After my first session with Warlords for the Atari 2600 came to a close, the only thought I had was "Where have you been all my life?"
That was the most apt question I could direct toward the surprisingly fun and entertaining Warlords, which I stumbled upon in 1990 on a day when I was nostalgically digging through my brother's ol' magic box (the bulky cardboard box within which he stored his 2600 games, whose number was always mysteriously, inexplicably increasing) and loading up random games.
By then, sadly, the magic box's potency had long since dried up. It had lost its power to supernaturally generate 2600 games. The old days were gone, and I was now living in an era that was far removed from the one in which I would frequently drag that large, heavy cardboard box out of my brother's messy closet and over to the TV and sample all of the new games that had magically appeared within it since the last time I dragged it out. That era was now only a memory.
In 1990, that box was a shell of its former self. It had grown old and worn, and it was tattered beyond repair. Its deteriorated, torn-up flaps were close to falling off, and its corners were being held together with masking tape. It was at the end stage of its life and, tragically, well on its way to becoming nothing more than a pile of cardboard scraps at the bottom a large Hefty bag.
Yet somehow, that old, shabby box was able to reach within itself and find a way to pull off one final act of magic. It was able to generate a small spark and conjure up one last new present: Warlords, which was, fittingly, one of the finest games it ever produced.
Warlords was immediately interesting to me because it was a hybrid-type game and I was fascinated by those of its type. For as long as I'd been gaming, I'd always loved the idea of developers mixing together different game and genre types and creating products that were fantastically or bizarrely new.
That's what Warlords' developers did: They combined elements from Breakout and Pong and created an action style that was familiar yet somehow wholly new-feeling. It wasn't like any other game I'd ever played. And that's why I found it so appealing.
It wasn't like that at the start, though, no. In my first session's opening moments, I was inclined to think that I wasn't going to like Warlords very much. While I thought that combining elements of Breakout and Pong was a cool idea, the fact was that I wasn't really a big fan of either of those games. I just wasn't high on ball-bouncing and block-breaking games. For me, they got old quickly; I'd get bored of them after about two or three minutes. So logically, I thought, there was no way that Warlords, a game that was certainly in their class, was going to be able to hold my attention for very long.
But several minutes later, I was having much different thoughts. I was saying to myself, "What a simple-yet-brilliant concept! I'm really digging this!"
Warlords' was such a unique and interesting idea for a game: Each of four players was given control over a blocky, three-layered castle and tasked with destroying the other players' castle while defending his or her own from attack. At all times, a little ball was rebounding its way around the screen, and your job was to use your sliding shield to stop the ball from colliding with your castle and redirect it toward one of your rival warlords' castles. To destroy a rival warlord, you had break through all three layers of his castle and strike him with the ball. And when a warlord was slain, his controlling player was eliminated from the competition.
And what was born from this was a new type of block-breaking game that was intense, engaging and just plain fun! I loved it.
I wasn't even bothered by the fact that Warlords required the use of paddle controllers, which, ordinarily, I went out of my way to avoid. I just never felt comfortable with them; I always found their movement controls to be overly sensitive and shaky-feeling. Whenever I'd play games like Kaboom and Circus Atari, I'd feel as though the characters or objects I was controlling were either completely unstable or insanely hyperactive.
But for Warlords, paddle controls felt surprisingly natural. They had the perfect level of sensitivity, and thus they made it easy to smoothly and accurately slide the shield along surfaces and curve it around corners. Paddle controls had never before felt this comfortable to me.
Warlords, I recognized, was a high-quality 2600 game. All of its ideas, gameplay mechanics, and control aspects were brilliantly executed.
And on that day, I found myself unexpectedly having a ton of fun with a newly discovered 2600 game when all I was looking to do, originally, was bounce between a few old favorites and reminisce for a while. I'd discovered a hidden gem--a game that was so fun and addicting that I couldn't think to abandon it. I couldn't think to pack up the 2600 and stuff it back in the closet, as I usually did after completing a nostalgic revisit. I wanted to continue playing Warlords, and for that reason, I decided that the 2600 should remain right there, by the TV, so that I'd have an easier time of returning to the game the next day (I wasn't worried about what my brother would say because he was too much of a slob to notice when anything changed).
