Superman, Adventure, Haunted House, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Dark Chambers... a big chunk of Atari's legacy constitutes multi-screen or scrolling adventure games, and the fabulous thing about all of them is that their balance between action and brainwork is optimum. In most gamers' minds, this genre probably stands out beyond all of Atari's other creations for their own machine. Taking all of this into account, it's not surprising that the Atari 2600's inventor marked his return to the industry with an adventure game.
Nolan Bushnell has been responsible for a lot of joyous times. Not only did he found Atari, but he designed Computer Space, the first coin-operated video game, and created the Pizza-Time Theater stores around the nation (which contained sizeable video game arcades). But for at least five years, our hero was all but completely kept out of the industry.
In 1977, before Bushnell and his coworkers knew how big the 2600 was going to be, financial problems drove him to sell the company to its parent, Warner Communications. Challenges by Bushnell concerning Warner's plans for Atari led to him being fired, and he could no longer release games for Atari or any competing companies (which, by Warner's definition, meant anybody else). Until 1982, I believe it was, the man who started it all had to watch from a distance.
But the pro outcome was that he had a few years to program something, able to draw from the successive technological tricks and discoveries made by other programmers as the average 2600 game got better and better. When Bushnell re-emerged, Sente, his new company, was formed. He designed a 2600 game that was eventually released by Atari (I assume that they simply bought the game from him). The revolutionist's masterstroke wasn't released until the late '80s, meaning that it tragically missed the 2600's popular era; but for us lingering classic machine fans, it stands as the apogee of Atari's adventure annals, combining many of the best elements seen in multi-screen games over the years.
Secret Quest, devised in seclusion and kept from the public for years for one pencil-pusher's reason or another's, duly traps the player in a series of cold and lonely space stations, here introduced as logical successors to the old castles and dungeons. Each station comprises a multi-level maze of rooms, and they get harder and harder to navigate as you go on -- it's just like a good game should be. It's not something you can beat overnight. It's also the only non-SuperCharger 2600 game that I know of to use passwords (to return to your last place in the game).
The successive quality is very thoroughly employed throughout the game; you don't graduate to better weapons for many levels at a time, and the bad guys get gradually harder and harder to obliterate. Bushnell cleverly keeps the player from simply dashing through a room that contains a sneaky enemy by tendering vital supplies -- energy and oxygen -- only upon the destruction of a baddie.
The playfield recalls Adventure -- simple, exciting, raw walls with openings in them indicate exits to similar rooms. The square explorer has been replaced with an animated humanoid figure, resplendent in his deliciously science-fictionish spacesuit. As in Haunted House, higher or lower floors are accessed by finding staircases in the corners of certain rooms. An additional floor is added every time the player blows up a station and progresses to the next. A station is destroyed by properly entering a code into its self-destruct computer, which you have to locate. The code itself grows by one symbol per station; each floor contains one symbol of the code. Once it's entered, a clock starts ticking down and you have to find the exit and get out of the station before you go kaplooey with it. There's just so much here.
Interestingly, there are no shoot-outs in the game; the swordfighting element of the classic definition of "adventure game" has arrived intact in the form of hand-to-hand combat with something that looks like a Light Saber. One strategy that makes this game pretty unique is that you can't be wild with your weapon; every time you lash it forward, it uses up a bit of your limited supply of energy. It's akin to running out of ammunition, and it makes the battles more strategic than anything resembling tiresome hack'n'slash. Enemies have quite a lot of dodge-and-strike intelligence (or at least seem to, which declares great programming skill anyway).
A great game from the daddy of gaming himself, this will hopefully be rediscovered for years to come by fans of games that truly deserve the description "classic." -- CF