How to play Battlezone online
- Drive forward / reverse: up and down arrow keys
- Turn on the spot: left and right arrow keys
- Drive in a curve: press two arrow keys together
- Fire the turret gun: Space bar
- Start a new game: F12 (the console’s Reset switch) or Space
- Choose a skill level: F11 (the console’s Select switch)
- Save and load your progress: Ctrl + 0–9 saves to a slot, Alt + 0–9 loads it
Gameplay
The manual sets the scene in 1999: automated war machines are loose in the countryside, and you have found an old tank in a museum to fight them. You only see what is in front of you, so the radar at the top of the screen is your key tool. Enemies show up on it as white blips around your tank in the centre. Turn until a blip sits between the two lines at the top of the radar and the enemy appears on the main screen. The sighting mark above the battlefield turns from black to white when a target is in your line of fire.
You have five tanks and lose one each time you are hit, even by an enemy you can’t see. There are four kinds of opponent:
- Tanks, the most common enemy, have blue turrets and are a little slower than you.
- Supertanks look like tanks but have yellow turrets and are faster than you.
- Fighters appear straight ahead, zigzag towards you with a buzzing sound, then swerve aside at close range and fire a shell at you.
- Flying saucers never shoot, but they are hard to hit and good at distracting you.
| Target | Points |
|---|---|
| Tank | 1,000 |
| Fighter | 2,000 |
| Supertank | 3,000 |
| Flying saucer | 5,000 |
You earn a bonus tank at 50,000 and again at 100,000 points. The Select switch offers three skill levels: Novice, Intermediate and Advanced. The number of tanks at the bottom of the screen shows the chosen level. The difficulty switches have no effect.
Tips for surviving longer
- Make every shot count. You can’t fire again until your shell hits something or leaves the screen, so a miss leaves you defenceless for a moment.
- Dodge at an angle. When you hear an enemy gun fire, turn about 45 degrees and drive forward or backward at once. Spinning on the spot won’t save you.
- Reverse to find a tank behind you. Back up until it comes into view, then shoot as it turns to face you.
- Use enemies against each other. By shifting sideways you can sometimes steer a flying saucer into a shell fired by an enemy tank.
The story behind Battlezone
The arcade Battlezone was designed by Ed Rotberg, who took Atari’s 1974 arcade game Tank as his starting point and turned it into a first-person 3D game with vector graphics. It is often named as the first successful first-person shooter, and about 15,000 cabinets were sold. A modified version, The Bradley Trainer, was even built for the US Army.
Bringing that to the Atari 2600 meant dropping the vector graphics. The home version uses ordinary raster graphics, and your own tank is visible on screen, rather than the arcade’s pure cockpit view. Several programmers tried their hand at a 2600 conversion, both inside Atari and at the outside developer General Computer Corporation (GCC), and it was the GCC version that reached the shops. Activision’s Robot Tank, also from 1983, offered a similar tank battle on the 2600.
Similar games to play next
- Robot Tank – Activision’s tank battle with day, night and bad weather
- Star Raiders – Atari’s first-person space combat with a galactic map
- Star Voyager – Imagic’s first-person space shooter
- Combat Two – Atari’s unreleased sequel to the two-player tank duel Combat