| Raiders of the Lost Ark 1982, ATARI |
 
In 1981, Lucasfilm LTD released a movie in the popular Indiana Jones series - Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark, starring Harrison Ford of Han Solo (Star Wars) fame. THe movie was highly successful and lead to a license from Lucasfilm to Atari, where star programmer Howard Scott Warshaw basically created one of the most complex Atari 2600 games ever created. I'm not kidding.
In the Atari Game, you play as Indiana Jones in search of the Lost Ark. Unlike most games at the time, which had you racking up a score till' you run out of lives, this game was a true, full-fledged, adventure game in every sense of the word. Kind of insane considering this was on a console designed to run PONG, Tank, and Breakout. Basically, you play the game with not one but TWO Joystics, one to move Indy, the other to control his inventory, and you have many intricate (for an Atari game) pieces of your quest such as whipping snakes, whipping through walls, navigating a mesa, avoiding tse tse flies, a nazi theif, and snakes (of course), and finding a "map room" to find the location of the Ark.....all kinds of crazy stuff. It's kind of like a great ancestor to Monkey Island. Raiders of the Lost Ark is known as one of the hardest games for the Atari 2600. You have to control it with 2 controllers, manage inventory with finite space, follow an almost convoluted/tricky plot without a whole lot of guidance. It's truly one of the games you NEED The manual for because it's not your simple score-gatherer.My Experiences This was one of the games my sister's played back in the 80's when it was new. I vaguely remember hearing the "flute" music as a baby while playing with matchbox cars on the floor. When I was 7, I used the friggin manual to make a book for my other sister of "Raiders of the Lost ARk" - which SOMEONE in my family sent a message to me about a few years ago. It was mega-cringe, but I guess it's part of why I have a weird connection to this game. Honestly, as a week kid, this game was HARD! I seriously would get frustrated trying to avoid the snake, get the giant flyswatter (whip), and figure out what the heck to do, just to drop to the Valley of Poison and get stunned by tse tse flies while getting robbed and stabbed by that creepy thing that might as well have been an Atari version of death incarnate. It kind of got on my nerves after awhile, so I did not play it often. I don't even think I put 1 and 1 together enough to use the manual to help out - welcome to impatient, lazy, Millennial kids circa 1990 folks. I've had it a few other times but never given it a fair chance. Then this year, at the ripe young age of 41, I decided to give it a true, generous shot, and got pretty far into the game armed with a tactile switch modded Gemstik and a new CX-78+ gamepad. I actually managed to become quite skilled with navigating the mesa...which is nuts because I remember just falling through that thing every time to certain death. So I might be doing more long-plays of this until my quasi-retirement from YouTube in March of 2026.Videos Walkthroughs/Manuals/Reviews |
