287th played so far
Genre: Shoot ‘Em Up
Platform: VCS
Year of Release: 1977
Developer: Atari
Publisher: Atari
Here’s an interesting landmark for you: As far as we can work out, Combat is the first game on the list that was developed specifically for a home gaming onsole and at home gaming, the Atari VCS being one of the first gaming consoles flexible enough to allow any sort of game to be played without putting the (expensive) logic components in the cartridges.
(While Oregon Trail is not an arcade game, it’s developed for school use and more general micro computers)
The game is billed to have 27 games inside – although most seem to be mostly repeats of what we already know. Let’s see.
Our Thoughts
I’m always a bit apprehensive when starting these sort of games. While they can be fun enough, many more seem to suffer from impervious controls and unclear graphics.
Combat does pull it off. It’s a fairly simple but as a simple player versus player experience, the game offers plenty of shoot out opportunities.
Whereas most games of the time that offered multiple games made minor changes, the game modes in Combat feel more versatile. There are three clearly different game modes (driving a tank, flying bi-planes and flying jets) with different controls, weapons and different options for game modes – the tanks add more walls, while the jet includes adding more planes into the mix.
The graphics of the game are obviously simple, but functional – but obviously you wouldn’t want to go for a game like this for its graphics anyway. Interesting thing about this though – again, a first – the game is the first in the list to use colour graphics. Not through overlays like Breakout or Boot Hill, but because that’s what the game supported, and helped use to indicate different game modes.
Final Thoughts
While this game may not be interesting today, the additions to the game are pretty big to look back on and the game remains playable enough between us to stay fun even today.
Even if you have never played Combat before you will have played a variation of the gameplay in a free Flash or Miniclip game at some point. Something that much copied and clichรฉd that started off right here… it’s great to get a sense of the history.