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Animated Puzzle
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Name:
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Animated Puzzle |
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| Company: |
Atari |
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Model #:
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N/A |
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Programmer:
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Hal Canon |
| Year: |
1984 |
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Released?
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No
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Notes:
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A 5200 version was planned |
Animated Puzzle is one of the stranger prototypes to have surfaced
in the last few years. As the name suggests, Animated Puzzle is
a puzzle game based on the classic sliding tile game. For those
of you unfamiliar with sliding puzzles, the concept is simple. You
have a grid of squares (usually 4x4) that are randomly ordered, except
for one square that is empty. Each tile contains a piece of a picture
or is numbered, and your goal is to arrange the tiles in order (to complete
a picture or line up the numbers). This is accomplished by sliding
the tiles around using the empty square until they all fall into the right
order.
As soon as the game begins one can easily see that it
was aimed at children. The puzzles consist of large, colorful, and
friendly looking animated characters. There are three separate puzzles
to chose from: a train, the Nutcracker, and uhh police officers with a
robot (ok so the last one is a bit out there). Each of these puzzles
has different animation and music, but your overall goal is the same.
Upon completing each puzzle the player is rewarded with a cute little
ending animation and are shown how long it took you to complete the puzzle.
There are also four different skill levels to chose from, the higher
the skill level the more jumbled the puzzle is at the start.
Along with some amazing graphics, each puzzle is accompanied
by beautiful music. Each musical theme is representative of the
puzzle that is being played. This is no surprise, as programmer
Hal Canon was also an accomplished musician. Hal later went on to
compose the music for famous arcade game soundtracks such as 720 degrees,
Toobin, Marble Madness, Paperboy.
It is unknown why Animated Puzzle was unreleased, but
the fact that the game was aimed at children may have been one of the
main reasons. Around the time the game was completed (mid 1984)
the game market was collapsing quickly, and Atari probably felt that a
children's game didn't have enough wide range appeal to be profitable.
Although it may not hold much interest to today's gamers, Animated
Puzzle is a wonderful example of how the Atari 8-bit could produce large
animated graphics and beautiful music.
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