Atari XL/XE - Elektra Glide [English Software Company] 1985

[patiomkin2001]

This game was so annoying. These random bouncing balls were almost impossible to dodge!

[tdc6502]

Unusual in this game is that the animation is beautiful, and for that one frame of the animation falls on one frame! and is a rarity even in the games on the Amiga. And Electra Glide is from 1985!

[davidvandayscousin]

WOuld love to hear the whole soundtrack . Does anyone have it? I'm not good enough at the game to get far enough without crashing.

[telemetry9]

This game used to get my heart going. It is thrilling and rewards skill and memory. A great piece of programing. Also - the frame rate and movement is awesome for an 8 bit.

[crusherrSK]

thx for the great memories. one of the loved games that we played when I was a kid..18 years ago. what a great time that was.

[roboaalien]

Yeah I remeber this game.  Fuck.ng Timer, JEJEJE

[mushypeas20]

I had a 800xl,my parents bought it me from Wigfalls in 1985.I wanted a Spectrum or C64 but the nice salesman told my parents that the 800xl was superior.I bought loads of games for it but at the time thought my parents had been conned by the salesman wanting to get rid of stock that wasnt selling well. 26 years on I would be curious to know what people thought of the 800xl and if indeed it was a superior home computer to the C64 etc.The other home computers always seemed to have more games

[SimmeringPotpourri]

@mushypeas20 I was an Atari fan & there were a lot of games for both systenms but the C64 did have a larger market. I do remember that the C64 took forever to load things off of disk, even w/ the booster cartridge, it still took a long time. Some games looked better on the C64 and visa-versa on the Atari. I think the most important thing was getting in with a group of people that owned the same thing.

Now, you have emulators so you can give them both a try and finally see which was better.

[aerobertj]

Just played Need for Speed on my son's PS3 - it brought back memories of this. Really the game play isn't much different, the Elektra blobs are a bit like crashes in Need for Speed. Isn't the music "wonderful" ?-)

[aerobertj]

Just played Need for Speed on my son's PS3 - it brought back memories of this. Really the game play isn't much different, the Elektra blobs are a bit like crashes in Need for Speed. Isn't the music "wonderful" ?-)

[Foebane72]

WHY does the tune have to restart with each impact? It's FRICKIN' ANNOYING!

And why do the foreground hills move faster than the background mountains at each turn? I don't think the programmer quite understood Parallax and Perspective, if you ask me.

[wilfscorner]

@Foebane72 Lol. The programmer went on to create RenderWare as used in GTA3 etc. I loved this game.

[AmigaCoder]

Great Game this...would love an ipod version!

[markemoon2]

there was a knack to avoiding the balls - they bounce slightly from left to right and you could get a good enough run on them to get to the later parts of the tune.

the start bit, racing out of the tunnel as the soundtrack starts is still one of my favourite gaming moments of all time....

[markemoon2]

there was a knack to avoiding the balls - they bounce slightly from left to right and you could get a good enough run on them to get to the later parts of the tune.

the start bit, racing out of the tunnel as the soundtrack starts is still one of my favourite gaming moments of all time....

[christschinwon]

never got the point of this one - vwere you supposed to be able to avoid them?!!!

[andthis1]

i remember this one.......those friggin ball thingys, arrrrrrggghh!!!!!!!

[philiptwood]

@thelleht LOL!!!

[romzom666]

Can someone please help me about this game? On side a it is for the c64. on side b it is for the atari 800xl. I am trying to load it on the atari 800xl but don't know what to type in to load it. My disk drive is the Atari 1050. Any help would be appreciated.

[StaxX28]

@romzom666

Just hold down [Option] while turning on computer with disk inserted in powered disk drive.

[bentsimon]

Listen to the flange on that bass!!

[Anto1]

Man I loved that music!! The ol' 800 series had great colour compered to the C64.

