Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: atari, Swordquest

Swordquest: A Lesson In Poor Planning Returns As A Comic Book Storyline

As reported earlier today on Bleeding Cool, Dynamite is partnering with Atari to release comics based on their gaming library, starting with one of the biggest gaming events that unfortunately died from the 1983 game crash: Swordquest. But a lot of younger gamers who only know Atari from being a '80s game console or the producer behind the RollerCoaster Tycoon series may not be aware that the story line for the upcoming Swordquest comic is based in reality with an extravagant game series and contest.

Flashback to 1982: The original video game craze that popularized arcades and turned companies like Atari into a household name was starting to dwindle, but it hadn't reached rock-bottom yet. Designers Dan Hitchens and Tod Frye put together a game based on the 1979 title The Adventurer, but the story and mythology quickly branched past the original and spawned into its own series. At some point, Atari got the idea to come up with a contest based on the game and branch it out into four titles. (Because why make money off one game when you can make four times that off of four games.) The four titles were based off different worlds in the game's universe: Earthworld, Fireworld, Waterworld, and Airworld. Players would traverse the 8-bit landscape solving puzzles on a massive adventure (for its time) and receive clues to give back to Atari.

You're probably thinking to yourself "Why were they giving info back to the company?" Turns out Atari decided to go all out with the game and have a contest! Top winners would go to Atari headquarters to play a custom version of the game in the finals and the winners would receive prizes like a talisman, a chalice, a crown, and a philosopher's stone. The grand prize to this entire thing was a white gold sword that the four finalists would compete over in a custom game, with the total amount of prizes being $150,000. Even if you didn't win any of the final rounds, you could still sign up to be in a club where you got t-shirts, posters and specially made DC Comics books for each game (as mentioned in our other news).

So what the hell happened and why isn't this a bigger deal like the Nintendo World Championships? For starters, the game was killed off. Atari was in major debt and the 1983 crash was looming, so the company canceled Waterworld's final round. The fourth game, Airworld, never made it past production. The first two winners of Earthworld and Fireworld received their prizes, but were never given a shot at the grand prize. Everything was just halted because of financial issues, and after Commodore purchased Atari's assets in 1983, there was no going back. There are rumors of what happened to the final three prizes, but nothing substantial beyond the fact that the prizes were commissioned and owned by The Franklin Mint, who most likely scrapped them and turned them into other objects after Atari went bust.

And now that story is the basis for the new comic book you'll be seeing from Dynamite this year. On the surface, it's an intriguing story of how companies were super ambitious even before the industry got a second wind from the NES a few years later, and should make for a cool story when it's published. If you'd like a more detailed look at the series, the Angry Video Game Nerd (James Rolfe) created a video about the series back in 2011, which you can check out below.

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