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Found 2 Activision Prototypes


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The 1983 copyrights are interesting, because Kaboom! and River Raid were released in 1981 and 1982, respectively.

 

By the 'HCS' on the labels, I'm guessing that they were somehow related to the patches given away for taking a photo of your score and sending it in to Activision; both the Kaboom! and River Raid manuals reference writing the game's name plus 'HCS' on the envelope.

 

If you're not averse to opening them up, could you take some pictures?  Is dumping them out of the question?

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4 minutes ago, x=usr(1536) said:

The 1983 copyrights are interesting, because Kaboom! and River Raid were released in 1981 and 1982, respectively.

 

By the 'HCS' on the labels, I'm guessing that they were somehow related to the patches given away for taking a photo of your score and sending it in to Activision.

 

If you're not averse to opening them up, could you take some pictures?  Is dumping them out of the question?

I could be wrong, but pretty sure the HCS = Home Computer System to designate the 8-bit computers.

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River Raid and Kaboom were released on the computer in 1983 according to Atarimania.

I was almost going to ask could they be C64 games but Activision didn't do Kaboom on it (C64 carts can be practically the same size as ours but have wider edge connectors)

It would be interesting to have them dumped so they could be compared with the production versions.

 

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On 5/23/2023 at 5:00 PM, x=usr(1536) said:

The 1983 copyrights are interesting, because Kaboom! and River Raid were released in 1981 and 1982, respectively.

I don't think you are correct. The 2600 versions of these games were released in 1981 and 1982, but the Atari home computer versions were released in 1983.

 

Just my thoughts. I don't think these cartridges are "European", because as far as I know there are no specific European versions of these games. The US cartridges were available in Europe (in US packaging), but they were sold by official distributors. Between 1979 and 1983 Activision did not have a company in Europe. For example for Germany and The Netherlands the distributor was Ariola and for the United Kingdom it was a company called CGL. The first European Activision company was founded in the United Kingdom in 1984, after the A8 versions of Kaboom and River Raid were released.

 

So personally, I think that these cartridges (if they are prototypes) are US cartridges. The question that remains is, how did they end up in Germany? An old employee who migrated? Or maybe from a US militairy base in Germany? (my 810, 1025, 820, 830 came from a US base in Frankfurt).

PXL_20230525_173817754.jpg

 

@softensive If you need someone in Europe to dump them, I can do that for you or you can ask @Farb. He lives in Germany too.

Edited by Fred_M
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22 minutes ago, Fred_M said:

I don't think you are correct. The 2600 versions of these games were released in 1981 and 1982, but the Atari home computer versions were released in 1983.

I wasn't ;-)  That one was cleared up a few posts above.

 

ISTR that either the Australian or New Zealand Atari importer / distributor was known to have issued their own locally-manufactured cartridges.  I'm wondering if these may not be a couple of those.

 

Regardless, dumps would be useful; without being able to compare them against the US releases, there's no way to know what may or may not be different.  Given that they're in Germany, though, there is the possibility that they came over with US service personnel stationed there, or were marked as prototypes to reduce or avoid taxation when entering the country privately.  The latter really only makes sense if they were destined to be pirated and / or converted to PAL and manufactured locally, however.

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13 minutes ago, x=usr(1536) said:

ISTR that either the Australian or New Zealand Atari importer / distributor was known to have issued their own locally-manufactured cartridges.  I'm wondering if these may not be a couple of those.

 

Interesting! That was not the case over here. We got the US carts and disks in US boxes. In 1984 Activision started to make their own media (disks and cassettes, no cartridges) in the United Kingdom and those were distributed across Europe.

 

I hope these carts will get dumped!

Edited by Fred_M
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On 5/25/2023 at 1:04 PM, Fred_M said:

Interesting! That was not the case over here. We got the US carts and disks in US boxes. In 1984 Activision started to make their own media (disks and cassettes, no cartridges) in the United Kingdom and those were distributed across Europe.

Not everywhere in Europe ;-)  We continued to have US-manufactured software in Ireland right up until the mid-'90s when everything Atari disappeared.  To be fair, we did get quite a bit out of the UK as well, but for A8 stuff the split was generally that disks and cartridges were American and cassettes came from the UK.

 

With the ST, though, the opposite applied - nearly all the software was manufactured somewhere in Europe, except for some specific titles that didn't receive official European releases.

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15 minutes ago, x=usr(1536) said:

To be fair, we did get quite a bit out of the UK as well, but for A8 stuff the split was generally that disks and cartridges were American and cassettes came from the UK.

Very few cassette game titles were ever released by Atari in the U.S. Most of what was released was educational.

 

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On 5/25/2023 at 2:33 PM, MrFish said:

Very few cassette game titles were ever released by Atari in the U.S. Most of what was released was educational.

Atari UK released a reasonable amount on cassette in addition to Atari US, but the vast majority of cassette titles came from third-party companies.

 

They also once released Compilation A, a cassette containing five games.  One of the games happened to be Centipede.  This was all well and good, but the version they included was Glenn the 5200 Man's hack / port from the 5200, not the A8 version :D

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23 minutes ago, x=usr(1536) said:

They also once released Compilation A, a cassette containing five games.  One of the games happened to be Centipede.  This was all well and good, but the version they included was Glenn the 5200 Man's hack / port from the 5200, not the A8 version :D

They should have released all of Glenn's conversions... oh, wait... they could have done the conversions themselves; they even had a very useful thing called source code.

 

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I can't recall our distributor doing Activision carts though it might have happened.

Futuretronics was an utter turd of a company and the main reason Atari never made any inroads in the computer industry here.

Generally they tended to just sell the stuff without much own branding or modifying of the packaging but my 1050 PS has their silver label on top and I do seem to remember getting their inserts (probably warrantee cards) inside the computer boxes.

 

Luckily for us, the Tramiels had the smarts to setup their own base here so at least the ST had half a chance of success here (until left in the dust a few years later once the Amiga 500 was around the same price as the 1040ST)

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 5/25/2023 at 7:30 PM, Fred_M said:

 

So personally, I think that these cartridges (if they are prototypes) are US cartridges. The question that remains is, how did they end up in Germany? An old employee who migrated? Or maybe from a US militairy base in Germany? (my 810, 1025, 820, 830 came from a US base in Frankfurt).

 

Actually I found multiple Activision prototypes over here (in the last 20 years) which are authentic, most for the Atari 2600 - and those were the PAL versions. I am pretty sure Activision distributed those prototypes over here to video game magazines.

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16 hours ago, softensive said:

Actually I found multiple Activision prototypes over here (in the last 20 years) which are authentic, most for the Atari 2600 - and those were the PAL versions. I am pretty sure Activision distributed those prototypes over here to video game magazines.

According to the various preservation projects (and my own findings) there are no specific PAL cartridges of Activision games for the Atari 8-bit home computers, the Activision cartridges distributed in Europe are the same as the ones distributed in the US. The "US" cartridges run fine on PAL systems, although a little bit slower than intended ;-)

Edited by Fred_M
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