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Touch Pad Game
Just when you think you've seen everything that was in
development for the Atari 5200, a new prototype comes along and
turns everything on its head. These prototypes were found
in a storage unit that was purchased in an auction in 2025 and
quietly sold on Ebay along with three prototypes for Slide
Show and several other 5200 prototypes. This storage
unit most likely belonged to a former Atari programmer, although
their name is currently unknown.  Although the game identifies itself as Touch Pad Game on the splash screen, a more apt description would be Touch Tablet Game. In fact the earliest prototype EPROMs are actually labeled TT (Touch Tablet) and the latest prototype is called Touch Tablet on the label (but not the splash screen). These prototypes appear to be an attempt at making a game for the 5200 that would utilize the CX77 Touch Tablet. Although no Atari 5200 version of the Touch Tablet has ever been found or known to be in development, the Atari 8-Bit version was released in January of 1984, which is right around the time these prototypes were created. Given the expense of the hardware Atari may have been considering simply making an adapter to plug the CX77 into the 5200 rather than make an Atari 5200 specific version. Although the prototype was made to be played with a Touch Tablet, it appears to be playable with a standard 5200 controller (although with some difficulty). This is because the Atari 5200 controller is really just two paddles in joystick form (one for the X-axis and one for the Y-axis) and the CX77 Touch Tablet just happens to to connect to the same inputs (paddle #0 and paddle #1). As the CX77 Touch Tablet uses an inverted vertical axis, the vertical control is also inverted when using a 5200 controller (up is down and down is up). As the Touch Tablet only had one button, only the bottom fire button is used and none of the 5200's keypad buttons are recognized. Being a tech demo, the gameplay is fairly simple. The screen consists of a room with an exit at the bottom. Bouncing around the room are four objects (two TVs, a toaster, and what appears to be a water cooler). At the center of the screen is a star shaped marker which represents the player. The player can move the marker to the edges of the room by pressing the joystick in one of the eight cardinal directions. When the player pushes the fire button the marker will be pinned to that location and start to fade. The player then has about 1.5 seconds to move a second marker to another location and press the fire button. If done correctly a line will appear between the two points. If the player fails to push the button before the first marker fades away the screen will flash green and a beep is heard. The button must not be pushed too quickly or the line will not be drawn (wait for the marker to start fading). The purpose the line is twofold. The player may either try to hit the objects with the line, or the player may use the line to form a barrier to reflect the objects (worth 5 points). Hitting the objects with the line doesn't actually destroy them, but scores some points depending on how many objects were hit at the same time (10, 25, 45, or 75 points). The screen will also flash blue when an object is hit. However the real goal of the game appears to be to force the objects into the exit at the bottom of the screen before the 45 second timer expires. Each object that is forced into the exit scores 100 points. After all four objects are forced into the exit the game will reset. If the player fails to get all the objects into the exit before the timer expires the screen will flash red and the timer and score will be reset, but not the objects. Therefore the player can keep playing until they get all the objects into the exit. It's unknown if Touch Pad Game was ever intended to be full game or was just a tech demo. No documentation exists on the Atari 5200 Touch Tablet project, so it may have been an unofficial project that was being worked on at one Atari's skunk works labs (Cyan Engineering, Grass Valley, or the Design and Research Group). It is unknown if any further work was done on the game past the 2/21 prototype, but another tech demo called Slide Show also appears to have used the 5200 Touch Tablet controller. Until these other prototypes are archived we may never know the full story of this previously unknown project.
Special thanks to Kr0tki for figuring out how this prototype works.
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