How to play Robotron: 2084 online
- Move: arrow keys (eight directions)
- Fire: Z or X. Your laser shoots in the direction you are moving.
- Choose 1 or 2 players: F2 (Select), or the up and down arrows before the game
- Choose the difficulty: the left and right arrows before the game. There are five levels: Novice, Intermediate, Advanced, Expert and Challenge.
- Pause: F4
On a real console you could also plug a second joystick into the right port and use it only for aiming, much like the arcade machine’s twin sticks. With the keyboard, you play the one-stick way: move and shoot in the same direction. Only the USA (NTSC) release is on this page.
Gameplay
It is the year 2084, and the Robotrons have turned on the humans who built them. You are the one person their reprogramming can’t touch. Each wave drops you into a single screen packed with robots and a few surviving humans. The wave ends when every robot that can be destroyed is gone. You have five lives and earn another every 25,000 points.
- Grunts simply march towards you.
- Hulks cannot be destroyed. Your shots only slow them down, and they kill any human they reach.
- Brains appear every fifth wave. They fire homing missiles and turn humans into hostile Progs.
- Spheroids release Enforcers, which shoot sparks at you.
- Quarks release Tanks, which throw bouncing bombs.
- Electrodes stand still but kill on contact; they change shape from wave to wave.
To rescue a human, a man, woman or child, just touch them. Each rescue in a wave is worth more than the last.
| Target | Points |
|---|---|
| Humans saved in a wave | 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, then 5,000 each |
| Quark, or Spheroid before it hatches | 1,000 |
| Brain | 500 |
| Tank | 200 |
| Enforcer | 150 |
| Grunt or Prog | 100 |
| Missile, spark or bomb | 25 |
Tips
- Get out of the middle, but not into a corner. At the start of a wave enemies close in from all sides, and a corner leaves you nowhere to go.
- Kill Spheroids and Quarks first. Left alone, they keep filling the screen with Enforcers and Tanks.
- Leave a few Grunts for last. As long as some robots remain, the wave isn’t over, so you can collect the remaining humans before finishing it.
- On Brain waves, get to the humans quickly. Every human a Brain reaches becomes a Prog that hunts you.
- Don’t fight the Hulks. Shooting them only slows them down, so steer around them.
The story behind Robotron: 2084
Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar of Vid Kidz made Robotron for Williams Electronics in about six months, and it reached arcades in 1982. They drew on Berzerk, Space Invaders and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The twin-stick controls came from Jarvis’s own frustration with Berzerk, where you could only fire the way you faced. After a car accident left his right hand in a cast, he imagined one stick for moving and a second just for shooting. The first prototype used two Atari 2600 joysticks.
The 7800 version was promoted as a launch title in 1984, and early reports said it would come with a holder for two joysticks, like the Atari 5200 version. When it finally came out in 1986, after Atari’s change of ownership, there was no holder in the box. Allgame’s Brett Alan Weiss thought newcomers would enjoy it but rated it below the arcade original, mainly because of the missing holder. Its source code was released to the public in 2009.
