Warlords

Warlords

Arcade - USA - Cabinet.

Developer Atari Games, Atari Publisher Atari Games, Atari, Sears, Roebuck and Co. Published 1981-04-?? Platforms Arcade, Atari 2600 Genres Ball and paddle Themes Fantasy Multiplayer Simultaneous versus Distribution Commercial

Warlords is a competitive ball and paddle video game with a fantasy theme developed and published by Atari initially for the Arcade in April 1981, then for the Atari 2600 later that year. The game combines the competitive four-player action of Quadrapong with the brick-breaking of Breakout. The arcade version was sold both an an upright and cocktail cabinet. The upright has two controllers and a cocktail has four.

In the game, you play a knight defending your lord's castle from a dragon's fireball which bounces around the screen. You move your shield around your castle to deflect the fireball toward the castle of the other warlords who you are trying to defeat. Each time the fireball hits a castle, it breaks down a part of the wall, and, when there is no wall left, the fireball enters the castle and kills your warlord. As time goes on, more fireballs appear and need to be continually deflected. Players can catch and catapult the fireballs back with increased speed and accuracy, but they must be quick about it, as the fire burns their own walls while the fireball is held. When fewer than four players are playing at once, there is a black knight with an impregnable castle to ensure the players will never be safe from competition.

Personal

Own?	No.
Won?	Yes. Atari 2600 port. Games 4, 9, 14, and 19.
Finished	2024-07-14.

In 1988, my brother and I got an NES and we stopped playing our Atari 2600. Around a year after that, my mother convinced us to give our 2600 to our cousin, which I didn't really want to do, but, she was right to note we really didn't play it any more. As we were boxing it up to give away, I noticed a cart that I had never seen before: Warlords. This was odd because I was intimately familiar with all of our games, and the attractive knight on the cover made me eager to hook up the console right then and there and try out what must have been an exciting fantasy hack 'n slash. My brother — who must have procured it fairly recently — assured me it wasn't any good. The fact that it used paddle controllers certainly made me question it, and the knowledge of how little Atari 2600 games actually matched their cover art was enough to let me part with it. I never did see what the game looked like until several years later when I found out about Atari emulation and discovered it was just a four-player version of Breakout.

While researching games for my list of winnable Atari 2600 games, I discovered the game had an AI, so I was determined to beat it. The arcade original cannot be beaten.

Review

3	3	3	2	3

Best Version: Arcade

Good

• The fantasy theme adds much-needed creativity to a game that is otherwise just a mash-up of two previous titles.
• The hand-painted backdrop on the monitor looks nice, and the warlords are appropriately imposing.
• Both the arcade and Atari 2600 ports have attractive manuals.

Bad

• At its fastest speed, the ball moves too quickly for anyone with normal reflexes to cope with, especially on the Atari 2600 port.
• The ball seems to speed up and slow down without a predictable reason, and it's even worse in the Atari 2600 port.
• I don't like the concept of the black knight warlord. Having an invincible opponent doesn't make the game feel fair, and is unnecessary since players win by defeating all opponents anyway. I prefer the way the Atari 2600 port handles this by letting the AI castles fall and letting the ball bounce through the holes in their walls.
• The Atari 2600 port is fixed to one fireball, which is lackluster.
• The sound in the arcade original is effective, but annoying, and not even effective in the Atari 2600 port. Neither port has music.
• The ball physics in the Atari 2600 port are awful. The ball frequently bounces in a direction you wouldn't expect based on how it hits a paddle or wall. Sometimes you will hit it, and it will still bounce back toward your paddle to have to be hit again! Sometimes it bounces through a wall and leaves a hole deeper in the castle than it should be able to hit.
• The Atari 2600 port only supports ball movements at 45° angles which causes the ball to follow similar paths the entire game. making for a boring time.
• In the Atari 2600 port, the ability to catch the ball has no downside, and the AI is easy to trick, so, once you learn the necessary angle to target their warlords, defeating them is pretty simple. On my first attempt, I shutout all three AI opponents.

Ugly

• When playing the AI in the 2600 port, when the ball is moving at a slow speed, it will often get "stuck" repeating the same bouncing pattern. It's not moving fast enough for the AI to miss it, and, when you bounce it back, it ends up following the same path as before since there aren't any alternative angles. If you're lucky, the ball will eventually get out of the loop, but, otherwise, you have to purposely let it hit your wall to stop the stalemate.
• The lack of a bounding box around the play field in the Atari 2600 port makes it very difficult to predict how the ball will rebound around the edges of the screen.

Media

Arcade Art

• 

  Cabinet - USA. I really like the side art.

• 

  Marquee - USA. A bit dull.

• 

  Bezel - USA.

• 

  Monitor backdrop - USA.

• 

  Control panel - USA.

Box Art

• 

  Cover - Atari 2600 - USA. The attractive 2600 watercolor was painted by Steve Hendricks who uses the knight's body to frame the catapult siege.

• 

  Cover - Atari 2600 - USA - Revision. Later reprints were released in an orange box.

Documentation

• 

  Manual - Arcade - USA.

• 

  Manual - Atari 2600 - USA.

• 

  Flyer - Arcade - USA - Front.

• 

  Flyer - Arcade - USA - Back.

• 

  Comic book.

• 

  Strategy guide - How to Master Home Video Games.

• 

  Strategy guide - Be a Home Videogame Superstar: Secrets to the Best Games for Your Atari VCS.

Font

See Video game font collection.

Videos

Longplay - Atari 2600 - Game 4.

Game play - Arcade.

Play Online

Arcade, Atari 2600

Representation

Strong female character?	Fail	There are no women.
Bechdel test?	Fail	There are no women.
Strong person of color character?	Fail	All of the characters in the illustrations are white or have an indeterminate race.
Queer character?	Fail	There are no clear queer characters.

Credits

Role	Staff
Atari 2600 Port	Carla Meninsky
Atari 2600 Cover Art	Steve Hendricks

• MAME code: warlords

Links