[odraconiandevil79]

One of the first games I played as a kid. Oh balls, that shows my age! Kind of freaked me out with all those bizarre flying shapes. What on earth was the plot in this? Maybe this could be named "Planet Highway" or something.

[maviozoPL]

Someone passed third lap? i see bifurcations but nothing else...:)

[vaganet]

One question: What program did you use to save the video? I´d like to contribute with mine as well.

Thanks in advance.

[pianistttt]

Is there someone who made it to the end? I mean, did this game have some kind of "finish"? I never got further than to the third lap.

[ioport]

I hated those fricking balls...

[mashmahalla]

I was very impressed with this at the time. The graphics and some were awesome and it played well. I just wished I could get a lot farther into the game without hitting the balls or columns so that I could see how it panned out (and what the tune sounded like) but like the guy who recorded this, I was not good enough.

[bruceleeC64]

I just wanted to get to the end of that tune !

[lordtrumpy]

A good cult game from the 80's.

It was better on atari than c64, but the music(same tune)was better on c64.

[dvamateur]

The rivalry between the Commodore C64 and Atari 800XL seemed to be in those days like Mac vs. PC today. I was definitely an Atari guy, with my 65XE and later 1040STe. Great old days! Nothing will capture the magic of the graphics and sounds of those games...

[musicmarius]

I really like this game, and thanks to this movie I re-found this game, and I'm playing it each day now. Thanks for that StaxX28!

About the game. It is hard to control indeed, but when you succeed, it gives a fabulous feeling. On the other hand... sometimes (at least I have that idea) it appears to be impossible to avoid a collision with one of these objects. And when you had one, probably more follow, because you are out of speed. But besides that... VERY GOOD GAME!

[greenbriggs9]

this game was far to fast for me, on the old 800XL. Still, it was better than my Acorn electron, as there were never any games produced with corners in the road. My mum could not afford a BBC at the time. In the end, i swapped my electron for an MSX, with our kid. lol. Good old days eh!

[EnglanderUK]

I remember having the C64 version of this, the graphics wasn't as good (no lines on road for example), but the music was more meaty and played at a random point when you hit something rather than going back to the start like this one.

Good game though, way ahead of it's time.

[Busasystem]

I had love this game and his song. It is better on C64.

[vitoco81]

Yes the song is very good!!,

I played this game a lot, but I could never finish, greetings from Chile!!!

[thorgallpl]

haha 4 sure atari4ever :))

[BFCboi]

Pretty sure this game was 48k, hence the plot was shallow! Good though. When you got good at games as hard as this, became a skill for life. I still use the skills I learned in this game and apply them to driving on the M6.

[BFCboi]

If I remember right, you played this game and made a note of whether the obstacles were coming from the left or right. I don't think they were random, but after learning them you could do lap after lap without stopping, except for the bloody tunnels!

[christschinwon]

I never got to grips with this but bought it at the time as the review raved about the graphics

[BFCboi]

Those 8 bit Atari's were and still are an excellent machine for their time. You can keep ya Wii machines as far as I am concerned - All the fun is in an Atari 800xl/65/130xe.

[simplyeighties]

These were awesome graphics at the time. Couldn't get this on a ZX Spectrum! Pity about the gameplay, though.

[cosine303]

nah the gameplay on elektraglide was ok.. providing you changed the steering icon (the right one) .. it was a tough game though.. although as I mentioned before the stupidly long tape loading time was a big put off.

[maiki60fps]

Well, its colourfull but look at the resolution and number of pixels / objects.... remember we are talking 1979 technology here...

[pablotweaks]

My first ever computer! I didn't think anyone else had one of these. What a time I had with this game. Great music as well

[rastaman1137]

how memories this game!! remeber this :-  setcolor 2,0,0 to change backround colour e:?

[effeffeff]

This game was pretty poor, except for the amazing graphics, the obstacles in the road just killed the enjoyment of racing.

[reverendcutterx]

30 minutes loading time: if you were lucky. I spent hours getting some of these games running and had my dad realigning the heads or making cardboard risers of different thickness for every tape. First thing I bought when I started working was a Happy chipped 1050.

