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Dave Akers
Dave Akers is a video game programmer and designer who worked on the M Network ports of ''BurgerTime'', ''Bump 'n' Jump'', and ''Star Strike'' for the Atari 2600. He co-designed the 1989 arcade game '' Klax'' with Mark Stephen Pierce and worked on '' Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters''. Akers prototyped ''Klax'' in AmigaBASIC in just a few weeks, then ported it line-by-line to C. As of the spring of 2006, Akers was working as an English teacher in Numazu, Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north .... In 2013, Dave Akers developed ''Paddle Party'', a game for Intellivision released by Elektronite. References Atari people Video game designers Year of birth missing (living people) Living people {{videogame-bio-stub ...
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M Network
M Network was a video game division of Mattel that, in the 1980s, produced games in cartridge format for the Atari 2600 video game system. History In the early 1980s, Mattel's Intellivision video game console was a direct competitor to Atari's Video Computer System (VCS), better known as the Atari 2600. Although Mattel designed and produced video game cartridges for their own system, the company surprised the industry by also releasing simplified versions of its games for the 2600 under the M Network label. M Network produced home ports of popular arcade games, including ''BurgerTime'', '' Bump 'n' Jump'' and '' Lock 'n' Chase'' (all 1982) as well as original titles such as '' Tron: Deadly Discs'' (1982 – based on the Disney movie) and '' Kool-Aid Man'' (1983), one of the earliest " promogames", originally available only via mail order by sending in UPC symbols from Kool-Aid containers. Mattel programmers (named by ''TV Guide'' as the " Blue Sky Rangers") were also enco ...
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BurgerTime
originally released as in Japan, is a 1982 arcade game developed by Data East initially for its DECO Cassette System. The player is chef Peter Pepper, who must walk over hamburger ingredients located across a maze of platforms while avoiding characters who pursue him. In the United States, Data East USA licensed ''BurgerTime'' for distribution by Bally Midway as a standard dedicated arcade game. Data East also released its own version of ''BurgerTime'' in the United States through its DECO Cassette System. The Data East and Midway versions are distinguished by the manufacturer's name on the title screen and by the marquee and cabinet artworks, as the game itself is identical. The game's original Japanese title ''Hamburger'' changed outside of Japan to ''BurgerTime'', reportedly to avoid potential trademark issues. In addition to all releases in the Western world, ''BurgerTime'' also became the title used for the Japanese ports and sequels. When Data East went bankrupt in 200 ...
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Bump 'n' Jump
''Bump 'n' Jump'' is an overhead-view vehicular combat game developed by Data East and originally released in Japan as . The arcade version was available as both a dedicated board and as part of Data East's DECO Cassette System. It was distributed in North America by Bally Midway. The goal is to drive to the end of a course while knocking enemy vehicles into the sides of the track and jumping over large obstacles such as bodies of water. The arcade game was a commercial success in Japan and North America. The game was ported to the Atari 2600, Intellivision, ColecoVision, Nintendo Entertainment System, and Sharp X1. The Famicom version of ''Burnin' Rubber'' was published as in Japan in 1986. Gameplay The enemy vehicles are cars and trucks. Cars can be bumped into obstacles or jumped upon and destroyed, while trucks cannot be bumped; they can only be jumped upon to destroy them, and will sometimes drop obstacles that will destroy the player or one extra life. At the end of eac ...
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Star Strike
''Star Strike'' is a single-player video game, released by Mattel for its Intellivision video game system in 1981. The Intellivision's best-selling game in 1982, with over 800,000 copies sold, ''Star Strike'' was inspired by the attack on the Death Star in the 1977 film ''Star Wars''. The player must drop bombs on alien weapons silos before Earth moves into range. A port of ''Star Strike'' for the Atari 2600 was published under Mattel's M Network label in 1982. Gameplay In ''Star Strike'', invading aliens have targeted a super-weapon on planet Earth. As soon as Earth moves into range, the weapon will be fired and destroy the planet. The player controls a spaceship launched at the invaders in an attempt to destroy the weapon before it can be fired. To do so, the player must bomb five red weapons silos in a narrow trench. If one of the silos remains when Earth is in range, the planet is doomed; George Plimpton bragged that the game depicted the "total destruction of a planet" ...
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Atari 2600
The Atari 2600, initially branded as the Atari Video Computer System (Atari VCS) from its release until November 1982, is a home video game console developed and produced by Atari, Inc. Released in September 1977, it popularized microprocessor-based hardware and games stored on swappable ROM cartridges, a format first used with the Fairchild Channel F in 1976. The VCS was bundled with two joystick controllers, a conjoined pair of paddle controllers, and a game cartridgeinitially ''Combat'' and later ''Pac-Man''. Atari was successful at creating arcade video games, but their development cost and limited lifespan drove CEO Nolan Bushnell to seek a programmable home system. The first inexpensive microprocessors from MOS Technology in late 1975 made this feasible. The console was prototyped as codename Stella by Atari subsidiary Cyan Engineering. Lacking funding to complete the project, Bushnell sold Atari to Warner Communications in 1976. The Atari VCS launched in 1977 ...
