| BOULDERDASH 1984-2011 FirstStar Software/2024 AtariAge/GCC/Andrew Davie |
 
Boulderdash is a game developed for Atari 8-bit Computers (400/800/1200 etc...) by Canadian developers Peter Liepa and Chris Gray in 1984 by First Star Software. Austrailian developer Andrew Davie made a Atari 2600 port that was originally released on the AtariAge website in 2011 and limited to 250 copies. When the rights to Boulderdash were obtained by BBG Entertainment in 2017, it eventually got officially licensed in it's 2600 version, and then AtariAge did one last release in 2024, one of the copies went to me - CreepingNet, as my first Homebrew 2600 cartridge.
In Boulderdash, you play a guy named "Rockford" who tunnels through the dirt looking for treasure. Surrounding him are various hazards in the form of boulders and other obstacles that can fall or cause a cave in, or collapse when he digs under or around them. Once you collect enough treasure on a level you can move to the next level of the game. This game is notable because of the technical challenges Andrew and Thomas Jentsczh. THe cartridge requires adding a RAM expansion to the Atari 2600's paltry 128 bytes of memory, and some optimized programming techniques to make the game work on such limited hardware. As such, it's an amazing technical feat. Andrew Davie would continue this into a new game that as-of-yet-is-not-released: Boulderdash 2.....which takes the 2600 to levels of a circa 1987 NES game almost with fancy graphics and scalable gameplay views (!!!)My First Homebrew Purchase and Experiences I picked what had to be the craziest time to order a homebrew game from AtariAge TBH. See, in 2023, we got the Atari 2600+, this whet the public's appetite for more Atari, so then they released the 7800+ the next year (really just a 2600+ in fancier, more 80's like housing), and have been releasing homebrews, and controllers. In 2024, AtariAge.com - the long standing Atari site - was purchased and now is owned by Atari.SA (InfoGrames). So while nothing like a Switch release, Atari has been kinda' gaining some traction with these good moves (of the many bad ones they have made) and generating sort of a mini-Atari-Mania. More people have been buying games, even Gen Z and probably some of Gen Alpha are starting to collect for the console, old timers from GEn X and older Gen Y like myself are getting back into it, some of us even programming games of our own.. The 2600 Homebrew Scene, however, is not new to me. I've been hanging around AtariAge off and on since it started around 1998 or so, I remember when the earliest homebrew games started appearing in 1995. I remember when Princess Rescue was just called "Super Mario Bros VCS" as a workign title, and have seen countless attempts at NES De-makes, and whatnot. What drew me to Boulderdash though, was the interest to see how far people are pushing the ATari 2600 NOW. See, the 2600 vCS is such open-ended, minimal hardware, that you can do some pretty incredible things with it if you have the understanding and know-how. I actually found Boulderdash in reverse, because starting around 2018 or so, Andrew Davie, on YouTube, was posting all sorts of crazy videos of some kind of 2600 game that had background music, high amounts of animation, crazy physics, fancy graphics, I mean, the game looked more like something for an 8-bit computer or even a late 80's DOS game in some ways, with the complexity of a golden-age NES title. This would be the new game, Boulderdash 2, which uses a CDFJ Co-Processor on-board (a new practice for 2600 games, inline with the SNES era practice of things like the FX Chip and RARE's special hardware for Donkey Kong Country's 3D Renderings), and has been rumored to have 256K of ROM (!!! biggest 2600 game ever). So of course, I'm watching to buy that one when it comes out too. |
