Ah, the 1980s.
It was an exciting time of terrible fashion, cocaine, angular automotive design, Middle Eastern crises, AIDS, and music excellent and awful in equal measure. Arnold Schwarzenegger had not yet ascended to governorship of California. Mike Tyson had not yet descended into full-fledged lunacy. People thought you looked cool and tough when you wore a red bandana and a cutoff jean jacket instead of just thinking you might have mental problems. Maggie Thatcher was the man, the A-Team had the plan, and the San Francisco ’49ers dominated like few other football teams in NFL history.
Few other time periods in the history of the world are so synonymous with the products they birthed than the 1980s. Rubik’s Cubes. Cabbage Patch dolls. The DeLorean. Leg warmers. Members Only jackets. Transformers. Walkmans. VCRs. Boom Boxes. New Coke. Old Coke. And then there were the video games. And few of those video games exemplify the glorious yuppyism and Russophobia of the Reagan years more than these:
Tax Avoiders (Atari 2600)
Run around a platform-laden screen collecting “$” while trying to avoid “red tape.” Then, in the second screen, run around and climb up and down ladders to avoid the IRS agent; the longer you can keep out of his clutches, the more points money you earn. Then repeat the cycle until the tax year is up. Only in the ’80s could a game like this ever have seemed like a good idea.
Tax Avoiders: Income screen. Yup.
Interestingly, the game mechanics of Tax Avoiders -and even the character you control- are identical to those of 20th Century Fox’s Atari adaptation of the movie Porky’s (speaking of ’80s wonders…), which was released around the same time; it is inconclusive who ripped off who.
Communist Mutants From Space (Atari 2600 + Supercharger)
This game’s story reads like the plot of an exceptionally bad ’50s sci-fi propaganda movie: “The evil ruler of the planet Rooskie has launched a diabolical attack. A cunning Mother Creature, filled with irradiated vodka, transforms helpless slaves captured on peaceful planets into bloodthirsty COMMUNIST MUTANTS!” Irradiated vodka? WTF? Anyway, playing the game reveals that none of the title’s nor instruction manual’s references to communism actually have anything at all to do with, well, anything. Simply calling this “Mutants From Space” wouldn’t have made the slightest difference, although it wouldn’t be the campy curiosity it is today.
Is this what Lenin had in mind?
Despite the cheese factor of the title and premise, Communist Mutants From Space is actually a surprisingly good take on Galaxian. Additionally, it earns extra ’80s Points for being not only an Atari 2600 game, but an Atari 2600 game on cassette; a device called The Supercharger plugged into the Atari and allowed advanced games such as this, which couldn’t be done at the time on cartridge, to be loaded from cassette tape.
The Great Wall Street Fortune Hunt! (Odyssey 2)
First off, this one has a board and pieces. Secondly, it’s a stock market simulation game. It’s exactly as much fun as it sounds like.
The Great Wall Street Fortune Hunt! is one of the Odyssey 2’s three Master Strategy Series titles. These games are interesting in that, in an effort to create large and relatively expansive games while circumventing the Odyssey’s hardware limitations (which were painfully obvious even by 1982), they included game boards, playing pieces, special keyboard overlays, and other means of physical game interaction. They were, in a sense, hybrids of video games and board games, a concept never really seen before (the original Odyssey notwithstanding) or since. But while two of these three games, Conquest of The World! and Quest For The Rings!, respectively offered complex military strategy scenarios and Tolkienian adventure, The Great Wall Street Fortune Hunt! offered a rudimentary and austere stock market simulation that was difficult for Odyssey 2 owners bother with when they could play UFO!, K.C.’s Krazy Chase!, or Pick-Axe Pete! instead.
Just what you always wanted in a video game: a stock market ticker tape.
And yes, all Odyssey 2 games have exclamation marks in their names (except for the very, very few titles released by Imagic and Parker Bros).
Take The Money and Run! (Odyssey 2)
Have you ever had one of those nightmares where something is relentlessly chasing you, and no matter where you go, you can never escape? That’s basically what Take The Money and Run! is.
When a game takes place on a planet called “Keynesium,” it’s like it is warning you to stay away. Take The Money and Run! puts two players -and only two players (if you want to play alone, you have to watch the other guy just stand there)- into Keynesium’s “electronic labyrinth of more than a trillion different mazes!” as they do battle with the forces of…uh…economics. These economic forces -Inflation, Taxes, Income, Investment, Expenses, Reward, and Thief (just like you learned in Econ 101)- are represented by little robots, one to each player. The robots chase the players when a decrease to cash is in effect, such as Taxes, Expenses, Inflation, and Thief; when an increase to cash is in effect, the players go on the offensive. The longer a player goes without being caught by the (-) robot, or the sooner he catches the (+) robot, the better the score, which is naturally measured in dollars. It’s actually pretty similar to Tax Avoiders (or should I say, Tax Avoiders is like Take The Money and Run!, which came out earlier). But that’s basically it. It’s tag. With money. And relentless little econobots that haunt your dreams.
Beware the pink robots that chase you throughout Keynesium’s trillions of mazes!
What was the deal with games like this? Were we so obsessed with money in the ’80s that we actually needed video games about money?
Campaign ’84 (Colecovision)
Somebody, somewhere, thought this game needed to exist. Damn if I know why.
Apparently Campaign ’84 even tried to ban itself.
(c) 2012 Jeffery Koss
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