Surround

Surround

Atari 2600 - USA - 1st edition.

Developer Atari Publisher Atari, Sears, Roebuck and Co. Published 1977-09-11 Platforms Atari 2600 Genres Action, Grid capture, Maze Multiplayer Simultaneous versus Distribution Commercial

Surround is an action maze video game developed and published by Atari on the Atari 2600 on 1977-09-11, and a shameless ripoff of Blockade, but the game does add a few additional features. The game was one of the launch titles for the Atari 2600.

The game takes place in an arena where each player controls a moving box which leaves behind a solid trail. Players successfully gain a point if they cause their opponent to crash into one of the walls.

Personal

Own?	No.
Won?	Yes. Games 2 and 4 are played against an AI.
Finished	2024-07-26.

I didn't have this game growing up, in fact, I didn't know anything about it, so, when I first saw Tron in the 1980s, I just assumed the scene was made for the movie. The first snake game I ever played was Nibbles released with MS-DOS version 5.0 which game on my family's first computer. I even tried to create a similar game in BASIC, but never got it fully working. In my 30's, I finally discovered Blockade as the originator for games of this style, and, ultimately, the scene in Tron, then learned about Surround a little while later. I assumed it was a two-player only game, but, while researching for my list of winnable Atari 2600 games, I discovered it had two AI modes, so I promptly beat them.

Review

2	3	1	2	2

Best Version: Atari 2600

Good

• The game not only does a good job of replicating the game play of Blockade, an arcade game released only a year prior, but also adds additional play modes, and a primitive AI to the most basic modes.
• Though none of the additional play modes add anything groundbreaking to the game, they at least add a bit of variety to an otherwise simplistic game.

Bad

• In the speed up mode, the speed doesn't accelerate smoothly, but in abrupt jumps. This makes it easy to lose if you can't adapt to it quickly enough. It's best to try to predict when a speed up is going to occur, then try to make sure you don't need to turn during that time.
• The AI only works with the two most basic game modes, and it's pretty terrible. On my very first time playing the game, I beat the AI in game mode 2 without it ever scoring a point. I beat game mode 4 on my first attempt, and, while I did allow several points, it was largely to the speed up occurring in unexpected bursts.
• You can actually have both the player's characters move through each other or even exist in the exact same square which doesn't really fit the game's theme.
• The Video Graffiti mode just lets you draw using low-resolution boxes with a static foreground and background color. It's not easy to make anything that looks nice, and you can't save your work.

Ugly

• With nothing but boxes, the graphics look terrible, even for an Atari 2600 game.
• The sound effects are effective, but I find them to be quite obnoxious.

Media

Box Art

• 

  Cliff Spohn's produced an expert painting that tries to make such an abstract concept look exciting.

• 

  The revision just updated the text.

• 

  The art in the Telegames release attempts to add military themes that don't exist in the game.

Documentation

• 

  Manual - Original.

• 

  Manual - Revision.

• 

  Manual - Telegames.

Videos

Game Play.

Play Online

Atari 2600

Representation

Strong female character?	Fail	There are no characters.
Bechdel test?	Fail	There are no characters.
Strong person of color character?	Fail	There are no characters.
Queer character?	Fail	There are no characters.

Credits

Role	Staff
Blockade (Not credited)	Lane Hauck, Ago Kiss
Atari Port	Alan Miller
Cover Art (Atari)	Cliff Spohn

Titles

Language	Native	Transliteration	Translation
English	Surround
English (Telegames)	Chase

Links