing them to crash into their own walls. Run into a wall, either your own or someone else’s, ends your turn and erases your trail from the screen (potentially eliminating an obstacle for the remaining players). The player still standing at the end of the round wins. (Ramtek, 1976)

Memories: If you’re a fan of the “Light Cycle” concept made popular by Tron (both the movie and the game), this is where it all started, with an obscure game from a relatively obscure manufacturer. But that obscurity isn’t earned by a game that essentially launched and entire genre.

Death Race

Death Race The Game: Two players control one car each, careening freely around an arena filled with zombies. Faced with zombie-fication at the pedestrian crossing of the undead, the drivers have only one option: run over their opponents! Each zombie that’s squashed leaves a grave marker behind that becomes an unmovable obstacle to zombies and cars alike. Whoever has run over the most zombies by the end of the timed game wins. (Exidy, 1976)

Memories: Death Race, which didn’t even come within shouting distance of having anything to do with the movie of the same name, was the arcade game that sparked the very first protests about violence in video games. Those protests go on to this very day, with games like the latest iteration of Grand Theft Auto and Bully drawing fire for depicting various kinds of real world violence. Compared to those much more recent games, it’s almost laughable to think that the abstraction of Death Race was where some parents first drew the line. Why? Because Death Race was the first person to put stick figures – a representation of a human being – on the screen and let you do something nasty to them.

Odyssey 500

With the same trio of games as the Odyssey 400 – Tennis, Hockey/Soccer and Smash – the Odyssey 500, released in 1976 by Magnavox, would appear to not be much of an upgrade, but in fact, it’s an absolutely critical turning point for home video games: the Odyssey 500 did away with squares and rectangles to represent the player, and introduced character sprites – hardware-generated characters that roughly mimicked the shape of a human being.

Tennis / Hockey

The Game: Activated by leaving a cartridge out of the slot, powering the system up and pressing one of the selector keys, Tennis and Hockey are built into the system. Timed games can be selected, and the traditional rules of each sport apply. (Fairchild, 1976)

Memories: An interesting indicator of how new the idea of interchangeable cartridges were, Channel F featured two built-in games as well. If a Channel F owner bought the machine but never bothered with any of the game cartridges, he could still enjoy the console. It’s really no surprise, then, that Fairchild fell back on some standard-issue video game ideas – nothing obscure for Channel F’s built-in games.

Tic-Tac-Toe / Shooting Gallery / Quadradoodle

The Game: The first Channel F “Videocart” packs three games into one bright yellow package. Shooting Gallery is a straightforward target practice game in which players try to draw a bead on a moving target. Tic-Tac-Toe is the timeless game of strategy in small, enclosed spaces, and Quadradoodle is a simple paint program, long, long before its time. (Fairchild, 1976)

Memories: This is a game that changed everything. For the first time, owners of a home video game console could go into a store, buy something that was less pricey than the console itself, plug it into that console, and play new and different games. Rudimentary games by today’s standards, sure, but in every sense imaginable, Videocart #1 was a game changer.

Odyssey 2000

After the baffling backward step of the Odyssey 400, Magnavox’s Odyssey 2000 saw a return to the Pong-inspired, single-paddle control scheme, with digital scoring restored as well – Magnavox had decided to rest the Brown Box design (and the subsequent variations on it) permanently in favor of, once again, the General Instruments AY-3-8500 “Pong on a chip” processor. Packaged in a red casing, this would be the last anyone would see of the smoothly rounded-off, integrated Odyssey console. The next system to bear the name would return to its roots – with wired controllers that weren’t necessarily stuck to the main console – and look forward, with a futuristic new design that stands up even today.

Odyssey 3000

It adds nothing to the Odyssey 2000’s “four action-packed video games,” but the Odyssey 3000 is a quantum leap in the design aesthetic of the console itself. Finally breaking away from the basic casing design that had been in place since the Odyssey 100, Odyssey 3000 packs four games (well, really just three plus a Tennis “practice mode”) into a sleek, futuristic-looking black wedge with highlights that almost anticipate – believe it or not – the look of the computer screens in Star Trek: The Next Generation (though to be more realistic, it may have been influenced by the design line of Atari’s Fuji logo). The controllers are detachable but hardwired, and nestle snugly into the console itself.

Fairchild Channel F

It goes without saying that video games were big business in the 1970s, but sometimes getting a look at the players attempting to make their name on that particular field is a good indicator of just how big the business was. Take Fairchild Semiconductor, for example – a well-known player in the integrated circuit business already, Fairchild dipped its toes into the video game water. And why not? You could either have a lock on supplying the chips for another company’s machine, or you could build the whole system and put your name on it. Fairchild chose to go the latter route, and the chipmaker had an ace up its corporate sleeve – something they felt would change the video game industry permanently.

