Luckily, you begin the game with five lives(assuming that the game is running on default options operators could increase or lower this amount by flicking a switch inside of the game), which is more than enough for you to get your bearings and learn the basics.Īs most games of the era, Battlezone is very simple and features only a handful of different enemy types. The objective of Battlezone is to survive for as long as you can while dodging enemy fire and making short work of the enemy tanks that assault you every few seconds. You control a tank from a first-person perspective, which is saying a lot since you can only see your targeting reticle on the screen. The game is set on a flat plain with mountains surrounding the arena. This presentation made it unique, the prospect of allowing the player to “drive a tank” pulling in quarters.įor the gameplay, there are no levels or bosses, nor any type of visible progression other than different enemies that will move faster when you get past some thresholds. While the controls and gameplay are simple, Battlezone was groundbreaking as it gave gamers the first “open world” first-person shooter experience, years before the likes of Doom took the gaming world by storm.
Start Button: Begins the game after introducing your coin.If you miss a target, you’ll need to wait for your bullet to go offscreen to fire again. Only one projectile can be fired at any given time, so precision is always important. Fire Button: As its name implies, you shoot your main battery with this button.Instead, you must stop, turn to the desired direction, and then keep moving forward or back. Since you’re operating a literal tank in this game, you can’t turn while moving. Joystick: You can move forward or back, and also turn in place with the joystick.Games were still very novel back then so the controls and general gameplay were always on the simpler side, and Battlezone is no exception. They did release a new version of BattleZone some time afterwards, which can be found on various console platforms this article is only focused on covering the original 1980 classic.īut enough about the past, let’s blow some tanks up!īattlezone first launched in 1980, which was around the time that Asteroids, Pac-Man, and other huge titles found their way to the market. As a kid growing up in Venezuela, well, you take what you can get beggars can’t be choosers! Amongst a sea of DDR, Whack-a-Mole, light gun games, and other FOTM titles, there stood Battlezone, always unoccupied, always fun the ol’ reliable.Īs a note, BattleZone no longer belongs to Atari, having been sold to a UK developer known as Rebellion back in 2012. FECs in South America were few and far in between. In particular, this game was huge for me growing up as it was the oldest title in my favorite FEC at the time.
That will not be the case with today’s game, which is one of the biggest and most influential titles to land on the scene at the height of the “Golden Age” of gaming: Atari’s BattleZoneīattleZone is one of our personal favorites at PrimeTime Amusements. While we usually dedicate these articles to the games that were most popular in the ‘80s and ‘90s, we sometimes talk about more obscure gems that not many people might have played. Welcome to another entry in our Getting Good series of articles, which are meant to teach you the basics of a variety of different games from years of arcade past, as well as share several good practices to keep in mind if you want to set the highest scores in your local arcade.
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