Atari 8-bit - Synapse Software - 1983
Fort Apocalypse
1 / 4- Genre
- Shoot'em Up! - Miscellaneous
- Year
- 1983
- Language
- Machine Language
- Publisher
- Synapse Software
- Controls
- Joystick
- Developer
- —
- Players
- 1 / Demo
- Country
- Programmer(s)
- Hales, Steve
- License
- Commercial
- Graphic Artist(s)
- —
- Medium
- Sound
- —
- Rarity
- 668
- Cover Artist(s)
- —
- Serial
- —
- Dump
- Download
OTHER VERSIONS WITH THE SAME TITLE (2)
ADDITIONAL COMMENTS
Load cartridge with OS-B.
1 / 5
Cartridge 1
INSTRUCTIONS (8)
ADS (3)
CATALOGS (1)
TRIVIA (1)
Some excerpts from an interview by James Hague with Steve Hales...
JH: "After writing Slime, what made you decide to do something as complex as Fort Apocalypse?"
SH: "Fort was my idea but working with Ihor, it became ours. It originally came from a dream that I had about helicopters and such. Many people have compared it to Broderbund's Choplifter! as a clone. The truth is I had developed an initial version before doing Slime, and at least six months before Choplifter! came to the market. The game was inspired by the movie Blue Thunder and my own bent for creating games that were kind of off the wall. Complexity was never an issue for me. I was always trying to push the envelope. Sometimes I did and sometimes I did not."
JH: "How did you react upon first seeing Choplifter! after your initial work on Fort Apocalypse?"
SH: "My reaction was: why did I stop working on Fort? I actually was working on it four months earlier, but stopped to work on Slime. It was my first experience in which the same or similar idea was created at the same time from completely different sources. I think Fort is a much better game because of the very opposite reason Choplifter! is cool. Fort was never meant to be a real simulation. If I wanted real, I'd go outside. I wanted to do something in a game that I'd never be able to do in real life. Flying machines underground would never happen, so it was interesting."
JH: "Was it difficult to write?"
SH: "I spent maybe six months total on Fort. It was my third commercial title and it came very quickly. I liken it to writing a book. You get into a groove and it just flows. The hardest part was the AI for the enemy Robochoppers. It's not very good, but it works okay. The other hard part was tuning the game for play. The very first version we had shown at CES in 1983 was very hard to play. The first level was different and we changed it after too many people complained."
JH: "Did the design for Fort Apocalypse change during the course of the project?"
SH: "Somewhat. The original idea remained the same but the tuning changed the game - made it much more fun and interesting. The only thing I wish that would have gotten into the design was more levels. Originally, I had planned for fifty levels. But since we wanted to put it onto a cartridge instead of disk, I only had room for two. I spent almost two weeks working on compression methods, but could only get two levels. The ROM was only 16K and I believe there were only a few bytes left."
JH: "How well did the game sell?"
SH: "It sold well. Over 75,000 copies on the Atari 800 and I believe well over that on the Commodore 64. More people know the game from the C64."
WALKTHROUGH (1)
Discover the treacherous caves of Fort Apocalypse
by Bryan Stevens
BOOK / MAGAZINE REVIEWS (1)
Electronic Fun · August, 1983Rating: 1.5 / 4
What happens when you mix Defender, Scramble and Chopper Rescue together, and put them out as one game? About the same thing as mixing ice cream, spaghetti and steak. By themselves they're each terrific, but when mixed together they make something that you don't even want to think about. This is what happened in Fort Apocalypse.
This game has the "rescue the hostages" theme from Choplifter!, and also its bombing mode. It has the caves of Scramble and the movement and firing of Defender. Fort Apocalypse has to win some kind of award for consistently mixing oil and water.
The game begins on the Defender-like upper level, where you encounter some weary-looking aliens who practically refuse to move. You fire this terrific burst from your twin guns and the beams are absorbed by the alien, without any damage to it at all. Apparently your firepower is a joke - you have to hit everything just right in order to destroy it, and sometimes (to add excitement to the game?) the enemy simply refuses to be killed.
Well, after that you descend into Scramble-like cavern passages, where you are supposed to find and rescue the hostages. Down there you are opposed by a number of adversaries - enemy choppers and missile launchers - which are also present on the top level.
The graphics aren't bad, but they've been done by someone with no sense of interior design. The walls are a nauseating pinkish-purplish color. That problem is solved on the second level where the walls are invisible. It takes somebody with a deeply masochistic bent to enjoy playing a game where you blow up after running into something that you can't even see.
This game has the "rescue the hostages" theme from Choplifter!, and also its bombing mode. It has the caves of Scramble and the movement and firing of Defender. Fort Apocalypse has to win some kind of award for consistently mixing oil and water.
The game begins on the Defender-like upper level, where you encounter some weary-looking aliens who practically refuse to move. You fire this terrific burst from your twin guns and the beams are absorbed by the alien, without any damage to it at all. Apparently your firepower is a joke - you have to hit everything just right in order to destroy it, and sometimes (to add excitement to the game?) the enemy simply refuses to be killed.
Well, after that you descend into Scramble-like cavern passages, where you are supposed to find and rescue the hostages. Down there you are opposed by a number of adversaries - enemy choppers and missile launchers - which are also present on the top level.
The graphics aren't bad, but they've been done by someone with no sense of interior design. The walls are a nauseating pinkish-purplish color. That problem is solved on the second level where the walls are invisible. It takes somebody with a deeply masochistic bent to enjoy playing a game where you blow up after running into something that you can't even see.