The sad one-two punch to this story is as follows:

Fairchild’s new system did have something that would permanently change the video game industry, an industry-standard-setting new twist whose influence can still be felt today.
Fairchild’s new system wouldn’t survive long enough in the market to really reap the benefit of that revolutionary new gimmick.

Fairchild’s Video Entertainment System came, as did most dedicated consoles of the day, with games built into the machine’s hardware: a simple game of hockey and a Pong-like tennis game. The VES’ two hard-wired controllers were an interesting new twist unto themselves, literally: players would hold the bulk of the controller in one hand and manipulate the control – a combination of multi-directional joystick, twisting paddle and “plunger” – with the other. And when hockey and tennis got old, you could buy extra cartridges and slide them into the slot provided on the front of the system’s main panel.

Fairchild’s system was the first home video game that could be programmed with additional games sold in cartridge form. These optional extra games were housed in their own ROM chips in the cartridges, and Fairchild promised that many future titles would be available. And in 1976, in a consumer world where the console wars, thus far, had been waged by systems that couldn’t be expanded or added onto, at least not since the Magnavox Odyssey with its add-on Shooting Gallery light gun, this was big news. So long as new cartridges were made available, and the games were fresh enough to keep the game-buying public entertained, Fairchild didn’t have to worry about churning out another machine in the next year. The VES simply wouldn’t get old. (At least that was the theory.)

Fairchild’s “Videocarts,” as they were called, were big, bright yellow, and covered with bold, day-glo label artwork that was certainly fancier than anything the machine could actually put on a TV screen. But when the first of these multi-game cartridges added not just one but several new games to the existing system, consumers saw the appeal immediately. Fairchild actually wound up backlogged, with more demand for the VES than they initially had a supply.

One year into the VES’s lifetime, however, another player emerged on the field, and its product had a similar name and operated on the same basic idea. And while Atari’s Video Computer System didn’t even have a built-in game going for it, it did have the marketing might of the makers of Pong behind it, and an established distribution network through Sears. Fairchild’s reaction would almost seem, in hindsight, to indicate that they knew they were up against a formidable foe: the VES was rechristened Channel F, to avoid confusion with Atari’s new cartridge-based system, and the games on Fairchild’s “Videocarts” grew a little more elaborate, now frequently taking up an entire cartridge’s memory with a single game.

Fairchild stayed behind the Channel F through 1978, but Atari’s gains in the home video game market by that time made Channel F look like an also-ran. Other systems – Magnavox’s Odyssey² and Mattel Electronics’ Intellivision among them – were also preparing to go on the market, trying to be the next Atari-sized success story. Fairchild didn’t feel it could compete, and found an unlikely buyer for the Channel F inventory and intellectual properties. Tool and instrument maker Zircon International took on the challenge, even going so far as to retool the console’s look (though not its internal hardware) and re-releasing it as the Zircon Channel F System II in 1982, at the height of video game mania – and on the eve of the crash. A few extra games were released through Zircon, and then they gave up the ghost as well. The first programmable cartridge-based system finally dead-ended.

Here, then, is a brief guide to the oft-overlooked Channel F and its games. And before you write off the influence of Fairchild’s wonder machine of the 1970s, ask yourself this: does your Game Boy Advance still run its games from pre-programmed cartridges? Players may have tuned out on Channel F over 25 years ago, but the system’s legacy still remains.

A Phosphor Dot Fossil examined by Earl Green

Checkmate

Checkmate The Game: Up to four players control markers that leave a solid “wall” in their wake. The object of the game is to trap the other players by building a wall around them that they can’t avoid crashing into – or forcing them to crash into their own walls. Run into a wall, either your own or someone else’s, ends your turn and erases your trail from the screen (potentially eliminating an obstacle for the remaining players). The player still standing at the end of the round wins. (Midway, 1977)

Memories: Any classic gamer worth his weight in pixels will recognize Checkmate as one of the inspirations for the Light Cycle sequence in both the movie and the game adaptation of Tron – but that doesn’t mean that Tron had to be behind the wheel for this concept to be a lot of fun.

Baseball

Baseball The Game: It’s a day at the digital ballpark for two players; the game is very simple – players control the timing of pitches and batting, which will determine how the game unfolds. The highest score at the end of nine innings wins. (RCA, 1977)

Memories: I’m all for a simple game of video baseball. When it got to the point that baseball video games were keeping track of batting averages and other stats, that knocked the genre out of the park for me – I was more than happy to stick to baseball on the Odyssey² and the Game Boy (the two best video versions of the sport for my money). However, it is possible – even for someone with simple tastes like mine – to go too far in the opposite direction: too basic. RCA’s Baseball for the Studio II goes over that line.

