We all tend to look away from the past that was once Atari's ruling in the video game industry. You know, most adults of our generation would tend to know more about Atari than all of us. With us, we have the knowledge of current video game systems. But the past holds more of a greater accomplishment than today's current system. Let's go back about twenty-five years or so to the 80s, can you actually believe we have to say that now? There's a game out there that brought attention to many young people's souls. This game was known as Swordquest.
This game has it where they're not only having you play the game, they're making you scavenge comic book panels for clues that are revealed when a certain action takes place in the game. You must find a secret in a panel to discover a word that's a part of a giant list of words. These words soon become a sentence, but only a few of them are useless words. To figure out what these words, you must look throughout the booklet for a clue. The game's story has two words written in different colors, Prime and Number. Therefore, this hint is to help you solve the mystery behind the five words that you must find out of the group of words you found in the comic.
You later mail the clues out to the company of Atari and there, whoever gets the right answers will have the right to play the game again, only this time, you're playing the company's version of the game that is to determine who wins the grand prize of, get this, jeweled possessions. You have a crown, a talisman, a chalice, and a philosopher's stone all made out of gold with various jewels attached to them. But wait, with those prizes, then there must be more games out, right? