Dragonstomper

Dragonstomper is set in a sword and sorcery–themed world. It takes place in a kingdom where a king once ruled peacefully. After a druid magician enchanted a powerful amulet which he believed would subdue a dragon, they entered the dragon's cave and accidentally left the amulet to fall into the hands of the dragon, increasing its power. The creature used its newfound powers against the kingdom, causing crops to die and creating savage creatures across the land.

With the king's knights vanquished by the dragon's warriors, the Dragonstomper was the only person left to restore the kingdom. The Dragonstomper travels through the countryside and a township to prepare themselves to battle the dragon. The ending features different ways, chosen by the player, to deal with the dragon.

Dragonstomper was created by Stephen Landrum for Arcadia, later rebranded as Starpath. The game was made for a peripheral for the Atari 2600 called the Starpath Supercharger, which allowed for the system to operate through cassette tapes. It was developed in Santa Clara, California, by ex-Atari Director of Research Bob Brown and ex-Atari development engineer Craig Nelson. The system allowed for 6 kilobytes of RAM, while the Atari 2600 had only 128 bytes built into the system. The Supercharger plugged into the cartridge slot of the system and loaded games from audio cassettes by connecting an audio cable on the side of the cartridges to the earphone jack of an external tape player.

Landrum worked for Arcadia/Starpath from March 1981 to November 1983, creating games like Communist Mutants From Space and a port of Frogger as well as completing the code for Suicide Mission. Dragonstomper was developed under the name Excalibur. Landrum stated that the game took several months to develop and chose to make it a role-playing game, as he felt nobody had yet made a "real" fantasy role-playing game on the Atari 2600. Like all the Supercharger games made by the company, they were developed on Apple II computers.

Contemporary reviews of the game praised the game's sophistication for a console game, comparing it to the quality of home computer games of the period. The Electronic Games 1983 Software Encyclopedia praised the games graphics and sound as "excellent" and its gameplay as "outstanding", noting that "clever design makes it possible to enter all necessary commands through the joystick" and that the game's on-screen menu cut memorization of instructions "to a blessed minimum". The same review was published in the 1984 version but lowering the score to a seven. "B.H." of Games stated that the game was "the most sophisticated adventure game we've seen from any home video system" and that, along with Escape from the Mindmaster, it raised the Atari 2600 to "virtually the level of a home computer".

Other reviews focused on its quality and hailed it as among the best games using the Supercharger, while a few disliked the slower pace and graphics. Mike Meyers of the video game magazine Blip declared that although the game was difficult to master, he ultimately declared Dragonstomper to be best of the supercharger games and "probably the best 'swords and sorcery' game yet produced for a home video game system." An anonymous author in Computer and Video Games also proclaimed it the best of the current Supercharger games in July 1983 and that the game "should be enough to keep even the most skilled adventurer occupied for a very long time". In the UK publication TV Gamer noted that text in the game made it "one of the most striking things about it" and that with Dragonstomper the "supercharger definitely comes into its own".