Although I never owned an Atari 2600 (or Atari VCS as it was known) at the time, my best friend did, so I wasn’t far off, and as a result, I’ve had that level of fondness for it all the same ever since! And that’s why getting an Atari 2600+ console for Christmas 2024 meant the world to me, and even more so because I wasn’t expecting it! This is the fully backwards-compatible, as good as totally authentic, modern replica of the 1980 marvel; it’s ever so slightly smaller, USB-powered, and plugs into a TV with HDMI but otherwise, it’s got the original cartridge slot, old-school controller ports and all the big weird switches from the real thing! Of course, that also means you need a cartridge to play anything on it, and fortunately it does also come with a surprisingly well-rounded 10-in-1 compilation, with some real big-hitters from Atari like Yar’s Revenge, Missile Command, Adventure and Haunted House, as well as some other old favourites of mine like Video Pinball and Realsports Volleyball, and they’re all selectable using combinations of the four DIP-switches on the back. As said, all wonderfully authentic, as is the CX40+ joystick included, which has been recreated to the same size and layout as the one that originally shipped with the console, and playing stuff like Combat (also included on the cart) feels exactly how I remember it!

Oh yeah, it runs Atari 7800 cartridges as well, although not all of them, and ideally ones with single-button controls, but that’s not a priority for me, and while I do still have an eye out for something I want that works and at the right price as write, I only really wanted this for the 2600 experience, and so far I couldn’t have asked for more! Now, as you can imagine, a ten-game compilation wasn’t going to keep me away for eBay for too long, and within just two weeks of Christmas, I had a library that also included original cartridges for Q*bert, Centipede, Pole Position, California Games, Video Chess, Galaxian, and a lovely sealed boxed version of Klax… And that was before I started thinking about all the stuff like Pitfall, Chopper Command, Kung-Fu Master, River Raid, Enduro, Seaquest and an awful lot more I also really wanted, although the patience and selectiveness I then exercised was almost as impressive as my emerging collection, if I do say so myself! All the same, I couldn’t wait to grab a couple of paddle controllers and the 4-in-1 collection they came with too, featuring Night Driver, Canyon Bomber, Breakout and Video Olympics, and so much so that I imported it from Germany because stupid Amazon – the only official UK supplier – had no stock and there was no sign of them getting any more. Anyway, worth the extra few quid, although by this point I was thinking I should definitely slow down before anyone significant noticed! And that’s where Demon Attack comes in…

I’m not sure I ever bought a game for a system I didn’t own before this one! Here’s the thing though – I’ve been toying with a feature covering my top ten favourite bits of box art for several years, and if future me ever remembers, I’ll come back and add a link should it ever appear, but in the meantime, Demon Attack is likely to be at the business end! Sorry for the spoiler, but since I first came across the VIC-20 version in the early eighties (when I did own one of them), I’ve just thought it looked awesome, and that rainbow-band and cool silver-foil mirrored surface brings it to life even more. So futuristic! Okay, more like the best Transformers ever than demons, as these cool, equally silver space-dinosaurs with bits of plane and missiles attached to them hurtle across this gorgeous, glittering star-field, but whatever, it’s fantastic… And fantastic enough to buy a complete, very good condition, boxed Atari 2600 version long before you have any means to play it! Incidentally, since writing that last sentence, I learned that apparently it was actually based on some toys painted silver and blue, so I wasn’t far off!

I mentioned Missile Command and Night Driver earlier, and those 2600 ports were developed by an Atari programmer called Rob Fulop, who was also behind Space Invaders on the Atari 800. Some sources also suggest he was behind the 2600 conversion too, and an interview with him in Atari 2600/7800: a visual compendium by Bitmap Books, confirms his frustration about Atari not crediting the game creators, so that could be the case, and definitely led to him leaving and co-founding Imagic. It also partially confirms another story about the final straw being him getting a turkey as a Christmas bonus the same year his Missile Command had been a huge commercial hit for Atari, which is so National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation! Anyway, he certainly developed Demon Attack, and it was released on the Atari 2600 as Imagic’s debut in March 1982, alongside Star Voyager and Trick Shot. It’s a single-screen, fixed shoot ‘em up, clearly inspired by Galaxian’s “death from above” gameplay, as remarked by Fulop himself, but even more so bits of Centuri’s 1980 arcade shooter Phoenix, to the point they took legal action over the similarities after they’d licensed it for the 2600, where it’s got an absolutely phenomenal conversion!

