#oneaday Day 591: 112 Video Games

I acquired a copy of Space Invaders for Atari 2600 today, and have been playing a bit. It's a good version of Space Invaders — certainly very addictive! — but the thing I find amusing about it is that it has a hundred and twelve different game modes.

For those unfamiliar with the Atari 2600, the limitations of the console meant that most games didn't have the kind of "main menu" we tend to expect from a game today. Instead, different ways to play were stored as different "game numbers" that changes the rules of play somewhat.

For example, in Space Invaders, you have versions where it plays normally, where the shields move, where the enemy missiles move more erratically and where the aliens are invisible except for a moment after you hit them. Then you have more versions where there are combinations of those variables. And then, in the case of Space Invaders, there are all those versions all over again for two players playing together. Two players alternating turns. Two players sharing control of a single ship. Two players taking it in turns to fire a single shot from the same ship. And so on.

In total, there are, as noted above, 112 different combinations of all these factors available on that one cartridge — which, as you can imagine, made for wonderful marketing back in the day. Imagine picking up a game box for the Atari 2600 that proudly boasted, as it did, "112 Video Games". All of which are Space Invaders.

Usually, in order to access one of these specific modes of play, you press the "Game Select" switch on the 2600 repeatedly until the number of the game you want appears on screen. Atari was clearly aware that 112 variations would present a bit of a problem to some people, so they actually implemented a system where you could skip through the numbers more quickly by pressing the Game Select and Game Reset buttons at the same time — the latter, when pressed by itself, normally begins a game.

Me? I like Game 1. Although I did come perilously close to maxing out the score at 9999 earlier, so perhaps I need to graduate to something a bit more challenging!