Polo

How to play Polo online

• Player 1 (move your rider): arrow keys
• Player 2 (move your rider): T/F/G/H
• Choose a game option: F11 (the console’s Select switch)
• Start a new game: F12 (the console’s Reset switch)
• Save and load your progress: Ctrl + 0–9 saves to a slot, Alt + 0–9 loads it

Gameplay

Polo plays much like one-on-one soccer on horseback. Each player rides a horse and tries to knock the ball into the other player’s goal. You don’t need to press a button to hit it. Just ride into the ball with the lower half of your horse and rider, where the mallet is, and the ball flies off. It always goes towards your opponent’s goal, so scoring an own goal is very hard. The field is small and the horses are big, so matches are fast and short.

The game options let you change the speed of the ball and the size of the goals. In some games the ball passes through the walls instead of bouncing off them. There is also a two-on-two mode where each player steers a pair of horses that move together, although the small field makes it feel crowded.

Tips

• Stay low on the ball. Only the mallet half of your sprite hits the ball, so line up the bottom of your horse with it.
• Attack without fear. Since the ball always heads towards the other goal, you can charge in hard without risking an own goal.
• Watch out for the yellow player. The moving riders are drawn in thin lines and blur, and the yellow one is hard to see against the green grass.

The story behind Polo

In 1978 Atari belonged to Warner Communications, which also had business ties to Ralph Lauren. Carol Shaw, who also wrote 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe and Video Checkers for Atari and later River Raid for Activision, was asked to make a game to go with the new Polo fragrance. It may have been meant as a gift for big-spending customers. Prototypes and handwritten instructions were reportedly sent to Bloomingdale’s in New York, but the promotion never went ahead, possibly because giving away cartridges would have cost too much. The known prototype is dated 6 December 1978. A self-published reproduction cartridge appeared in 2002.

The players look striped because Shaw used a display trick known as “Venetian blinds”. It draws the objects on alternating lines, so the 2600 can show more of them in one row than it normally could. The price is that the riders look blurry when they move.