It has been quite a long time since we last reported on a new arcade prototype being found, and to clarify, when we cover this, we usually mean a game that was never released. The last time we had such a report was about an Atari Slot 4 game that was found, but this was from 2023; coincidentally enough, the past couple of prototype stories have also involved Atari, such as a proto basketball game and the controversy about Akka Arrh winding up on MAME.
Not all of our proto stories have involved Atari-made protos, although today does have an Atari connection. Let’s read into Dropzone Arcade.
What Was Dropzone?
Dropzone is a Defender-style game designed by the late Archer Maclean, and published in Europe under U.S. Gold back in 1984. First published for Atari 400/800 computers, he also made a port for the Commodore 64, although it did not throw as much around on the screen as the Atari version did. Copies of the game did end up for sale in the States, although from an interview that Archer did before his death, it sounds like he had no part in it, thus the game wasn’t optimized. It was also ported to the NES, Game Boy/GB Color, Game Gear; it also received a sequel for the SNES/PS1.
The game takes place in 2085 after a war of robots on Earth (you can see how the author was very influenced by Eugene Jarvis’ work, although he admits as much), and humanity has moved to Jupiter’s volcanic moon of Io. Playing much like Defender, you must rescue men on the moon’s surface, all while dealing with a variety of nasty alien invaders.
It’s fun, but comes with a high level of difficulty, in part due to your character sprite being so large and the whole thing is a hit box. That, combined with the game’s fast speed and small enemies, means you need a bit of practice to play it well.
Dropzone Arcade
Per that interview I linked to above, Archer wanted to see the game in a proper arcade cabinet. He coded the coin feature into the game (activated by pushing up on the Port 2 joystick), but he never moved forward in publishing it for an unknown reason. There wasn’t even a hint that it was going to get a coin-op release, aside from Archer expressing the desire to make it happen.
Per Games That Weren’t, they found the coin-op version among materials that they had obtained from the late author. They also kindly put the ROMs up, although they are in ATX format, which my Atari hardware doesn’t like (I believe I could get it to work if I were able to get those copied onto a 5.25″ floppy, but I don’t have any way to make that happen). Someone also put one version of the game into an arcade cabinet by themselves, although this doesn’t appear to be the Atari version that was discovered(I’m not familiar with all versions, but this looks nice enough that it could be someone putting Dropzone 40th Anniversary or Super Dropzone into a cabinet):
Fortunately, modern Atari 400/800 emulators handle those files fine, so I was able to capture this footage below, although I’m not very good at the game. I first tried playing with the keyboard and the controls weren’t very clear, with random smart bombs going off at times, then tried a gamepad and I could control it better, but not sure how the cloak and bomb work with that. I’ll post a version with commentary on this later.
I imagine that the reason this never made it into the coin-op space is that Archer didn’t have the contacts to make it happen at the time. There was a strong arcade scene in the UK in the ’80s, but often connections matter – if he didn’t know anyone in the industry to make the hardware and distribution happen, that could explain why it never went anywhere for the format.
I have to imagine that if Archer was over in the US at the time, he might have found out about the Exidy Max-A-Flex platform, which was a modified Atari 600XL, which was released in 1984 as well. Perhaps this software could be adapted to run on the Max-A-Flex without much trouble, although it is a pretty rare system to come across; I’m also guessing Exidy wasn’t a big name over in the UK. It only saw four games, with Boulder Dash being the only release that made any sense for the coin-op format, so it didn’t last very long. Although I do imagine that a game like Dropzone would have performed exceptionally well, since it’s like playing Defender.
That said, would this have moved the needle for the market in the positive direction if released back then? Probably not by much. While a fun game, it likely would have hit in ’85, being released on the Atari so late in ’84. By this point, you were getting more and more computer-to-coin-op ports, but they didn’t do much when players would then see new concepts like Gauntlet, Gradius, Space Harrier, or Commando at the arcade. New ideas and experiences were more compelling than clones, which could also be easily mistaken by an uninformed player to just be a bootleg. It probably would have helped something like the Max-A-Flex sell a few more units though.
What are your thoughts on this discovery?
