Chopper Command

Activision was founded as the first independent studio making games for someone else's console, and its Atari 2600 catalogue includes some of the best work ever done on that hardware. Chopper Command, released in 1982, is a good illustration. You pilot a helicopter tasked with protecting a ground convoy from enemy aircraft, moving across a horizontally scrolling sky.

The radar strip at the bottom of the screen is the defining element. Because the helicopter's field of view is narrow, the radar shows where enemies and your protected vehicles sit outside the visible area, forcing a constant decision about which direction to fly. Several games of the era borrowed this idea, and it is a large part of why Chopper Command plays more actively than a shooter where you simply react to whatever enters the frame.

The Atari 2600 was an extraordinarily constrained machine — 128 bytes of RAM and a picture assembled line by line in real time as the beam swept the screen. Achieving smooth scrolling, a radar display and several simultaneous objects on it was a genuine programming feat. The graphics are necessarily schematic but readable, and speed increases as you progress so pressure builds naturally. Single-player and multiplayer are both supported. You can start it directly in your browser here, which for a 1982 arcade design is the quickest way to confirm that a good core rule keeps working regardless of the hardware's age.