Rabbit Transit

Name:	Rabbit Transit
Company:	Starpath / Arcadia
Model #:	AR-4104
Programmer:	Brian McGhie
Year:	1983
Released?	Yes
Notes:	Atari may have considered releasing Rabbit Transit on cartridge

One of the more original games from Starpath, Rabbit Transit is part Frogger and part Q*Bert. Although this may sound like a strange combination, in the end the mix works quite well.  In fact Rabbit Transit is such a fun game that it appears that Atari may have considered licensing it themselves. 

If the title of the game didn't already give it away, you are a rabbit who must rescue his girl that has been whisked away to the Land of the Ledges by evil powers unknown.  To get to the Land of the Ledges you must journey through the Mysterious Meadow and meet your friend the turtle.  Unfortunately the meadow is crawling with various bad guys just waiting to take a piece out of your tail.  Since you're a rabbit, your only defense is to quickly jump from lane to lane (ala Frogger) until you make your way to the water.  While you can jump through the flowers, you cannot jump through the fencing so you'll be forced to go through one of the small openings.  Take note that depending on the position of the difficulty switches the turtle may drop below the water for a time, so make sure you wait until he's there before jumping.  On higher levels more enemies appear such as the snake and of course more fences.

Once you've made it to the Land of the Ledges you must quickly jump around and change each ledge from green to the color indicated in the square at the top of the screen (ala Q*Bert).  To make your task more difficult, there's a little guy who looks suspiciously like Pitfall Harry walking around the top of the screen dropping rocks on you (Why Harry?  Why?).  Not only are these rocks deadly, but in later levels the rock will start changing the ledges back to their original color!  Once again the difficulty switches will affect if the turtle is able to dive below the water or not. 

If you succeed in changing all the ledges you'll be rewarded with a cute intermission showing the 'fruits of your labor'.  Each time you clear the Land of Ledges you'll see more and more bunnies on the intermission screen.

As previously mentioned, it appears that Atari may have been interested in releasing Rabbit Transit themselves.  No one is quite if Atari and Starpath were in formal talks about some kind of game licensing or if this was simply a case of a curious employee experimenting with new ideas.  Whatever the case, the idea of Supercharger games on Atari carts was brilliant.  Not only could Atari increase their library with quality games, but there would be almost no development costs involved.  It's unknown whether the more complex Multi-Load games could have been put onto cartridges.

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