Polaris

Polaris is catalogued here with the year 1980, Taito as developer, Tigervision as publisher and the Atari 2600 as platform. That pairing calls for a note: 1980 belongs to Taito's arcade original, while the Tigervision cartridge for the Atari 2600 came later as a home conversion.

The game places you in a submarine along the bottom edge of the screen. Ships and aircraft attack from above, and you move below the waterline shooting upward while also watching what is dropping down. It inverts the usual arrangement in which the player sits at the top and the targets below.

Home conversions of arcade cabinets were always a compromise on the Atari 2600. A 1980 arcade board had considerably more memory and a better display, so the console version had to shed objects, detail and colours. Even so, cartridges like this one shaped how most people first encountered arcade games. The record notes a side view and single-player, matching a static screen with targets moving vertically through it. The title can be tried directly in a browser.

Tigervision was the games division of an electronic toy manufacturer and one of the firms that entered the Atari 2600 cartridge market at a moment when anyone could publish there. Dozens of such publishers appeared in the early eighties and their simultaneous output flooded the shops. The 1983 collapse swept most of them away, and cartridges released just beforehand are among the scarcer ones today, simply because few sold.

Start this one in your browser right from its OldGame.cz page, which also holds the release year, the developer and images.