Odyssey 4000

The final member of the Odyssey stand-alone console family tree, the Odyssey 4000 boasts more games than any of its predecessors since Ralph Baer’s original Odyssey, and was only the second of the dedicated Odyssey consoles to feature color (after the experimental Odyssey 500). And for those who have ever held the joystick of a Magnavox Odyssey² in their hands, the Odyssey 4000 offers another familiar element – its joysticks are exactly the same mold as those of the Odyssey², only rotated 90 degrees, and sporting some major differences in internal mechanisms. Though multidirectional, the joysticks are designed to favor vertical movement and offer some resistance to horizontal movement.

Blasto

The Game: Piloting a mobile cannon around a cluttered playfield, you have but one task: clear the screen of mines, without blowing yourself up, in the time allotted. If you don’t clear the screen, or you manage to detonate a mine so close to yourself that it takes you out, the game is over. If you do clear all the mines, you get a free chance to try it again. Two players can also try to clear the minefield simultaneously. (Gremlin, 1978)

Memories: It may not look terribly entertaining if you’re accustomed to graphics even on the Atari 2600’s level, but Blasto is quite addictively entertaining when you get right down to it, and its decidedly lo-fi graphics are just part of its charm.

Frogs

The Game: Long before Frogger and Frog Bog, there were simply Frogs, the original arcade amphibians. One or two frogs hop along a lily pad at the bottom of the screen, scoping out tasty flies to eat. When you’ve got a morsel in your frog’s reach, jump and try to activate your frog’s tongue at just the right time. (You’ll know if you’ve snared a meal because your frog will seem to ascend the screen in heavenly bliss.) Whoever has the most points at the end of the timed game is the supreme frog. (Gremlin, 1978)

Memories: Though the game concept would be more widely popularized by Frog Bog several years later on the Intellivision, this is where the two-frogs-catching-flies game began. If you’re wowed by the amazing graphics on this early game, don’t be – the colorful background was a piece of artwork set into the arcade cabinet, onto which the game’s graphics were “projected” by laying the monitor flat on its back and reflecting the computer-generated graphics of the frogs and flies toward the player via a mirror at a 45-degree angle. (The game’s graphics were actually generated and shown backward, so the mirror reflection would show letters and numbers properly.)

Gee Bee

The Game: It’s like pinball, but not quite. Not only are the bouncing-ball physics and bumpers of pinball present, but so are walls of bricks which, when destroyed, add to your score and sometimes redirect your ball in unpredictable directions. Pinball meets Breakout. (Namco, 1978)

Memories: If you’re wracking your brain trying to remember this game, don’t spend too much time – not that many gamers actually got to play it first-hand. It is, in fact, only in retrospect that Gee Bee‘s true historical significance has been revealed.

3-D Tic-Tac-Toe

The Game: If you’re not quite up to the challenge of playing 3-D chess with Mr. Spock, you can always try playing 3-D tic-tac-toe against the Atari 2600. Using your joystick, you position your pieces in an ongoing battle with the computer. But be careful – the machine is very wily about placing its pieces, and can often force you to head it off at one pass, only to leave yourself wide open for a complete vertical row. This game is much more challenging than it looks, despite the age of the technology involved. (Atari, 1978)

Memories: Clever little game, this, and among the earliest batch of Atari cartridges released. And considering that its contemporaries in that batch included such titles as Breakout, Space War and Combat, 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe is probably the most graphically refined of the early VCS games.

Pinball

The Game: A virtual pinball machine is presented, complete with flippers, bumpers, and the ability to physically “bump” the table to influence the motion of the ball. Per standard pinball rules, the object of the game is to keep the ball in play as long as possible. (Ralph Baer, 1978 – unreleased prototype)

Memories: Ralph Baer’s Pinball, released to the public on cartridge at the 2001 Classic Gaming Expo, was never intended to be a commercially released title. Instead, it’s a tech demo of sorts, a “rough sketch” example of what kind of games Magnavox’s still-in-development Odyssey² system would be capable of. There are no special graphics to represent the various elements of the game; the bumpers are simply the letter O, and the flippers are forward and backward slashes.

Armored Encounter! / Sub Chase!

The Game: War is pixellated, blocky hell on the Odyssey²! In Armored Encounter, two combatants in tanks circumnavigate a maze peppered with land mines, searching for the optimum spot from which to blow each other to kingdom come. In Sub Chase, a bomber plane and a submarine, both maneuverable in their own way, try to take each other out without blasting any non-combatant boats routinely running between them (darn that civilian shipping!). In both games, the timer is counting down for both sides to blow each other straight to hell. (Magnavox, 1978)

Memories: Armored Encounter! is a somewhat standard-issue variation on Atari’s Tank coin-op (which that company later used to launch the Atari VCS under the name of Combat), only with a vastly simpified map.

