Atari Video Cube

How to play Atari Video Cube online

• Move Hubie: arrow keys
• Pick up or drop a colour: Space bar
• Choose a game variation: F11 (the console’s Select switch)
• Start a game: F12 (the console’s Reset switch), then choose one of 50 scrambled cubes with the arrow keys (up or left adds 10, down or right adds 1) and press Space to begin
• Buzzer or beep for an illegal move: F4 toggles the Player 1 difficulty switch

The goal of the game

The cube has six sides of nine squares each, in red, blue, green, white, purple and orange. At the start the colours are mixed up, and your job is to make every side a single solid colour. You see one side at a time. Walk Hubie off an edge and the cube turns to show the next side, with a short edge-on view while he crosses over.

Hubie himself always has a colour. When he picks up the colour of the square he is standing on, he trades his own colour for it. Press the button once to pick up and again to drop the colour on the same square or another one. He can’t step onto a square of his own colour. If you try, you hear a warning sound and it still counts against you.

You want the lowest score. In odd-numbered games you get one point every time Hubie steps onto a new square, picks up a colour or tries an illegal move. In even-numbered games a timer measures how long you take, down to tenths of a second.

Game variations

There are 18 variations:

• Games 1–10 run at normal speed, and games 11–18 are faster.
• Odd numbers count moves, and even numbers are timed.
• Games 3, 4, 7, 8, 13, 14, 17 and 18 black out the cube, so you only see the colours while it is turning.
• Games 5–8 and 15–18 are demonstrations. Press Reset and Hubie solves the cube on his own.
• Games 9 and 10 let Hubie move only up and to the right.

Tips

• Build on what is there. Look for sides that already have three or more squares of one colour, pick a target colour for each side and keep adding to it.
• Avoid backtracking. Every step costs a point, so plan routes that drop off colours on several sides in one trip.
• Watch Hubie first. Run one of the demonstration games and copy the routes he takes.
• Save the extra square for last. Each game has one extra square of one colour, and picking it up is your final move.

History

After legal disputes with Atari, General Computer Corporation was hired to make games for the company, first arcade games such as Food Fight and Quantum, and then home cartridges when many of Atari’s own programmers had left for Activision and Imagic. Atari Video Cube came out in 1983 through the Atari Club and later appeared in shops.

The same game was also sold as Rubik’s Cube, with the official licence and the same box art. Sources disagree on which name came first. Critics have found the sound crude and repetitive, but the turning cube is a neat effect on the 2600. The game has since appeared in collections such as Atari Anthology and Atari 50.