Thursday, July 30, 2026

Atari Emulator -> Gunfight

Now that I'm a decrepit old man, and the brain cells are starting to go, memories of things like this flood back once in a while. Way nicer than the Top 10 Mistakes that my brain seems to keep hashing over. This is why I'll never get anywhere in life!  But I did play a lot of Atari games in my ill-spent youth.  And this one from Epyx (C) called Gunfight was a beloved classic... okay, not really, but it did have slick graphics and smooth movements at 60 jiffies a second, which I always appreciated.  Oh, how that 6502 got strained so easily!  And believe it or not, I actually played this with a SECOND person once!  I know, right?  And we both had joysticks!  Oh, and we also had them for playing the game.  Drumroll, please!
...where was I?  Oh right.  As often happened with the Atari 8-bit computers, this was basically a glorified 2600 game.  Can you believe it?  A handful of people made millions off the Atari 2600!  But the aspect of Gunfight... sorry, Gun Fight, that I was dwelling on is that it's got the most cheerful version of "Taps" you'll ever hear... on the other hand, it's only the first two groups of three notes, and then it goes into the game's theme song.  I was confusing it with Chopin's Funeral March song.  More old man problems!


 ...NOT available at Atarimania.com!  But let's see if this link works anyway.

Epyxgames.com!  Just found out that they insist on living on in Internet form.  But you obviously can't talk about Gun Fight without considering Seawolf II on the same 5.25" floppy disk!

And finally, to give credit where it's clearly due, Epyx (TM)(C)(R) adapted this based on a Midway Games game of the same name from 1975.  Were they that strapped for ideas?  You're telling me no one wanted to make Shootout at the Temple of Apshai?