Blockade

Blockade is a black and white arcade game developed and published by Gremlin in October 1976. Using four directional buttons, each player moves their character around leaving a solid line behind them, turning at 90 degree angles. To win, a player must last longer than the opponent before hitting something, with the first person to hit something losing. The game ends after one player gains six wins. Blockade is the first of what have become known as snake games.

Released: 1976
Platforms: Arcade TRS-80 VIC-20 Windows
Genres: Arcade Maze Puzzle Strategy
Developers: Gremlin Industries
Publishers: Gremlin Industries
Modes: Multiplayer
Perspective: Bird view / Isometric
Country: United States
Languages: English

About

Blockade is an arcade video game developed by Lane Hauck and Ago Kiss for Gremlin and released in November 1976. It is a two-player game where each player controls the direction of an arrow on the screen which creates a trail behind it. The object is to avoid any walls surrounding the playfield or trails created by each player for a select amount of turns. Blockade spawned many clones which came to be known as snake games.

The game was designed by Lane Hauck. Prior to joining Gremlin, he had taught himself to code and met with the team at Gremlin before their entry into the arcade game market. After experimenting with a physics problem in assembly language, he created a game where a trail was left behind a player that disallowed them to return to a position they had already visited. After showing the concept to the staff at Gremlin, it was developed into a video game, test marketed and released to great acclaim at the 1976 Music Operators of America in Chicago. As Gremlin were new to developing arcade games, before they could release it publicly, several other companies such as Atari, Inc., Ramtek, and Meadows Games released their own variations of the game, leading to many pre-sales being cancelled for Gremlin.

Keywords

abstract
snake

Media

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Gameplay

Blockade is a two-player game where each player controls the direction of an arrow on the screen. Each player utilizes a set of push-button controls to change the direction of the moving arrow. When it moves, the arrow leaves a trail of blocks behind, which form a continuous wall. Anytime the player collides with a wall created by either player or the barrier wall on the screen, an explosion sound is heard, the symbol flashes, and a point is rewarded to the opponent.

After a pre-set number of crashes happen to the player, the game ends. The pre-set number is set by the operator of the arcade, ranging from 3 to 6.

Development

Gremlin was a San Diego–based coin-op arcade manufacturer that started in 1970.

Designer Lane Hauck, a physics and engineering graduate of UCLA and Cal State, purchased a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-8 computer to teach himself assembly language. Hauck played games on the system such as Moo and began to grow interested in simplifying complex technology to make it more affordable. He soldered together twenty-five logic circuits to create a handheld device that could play Moo. He later made other small machines which could play games like Blackjack.

Reception

In November 1977, Play Meter ranked the top highest ranking arcade games from the past 12 months. Blockade was Gremlin's highest ranked game, tying for 10th place along with Indy 4 by Atari.

From contemporary reviews, Ray Pasziewicz, a Baltimore coin-machine operator, said he specifically praised Blockade at the MOA show, noting the games competitiveness and that "I stood there and played it for a long time and I was excited over it." In a report in Play Meter magazine, Ralph C. Lally II said that Blockade was "probably the most played game at the show" and that the game was an "excellent example of a good game based on a rather simple concept", declaring the game great and that it "could just well turn out to be the Tank everybody was hoping for this year".

Legacy

After witnessing a mother and daughter play Blockade and constantly hit each other and laugh at them exploding, Lane Hauck developed the arcade game Fortress. By 1977, Gremlin had no major hit arcade games following Blockade which led to the company being purchased by Sega on September 29, 1978.

Blockade is the progenitor of the snake video game genre which features hundreds of games, including multiple arcade clones of Blockade, the Atari Video Computer System's Surround (1977), the 1982 single-player home computer game Snake Byte, and Snake (1998) for Nokia's mobile phones.