“Marooned on the ice planet Krybor, you watch legions of eerie creatures scream overhead. They hover ominously. They give you no quarter. Attack and destroy them – or be destroyed! Armed with your Laser Cannon, you confront the ultimate challenge: Survive!” The eerie creatures overhead turn out to be the titular demons, which you need to shoot for points until they kill you. You’ve got three “reserve bunkers” (or lives), which you can increase up to a maximum of six by destroying an attack wave unscathed, but when they’re all gone it’s game over, and that’s all there is to it! Once again, according to Fulop, there are actually two versions of the game in circulation, with the first batch shipped containing its original eighty-four waves, at which point it was also game over, but then after only a few days, they were receiving calls from people saying they’d beaten it, so they killed the shut-off in subsequent batches, where I assume it just keeps going… By which you can assume that I’ve no idea if my copy is one of the first ones or not because I’ve got no chance of ever getting that far! As for controls, it’s built for the classic Atari joystick that the one I’ve now got is based on, and it’s left and right and fire.

Coming back to the console’s famous switches from earlier, the Game Select Lever is going to allow you to choose a game mode, of which there are ten, and this is where you can really get your money’s worth, especially if you’ve got a player two, but I think I’ll start with vanilla Demon Attack for one, get into a game, then we’ll have a look at the rest from there. It is worth mentioning a couple of additional difficulty settings though, sitting on the Right and Left Difficulty Levers around the back of the console. In case you’re not familiar, these switches are both marked A and B, and one or the other or both may or may not be used by a game. Demon Attack uses both, one for solo play and one for two player, where A is for Aggressive Action and B is for Basic Bombardment, or expert and beginner modes, I guess, although honestly it’s not a massively noticeable difference in my opinion. I think it affects the enemy fire frequency and the amount of fire they’re laying down in one go but it’s really hard to tell! Again, maybe I’m just not good enough to get to where it’s really significant either way. What is nice regardless though is for two players of different skill levels, you can set one switch to A and the other to B to even the odds. In theory!

Gameplay is just about as basic as it gets by today’s standards, but it’s the classic early arcade shooter format of enemies moving left and right at the top of the screen, shooting at you while you move left and right at the bottom, dodging what they’ve got and shooting back at them. It’s easy to pick up (although there is a dead zone at the very left and right of the screen you need to get used to), and it’s responsive, and it’s all very Space Invaders and derivatives thereof, and in particular the third and fourth waves of Phoenix with the birds, plus a hint of the first wave, which itself is effectively Galaxian. All of which are a pretty decent place to find some fun, but that’s not to say the game doesn’t come up with its own fun too, so let’s get into how it plays! Things start relatively sedate, with a maximum of three demons appearing at once, with just one of them firing sporadic laser bursts at you. Their movement is a bit random, moving left a bit or right a bit for a sec, then some more, then up or down a bit, and so on, and totally independent of each other, so they’re not moving in uniform waves like in Space Invaders. This makes shooting them a bit more cat and mouse than that, especially with the one shooting back at you, where you’re trying to anticipate their next move as you take a shot, and also get out of there as soon as it’s gone before they get you. It also gets a bit more strategic as the action hots up a few stages in, as both split demons and diving demons start to appear around level five – shoot the regular demon and it splits into two smaller ones, one of which might also be the one now shooting at you if that’s what its “predecessor” was doing, making it way harder to anticipate and subsequently hit. And once they’re split, sooner or later they’ll start diving at you…

I’m going to jump to sound for a sec, and if you know Galaxian you know why! I’d read Rob Fulop’s “death from above” quote somewhere before and it always stuck with me, but no so much for the gameplay as for the terrifying sound the aliens in that game make as they peel off to dive-bomb you! It’s such an intrinsic part of what makes that a golden great, totally unmistakable and totally exhilarating! Unfortunately, I reckon Demon Attack misses a trick in this department. Okay, I’m not suggesting it just copies it (although it doesn’t seem too averse to doing that elsewhere!) but the sound overall is just a bit underwhelming, and a little chirping noise, like The New Zealand Story’s worst nightmare, accompanying the game’s greatest moment of peril is the worst culprit! Elsewhere, it does do a decent job of raising the tension the longer you take to clear a stage, with this pulsing, initially low-pitched beep gradually getting higher and higher, but your own gunfire sounds weedy, the regular demon attack doesn’t have any sound at all, and the only other thing is a functional bit of prolonged white noise to introduce a new demon into the fray when you’ve dispatched another, which also gets a nice graphical effect as it evolves from a stream of coloured particles on either side of the screen. On that front, I think it would be unfair to look at this with anything but early eighties eyes, when I remember perfectly well that this would have been considered a real stunner! The enemy sprites are big, detailed and impressively varied stage by stage, and impressively full of colour too. They’re also full of movement, with convincingly flapping wings and little explosions into multicoloured dust when you shoot them, as well as that fancy particle effect I just mentioned.

