Unknown Activision Game #1

How to play Unknown Activision Game #1 online

• Move your square: arrow keys
• Show which squares are in the right place: Space bar
• Choose a game (1–4): F11 (the console’s Select switch)
• Start a game: F12 (the console’s Reset switch)

The difficulty switches and the colour switch do nothing in this prototype. Oddly, the Player 2 joystick (T/F/G/H) also moves the squares, even though it is a one-player game.

Gameplay

The start-up screen shows the solved board, with the colours running from red down to purple. Your goal is to put a scrambled board back into that order. The tricky part is how things move: when you push your square along a row or column, the square at the far end of that line slides in behind it. You have to learn how this works before you can plan a solution. Pressing fire turns every correctly placed square black. That shows you which shades are in the right spot, but it doesn’t tell you which colour belongs in each row.

Only two of the four games are complete. Game 1 scrambles the board at random and Game 2 always uses the same pattern. Game 3 starts already solved and seems to score points instead of using a timer; it looks unfinished. Game 4 is a demo that you can’t control.

Tips

• Learn on Game 2. The fixed starting pattern lets you repeat the same puzzle until you understand how the squares move.
• Write down the solved order. Note the colours from the start-up screen, because the fire button only shows positions, not colours.

The story behind the prototype

Collector Ben Liashenko found this cartridge in a salvage yard in 1998, together with the prototype listed here as Unknown Activision Game #2. That second game was later identified as Hard Head, but this one is still a mystery. AtariAge and AtariProtos still list it as unknown, and the programmer is not known either. Two builds survive, labelled “SCRMNN” and dated 22 and 29 October 1982. The earlier one has no sound. The file on this page matches the later build with sound. Nobody knows why the game was dropped. AtariProtos thought the puzzle was hard and not much fun, and suggested it may only have been a concept demo.