The Game: Journey through space, visit free-floating outposts, and raid ’em in search of oxygen. Then you just have to get back out with your precious loot – and that’s the hard part. (Atari, 1983)
Memories: Introduced to much fanfare in 1983, Atari’s Major Havoc may well have been the last of the red-hot vector graphics games – and truth be told, it didn’t catch on like the wildfire their marketing materials seemed to be hinting at. It was a really challenging game too – it was easy to lose a lot of quarters to this machine.
That said, Havoc was a very cool game graphically – the elaborate graphics shifted rapidly from 2-D to vaguely 3-D very quickly, and this game offered some of the most active X-Y graphics since Tempest – and certainly some of the most colorful.
Major Havoc was more than home video game consoles of the day could handle, but it’s now been ported to several modern consoles.