Kaboom!

Kaboom! was programmed for Activision in 1981 by Larry Kaplan, and on the Atari 2600 it stands as a textbook example of pure action design. The concept traces back to the arcade game Avalanche, but instead of anonymous falling rocks you get an opponent with a face: the Mad Bomber scurries along the top of the screen dropping bombs, while below him you slide three buckets of water and have to catch every single one. That is the whole game — and that is exactly why it still works.

The crucial ingredient is the paddle, Atari's rotary controller. It allowed movements that were both lightning-fast and pixel-precise, something no other input method quite reproduces. Early waves fall lazily, but each one is faster and more erratic than the last, until the Bomber is sprinting like a madman and so are you. Points scale with the wave number, so late bombs are worth many times more. Miss a single bomb and you lose a bucket, which means you often catch the final waves with just one left; every thousand points, on the other hand, earns a bucket back.

The result is something close to a trance. A round lasts a few minutes, defeat stings just enough to make you try again, and improvement is immediately visible. Activision famously mailed a Bucket Brigade patch to players who sent in a photo of a 3,000-point screen, and Kaboom! went on to become one of the company's first million-sellers.

To be honest, this is a game for a quarter of an hour, not for an evening, and without a physical paddle some of the magic is lost — a mouse comes closest in emulation, while keys feel clumsy by comparison. As a demonstration of what one good idea could do on a console with a few kilobytes of memory, though, Kaboom! has never been beaten.

You can play it on oldgame.cz straight in your browser, nothing to install.