Meltdown
by Videa, for Atari 2600

• 4K game

• 4 x 3 skill levels

• difficulty and TV type switches seem to have no effect

Classic Gaming Expo is proud to present another treat for the gaming community. Over the CGE2k4 weekend, we had the pleasure of meeting up again with old friends, Ed Rotberg and Roger Hector. As an added bonus, we also met Howard Delman, ex-Atari employee and one of the three founders of Videa (along with Ed and Roger). We discussed "the old days" and they told us about an unreleased game programmed by David Ross of Videa that they still had.

Turns out, that game is Meltdown, and it had been licensed to Fox who never published it. After a period of time, the rights lapsed and reverted to Videa. After some discussion, we were able to arrange for the ROM to be released for everyone in the community to enjoy, free of charge!

Just our way of saying thank you to all who support us and our work. Thanks for another great show!

As for the game, it's essentially a game of cat and mouse as you try to line up your horizontal and vertical crosshairs on a nuclear particle gone haywire. It jumps from cell to cell and each time you press fire you launch a beam at it. If it's still in your beam, you destroy it, scoring points, as another comes along to replace it. If you miss, it will disintegrate your cell. Once a cell is fully disintegrated, it will begin to pulse and glow. If ALL of the cells pulse and glow... it's MELTDOWN! Game over, man... GAME OVER!

The game has an unusual skill selection and level progression method and starts out quite easy. As you hit five digit numbers you cannot miss the particle as it will quickly disintegrate the cell it has left.

We actually picked up TWO prototypes from the Videa guys... the second is also an Atari 2600 game, one we had never even heard of before, also seemingly complete and lots of fun. Details on this title to follow!