X-Man

X-Man was released for the Atari 2600 in 1983 by Universal Gamex, and it is one of a small handful of games for that console sold under the counter or by mail order only. It has nothing to do with comic-book mutants; it belongs to the short adult-game wave the American market threw up in the early eighties, which ended about as fast as it began.

The game itself is a maze. You steer a naked figure through corridors towards a door in the middle while dodging obstacles meant to be funny and mostly just unpleasant: scissors, crabs, and a set of snapping teeth. Reach the goal and you get the brief animated scene the whole thing was built around. Then the maze restarts, slightly faster.

As a game it can be summed up in a few sentences. The controls work, the maze is small, the hazards follow simple paths, and one full cycle takes a couple of minutes. Set beside the decent maze games of the period, X-Man is two classes below; its content was meant to replace design rather than support it. And the 2600 renders so little detail that anything supposedly daring is more implied than seen.

What makes it interesting is the context around it. Shops refused to stock it or sold it to adults only, women's organisations protested against it, and the publisher exhausted itself in the process — X-Man is the only commercial release it ever made. Today it is a historical exhibit, useful mostly for showing how wild the Atari 2600 market had become in the months before it collapsed.

On oldgame.cz the game starts directly in the browser, with no installation.