Laser Blast

Laser Blast was published in 1981 by Activision for the Atari 2600. The record lists one player and a side view.

Activision had been founded shortly before as the first independent publisher of games for someone else's console. It was started by programmers who left Atari because their names never appeared on the boxes. The new company inverted that: the author was credited on the packaging, often with a photograph, which made programmers publicly known figures for the first time.

The Atari 2600 made extraordinary demands on developers. The console had 128 bytes of RAM, and the picture was assembled line by line in exact step with the television's scanning beam. Every game was therefore a compromise between the number of objects, the colours used and smooth motion, and the gap between skilled and weak programmers showed immediately in the result.

1981 also sits just before the crash of the American games market. Activision's output from these years is remembered precisely because it held a higher standard than the flood of titles that swamped shelves two years later and helped bring the business down.

The model Activision established reshaped the industry. It proved that anyone who understood a console's hardware could make games for it, and Atari failed to reverse that even in court. Within two years dozens of further independent publishers existed, and their sheer number contributed directly to the market glut of 1983. This release comes from the short window when the model still worked cleanly.

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