Taz

Taz is Atari's 1983 game for the Atari 2600, starring the Tasmanian Devil of Looney Tunes fame — the whirling glutton who devours everything in his path. Few licensed characters have ever matched a game mechanic so precisely: the entire design is about eating, and about the one thing you must not eat.

Objects stream across the screen in stacked lanes, and Taz hops between them, gobbling food for points while dodging the dynamite mixed into the flow. It is a textbook Atari 2600 design — one principle, no tutorial, difficulty ramping until the player finally cracks. A console with 128 bytes of RAM could not afford elaborate structures, and that constraint is exactly what taught the era's designers the craft of simplicity.

The Looney Tunes licence pulled real weight in 1983. The cartoons ran on television daily, and a character a child recognised at first glance sold cartridges more reliably than any invented hero. The record lists one or more players, so the contest for best eater could be settled between two humans rather than against the machine alone.

Taz is one of this archive's playable titles. Open the card on OldGame.cz and the Tasmanian whirlwind spins up directly in the browser — you can find out immediately how long you last among the dynamite.