Kool Aid Man Atari 2600 game

Under the M Network label for the Atari version, but each game is of unique design. They are centered on the Kool-Aid Man, the television mascot of the beverage Kool-Aid. Initially available exclusively through mail-order, it was later released through traditional retail outlets. Help Kool-Aid Man in a battle with the Thirsties! Those insatiable Thirsties are stealing the water out of your swimming pool. You want to catch them when they stop to dip their straws in the pool. Also, help Kool-Aid Man gobble up Kool-Aid ingredients in order to keep the Thirsties from bouncing Kool-Aid Man around the backyard.

In the Intellivision version, two children must gather the necessary ingredients from within their house and perform a ritual in which to summon the Kool-Aid Man. Oh Yeah! If you were a kid in the 80's (and you probably were if you're reading this), you remember the new ad campaign for the most ubiquitous of drinks - Kool Aid! The introduction of the giant talking pitcher we still know and love burst upon us not only on television but also on Intellivision and the Atari 2600. That's right - long before the 7-Up dots starred in their own platformer, the Kool Aid Man starred in two different games!

You're thinking, wait a minute - there wasn't a Kool Aid Man 2: Electric Boogaloo, was there? No, the two games I refer to are the two completely different games developed by Mattel Electronics - one for the Intellivision, and one for the Atari. It was an experiment that the programmers at Mattel had wanted to try for some time. Mattel's Marketing department insisted that all games be designed the same across all platforms, the programmers insisted that games should be designed around the strengths and weaknesses of a particular machine (a view I share).

Because so little time was available for the development of the Kool Aid man games to coincide with the ad campaign launch, the marketing department capitulated, and two unique ideas were developed for the two systems.

The Atari game concept was developed by Steve Tatsumi, who won the internal two-week design contest. The concept of the game: Thirsties (the villains in the early commercials) are drinking all of the Kool-Aid! It's up to Kool-Aid Man to stop them! Of course, it would be far too easy if Kool-Aid Man was his normal self... he is normally something more like Kool-Aid Boy, and must touch the straws that the Thirsties use to drink to eliminate the thirsty. If Kool-Aid Boy touches a thirsty, or a wall, he'll rebound across the screen for a few seconds, and if he touches something else, the bouncing will continue (which can get frustrating some times). Fortunately, there's hope - if Kool-Aid Boy touches a 'W' (water), 'S' (sugar), or 'K' (Kool-Aid Mix) he'll turn into his true self, Kool-Aid Man, for a few seconds, and become invincible. Also, when one of the drink's components is caught, the level of Kool-Aid rises by one line, which is important, because if the Thirsties drink all of the Kool-Aid, the game's over, man! I really love this game, I got the cartridge in an auction quite a while ago. I tried it, just to see if I should keep it... I think I played it for several hours the first time. I got hooked, fast. I apologize that the screen captures are fudged a little (I had to re-composite the pitcher and couldn't get a 'K', 'S', or 'W' in them - StellaX 1.1.3a doesn't seem to run the game properly...) Kool-Aid Man is yet another of my top ten 2600 games (It'll be fair to say that the first ten Games of the Week will be my top ten). It's a testament to the classic designers who had to design something fun - they didn't have 32bit mip-mapped textures to work with. I highly recommend it!

Kool-Aid Man was one of those games that was an attempt to cash in on the popularity of the Atari 2600. Released in 1983, the year of the Crash. As an 8-year-old kid, the Crash didn’t mean much to me, other than that games got insanely cheap that year, as a glut of unwanted video games were liquidated by retailers for pennies on the dollar. The Kool-Aid Man video game was initially a special offer only game. To get a copy, you had to send in proof-of-purchases for Kool-Aid and wait several weeks for the cartridge to arrive by mail. I don’t remember how many points you had to send in, but we drank a ton of Kool-Aid in my house, and one day our copy arrived. 125 points? That doesn’t seem like all that much. I found this scanned image of a print ad from some comic book on the web, and it says you could send in either 125 Kool-Aid Proof of Purchase points or 30 points + $10. I think each packet of Kool-Aid drink mix powder was worth a single point, and mixed like a gallon of Kool-Aid. So it really was a TON of Kool-Aid we had to drink to earn this game.

People will tell you this game sucked, but I liked it. The game was fun, if a simple game. The premise of the game is that there’s this swimming pool full of water, that you, Kool-Aid Man, have to protect from these creatures called Thirsties. Thirsties are… well, they’re thirsty, and they want to drink up all the water in the swimming pool. If that happens, the swimming pool won’t be fun anymore, and everyone’s day will be ruined. But you’re Kool-Aid Man, your job is to quench people’s thirst. So you can save the day by quenching the Thirsties’ thirst, thereby saving the swimming pool for the swimmers. Now, if only someone could fix that huge hole in the wall…

The people saying this game sucks might have been speaking literally. The game consists of rounds lasting 60 seconds, and if you can clear all the Thirsties in the level before this time elapses, you’ll get bonus points for the remaining time, and then start a new level with higher difficulty provided by the Thirsties moving faster than before. You spend most of your time dodging moving Thirsties. When a Thirsty drinks, it stops to extend a long straw to the water in the pool. This is when it is vulnerable. Hitting Thirsties when they are drinking eliminates the Thirsty and gives you some points. Colliding with a free-roaming Thirsty or into one of the edges of the screen will cause you to bounce out of control, giving the Thirsties time to drink more pool water. You can buy yourself a few seconds of invincibility by grabbing ingredients of Kool-Aid: Water, Sugar, and Kool-Aid Mix. Grabbing these changes you into a bigger pitcher of Kool-Aid and makes you invulnerable while a tune plays and also adds some water back to the pool. Mercifully, you can still knock out a drinking Thirsty if you careen into it while out of control, and if you luck into a power-up, it renders you invulnerable, instantly returning control back to you. The fire button does nothing in this game, which is a rare thing.

If you play the game enough, you may notice that the Thirsties' behavior is not random — the Thirsties always stop to drink at the same time, in the same order. By learning the pattern, you can gain an advantage over the game and get a better score, which makes the game somehow both more and less re-playable. More because learning the pattern could lead to developing strategies to get through the level while losing less of the water, less because if the game is always the same every time you play it, that can get boring. I only noticed this when I went back to re-play the game to write this review when I was a kid it seemed like each new game was random, and I never caught on to the pattern.

Unlike most Atari 2600 games, Kool-Aid Man starts a new game immediately upon turning the console on. To give you a second or two to get ready, there’s a sweet intro screen, which features a full-screen animation of Kool-Aid Man crashing through a wall around a typical suburban backyard. The invincibility tune plays, and then the game starts without any delay.

Check out that cinematic cutscene! Oh yeah! It seemed to me that the game programmers were a little sloppy by making the game work like this. It always made me anxious to know that I had to start playing the game immediately upon turning on the console. When the game ends, the screen background goes dark, and you lose control over Kool-Aid Man, and the score stops increasing. But the Thirsties continue to fly around, and every time they crash into Kool-Aid Man, he’s sent careening around, bonking off of the walls and other Thirsties, forever. Even in death, the power-ups make you invincible. And while it was funny to watch the defeated Kool-Aid Man bouncing around forever, the noise from this going on non-stop was pretty annoying, and tended to make you want to turn the game off as soon as your game was over unless you were going to immediately start a new game. Overall, the game was a good test of skill and reflexes, had tight controls, decent balance, and a tough challenge curve. On the other hand, it got old fast because there was nothing new after the first screen, the game immediately presented everything it had to offer.