1989

Shooting Arcade

Atari console exclusive

Shooting Arcade is one of only two Atari 2600 games to use the Light Gun (Sentinel being the other), but was never released. Interestingly, it appears that Shooting Arcade was not developed in the US, but rather in Mexico by a company called Heuristica. How Axlon was involved is unknown, but they may have simply sub-contracted the game out to Heuristica instead of doing it themselves. So why wasn't Shooting Arcade released?

Released: 31 December 1989
Platforms: Atari 2600 TRS-80 Color Computer
Genres: —
Developers: —
Publishers: —

About

Shooting Arcade is a fixed shooter written by Mark Riley for Atari 8-bit computers and published in 1982 by Datasoft. It was released under Datasoft's Gentry Software budget label as Target Practice. It was ported to the TRS-80 Color Computer by James Garon and released as Shooting Gallery. The game is similar to the 1980 Sega arcade game Carnival.

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Gameplay

Shooting Arcade is based on an amusement park shooting gallery. The player controls a pistol which moves along the bottom of the screen. Targets moving right and left appear in six rows before the player, and the goal of the game is to shoot them all down before the player runs out of bullets. The directions in which the rows of targets move alternate from row to row.

The targets move off one edge of the screen and reappear on the other edge. Each target has a different point value and some also have special features: the diamonds give an extra bullet when hit, the bull's eyes change the direction targets are moving and the frowning faces cause an extra rabbit to appear making the player waste an additional bullet.

Reception

David Plotkin writing for SoftSide called Shooting Arcade "the finest implementation I've seen of a shooting gallery for the Atari. This program exhibits the DataSoft hallmarks of fine color and music, as well as excellent animation."