How to play Hard Head online
- Run left and right: left and right arrow keys (the longer you hold a direction, the faster you run)
- Jump: Space bar
- Start a new game: F12 (the console’s Reset switch)
- Game difficulty: F4 toggles the left difficulty switch
- Climbing style: F9 toggles the right difficulty switch
Gameplay
Blocks roll along a conveyor belt at the bottom of the screen. You jump up and bump them with your head, and they fly off and land somewhere on the screen. Blocks that fly off the edge don’t count. Once you have built a usable tower, you hop onto the conveyor belt and climb up to the next screen. Be careful on the belt: touching a moving block flattens you.
Later levels add twists. A yellow block creeping up the tower knocks you down, a blue one pays bonus points, and the tower eventually collapses: when the alarm sounds you have ten seconds to reach the top. Flying aliens can be knocked out with a block, but a two-legged one that appears from level four can only be dodged by hopping onto the belt.
There are no game variations. The left difficulty switch sets the difficulty. The right one changes how you climb: either straight up the middle of the tower, or, for experts, only up the edges of a staircase-shaped tower.
Tips
- Use short taps to move. Your speed builds up the longer you hold the stick, so quick taps help you line up under a block.
- Expect bugs. This is unfinished work, and your character can get stuck in walls or the screen can shake.
The story behind the prototype
Collector Ben Liashenko found this cartridge in a salvage yard in 1998, together with the game now listed as Unknown Activision Game #1. Its label had fallen off, so for years nobody knew what it was called. In 2017 another copy turned up for sale in the UK with its label still attached, and that finally revealed the name Hard Head. The programmer is still unknown, and so is the reason it was never released. A PAL build dated September 1983 also survives.
Similar games to play next
- Unknown Activision Game #1 – the colour puzzle found in the same salvage yard, still unidentified
- Save Mary – Atari’s later game about stacking blocks into a tower
- Frostbite – Activision’s game about building an igloo one block at a time