The Video Game Project
A Closer Look At The Prototypes That Became Your Favourite Games!
Ballblazer
Created under the working title of Topsy Turvy, Ballblazer was programmed by David Levine, Peter Langston, David Riordan, and Garry Hare. One of two titles published by LucasFilm as part of their partnership with Atari (the other being Rescue on Fractalus) the game was released in 1984. Created in the Atari 5200's golden years, the alliance was sadly short lived but LucasFilm did go on to release other games under their own brand.
LucasFilm's Games Group was actually conceived directly by George Lucas. He had a clear vision for the future, so a small group of designers, programmers, and artists were ensembled with the sole intention of getting them to do for video games what his visual effect team had been doing for movies and take them to the next level. That newly created section of the computer division was establish as early as March of 1982 with the hiring of Peter Langston and LucasFilm signing a profitable licensing agreement with Atari. Langston then went on to immediately interview and bring in several members to be part of the team.
The Games Groups first task was to set about studing and investigating the true capabalilities of Atari's 2600 and 5200 consoles. That intial small group of four people set about creating game development tools and picking up a couple of "throwaway" games to use as test cases and proof of concept. These tools allowed them to develop directly on Unix workstations and download the binaries to the actual target hardware, something that was virtually unheard of at the time! In 1983 LucasFilm showed early versions of their first two games to Atari.
Known at the time as "BallBlaster" and "Rebel Rescue" Atari were very impressed with their efforts and held onto copies of the games for themselves. It isn't expressly known who leaked them but soon pirated versions of their early game builds began appearing on online bulletin boards. Despite only being available in pirated form, their games received very positive reviews from the public. With that excellent feedback at hand LucasFilm officially delivered the final versions of BallBlazer and Rescue on Fractalus to Atari in May of 1984. A big press conference was held on the 9th to announce their release.
You'd probably expect with all positive publicity the game received that Atari would have jumped at the chance to honor their agreement with LucasFilm and release the home computer (Atari 800) and game machine (Atari 5200) versions of the games. Sadly this wasn't the case and Atari decided to initially make the games 5200 exclusive. For over two years the only way to play these games on your Atari 800 was to download pirated versions from those previously mentioned online bulletin boards. After receiving more positive reviews (this time from the press) Atari decided to change the goalposts once more. Their management structure had changed and hoping to get more money from the deal, the new management team decided to try renegotiate the contract. Ultimately this brought the original Atari / Lucasfilm collaboration to an end. On a positive note (for LucasFilm at least), in 1986 BallBlazer and Rescue on Fractalus were finally officially released on disk for the Atari 800 home computers by Epyx.
Proto - Front
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