Elektra was rock hard too, see that bouncing ball? That thing ensured I'd never hear more than a few seconds of the funky music.

Still, bless English for supporting us, and at a lot better price than the US imports.

[jakebig22]

Adam Billyard was a genius....Philp Morris, Owner English Software Company

[Brigand22]

I suppose typing in a BASIC listing is something one either generally enjoys or despises. You're right, it could sometimes be an extraordinarily tedious affair — especially some of those long DATA statements. /*shudders*

Your checksum argument is incorrect though. Atari User(later Page 6) incorporated the 'Get It Right!' type-in aid, and later the improved v2. Antic used 'TYPO' which was replaced by the MUCH improved TYPO II.

[NotATube]

The original Atari User was unrelated to Page 6- both magazines were on the market at the same time.

When AU got cancelled, Page 6 bought the rights to the name and subscribers and retitled themselves "New Atari User". But really, NAU was just Page 6 under a different name- not much to do with the old AU.

Both magazines used checksums for their listings though; Page 6 (AKA NAU) used Antic's Typo- I forget which version(s).

[Brigand22]

Oops. Beg your pardon, my mix-up there.

Page 6 used TYPO 2, and made a switch to version 3 starting from issue 18.

[telemetry9]

This was an excellent game - really well made. The c64 version didn't have the colour scaling or as fast 3D.

it was a well balanced game that really brought your skill levels up and it was exciting to learn to avoid the obstacles at high speed.

[cosine303]

I had both atari 800xl + c64... great game.. but not for tape users... THIRTY minutes loading time.. as much as I liked the game, I remember atari loading times were so poor in most cases.. Although I do remember Hover bovver by jeff minter being ultra quick to load =)

[NotATube]

I'm sure it was more like 15 minutes, although it may have seemed like 30. The worst "ordinary" games I had were 20+ minutes (which is dire by modern standards, try telling that to t'kids of today they won't believe you, etc etc)

[NotATube]

I did have one multiload tape game (Ace of Aces) that was almost 30 minutes in total.

I suspect that was because it was an American game- I read somewhere that by the mid-80s the U.S. market was almost exclusively disk-based, so it was probably written with fast disc access in mind and converted to tape for the UK market. Sad thing is that many UK Atari owners had disk drives, but the 8-bit budget/reissue channel in general was tape-centric, so cheap games were only on tape anyway. :-(

[gamorbab]

I am not sure what is it about this game that would make it signifigantly better than the C64 version. The graphics are only little better, and the music is a lot worse. (the quality of sound anyway, lacking drums etc.) And to say 'so was all atari stuff' is clearly just a sad attempt to provoke reactions, as it is a blatant lie.

[cosine303]

I'm not doing it to provoke any reaction. look at my favourite videos.. notice a LOT of c64 things there. I used to code c64 a lot, my names in a few games. Colour wise the 64 had limits, but I always prefered the sid chip.. as for the graphics, most of the time they were chunkier on atari even if they were more colourful.

[Brigand22]

The most over-hyped game of its era. I've still got one of the magazines that contains the generic company PR pre-release comments for this -- utterly daft stuff!

At least in those days magazines didn't subscribe to PR hype the way that websites/mags do today - a trait that I truly miss.

Example: the 'Atari User' magazine used to regularly design their front cover art around the type-it-yourself Basic games, sent in from random people. Today, it's all become a silly corporate playground.

[NotATube]

To be fair, typing in games absolutely *sucked*. Hated it, tedious as anything. Even worse when they didn't use checksums so you didn't know if you'd typed in the line correctly.

Apparently some people enjoyed learning stuff by "debugging" the bugs caused by their typing mistakes, but it never did anything for me.

[jtlaitin]

Thanks for the memories! Still remember ducking those balls and cubes with my head while playing....

[SuperPostman]

I will always remember the music !

