SO here's the big news that everyone has been wondering about today!
We have indeed found a RELEASED Atari 2600 game made in 1983 that has never been archived, and I am quite sure that nobody out there has played it (but if you have, please let us know)
The game is called "Extra Terrestrials" and is a combination of (in my opinion) Freeway, E.T., and Pac-Man. The game was created in Burlington, Ontario and sold in VERY limited quantities.
o.pwuaioc wrote:Why hasn't this been mentioned before?
Because most people here (myself included) don't really care that much about the 2600. AtariAge has that crowd pretty much covered. I do think it's neat that they just discovered a new game, though.
prfsnl_gmr wrote:There is nothing feigned about it. What I wrote is a display of actual moral superiority.
BoringSupreez wrote:
Because most people here (myself included) don't really care that much about the 2600.
WTF are you talking about? We're a retro forum. Why wouldn't we care about 2600? It was my first console (unless C64 is considered a console) and I have tons of great memories of it. I definitely think 2600 news is more than news-worthy around here. It's definitely amazing that a released game could possibly have been overlooked for this long!
Great story, Thankyou! Never heard of it either, I went to the other page, looks like it was made in Canada. Maybe some more copies floating up North somewhere? Okay, who here is from Canada!
The group was hoping to capitalize on the video game market that was booming at the time. They had hoped to get the game out for the 1983 Christmas season, but delays in the programming precluded that and the game missed the Christmas window. After it was finally finished in early 1984, Peter remembers taking the game out to retailers door to door to purchase copies of the game. They had no distributor, and in the end sold only a couple of hundred copies at most. By then, the video game market had collapsed.
Skill Screen Games was formed by Tom Banting, Peter Banting, and J. Maitland Banting. They produced one game, "Extra Terrestrials" which has been hidden away for almost 30 years before being "discovered" in 2011.
I've been absolutely fascinated with the Atari over the last couple months. It's not my favorite system to collect for but there are so many cool stories relating to the system.
Also, I think the Vader 2600 may be the coolest looking console of all time.
