Atari 5200 Tempest now out at Atari Age Now here is an unreleased beta game done right in coded complete form in an original game cart! Bought one, really professionally made in a 5200 original cart, new PCB inside, manual and outer packaging. How often does one get to buy a game as new thirty years later! So why the excitement over the 5200 version? Well, the Arcade came out in 1980. The 1984 movie Cloak & Dagger had fake boxes on display of various systems including TEMPEST and BATTLEZONE. I have been waiting for this game to come out for Decades (really!) and created a 5200 Tempest Thread back in 2010. The game plays beautiful with a 5200 Arcade sized Trakball, I'll post a full review later. http://www.racketboy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&p=293108#p293108
The best part? That the beta version of Tempest was finished by the original programmer who started it back at Atari almost 30 years ago. This means Duke Nukem no longer can claim to be the longest running vaporware as Tempest took double that time to get released.
The movie is a cheesy 80s flick. However, there are scenes of a real game store from decades ago in the movie worth looking at for the nostalgia. Note the brand new Colecovision Console at the top. THIS. An interesting history in this game, how the code was rediscovered twenty years later on 8 inch floppies. Atari Age really made the release perfect with the professional packaging; putting the game in a real 5200 cart to play as it was meant to be played, in the 5200 console. I posted a review with pics including a look inside the 5200 Trakball. Atari Age 5200 Tempest Review / 5200 Trakball Servicing http://www.racketboy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&p=724273#p724273
I wish we could have used the same artwork that appears on the mock-up in the move, but to my knowledge that has not been found. Speaking of mock-ups, with the advent of freeze frame and DVD's, you can really see how bad that C&D box is. They just took a silver piece of paper with a makeshift C&D logo on it and pasted it over another box. Notice how the style doesn't even match the other real boxes. I never noticed how bad this was back when I saw this movie on the big screen because they generally don't show the box for very long. Oh and you can see the sides of the boxes for 5200 Battlezone (far left) and 2600 Tempest (far right) which were also not released. Interestingly the 5200 version of Battlezone had the ability to use the dual controller holder like Robotron and Space Dungeon, but doesn't appear to come in an oversized box with the holder included like they did. Maybe Atari wasn't planning on selling it like this or maybe they're just mock-ups for the move (although they look like production boxes).
