Video Gaming Blog

Submitted by Gaming Briefs and Nostalgia Bits

One of the games I fondly recall from childhood is Atari’s Combat for their old 2600 console, which was actually two games in one: Tank, which they made in 1974, and Pursuit, which they made in 1975, both for the arcades, and when first produced, they were marketed under the alternate name of “Kee Games”, in order to get around the problem of some distributors demanding exclusivity at the time (Atari had 7 or 8 different names under which to market some of their games back then, which could include even “RamTek” and certainly “Horror Games”, under which they sold Shark Jaws so as not to get into possible lawsuit problems with Universal, since Jaws was coming out at the time). Both Tank and Pursuit were big successes, and when translating them for the home system, Atari decided to put them both in one cartridge title, Combat, which was a launch title for the system when it debuted in 1977.

I played it on a console owned by the son of a babysitter who’d immigrated to the US from Romania, and it was quite a lot of fun. It should be noted of course that the fun in these two games in one comes from playing with a friend: they were intentionally programmed so that both sides had to be manned by a player, and if only one person was playing, the other tank or plane wouldn’t do anything.

There were about four games of Tank that were put out, and the 4th one, Ultra Tank, which debuted in 1978, was designed for participation by a whopping EIGHT players! And this was years before Sega and Namco, to name but some, came up with racing games where you could join eight driving cockpits together for 8 people to race on the track at the same time. Just like the other games, Ultra Tank also required that all eight units have someone controlling them in order for there to be real action going on.

Combat was a great game for participation between pals to see who could be the winner in a duel, and you could probably say that the games they feature together here were like the grandfather of the fighting games produced years later, like Street Fighter. Isn’t that something?

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