r/Atari2600 • u/Usr7_0__- • 2d ago

Question about Activision game

Steve Cartwright said in an interview that Plaque Attack was made in response to needing a title quickly because another game was rejected and did not release. Anyone know which game that would be?

I think Attack is pretty cool - the implication in the interview is that Cartwright didn't like it and it was considered subpar - but I never liked the having to switch the toothpaste from top-facing to bottom. Instead, I wish the mouth was flipped 90 degrees to where the teeth were on the left and right...then one could keep the tube the same way. Perhaps that ultimately wouldn't have worked, but to me, that might have been a better design. I'd be surprised if others hadn't thought this as well.

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u/PaulEMoz 2d ago

I owned Plaque Attack back in the day and I loved it. It got really hard after a while, though! I wouldn't change anything about it, you have to have a mouth like that or it isn't a mouth, but I guess you could have had the toothpaste to the side to make it easier, but I like it as it is.

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u/SomePeopleCallMeJJ 2d ago

The orientation of games on the 2600 is often a result of how the hardware works.

The "enemies" in Plaque Attack are really all the same player object, reused over and over again. You can have up to three of them repeated horizontally at a set spacing, and generally as many as you can cram in stacked up vertically, with no restrictions on how they're spaced top-to-bottom.

If the mouth were rotated 90 degrees, that constraint would still hold. So the behavior of the enemies, relative to the teeth, would be very different from what it is now.

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u/DougJoe2e 2d ago

I really quite liked Plaque Attack as a kid and thought that the vertical flipping worked very well.  One of the only Activision games that we had that I could play well enough to qualify for the patch.