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Klax (video Game)
''Klax'' is a puzzle video game released in arcades in 1990 by Atari Games while Namco distributed the game in Japanese markets. It was designed by Dave Akers and Mark Stephen Pierce. The object is to catch colored blocks tumbling down a machine and arrange them in colored rows and patterns to make them disappear. ''Klax'' was originally published as a coin-op follow-up to ''Tetris'', about which Atari Games was in a legal dispute at the time. The Atari 2600 version, released in mid 1990, and '' Fatal Run'', are the final releases for the console which was discontinued in early 1992. Gameplay Controls consist of a four-position joystick and a button. The player controls a small paddle at the lower end of a constantly running conveyor belt. Using the joystick, the player can move the paddle left or right to catch tiles in various colors as they advance down the conveyor. Below the paddle is a well that can hold up to 25 tiles in five columns of five; pressing the button causes t ...
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Escape From The Planet Of The Robot Monsters
''Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters'' is a multidirectional shooter released in arcades by Atari Games in 1989. The game is styled after campy science fiction B movies of the 1950s. It was ported to the Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, MS-DOS, SAM Coupé, and ZX Spectrum. Gameplay According to the introduction, Planet X is a synthetic industrial planetoid whose most notable feature is the research laboratory of the buxom and brainy Dr. Sarah Bellum. Evil aliens called Reptilons invade the planet, capture the good doctor, and force the rest of the humans to manufacture a robot army to take over the Earth. ''Escape From The Planet Of The Robot Monsters'' is a one or two-player game in which the players must rescue Dr. Sarah Bellum from Planet X, where her research facility has been taken over by the evil Reptilons. The game is played from an isometric perspective where players control their avatars using Hall effect joysticks on the arcade version. Th ...
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AmigaBASIC
AmigaBASIC is an interpreted BASIC programming language implementation for the Amiga, designed and written by Microsoft. AmigaBASIC shipped with AmigaOS versions 1.1 to 1.3. It succeeded MetaComCo's ABasiC, which was included in AmigaOS 1.0 and 1.1, and was superseded by ARexx, a REXX-style scripting language, from AmigaOS version 2.0 onwards. History and description AmigaBASIC provided not only the common BASIC language, but also attempted to provide an easy-to-use API for the Amiga's unique graphics and sound capabilities. OBJECT commands, for example, made it easy to create moving objects – sprites and bobs that could be drawn with an external drawing program, ''Object editor'', that was supplied with AmigaBASIC. An unusual feature of the language is that it theoretically allowed the calling of handwritten assembly language subprograms; however, this feature never worked because of a bug that failed to align the assembly language instructions correctly on a word boun ...
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C (programming Language)
C (''pronounced like the letter c'') is a General-purpose language, general-purpose computer programming language. It was created in the 1970s by Dennis Ritchie, and remains very widely used and influential. By design, C's features cleanly reflect the capabilities of the targeted CPUs. It has found lasting use in operating systems, device drivers, protocol stacks, though decreasingly for application software. C is commonly used on computer architectures that range from the largest supercomputers to the smallest microcontrollers and embedded systems. A successor to the programming language B (programming language), B, C was originally developed at Bell Labs by Ritchie between 1972 and 1973 to construct utilities running on Unix. It was applied to re-implementing the kernel of the Unix operating system. During the 1980s, C gradually gained popularity. It has become one of the measuring programming language popularity, most widely used programming languages, with C compilers avail ...
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Numazu
is a city located in eastern Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 189,486 in 91,986 households, and a population density of 1,014 persons per km2. The total area of the city is . Geography Numazu is at the northwestern end of the Izu Peninsula, which is a leisure destination known for its numerous hot springs. Mount Fuji, Japan's tallest mountain, may also be seen from Numazu on clear days. Numazu is located west of Tokyo and is on the Tōkaidō Main Line, the main railway line from Osaka to Tokyo. Warmed by the Kuroshio Current, the area enjoys a warm maritime climate with hot, humid summers and mild, cool winters. The Kano River runs through the middle of the city. Mount Ashitaka (1188 meters) is the highest point in the city Neighboring municipalities Shizuoka Prefecture * Mishima * Fuji * Izu * Izunokuni * Shimizu * Nagaizumi * Kannami Demographics Per Japanese census data, the population of Numazu has been in slow decline over the past ...
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Japan
Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north toward the East China Sea, Philippine Sea, and Taiwan in the south. Japan is a part of the Ring of Fire, and spans an archipelago of 6852 islands covering ; the five main islands are Hokkaido, Honshu (the "mainland"), Shikoku, Kyushu, and Okinawa. Tokyo is the nation's capital and largest city, followed by Yokohama, Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo, Fukuoka, Kobe, and Kyoto. Japan is the eleventh most populous country in the world, as well as one of the most densely populated and urbanized. About three-fourths of the country's terrain is mountainous, concentrating its population of 123.2 million on narrow coastal plains. Japan is divided into 47 administrative prefectures and eight traditional regions. The Greater Tokyo Ar ...
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Atari People
Atari () is a brand name that has been owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by French publisher Atari SA through a subsidiary named Atari Interactive. The original Atari, Inc., founded in Sunnyvale, California, in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, was a pioneer in arcade games, home video game consoles and home computers. The company's products, such as ''Pong'' and the Atari 2600, helped define the electronic entertainment industry from the 1970s to the mid-1980s. In 1984, as a result of the video game crash of 1983, the home console and computer divisions of the original Atari Inc. were sold off, and the company was renamed Atari Games Inc. Atari Games received the rights to use the logo and brand name with appended text "Games" on arcade games, as well as the derivative coin-operated arcade rights to the original 1972–1984 arcade hardware properties. The Atari Consumer Electronics Division properties were in turn sold to J ...
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