Atari 2600: Warlords
Years ago me and my cousin Jason refurbished an old shed type structure in my folk's backyard. It had a stone frame with a wooden roof and a few windows. The shack had been haggard and smashed up for years. We didn't really do much construction or anything not being skilled in that area. It was mostly a clean up type venture but we did patch up some of the holes in the dilapidated ceiling with corrugated plastic in hopes of keeping rain and falling leaves on the outside. It wasn't much of a building but it served it's purpose as a hideout.
The shack didn't come with any power outlets so we ran a super long extension cord from the pool house down through the ceiling so that we had the juice to set up a boombox, a couple of lights and an Atari 2600 that I picked up at the flea market.
I like Atari as much as the next guy and even I have to admit the games don't hold up well over time, with a few exceptions. One of those major exceptions is a cool ass four player game called Warlords.
The deal with Warlords is that you have a king or some other type of leader encased behind a brick half circle. In front of the half circle is your avatar. In this case a curved thing made out of squares. The point of a the game is to hit the other castle's king with a ball that bounces around the screen until you break through the wall and slay the leader. Last man left is the winner.
You can catch the ball by holding down the button on the side of the paddle and throw it at your foe or just let it bounce off of your avatar toward one of the other dude's home.
What I liked the most about Warlords is that you can play with up to four players at the same time. This was the first time that I can recall seeing this feature. It's really what makes the game fun. You get the chance to defeat your buddies and laugh at them while doing so.
So, we had the Atari set up in the shack and over time picked up a whole bunch of games and the only one that we played more than a couple of times was Warlords. It's not that it's an awesome game but the competition keeps you coming back.
I understand that Warlords started off as an arcade game but I've never had the pleasure of playing it in that format. I'd like to though. It came as a stand up cabinet as well as a cocktail table. The stand up cabinet only allowed for two players at a time but the sit down version let you and three buddies go at it simultaneously.
Warlords was created by Carla Meninsky who was one of two female designers working for Atari (the other being Carol Shaw). Meninsky also created Dodge 'Em which was a car race-maze type deal. According to an interview she gave years back when she started work on Warlords it was a 2600 game before being converted to an arcade game
Overall I'd have to say that Warlords is one of the more memorable Atari cartridges, as a matter of fact it was voted the 25th best game of all time by Game Informer Magazine in a 2001 poll. It's astounding that a 2600 game could crack that list but it was ten years ago and video games have come a really long way in that time. I wonder if Warlords would make a list like that the poll were taken today? Probably not but that doesn't make it any less fun to play.
Posted by Ben Lid at 10/15/2011 3:05 PM 
Categories: Video Games
Tags: Atari videogames warlords carla meninsky
Categories: Video Games
Tags: Atari videogames warlords carla meninsky
Comments