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| Larry Kaplan Larry Kaplan was hired in August 1979 as the first programmer to begin to develop games for the upcoming system. Kaplan's first title was Air-Sea Battle. Kaboom was a big seller for Activision - over one million cartridges were sold by 1983. Larry Kaplan originally wanted to port Dennis Koble's Atari Coinop game Avalanche to the atari 2600. But the problem was that in Avalanche all the boulders are lined up at top which is hard to do with 2600 graphics, hence the shift to the Madbomber. David Crane actually coded the overlaid sprites for the Madbomber himself. Although Avalanche failed in the arcades, the gameplay is quite similar to Kaboom!, and so the sucess of Kaboom! helps to vindicate Dennis' efforts in retrospect. Kaboom is a 2k game, as all the first Activision releases were. Kaplan is quoted as saying that 2k is all you really need for a 2600 title, and that 4k is extravagant. Kaplan only released one 4k title, Bridge, and he said that he only needed the extra 2k for the AI. The idea of this game is to catch the bombs being dropped by a psycho crook at the top of the screen. Every wave gets faster until you are up to 13 bombs a second. It gets really intense. Larry Kaplan himself once said that a kid was at a game expo and reached 999,999 (the highest score possible). Supposedly, he went into a zen-like trance! |
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