How to play Crackpots online
- Move Potsy along the roof: left and right arrow keys
- Drop a flowerpot: Space bar, while Potsy is standing behind a pot
- Choose one or two players: F11 (the console’s Select switch). Game 1 is for one player, Game 2 for two players taking turns.
- Start a game: F12 (the console’s Reset switch)
- Save and load your progress: Ctrl + 0–9 saves to a slot, Alt + 0–9 loads it
The difficulty switches are not used in this game.
Gameplay
Bugs come out of the sewer, cross the sidewalk and climb the front of the building towards its six windows. You walk back and forth along the roof and knock pots down onto them. The bugs arrive in waves of twelve, and each wave has its own colour and way of moving:
- Black bugs crawl straight up.
- Blue bugs wiggle from side to side.
- Red bugs crawl diagonally.
- Green bugs zig-zag between two windows.
After the four colours, the cycle starts again at a higher level, with faster bugs and more points per bug. Six Bonus Bugs are shown below the sewer at the start of every wave, and one disappears each time a bug gets into a window. If six bugs get in, you can’t drop any more pots, a bug eats one layer of the building, and you replay the wave at a slower speed. When six layers have been eaten, the game is over.
Each bug is worth 10 points times its level for a black bug, 20 for blue, 30 for red and 40 for green. So a green bug on level 8 is worth 320 points. At the end of every wave, each Bonus Bug still showing is worth 200 points.
Tips
- Hit them early. Dan Kitchen’s own advice in the manual is to aim for the bugs while they are still on the sidewalk or just leaving the sewer.
- Learn where red and green bugs end up. A red bug finishes two windows away from where it started its climb. A green bug ends up at the window above the spot it started from.
- Narrow your focus later on. At higher levels, the manual suggests guarding three windows in the middle instead of running along the whole roof.
- Protect the Bonus Bugs. Each one left at the end of a wave adds 200 points, so stopping bugs matters more than chasing big scores on single hits.
History
Crackpots was Dan Kitchen’s first Atari 2600 game at Activision. He first planned the enemies as arachnids, but the marketing department turned them into “sewer bugs”. As with many Activision games, players who reached 75,000 points could send in a photo of their score to get an official Crackpots emblem. A 1983 magazine review gave it a B grade, but felt Activision had leaned on the Kaboom! idea of things falling from above once too often. The game was later included in the Activision Classics collection for the PlayStation and Activision Anthology for the PlayStation 2. In 2018 an unfinished sequel, meant to be called Gold Rush, came to light.
Similar games to play next
- Kaboom! – Activision’s bomb-catching game, the other side of the Crackpots idea
- Keystone Kapers – another Activision chase set on the floors of a building
- Tomcat: The F-14 Fighter Simulator – a later 2600 game by Dan Kitchen
- Eggomania – catch falling eggs, then throw them back
- Centipede – another fight against waves of bugs