How to play Alpha Beam with Ernie online
A note on controls: this cartridge was made for the Atari Kid’s Controller, a large children’s keypad. An overlay left only four buttons in use: 4 and 6 move the shuttle left and right, and 2 and 8 beam a letter up or down. The emulator on this site emulates joysticks and paddles but not keypads, so the shuttle will most likely not respond to the arrow keys or Space. In practice the game cannot really be played here, though you can pick a game and start it to see how it looks.
- Choose one of the twelve games: F11 (the console’s Select switch); the game number shows at the bottom left, the number of players at the bottom right
- Start or restart: F12 (the console’s Reset switch)
The difficulty switches are not used.
Gameplay
Ernie’s rocket stands in the middle of the screen with four fuel bays on each side. Fuel tanks marked with letters float above and below it. The child steers a small shuttle under the right letter, beams it up and delivers it to the bay with the matching letter. In one-player games you fly the top shuttle; in two-player games a second child flies the bottom one from the other controller.
When the rocket blasts off, the number of correctly filled bays decides how far Ernie gets: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, or all the way home to Earth.
The twelve games
- Games 1–2: practice rounds for one player, where the shuttle centres itself under the nearest tank; capital letters in game 1, small letters in game 2
- Games 3–5: match scrambled letters to bays in alphabetical order, with capitals, small letters, or a mix
- Games 6–8: two-player team games where the bays have no printed letters and the children must match pairs
- Game 9: a timed game with a countdown from 9 to 1 in the rocket’s nose
- Games 10–11: pick the right letter from five; each one you use is replaced by the next letter of the alphabet
- Game 12: a two-player “superchallenge” pairing capital and small letters; the manual also suggests spelling four-letter words with it
History
Alpha Beam was one of the Children’s Computer Workshop series, a group of Sesame Street cartridges that Atari released with the Workshop in 1983. According to the manual, the games were created by a team of writers, artists, programmers and psychologists, with help from many children. Several prototypes survive, the earliest dated December 1982. Atari sold the Kid’s Controller separately, and the game also works with Atari’s standard keypad controller.
Similar games to play next
- Cookie Monster Munch – another game from the same Sesame Street series (also made for the keypad)
- Big Bird’s Egg Catch – Big Bird catches eggs in the same series (also made for the keypad)
- Oscar’s Trash Race – a counting game with Oscar the Grouch (also made for the keypad)
- Word Zapper – a letter game that works with a joystick, so it is playable here
- Basic Math – Atari’s arithmetic cartridge, also played with a joystick