In a long life of playing video games, there have been only a few times that I have been so impressed by graphics that I didn't quite believe what I was seeing. Believe it or not, the above screenshot is one of those times.
The game in question is the 1982 Atari 2600 action-adventure Swordquest Earthworld, first of what was meant to be a series of four games each with a title based on a different element. (Only three, Earthworld, Waterworld, and Fireworld, were actually completed.)
The series now is little remembered even in retro-gaming circles except perhaps for its bloated and aggressive marketing campaign, which featured original comic books and a series of gaudy prize giveaways -- neither of which could mask the fact that the games were confusing, clunky, and often seemed to be little more than ersatz Frogger clones.
Indeed, rightly or wrongly, the Swordquest games -- with their juxtaposition of weak gameplay and over-the-top promotion -- could be seen not only to exemplify the soulless corporatism and hubris of Atari in the Ray Kassar era, but to qualify as at least a supporting episode in the moralistic saga of the Great Video Game Crash of 1983, which left a mythical landfill of E.T.: The Extraterrestrial cartridges as Atari's Ozymandias monument and which paved the way for the industry's redemption at the hands of a certain plucky Italian plumber.
All of that lay in the future as my eight-year-old self gazed in amazement at the intro screen above. It doesn't look as good in a still frame as in animation -- there's a nice color cycling effect that causes the sword to shimmer and sparkle -- but still you can make out two noteworthy features. First, there's that rich palette of colors that the Atari 2600 could boast. Look at those fine gradations of gold, for example. My personal gaming lineage (Atari 2600 to Commodore 64 to Commodore Amiga) would have to wait until 1987 to have a piece of hardware that could produce a palette anything like that again.
Second, the title, "SwordQuest," is typeset in an ostentatiously fancy way. Text in Atari 2600 games usually didn't look like much. It was flat and blocky. This, by contrast, looked baroque -- dare I say, voluptuous.
The other thing to keep in mind is that all graphical appreciation in those days was contextual. I knew there were many games with more impressive graphics, but not on the Atari 2600. The holy grail in those days was a game with graphics 'as good as the arcade,' and to be an Atari owner was to be bitterly, repeatedly, disappointed in that quest. (I think the port of Berzerk came closest to achieving the ideal, but that was an ugly game to begin with.) If you had an Atari in the early '80s when obviously superior systems were omnipresent on TV commercials and in the pages of magazines, you internalized a certain defeatism, even a kind of self-loathing. Your parents didn't have the money for a fancy Colecovision or Intellivision. You took what you could get.
So when you're eight years old and an Atari 2600 game, even just the intro screen, even just the font on the intro screen, momentarily astonishes you, not just fails to disappoint but actually astonishes you -- you do indeed wonder, "Am I really seeing this?" And you savor that feeling and decades later you savor the memory of it.
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