Atari Poop

Atari Poop – Stargate

Stargate is a 1981 arcade game ported to the 2600 in 1984. It’s a sequel to Defender, but they decided that name was super lame and went with Stargate instead.

The other great move they made was to make this guy the main character:

After the discovery of a massive stone ring in the sands of Giza, Egypt in 1928, the best brains in the world deduce that the symbols are star constellations and coordinates for a location within space. The sequence creates a stable wormhole to a location in another galaxy. Jack O’Neil (Russell’s character) leads a team through the Stargate, steals a super spaceship, and defends a planet against evil aliens who lust to conquer it.  But the marauders keep coming! Your new secret weapon, the Stargate, is the only hope for the beleaguered planet!  You take to the skies in your ship (fortified with the mysterious cloaking compound INVISO) and with the help of the Stargate, maybe — just maybe — you can save the last humanoids and wipe out the aliens FOREVER!

The game is alright. It’s a fun little side-scrolling space shooter. I liked how if you go left or right long enough, it loops you back to the same spot, as though you had just flown around the entire planet. Some of you may be more familiar with its 8-bit port to the NES, known as Defender II (yes, they went back to the lame name). It, along with Rad Racer and Zelda II (the only reason I even bought the NES in the first place), were the first three games I owned for Nintendo’s grey box. A strange part of me prefers the 2600 version. The NES version just looked cheap for an NES game, whereas the 2600 port is decent for a 2600 game.

In the end, Stargate’s legacy ended up forever overshadowing the game, as it now stands as the most successful video game to have ever made the jump to film and television. Eat it Super Mario Bros. Super Show!