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 through a mystery door that appears once the required number of treasures have been collected.

Among the earliest homebrews I recall was a game that had you releasing a trapped car from a parking lot. I vaguely recall hearing of Boulderdash's inception in 2003, which was during the height of my collecing days. But I sorta' ignored it because I'd watched many crazy ideas come and go. That's one reason I've been so secretive about my own game "Wall War" - was so I would not join the ranks of the guys who started making games in Batari BASIC and never finishing anything.

By 2017 or so, I'd long since forgotten about the homebrew scene, and was of the opinion by then that the Atari 2600 was going to be one of the first major pillars of gaming history that would be forgotten due to the vast interest in the oldest 8-bit consoles generally being into the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). I'd cashed out my collection of 325 games, but one day bumped, I don't remember how, into this....or at least, a video like it....I think I also saw the "Wen Hop" demo around this time....

By then, I was already programming some, making scripts for stuff at work, already working on this website, already messed with a lot of coding in Adventure Game Studio, and I'd read a lot of the Atari 2600 programmers manual, and understood (kinda...sorta...) what "Racing the Beam" is. Up to this point, a "complex" 2600 game in my mind, was something like, Raiders of the Lost Ark or Solaris, but this....this blew those out of the water. We have a 2600 game with complex physics, colorful graphics, many independant moving animations, scalable views of the playfield (that's something not even the NES really did well, but here's an Atari 2600 whoopin' an NES's ass!), multiple colors per scan line....geeze. Needless to say, I was impressed, but the Atari at this point was just a mere time-waster and not something I was investing into anymore...then 2023 came along....

So in 2023, Atari.SA, Infogrames basically, started making the first of many GOOD business moves. In our time of cloud-stored, "you don't own the game just the right to run it" EULAs for everything outside of Microsoft Windows (which had been that way for years), here was a game company moving in the RIGHT direction in my opinion. THey made a new 2600 console (well, 7800 really, just in a 3/4 size 2600 housing) called the 2600+, and with it, it seems there's been a small "Atari Mania" of sorts. And then the 7800+ was announced, and the things that I'd been wanting for the longest time were FINALLY a reality - WIRELESS CX-78 Gamepads......from a company.

So what does that have to do with Boulderdash? Well, everything kinda. I started "investing" in the platform again. THis time, not as a mere "retro-nostalgia" thing, but because this was a new way of consuming entertainment I could get behind. You own a physical cartridge, that sits in your house, and you can play it on your actual console - even the OLD ones like I prefer to use. I missed having a Heavy SIxer, so I bought one and restored it. I finally got Indy 500 with the required driving controllers, dove into the world of Flash Carts assembling my own 2600 Uno "UnoCart" and learning how to flash it using an ST32 programmer device, and of course, on December 7th 2024, I laid down $40 on the "last chance" to buy a physical copy of the first Boulderdash release......because I Wanted to play it on my own consoles, not on an emulator.

It was a crazy time to order, at the time, Atari.SA bought out the AtariAge site and Albert at Atari Age, the one-man-show who puts together/assembles/packages all the games, was moving cross country, had a convention to go to to represent AtariAge, while the 7800+ and 2600+ and all the included accessories and new games being released I'm sure added mroe fuel to the fire of orders being put in, especially for a large "last chance sale". I'm also sure the orange turnip's new Tariff bullshit was about to affect the ability to make carts too. All that meant waiting about 5 months to get my cartridge. But the wait was worth it and gave me time to focus on the heap of new stuff I got for the 2600 over the 2024 xmas season (CX-78+ wired and wireless gamepads, Mr. Run and Jump, and later the UnoCart which has been giving me more access to the library).

And this game, has not let me down, it's challenging, but seems to follow modern gaming sensibilities. While I bought cart only, I got a manual with it which includes Andrew and Thomas's tech talk about making the game in the last sections (cool reading for me), and some other things (AtariAge sticker...probably going on one of my guitars), and some other homebrew listings and info. So cool stuff. I got it when I was still a bit sick with leftovers from a bad cold so I spent the tiem I wasn't sleeping playing it, and will probably expand this section later.