Gotcha

Gotcha is a two-player maze game in which one player attempts to catch the other. The maze is composed of a repeating pattern of elements set in multiple columns on the screen. The "Pursuer" is represented by a square, while the "Pursued" is identified by a plus sign. As the Pursuer gets closer to the Pursued, an electronic beeping sound plays at an increasing rate until the Pursuer reaches the Pursued.

Whenever the Pursued is caught, the Pursuer scores a point, the maze disappears for a brief moment, and the Pursuer is moved to a random position on the right side of the screen. There is no score for the Pursued, so determining who won is left to the players.

Development on Gotcha began in July 1973, as Atari's fourth game after Pong, Space Race, and Pong Doubles. The company was interested in producing a very different game from their previous success of Pong, as they felt that innovative design was what would separate them from their competitors, which they saw as flooding the market with Pong clones rather than making new video games. After the release of Space Race, development immediately moved on to Gotcha. The design of the game was done by Allan Alcorn, the designer of Pong and developer for Space Race.

Alcorn had the idea for the game from a defect he sometimes saw when testing Pong machines: if part of the circuit that converted scores to images on the screens was broken, then parts of the numbers would be scattered across the screen. Alcorn thought that combining that defect intentionally with a motion circuit could create dynamically changing mazes. A prototype design was developed by Steve Mayer of Cyan Engineering, which had recently become a semi-independent research and development subsidiary of Atari.

Gotcha was not commercially successful; later sources have described it as receiving a "lukewarm reception" and "arousing little more than controversy". Ralph Baer, however, claimed it sold 3,000 units, which would make it the seventh best-selling arcade video game of 1973 according to him. Additionally, despite Gotcha's prominence as Atari's fourth game and their second game not related to Pong, the 1973 arcade video game market was largely dominated by Pong clones; while Pong was the fourth arcade video game ever produced, Gotcha was approximately the twentieth, with nearly all the other games released before and after Gotcha through the end of the year Pong clones. Gotcha was the first arcade maze video game, though non-commercial maze-based video games had been developed as early as the 1959 Mouse in the Maze mainframe game.