The Long-Lost Tarzan Atari Game, Preserved
owl writes:
https://gamehistory.org/atari-2600-tarzan/
When you think about games written for the Atari Video Computer System (or 2600) today, what do you picture? Likely a home version of an arcade game, or some kind of shooter, a maze game, something that takes place entirely on a single screen. This is not the entirety of the 2600 library, though - major releases such as Pitfall!, Adventure, E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial, or Smurfs: Rescue in Gargamel's Castle were built around worlds that extended beyond the screen's borders, where you didn't necessarily know what was coming next or how you'd need to approach that challenge. And among the most ambitious of these titles announced was Tarzan, to be published by Coleco for the 2600 and the ColecoVision console in 1984.
Tarzan was initially announced for as a 1983 ColecoVision release at the 1983 Winter Consumer Electronics Show, held in Las Vegas, with a 2600 port announced later that year during the summer CES for a November release. These dates slipped, with the ColecoVision Tarzan finally shipping in August, and the 2600 game announced as a second quarter release before being quietly canceled. The released ColecoVision version was fairly well-reviewed, with the newsletter Computer Entertainer praising the graphics and the varied action, noting strategy is required to clear the game. But the 2600 version faded into obscurity, considered just another project canceled due to the 1983 North American market collapse and its yearslong aftermath. In 2011 a manual for the game turned up, but the game itself remained lost. Lost, that is, until collector Rob "AtariSpot" managed to purchase a working copy of the game off of a former Coleco employee in 2022 and successfully worked with longtime Atari homebrew programmer Thomas Jentzsch to get it dumped. All 2600 games bigger than 4 kilobytes in size utilize an approach called "bankswitching" to get around hardware limitations by inserting code that gets the console to look at a separate 4-kilobyte chunk of data. This allowed for larger and more complex game programs, and Tarzan, a 12-kilobyte cartridge, is no exception. The game uses a unique bankswitching scheme, but Jentzsch was able to modify it into a standard "F6" bankswitch to make it operable on emulators and flash carts. Both versions are included with this article.
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