Atari Tempest: Dave Theurer’s Masterpiece

It’s a brave man who tries to criticize Atari’s seminal, groundbreaking game Tempest. More than any other classic arcade game, Tempest hit the arcade scene like a juggernaut. Nothing like it had been seen before, and arguably, nothing has come close since. As Atari’s first full color vector game, Tempest not only broke new technical ground, reinforcing Atari’s position at the top of the arcade development scene, but also threw something completely new at the playing public.

This week, I wanted to take a more detailed look at how the game was made. Its creator, Dave Theurer had just finished up Missile Command, having previously worked on Atari’s Four Player Soccer game. Now highly respected internally at the company, he had very quickly been catapulted to Superstar Programmer status… read more >