Laptop gaming historical past is suffering from tales of fabled misplaced {hardware} and software program. A few of them are very well-known such because the E.T. cartridges buried in a desert landfill or the few prototype SNES/CD-ROM hybrid that Nintendo was creating with Sony earlier than the introduction of the PlayStation, however others have pale considerably into obscurity. Amongst these is Tarzan for the Atari 2600, a sport which was by no means launched because of the 1983 console crash, and which the [Video Game History Foundation] have a report on its rediscovery and preservation.
The sport was to be printed by Coleco for his or her ColecoVision console in addition to the 2600. The ColecoVision model was launched and was apparently even pretty properly reviewed, however the Atari port was canceled and its very existence finally pale into obscurity.
Then a guide surfaced in 2011, and in 2022, a pair of prototype cartridges have been bought off by a former Coleco worker. The write-up goes into nice element on the online game manufacturing and offers a captivating snapshot of the turbulence within the trade on the time. However what actually caught our eye have been the 2 cartridges themselves. We now have an apparent prototype board and a extra skilled trying instance, each with a ROM and set of TTL chips used for financial institution switching. Curiously the chips are completely different on every board, in addition to the number of producers and date codes pointing to a hand-assembled board.
Whereas the sport appears quaint to fashionable eyes, it’s positively pushing the boundaries of the console as a lot as any fashionable AAA sport pushes that console below your TV at this time. Should you’re thirsty for extra tales of Nineteen Eighties shopper computing, look no additional than our colleague [Bil Herd]’s account of his days at Commodore.
