How to play Mean Santa online
- Fly the sleigh and move Santa: arrow keys
- Choose a difficulty mode: F11 (the consoleās Select switch)
- Start a new game: F12 (the consoleās Reset switch)
- Save and load your progress: Ctrl + 0ā9 saves to a slot, Alt + 0ā9 loads it
Gameplay
Each house has two parts. First you steer the sleigh across the night sky and land it on the roof. Stray snowflakes push the sleigh off course if you hit them, and the chimney is an obstacle, not a landing spot. Inside, Santa has to grab every item in the house, such as the Christmas wreaths. Only when the room is empty does the chimney appear as your way out. Later houses add banana peels and a dog that chases you.
There are no points. A hidden clock runs while you play, and when you finish a mode the game shows your total time, so the goal is to beat your best. Hard mode has 25 houses and a final screen.
You choose Easy, Medium or Hard with the Select switch. Easy is gentle enough for young children. Finishing modes also unlocks hidden ones. Cool mode, the programmer explained, is Easy with five extra houses, and players on AtariAge found a final Grinch mode that you only earn by playing Hard mode well.
Tips
- Land away from the chimney. Aim for open roof.
- Plan your route. The exit only opens after the last item, so collect things in an order that ends near the chimney.
- Start with Easy. Finishing a mode is how you unlock the hidden ones.
- Save before a hard house. A save state lets you practise one house until your time is good enough.
PAL and NTSC versions
Mean Santa was made in two builds of the same game: NTSC for North American televisions and PAL for European and other PAL televisions, which use a different picture standard. Buyers outside the USA could order the PAL cartridge. In the browser both work and the game is the same. This page runs the PAL build; for the NTSC build, play Mean Santa (NTSC).
The story behind Mean Santa
The game celebrated the 100th printed issue of 2600 Connection, a newsletter for Atari 2600 fans and collectors. Tim Duarte pitched the idea to Al Backiel in July 2008, drew up the design on paper and asked John K. Harvey (Propane13 on AtariAge) to program it. Harvey said it took him more than a year, and the 8K cartridge ran out of space. In his first design, Santa would have walked across the roof and jumped into the chimney, but that had to go. The team never met in person and worked by email and post.
Mean Santa came out in October 2009 as a limited run of 100 numbered, boxed cartridges in NTSC and PAL, and all of them were sold by the end of December. An āunlimited editionā followed in early 2010: a loose cartridge with a different label and a simple manual.
