A Dave Palmer once played Battlezone – Atari’s iconic vector
graphic tank combat simulation – for 23 hours non-stop. Despite having no previous military
experience, Palmer clocked up a high score of 23 million points. This not only offers a neat million points
an hour scoring rate: 23 million is also the largest score it was possible to
get, and, in 1985, the biggest number in the world.

This was just one of six high scores on various games that
Palmer, who was single at the time, managed to achieve in the three day long
Video Games Masters’ Tournament of that year. We’ll be rummaging through the
motherboards of his other arcade conquests over the next few weeks, but for
now, Battlezone’s under scrutiny, so dust off your combat trousers and climb
aboard.

Battlezone was futuristic and exciting at the time of its
release, in 1980, although so were digital watches, zebra print blouses and
Ipswich Town. Battlezone has remained
so, however, and much of its charisma is drawn from the simple graphic
arrangement by Ed Rotberg, whose distinctive wire-frame technique was much in
evidence at the time, notably in Asteroids.

The player’s view of proceedings is straightforward, as are
his objectives. You drive a tank
around, blowing up other tanks before they can kill you, on a battlefield
strewn with improbable transparent pyramids and cubes, with a volcano constantly
erupting on distant hill range that never gets any closer, no matter how hard
you try and drive towards it. Something
of a novelty at the time, Battlezone featured a radar upon which the player
could ascertain his position and generally work out what was going on. As you might expect, enemy tanks got more
dastardly as the game progressed, and often the only warning of a new assailant
was a guided missile hurtling towards the player at some speed. This simple but relentless gameplay gave the
proceedings a very tense feel, largely due to the very simple matter of a shot
needing to hit something or disappear into the distance before another can be
fired. This is bad news if you have an
itchy trigger finger, and many a novice player has found himself desperately
trying to reverse behind an obstacle as returning enemy fire arcs towards him
as a result of trying to blaze away too soon.

Among Battlezone’s biggest fans were the US Army, who
commissioned Atari to make a special version of the game – catchily entitled
Bradley Fighting Vehicle – in which it trained the generation of tank
commanders that fought the First Gulf War.
Only two Bradley versions were produced, and are now something of a Holy
Grail for arcade memorabilia collectors: one is still held by the US Army,
although they probably use it these days for mucking about on, or propping
doors open, and the other is in the hands of a private collector who found it in a
car park at the back of Midway Games.

Rumours abounded that, at a certain point in the game,
swarms of enemy tanks would rush the player.
This is nonsense. Other myths
did the rounds: that the ever-present volcano could be scaled by way of a secret
route triggered by game events, and that once inside a secret castle would be
found. Along similar lines, it was put
about that if the player could drive for an hour unmolested in the same
direction, he would discover a tank factory which could be destroyed, beating
the game itself. It was also widely
believed that Battlezone was built around data stolen from the American
military and that the coding contained technical blueprints of top secret
hardware – almost certainly an inverse representation of the work Atari
actually did do with the US Army.
Sadly, original Battlezone cabinets are rare, as the periscope eyepieces
were withdrawn after one in Denver, Colorado was found to be passing on a skin
disease. Also, the first generation of
the cabinets did not allow for viewing by non-players as the screen was totally
enclosed, which is all very enigmatic but not commercially astute. One can only guess at the tribulations of
the gallant Dave Palmer, struggling on for hour after hour like the Man In The
Iron Mask, with his eyepieces filling up with sweat. May his novelty optical gaming devices be
always fragrant, hygienic, and regularly freshened.