Eggomania

Eggomania dates from 1982 and belongs to the part of the Atari 2600 catalogue that Atari itself did not make. U.S. Games was one of several companies that piled into cartridge production during the boom, aiming at the largest installed base in the world.

The idea is a single sentence: a hen at the top of the screen drops eggs, and you move along the bottom catching them in a hat. The drops come faster and at less convenient intervals as you go, so it turns very quickly into a test of anticipation rather than reflex alone. Movement is horizontal, response is instant, and one miss ends the attempt.

This is the archetypal early console game — one mechanic, rising difficulty, no ending, just a score. Games in the late seventies and early eighties used that model out of necessity, because a few kilobytes of ROM could not hold anything more elaborate. What is interesting in hindsight is how well the format survives: distilled to a single skill, it does not date the way more ambitious designs of the period do.

The 2600 had no frame buffer and assembled its picture line by line, so even something this simple required inventive programming. Colours are limited and the sound amounts to a handful of tones, yet legibility is perfect — you can always see exactly where an egg will land, which is the only thing the game needs to communicate.

It runs straight in the browser on OldGame.cz. Sessions are short and intense, and passing the controller to trade scores makes it noticeably better than playing alone.