Battlezone

Posted by: Paul Smith

A Dave Palmer once played Battlezone - Atari's iconic vector graphic tank combat simulation - for 23 hours non-stop. Despite having no previous military experience, Palmer clocked up a high score of 23 million points. This not only offers a neat million points an hour scoring rate: 23 million is also the largest score it was possible to get, and, in 1985, the biggest number in the world.

This was just one of six high scores on various games that Palmer, who was single at the time, managed to achieve in the three day long Video Games Masters' Tournament of that year. We'll be rummaging through the motherboards of his other arcade conquests over the next few weeks, but for now, Battlezone's under scrutiny, so dust off your combat trousers and climb aboard.

Battlezone was futuristic and exciting at the time of its release, in 1980, although so were digital watches, zebra print blouses and Ipswich Town. Battlezone has remained so, however, and much of its charisma is drawn from the simple graphic arrangement by Ed Rotberg, whose distinctive wire-frame technique was much in evidence at the time, notably in Asteroids.

The player's view of proceedings is straightforward, as are his objectives. You drive a tank around, blowing up other tanks before they can kill you, on a battlefield strewn with improbable transparent pyramids and cubes, with a volcano constantly erupting on distant hill range that never gets any closer, no matter how hard you try and drive towards it. Something of a novelty at the time, Battlezone featured a radar upon which the player could ascertain his position and generally work out what was going on. As you might expect, enemy tanks got more dastardly as the game progressed, and often the only warning of a new assailant was a guided missile hurtling towards the player at some speed. This simple but relentless gameplay gave the proceedings a very tense feel, largely due to the very simple matter of a shot needing to hit something or disappear into the distance before another can be fired. This is bad news if you have an itchy trigger finger, and many a novice player has found himself desperately trying to reverse behind an obstacle as returning enemy fire arcs towards him as a result of trying to blaze away too soon.

Among Battlezone's biggest fans were the US Army, who commissioned Atari to make a special version of the game - catchily entitled Bradley Fighting Vehicle - in which it trained the generation of tank commanders that fought the First Gulf War. Only two Bradley versions were produced, and are now something of a Holy Grail for arcade memorabilia collectors: one is still held by the US Army, although they probably use it these days for mucking about on, or propping doors open, and the other is in the hands of a private collector who found it in a car park at the back of Midway Games.

Rumours abounded that, at a certain point in the game, swarms of enemy tanks would rush the player. This is nonsense. Other myths did the rounds: that the ever-present volcano could be scaled by way of a secret route triggered by game events, and that once inside a secret castle would be found. Along similar lines, it was put about that if the player could drive for an hour unmolested in the same direction, he would discover a tank factory which could be destroyed, beating the game itself. It was also widely believed that Battlezone was built around data stolen from the American military and that the coding contained technical blueprints of top secret hardware - almost certainly an inverse representation of the work Atari actually did do with the US Army. Sadly, original Battlezone cabinets are rare, as the periscope eyepieces were withdrawn after one in Denver, Colorado was found to be passing on a skin disease. Also, the first generation of the cabinets did not allow for viewing by non-players as the screen was totally enclosed, which is all very enigmatic but not commercially astute. One can only guess at the tribulations of the gallant Dave Palmer, struggling on for hour after hour like the Man In The Iron Mask, with his eyepieces filling up with sweat. May his novelty optical gaming devices be always fragrant, hygienic, and regularly freshened.

  About the author

Paul Smith

When not writing stuff for us, Paul has his own blog here. It deals mainly with his war of attrition with the general public, a conflict in which neither side seems to want to back down.

You'd either have to be mad, or just have something better to do, to miss it.

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