One of my best video game memories is the Activision classic. Kaboom! for the Atari 2600. Back in the days when the simple lure of repetitive score-based games could hold your interest for hours on end, this was the best shelf for a tween like me.
Today’s young gamers may get some exposure to the game, either through various Activision collections on current or recent generation consoles or through Atari 2600 emulators, but there’s a big difference between these versions and the original. Those would be the controls.
In the days of the Atari 2600 there were various drivers for the system and each game required you to use the appropriate ones. The vast majority used the tried and true joystick controller or Atari Paddle controllers. With the current generation of consoles, there is no acceptable approximation for the paddle controller. A simple box with a round spinning wheel that gave it “stop on a dime” accuracy for games that required it. The closest you could get to the experience today would be an arcade trackball. Kaboom! it was the ultimate paddle controller game. He was the one who wore them out.
It was a simple concept. There was a villain on top of a wall dropping bombs and you were a pile of buckets of water at the bottom of the wall. You had to catch the bombs as they fell. If you missed one: KABOOM! You started with three stacked buckets and every time you missed a bomb you lost a bucket. When you missed three in total, the game was over.
My older brother and I would literally spend hours on this game every night. The instruction manual (quite heavy for such a simple game) talked about a special event that we were obsessed with unlocking.
If you were able to reach the incredible score of 10,000 points, the villain, in recognition of your incredible achievement, would honor you with some mysterious gesture.
My brother and I beat this game for a long time to get there. Back then, there was no internet, so you couldn’t just buy the game, run home, and go online to find all the information you needed or wanted about it. His gaming “community” was the other kids in his fifth grade class who also owned an Atari or who became his sworn enemy because they had the Intellivision console. My older brother was in his 20s, so his gaming community back then was his old friends from high school who he still got high with.
Kaboom! Gambling has become an art form. There were eight levels. With each level that progressed, the villain would sweep back and forth across the wall looting the bombs with increased speed.
Like any replay-based game, you can reduce the first 5 or 6 levels to an art form that’s only missing when you get too complacent. Levels 7 and 8 were the wild cards. To get to 10,000 you would have to go through all 8 levels and continue at crazy pace level 8 over and over again until you lose. The last two levels were so fast and chaotic that it was almost impossible to define a pattern that would give you a continuous success rate of more than 90 percent.
There were many tricks. Every thousand points, you would get an extra bucket if it went down to less than three. Every time you missed a bomb, the game would come back and you would start at the speed of the previous level. The perfect strategy if you had all three cubes was to deliberately miss the last bomb which would place you over the next 1000 point bonus so you could go back and rack up as many points as you could by replaying the previous level knowing you would pick that third cube back with the first capture. Bomb the next wave at a slower speed.
On the odd levels, the villain would drop the bombs together across the wall in a fairly simple pattern. On even levels, he would spread the bomb drops farther and throw an occasional erratic move on the right side of the wall.
The paddle controllers, while accurate, also showed a bit of resistance. One of the controllers was slightly better than the other and my brother and I always had to call Dibbs about the “good” one. One of them had a bit more jerky movement when moving the cubes around the screen. In certain places you could take your fingers off and the cubes would twitch. Sometimes you hit that spot at a bad time and while the effect was minimal, it could cause your cubes to move away from where you needed to be and cause you to miss.
All of these factors were part of our intensive study of the game. And for a short period of time it was a big part of our nightlife. I don’t know how many hours, days, weeks, months my brother and I put into the game, but we started to get quite defeatist about it after a while with talks like “it’s impossible. The 10,000 point barrier may not be reached.” .
We had spent so much time speculating on what the heck the mystical 10,000 point reward might be that we had built it to be almost anything, including the game cartridge that would jump out of the console and give you a handjob on the spot. The smart money was in my brother’s speculation that the villain would “doff his hat” to you. Hey, with Atari 2600 graphics, a hat hint was a pretty reasonable expectation!
It all came to a head one night. He was punching through level 8 over and over again getting me close to 10,000. Finally, I reached my last bucket of water. We almost arrive! Almost. And then at 9,998 points, I lost the next bomb. Game over.
That was the bubble burst and we both pretty much lost our taste for the game. We had both had enough.
We played Atari after that, but Kaboom! it was just an occasional joke and we went on with our gaming lives. This would have been around 1983.
The story begins about 12 years later, in the mid-1990s. My brother was married with two children at the time. She was married but didn’t have any of my children yet. He was unpacking some junk in my modest apartment and came across my old Atari 2600. It was still working fine, but the TV/GAME converter box wasn’t working, so I literally grabbed the metal end of the cord that went into the switch. the box and taped it to the metal TV antenna and tuned the TV to channel 3. Don’t laugh folks, that worked wonders in the days of channel 3 wireless TV. Crystal clear image as long as you don’t hit it.
Anyway. Elderly. Married. College degree. Full time work. it was time to revisit Kaboom!
All the time I spent on it when I was younger. Man, there was no way I was going to get my skills back into shape, but it was worth a try.
It took around 90 minutes. I don’t know what changed all those years later. Night after night. Week after week. Neither I nor my brother could break that barrier of 10,000. Then, without playing it for a dozen years, I played it for 90 minutes and hit it.
Now, before I finish this story, let me tell you that if you play this game on one of these collections, it’s not the same with a keyboard, XBOX controller, or Game Boy. IT’S JUST NOT THE SAME without the paddle controllers.
In any case, at 10,000 points the villain smiles briefly. Normally, he had a simple “V” on his face that was his mouth frowning. At 10,000, the V-shaped frown turns into a smile.
What a load of crap.
