How to play Peek-A-Boo online
Peek-A-Boo was built for Atariās Kidās Controller, a keypad with twelve buttons, held on its side. The emulator does not emulate this keypad, so on this page you can load the prototype and look at it, but you cannot really play it as intended.
- Start the game: F12 (the consoleās Reset switch)
- Choose a game: F11 (the consoleās Select switch)
Gameplay
The star is a cat called Smart Seymour, who hides behind shapes on the screen and comes back out again. The child presses keypad buttons to move him in different directions, which was meant to teach direction, spatial sense and memory. The eight games start with a single block, then use horizontal and vertical bars, four blocks and four coloured blocks, and in later games different rows or colours of buttons move Seymour in different directions. Wrong buttons give an error sound. The last two games behave oddly, so they may never have been finished.
Why it was never released
Atari presented Peek-A-Boo as a new kind of activity based on the familiar games of peek-a-boo and hide-and-seek. It arrived just as the American video game market was collapsing, and there was no longer room for a small educational title that would probably have sold only modestly, so it was shelved. Years later a disk with mock-ups of the title logo and of Seymour turned up among Jerome Domuratās old work.
