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Atari Football: The
Trackball
When most people think
of the trackball, they think of arcade classics such as Missile
Command, Centipede, or Kick Man. However, there was a classic game
that made use of the digital roly-poly long before those games:
Atari's Football, released in 1978.
Football featured a vertical cabinet that looked like an
overgrown cocktail-table game, with one trackball and one button
(for selecting plays) at each end. The game cost 25 cents for every
90 seconds of play. Two players (four in the sequel) could compete
head-to-head by frantically "rolling" their X- and O-shaped athletes
across the black-and-white field. Only four offensive and four
defensive plays were available, yet the gameplay was unique enough
and the action fast enough to make it fun and popular (at least
during football season). The initial trackballs were prone to
failure, but Atari worked out the kinks in later revisions.
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The trackball controller truly
invited physical participation.
| The trackball controller
truly invited physical participation. Success at Football required
not only hand/eye coordination, but a high tolerance for
pain--players had to shrug off stinging palms after slapping the
trackball repeatedly, and ignore the agony of having their skin
pinched between the ball and the cabinet. This level of injury would
not be surpassed until Konami's 1983 release, Track and Field, which
required players to constantly pound their hands against the "run"
buttons.
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