Obviously, the maximum of three big enemies at once is related to some kind of technical limitation, but they all move smoothly enough, including when they’re all split into two little ones, and there’s no flicker to speak of, although while I was attempting (and generally failing) to get a few decent screenshots to put here, I did notice a lot of bits of demon missing in them, so it’s possibly also doing that intentional flicker trick, faster than the eye can see, to make it look like there’s more going on on-screen at once than there really is. Your own little ship isn’t quite as interesting as your enemies, but apart from that there’s really not much else going on, which I think does work to good effect, giving them a certain boldness against the black of space! I guess my only criticism of the enemies is they lack personality, but given the time they come from, I’ll let not being particularly demonic go! Back to gameplay, I think we’d got to about stage five before, by which point you should have racked up a few extra lives, but even on regular difficultly, from this point forward, you’ll be very lucky to hang onto them for long, and sometimes you’ll get killed multiple times in quick succession if you’ve found yourself at the start of a hail of bullets that will still be coming when you reemerge with your next life! That hail of bullets will most likely be a continuous line of laser fire by now too, and the enemies are all moving faster, with a higher rate of fire, and all of this is reflected in the number of points you’re scoring, which increases as you go, and that’s important because this game is all about the score. On the first two waves, each regular demon is worth ten points, then fifteen on the next two; on five and six, they’re worth twenty, with split demons worth forty and diving demons worth eighty. By the time you get to wave eleven, these are worth thirty-five, seventy and one-hundred and forty respectively, and I think that’s then the maximum, although as said several times, we’re getting into uncharted territory for me now!

Overall, the gameplay balance is more or less spot on, with the challenge ramping at a decent enough rate whichever difficulty you’re playing, so it remains compelling rather than frustrating to wade through again once your out of lives. However, those other modes from earlier can mix things up a little bit more.. I’ll finish by quickly running through them, starting with an almost regular two-player mode where you’re taking turns between waves rather than when you lose a life, with player one controlling a little red cannon turret thing, and player two on a cool gold one. I’ve not played a lot of it but it’s a nice twist, and keeps both players actively engaged whatever their level of play (at least until one of them has lost all their lives and the other just carries on by themselves). The next mode, available for one and two players, is Tracer Shot Demon Attack, and this allows you to control the direction of your laser fire after you’ve shot it, kind of like putting swerve on it by swinging your ship or turret or whatever left of right once it’s in the air. Hard to describe but it’s very intuitive after a few goes, and is another really nice twist. Then we have advanced modes for all four variations we’ve just covered, which seem to be starting you a good few stages in, and everything is faster and more aggressive, but I’m still not picking up any major differences when I’m toggling those difficulty switches on the back. And yes, I am doing it right! That said, I have got into a rhythm of regular Demon Attack on the higher difficulty for a decent session, and Advanced Demon Attack on the lower one for a quick go, so maybe there is something in it after all!

The last two game modes are really interesting but they’re two player only, meaning I’ve got limited experience, unfortunately. However, you take turns against the same wave of attack, where control alternates every four seconds, making keeping track of your colour as important as actually shooting anything! You share lives but have independent scores, with the added bonus that if you or your partner loses a life, then the other gets five hundred extra points. In these modes, Demon Attack: Special Co-Op Version, as the ninth game mode is also known, uses regular fire, while the tenth and final one, Advanced Demon Attack: Special Co-Op Version, uses the controllable tracer fire. Just wish I still had a friend to play these ancient Atari games with because those last two modes really sound like fun if you both put some time in! There’s more than enough fun to be found in the single player modes though, and while it might not look like much to modern eyes, definitely won’t sound like much to modern ears, and is also clearly taking inspiration (to put it lightly!) from elsewhere in almost every department, what it does, it does very well. And what it does is absolutely nail that utterly addictive, score-chasing gameplay loop of the golden age of arcade machines, but does it right there on your own TV, and that’s timeless, and that’s Imagic!

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