Alpha Beam with Ernie

Alpha Beam with Ernie was released by Atari in 1983 and it is a Sesame Street teaching game aimed squarely at the very young. Ernie needs to launch for home, but his rocket is empty. You fly a small shuttle beneath it, gather fuel tanks and load them aboard until the tank is full.

The catch is that the fuel tanks are marked with letters and you cannot grab them at random. A letter lights up on the rocket, and you have to find the matching tank, catch it in your transporter beam and set it in place with the same beam. The whole game therefore rests on a single skill: recognising a letter and pairing it with its twin. For a preschooler still meeting the alphabet that is genuinely useful practice, and Atari added a handful of settings that let the game grow with the child. The letters can run in order from A onwards or come mixed; the tanks can sit still or drift about; and in the hardest variant you match a capital with its lower-case form, which is a much harder job for a four-year-old than it sounds.

It is worth knowing that the game was built for Atari's Kid's Controller, a large button panel that shipped with a paper overlay. That is obviously missing under emulation, and with ordinary controls the game feels clumsier than it was meant to.

As entertainment for an adult it has nothing to offer, and there is no sense pretending otherwise. As evidence of how seriously Atari took educational software at the start of the eighties it is interesting, and with a small child at the keyboard it still does exactly what it was designed to do.

On oldgame.cz it runs directly in the browser, with nothing to download.