[gamorbab]

Yep, me too! Except that I remember the better C64 version with actual DRUMS (to make it feel even more energetic, rhythmic and speedy song), and not missing some notes every now and then like the atari version does. Also the c64 version just 'fast forwards' the music a bit after hitting an obstacle, atari version boringly just starts it over and over and over from the beginning.. frustrating.

[cosine303]

adam made the c64 version? but I still think he was better making things on atari than c64.. amazing to think ONE person made it, now its like a team of 50+ people for a game. hehe

[nyyterp]

This was actually one of my lesser favorite driving games on the Atari. The obstacles took away from the fun and realism of an otherwise find looking game.

[mistapaul]

fantastic game, much better than c64 version.

well, so was all atari stuff

[cosine303]

one of the few games which was better on atari, this /fractalus/dropzone/ball blazer off the top of my head.. but try loading it off tape .. how long.. 30 minutes, due to atari's RUBBISH loading system like many more games. c64 had far more games, trying to find XL games was a nightmare. c64 was overall better game wise and demo scene wise.

[mistapaul]

no games for atari? when i sold mine on ebay 5 years ago, i had over 10,000 games with it.

from 1979 all the way to 2002

[cosine303]

i'm guessing you were a disk drive owner. not all of us were. 10,000 hhmm right. how many were basic "mag type in" games hehe. I used to go into shops, see very little commerical games for the atari. The uk support of it was pretty cr** to be honest. I have a lot of english/firebird/americana/cre­ative sparks games. no ocean ones etc =)

[mistapaul]

about 1% were typin.

had all games from uk, usa and a hell of a lot from europe.

ocean software were a garbage company, used to be called 'spectrum software' now owned by ATARI(infogrames).

[cosine303]

i'm just using ocean/imagine as one example, i could list more thalamus / system 3 (even though they ripped off a m8 for none payment of music) etc. i've been on a few atari sites of late. I'm guessing the main "support" was from the US? end of the day i couldn't get the games in my local shop.. it was shonky. i remember red rat software in manc, and thats about it.

[mistapaul]

i too remember rat rat software (fennel street) and rob.c

system 3,creators of international karate, which the atari 8bit version was far better than c64 version - including the musix, check it out on this site!

the only reason the c64 had more games was because it sold more computers, therefore software companys put their money into the popular machines, dosn't make it a better machine? yes? sid was good but so was pokey.16 colours vs 256

[gamorbab]

How is DROPZONE better on Atari? Atari version has worse graphics, horribly bad sound and odd bug-sounding loop in the explosion sound. The lightning looks ridiculous - an arrow? It plays pretty much the same though. So eventhough the differences are again quite small, by no means is atari version better in any way than the c64 version.

[cosine303]

ok gam.. look at it this way, say you were trying to promote the atari, showing things like ball blazer + dropzone + fractalus would be in there right? YES I owned both machines, but due to atari's p*** poor support in the uk I could get the games I wanted, so went c64. I also owned a speccy before that, and am from the c64 demo scene. So at least I'm trying to be objective =) each machine had its good & bad points.

[NotATube]

Gamorbab; are you discussing the PAL (European/Australasian TV system) or the NTSC (US/Japan) Atari version of Dropzone?

The original was PAL, and apparently an NTSC version was written without the author's permission and they messed up the timing and such.

Even though you're (apparently) in Europe, if you judged it via an emulator it's still possible you saw the flakey NTSC version. Even if you ran the NTSC version in PAL mode, I guess.

[gamein60seconds]

I have both versions and to be honest they are identical. I play the XE version though cause it loads in a few seconds - got disk drive! I have got an interview from Archer Maclean which seems to back this up, saying that both versions are "visually, sonically etc., identical", but that the atari version is ,"about 12K shorter", and capable of running ,"about 2 and a half times faster".

[yaKC]

What a nice take on the ol` driving game, liking the music, very cool :)

[GamesEmotions]

great classic game, thanks for posting :)