Ludography
Atari Video Cube cover

1982 · Atari · Puzzle

Atari Video Cube

Atari exclusive

Help Hubie the Cube Master solve the magical Atari Video Cube. He picks up and drops colors at your command - and you have billions of possible combinations! Atari Video Cube is fast-paced fun for the whole family!

Released
1982
Platforms
Atari 2600
Genres
Puzzle
Developers
Atari
Publishers
—
Perspective
Bird view / Isometric
Country
United States

About

Atari Video Cube is a 1983 puzzle video game developed and published by Atari, Inc. for the Atari 2600. It was sold exclusively through the Atari Club, run by Atari itself. It was later re-released as Rubik's Cube.

Media

Atari Video Cube screenshot 1

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Gameplay

The game implements a Pocket Cube, Rubik's Cube and Rubik's Revenge. The player takes control of "Hubie the Cube Master" as he tries to solve a scrambled "Video Cube". Hubie's method for solving the cube is to pick up the colored segments one-by-one and place them in their correct spaces. Picking up a square, however, limits Hubie's movements; he cannot move onto a square that matches the color of the one he is carrying.

The game manual encourages players to try and solve the cube in as few moves as possible, with their total number of moves being counted at the bottom of the screen. Atari Video Cube has several game modes that alter the difficulty of the game, such as square count and color range.

Development

Atari Video Cube was developed by Doug Macrae, one of the founders of General Computer Corporation. Following legal disputes with Atari, Inc., the company hired him to create games. He was told Atari would pay them $50,000 a month for two years to develop games, with no stipulation of how many games were to be developed. This led to GCC making arcade games Food Fight (1982) and Quantum (1982) for Atari.

Macrae said that as a lot of Atari programmers left to work at Activision and Imagic, this led to Atari asking GCC to develop games for Atari's home consoles. Macrae reflected on this in an interview published in 2024 stating "being the young, arrogant engineers out of MIT and Harvard that we were, we said, "Of course, absolutely.""

Reception

From retrospective reviews, Brett Weiss in his book Classic Home Video Games, 1972-1984 (2011) found the game had crude sound that grew annoying, while complimenting the 3D-like effect of the cube turning as impressive. On reviewing the first two volumes of Atari Flashback Classics for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, Channing King specifically highlighted Atari Video Cube as one of the many Atari 2600 games that have aged poorly.

Releases by platformdates and regions as published

PlatformReleasedRegions
Atari 260031 December 1982Worldwide

Editions and related releases

Included in
Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1Atari Flashback Classics Vol. 2Atari Flashback ClassicsAtari VaultAtari Anthology

Games like this

Collections2 collections

Platform libraries

Description adapted from its source, CC BY-SA 4.0.