And, well, I returned to Warlords the next day and pretty much every day after that. And before long, playing it became part of my daily gaming ritual. I couldn't stop playing it. It was too much fun!
So there I was engrossed in an Atari 2600 game at a time when I believed that the console no longer had the capability to provide me new, genuinely entertaining gaming experiences--at a time when Mario, Metroid and Mega Man ruled my life and nothing else, I thought, could ever matter.
What Warlords also contained was the special ingredient that the best 2600 games tended to have: a large collection of alternate modes that were fun in different ways. Some of its modes had a fixed rate of ball movement while others had systems in which the ball's speed would increase incrementally each time it deflected off of a shield. The were a couple of modes that allowed players to catch the ball and hold on to it and toss it in a desired direction, and in certain catch-mode variations, you could exert influence over your toss and cause it to curve. And there were also modes in which you controlled the shields of two adjacent warlords simultaneously.
And some modes had a mix of these different mechanics. There were so many possible combinations, and each one of them offered a wildly different, uniquely fun experience. And for that reason, Warlords was one of the most replayable games in our library.
The only recurring issue was that the bottom-right CPU player rarely seemed interested in participating in the action, and that only served to take some of the fun out of the experience. Still, though, competing against even just two CPU players was great fun, and it was enough to make me want to return to my brother's room each day and squeeze in a few games of Warlords, which was chiefly responsible for the 2600's continuing to find residence on that two-tiered, wheeled TV stand. (We had three such TV stands in our home. It was a popular furniture type with our family. I actually still own one of them; it's placed in the room adjacent to this one, and it now acts solely as a holder for receipts, bills and financial statements. Seeing it always makes me long for the days when its only purpose was to serve as a support for the small CRT TV that used to magically display those strangely new "video games.")
After I developed some strategies that helped me to reliably beat the CPU players, Warlords ceased providing any real challenge. At that point, I figured that the best way to spice up the action and make it challenging again was to introduce my friends to the game and compete against them, instead. Though, I was hesitant to do so because I feared that they'd reject Warlords due to its age. "It's an old game," I thought, "and they'd probably rather play one of the many new NES games that have come into my possession since the last time we got together."
But that's not what happened. Rather, I easily convinced them to play it, and they wound up loving it just as much as I did. And quickly it became one of our go-to multiplayer games. It became a regular part of our marathon gaming sessions. And whenever three or four of us got together for some ball-bouncing, block-breaking action, great times were had. In each instance, Warlords absolutely shined; it never failed to provide us the fun and intense multiplayer action we were seeking.
Sadly, I don't have any specific memories of our Warlords experiences--of the exchanges we shared or the conversations we had--but I do remember that we enjoyed many lengthy sessions and always created and immersed ourselves in an atmosphere that was all at once joyous, boisterous and uproarious. Warlords, more so than other beloved multiplayer games like Armor Ambush and Maze Craze: A Game of Cops 'n Robbers, was a big reason why the 2600 saw its life extended well into the mid-90s and why we'd break it out every week or so and play some old-school 2600 games (we'd play in my den or in my brother's room, and if those rooms were occupied, we'd resort to hooking up the 2600 to the TV in my parents' bedroom).
That's the way it was with classics that you discovered years after the fact. They had a special power. They could provide you great entertainment and at the same time remind you why you loved the old platforms and inspire you to want to keep their spirit alive. That's what Warlords did for me. It provided me fun and entertaining gaming experiences and helped the 2600 to gain years of extra life, and consequently it gave me the opportunity to spend yet more meaningful time with my old gaming mentor--the Atari 2600, which, it turned out, still had more to teach me.
And the fact that I've since developed a passion for video-game history and an insatiable appetite for discovery is proof that its lessons weren't lost on me.
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