If you’d asked me what sort of things Breakout-style games were missing, I likely wouldn’t have put “clown death” near the top of the list. Nevertheless, here we are.
Circus Atari began its life as the arcade game Circus in 1977. It was published by a company called Exidy. It received a ton of different ports and ripoffs over the years (including Sega’s Seesaw Jump and Taito’s Acrobat), but the most prominent of those is likely the unoriginally named Atari 2600 port Circus Atari in 1980.
The game is largely based on Breakout, a classic genre that typically places a field of blocks or objects at the top of the screen and tasks the player with bouncing a ball at them repeatedly to get rid of them. There are tons of these from the late 70s and early 80s, which vary in their degrees of complexity and deviation from the basic concept. Circus Atari mixes the formula up in a few interesting ways – most importantly, the ball is replaced with clowns on a see-saw.
Your job is to move the seesaw so the clown in the air lands on the high end, launching the other clown into the air towards the “balloons” in the air. Like its predecessor, Circus Atari makes use of Atari’s “paddle” controllers, whose dials move the seesaw from side to side:
Hitting the balloons can be surprisingly tricky – landing on the seesaw at an inopportune angle won’t launch your clown high enough to even reach them, so your timing has to be very good. Conversely, a well-placed launch will cause a clown to ricochet between balloons like a pinball machine, which is immensely satisfying. Of course, poor timing will lead to a clown’s untimely (and mildly hilarious) death:
I can’t stress this enough – as much as you’re frantically trying to avoid it, your characters futilely falling to their deaths is extremely entertaining. The low-fi sound affect that accompanies it just perfect.
Circus Atari moves surprisingly quickly, and it can be really tough to set up a good (or even passable) launch. You have five precious clown lives to work with, but can earn more by reaching certain score thresholds – a rarity in games of this age. Getting this right is tricky (see below), but that makes a great launch all the more satisfying.
Simplistic as it is, Circus Atari is a whole lot of fun, and an interesting variant on the Breakout genre. It’s fast paced, difficult to master, and the sound of clowns hitting the digital pavement is amusingly enjoyable. If you enjoy games like this and want to try one that’s a bit more unique, this is a great pick. An original cartridge is very cheap, and it also appears on a lot of the “Atari Flashback” consoles and compilations that are all over the place now.
Next week, we’ll be checking out one of the most unique and interesting fighting game releases of the early 2000s. You won’t want to miss it.