Space Jockey

After a week and a half of intermittent effort, I present my take on Space Jockey. This, like many aother 2600 titles that I played as a little kid, I categorized in my mind as snoringly easy. An unfair assessment, because I forgot that as a kid I habitually set it to the easiest difficulty. For that reason I almost neglected to do Space Jockey, but I am glad that I took another look. With the shot speed on maximum, no horizontal movement, and random enemy movement, this can be a tough little game. I kept as much of the packaging art as possible, and I used the YouTube upload of the commercial as inspiration for finding a background image. Basically something that would look halfway convincing off in the distance without changing perspective, while the foreground terrain scrolls like mad. All of the ship images in the bezel borders were taken from newsprint promtional ads for this game, which seemed to have the same art direction as the commercial. They were cleaned up and colorized in gimp. Many thanks to Atarimania for posting such awesome scans of otherwise tough to imagine and near impossible to find content.