Fatal Run (Atari 7800)

 

 The Atari 7800 is a console with an identity problem. The only place it ever really had a hance to be popular is the US, where obviously, the NES was almost uncontested as far as eight bit consoles go. I guess the heavily western-skewed design philosophy and aesthetic of its games might have fit in alongside the microcomputer culture of the UK and Europe of the time, but of course, the higher price of console games mean people would have expected higher quality to go along with it. And from a nostalgia standpoint, it doesn't have the sun-baked 20th century California feel to it that the 2600 has. In my mind, the Atari 2600 fits alongside pinball tables and the sixties Batman TV show than it does other videogames.

 

But anyway, the 7800 does inexplicably have a few exclusives, one of which being Fatal Run. It's a sprite scaling (if the effect's being fakes, they're doing a good job of it) racing game with some mild combat elements. You're acing across post-apocalyptic America, delivering a vaccine to all the towns you pss along your way, and for some reason, everyone else on the road wants to stop you doing that.  (As an aside, was the 1978 Judge Dredd story The Cursed Earth the first post-apocalypse story to use this premise? This is at least the second game I've covered here with this plot, after The Tousou Highway 2)

 

So you drive from town to town, as fast as you can, and that's the most impressive thing about Fatal Run: it really does go fast! Not only that, but the roads are winding and hilly, and you see them stretch off into the distance, far enough away that it's just a single pixel line wiggling off towards the horizon. It's a simple-looking, but very effective effect. As mentioned, you'll be attacked by other cars trying to ram you off the road, and you can fight back with various guns and gasgets, though ammunition is very limited. You get points for killing enemies, but not money, so it's not really a necessity. What you do get money for is speed: the quicker you get to each town, the fewer people will die from lack of vaccine, and the more people survive, the more you get paid. This is shown via a weird little sequence that took me by surprise the first time I saw it: you drive past the ruins of the town, looking out of your side window, as various innocent-looking people either stand still or explode and turn into gravestones. It reminds me of the kind of crude illustrations on certain kinds of American punk and metal album covers from the late eighties and early nineties.

 

Also at every town, you'll go to the car shop/bar, and these are another nice little arsthetic time capsule. They so powerfully evoke the working class America of the time (or at least a stereotype of it), and there's a few different screens used for the shops, too. I especially like the one with a TV behind the bar, switching between news and sports broadcasts. It feels like something you'd see in an early Simpsons episode, that kind of wood-panelled, slightly run down, slightly seedy place. It's actually a surprise to see a game from this time, on this console, with such a distinct, unglamourous, and non-videogamey aesthetic to it. I think if Fatal Run had looked more like a typical driving game (with the sunshine and luxury of Outrun, for example), or took place in a more standard post-apocalyptic wasteland, it might have had a harder time keeping my attention in the way that it did.

 

Fatal Run is an okay game. You won't regret never having played it, but if you do play it, you'll have a pretty good time. But as I've described, it's the way it looks and feels that really make it interersting. If you want to play a game that feels like it might have been played by Bart Simpson or Beavis and Butthead in their respective heydays, it's definitely one to look into.