| |
From programmer John Dunn: 'Snark was my first game for Atari. It was a combination maze solver and shooter. Each game generated a new maze, and you were set upon by critters that you had to shoot in order to negotiate the maze. It had a video spin mode that caused the screen to color cycle really fast, and release was held up because there was some worry this would cause people to have seizures (I know, it's bogus - but this was the early days of video games, and that kind of intense color cycling was unknown territory). It was not published while I was at Atari, and perhaps never was - I didn't track it.'
Why Dunn didn't just remove the video spin mode is unknown. The game seems complete and there doesn't seem to be any space left for more features. However, there are a few unused features in the code that hint at possible ideas that Dunn had been playing with such as different sized bullets. The game also has some oddities which may be bugs such as shooting a player with zero points will add one point to your score and the game will always take the player to the second maze if they are still on the first maze and about to win the game (the winning shot simply won't be counted and the second maze appears).
This is the only Snark prototype known to exist. It is believed that this is the last version that was worked on. Dunn stopped working on this game to start Superman. Atari didn't have real lab loaner labels at this point so they simply put a large white sticker over a production cart (in this case Combat).
|
| | | | |