Source: Creative Computing: Video & Arcade Games – Volume 1, Number 1 – Spring 1983
This review and ad come from Creative Computing’s Video & Arcade Games. Creative Computing was a 1980s computer magazine that wasn’t really around all that long. This magazine was a spin-off that was around even less time…only two issues were made in fact. This particular page has a couple of interesting items.
The first item is a review of a game called Ghost Gobbler for the TRS-80 Color Computer. This was a blatant rip-off of Pac-Man. Such complete rip-offs of successful arcade games were very common in this era though it was rare that they were ever as good as the original. This one seems to be a pretty typical example though from the review it sounds like the joysticks that were available for the Color Computer weren’t really suitable for this type of game…or most games.
There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about Ghost Gobbler except that it was a 3rd party piece of software and 3rd party software and hardware for the Color Computer line seems to have been pretty limited. I’m not sure why. Radio Shack made Color Computer hardware in various iterations and supported it with software and hardware from the early 1980s all the way into the early 1990s. However, it was rare that a popular 3rd party game made it to that system whereas the Commodore 64, Apple II, Atari ST, Amiga, Atari 8-bit, etc. all had tons of 3rd party support in their lifetimes.
The other item of interest is an ad for something called the Game Loader that supposedly allowed you to play Atari 2600 games on the VIC-20. There were a couple of different companies that advertised similar devices. Protecto was a well known mail order company (for Commodore owners anyway) throughout the 1980s and probably into the 1990s. However, for whatever reason, none of these magical devices ever saw the light of day as far as I can tell.
Such a device would not have been impossible. The ColecoVision had an Atari 2600 adapter and I believe the Intellivision had such a device as well. Internally, they were basically complete Atari 2600s that plugged into the system and just used the power and video output of the host system. so, no doubt a similar device COULD have been made for the VIC-20.
So what happened to them? I saw some speculation that these ads were intentional fakes to bring in more funding. It was also rumored that these were import devices from Hong Kong and were facing possible legal action from Atari. However, I think it is more likely that it was just a matter of timing. For instance, this ad appeared in Spring 1983. This would have been just after the video game crash hit. My guess is the sudden downturn in the video game market made manufacturing and selling such a device far more of a risk so they were probably just quietly cancelled. Video game and game system prices, including the Atari 2600, were falling rapidly. Computers and computer games on the other hand were just really entering their golden age.