Baseball!

The Game: In Baseball!, you are, quite simply, one of two teams playing the great American game. If you’re up at bat, your joystick and button control the man at the plate and any players on base. If you’re pitching, your button and joystick control how wild or straight your pitches are, and you also control the outfielders – you can catch a ball on the fly, or pick it up and try to catch the other player away from his bases. (Magnavox, 1978)

Memories: Why exactly do I like the Odyssey² baseball game? What the hell do I care for this stripped-down, ultra-simple, painfully two-dimensional version of baseball? Precisely because it is simple. Modern computer sports games are just too damned complex. Baseball! didn’t force you to pick existing players based on their RBI or average score per game, nor did it make you struggle to make sense of a vaguely three-dimensional display trying to ape ESPN game coverage.

Bowling! / Basketball!

The Game: Hit the hardwood in one of two sports. Roll your big shiny one down the lanes and try to knock down all the pins in Bowling!, or go for a basket in Basketball! Not possible in Odyssey² Basketball!: fouls, three-point shots, free throws, most steals… (Magnavox, 1978)

Memories: Granted, neither the bowling nor basketball games for the Atari VCS which competed for shelf space with this two-in-one Odyssey² title were significantly better, but they would’ve been hard pressed to turn out significantly worse.

Computer Golf!

The Game: As man eked out his existence in the dark ages with only his animal cunning and the brutal power of the club, so do you in this golf simulation, in which you putter around nine different courses in an attempt to make a hole in one – or simply to stay under par. (Magnavox, 1978)

Memories: Though Baseball! was a better-playing game, Computer Golf! must be, quite simply, the most memorable Odyssey² sports game there was.

Dodge It

Dodge It The Game: Trapped in a square or rectangular arena, the player is represented by a mobile square. Another projectile punches its way into the arena and begins ricocheting around; points accumulate rapidly the longer the player’s square avoids contact with the projectile, but starting at 200 points, an additional projectile is added every 100 points, each on its own chaotic, bouncing path. The game ends when the player inevitably collides with one of these projectiles. (Fairchild, 1978)

Memories: Nearly every system, no matter how obscure, has at least one unique game that’s worth seeking out both hardware and software, just to try it out and see how much fun it is. Some systems, like the Atari VCS and the Intellivision, have something like half a dozen “killer apps”. When I played Dodge It on the Fairchild Channel F, it was one of those occasions where I looked up at the clock, and realized two things: it was an hour later, and I was still playing Dodge It. It’s a unique concept that I hadn’t seen elsewhere, maddeningly simple and insanely addictive. Dodge It made it worth my while to have a Channel F hooked up in my game room.

Football!

The Game: Woooooo, Packers. Classic pigskin comes to sluggish life in this over-complicated video game edition. Despite the Odyssey’s full keyboard, the game forces players to look up plays in the manual and execute them with joystick commands. After that, aside from some minimal control of whoever has the ball, it’s a bit like watching an ant farm. (Magnavox, 1978)

Memories: Granted, Atari’s black & white arcade football game didn’t exactly conjure up a pixellated Howard Cosell, nor did any of the attempts to adapt that game for Atari’s own VCS. But when one looks at what an improvement Intellivision’s NFL Football was over either the VCS or the Odyssey²’s football games, one wonders what the Odyssey designers were thinking.

Las Vegas Blackjack!

Las Vegas Blackjack! The Game: Place your bets, ditch some cards, or play with the ones you’ve got. The computer offers the usual enticements – double down and insurance – but the odds are firmly in favor of the house. There’s no limit on how big your bet is, so you’re even free to bet an ante that’ll have you screaming “uncle!” if you lose. (Magnavox, 1978)

Memories: I’m not a big fan of card games. In fact, when I got hold of this rather common cartridge recently, the lovely Mrs. PDF actually had to teach me how to play blackjack. I was hopeless. But it’s grown on me. I’ve now had the opportunity to play both this Odyssey 2 version and a Game Boy Color edition which is part of a card game cartridge called Las Vegas Cool Hand. And I have to say I like the Odyssey version better.

Stellar Track

The Game: Welcome to the bridge. Your mission is to travel from sector to sector, eliminating alien incursions without getting your ship and crew destroyed. Friendly starbases offer aid and allow you to make resupply stops so you can keep up the good fight – and you do have to keep a careful eye on your phaser, shield and warp power… (Atari [Sears exclusive], 1978)

Memories: Quite a bit more rare than the VCS edition of Sega’s Star Trek arcade game is this Sears exclusive – and, unless you’re trying to put together an insanely complete collection of 2600 cartridges, don’t sweat it if the rarity of this game prevents you from ever getting your hands on it. Stellar Track sucks like a hull breach.