How to play Battlezone online
- Drive and turn the tank: arrow keys
- Fire: Z
- Start: Enter; Pause: P
- Keypad: K opens the on-screen keypad; its functions are undocumented (no manual exists)
- The prototype can also be driven with two joysticks, but the keyboard gives one stick, so use the single-stick mode.
Gameplay
You hunt enemy tanks on a flat plain while dodging their shells, and a saucer drifts by for bonus points. AtariProtos reports that the 5200 version keeps most of the vector graphics, though the mountains are solid blue and the volcano is missing, and that destroyed tanks break into pieces. It is not fully polished: objects jump between sizes instead of scaling smoothly, your shots often pass through tanks while enemy shots hit you easily, and the saucer appears more often than in the arcade and is very hard to hit.
Why it was never released
The cartridge dated 15 September 1983 is the only version known to have surfaced. Battlezone was on Atari’s schedule for November 1983, and a box for it appears on a shop shelf in the 1984 film Cloak & Dagger. Nobody knows why it was dropped; AtariProtos suspects it missed its date and was lost in the crash. Atari’s 1987 XE release of Battlezone was a new version, not this one.
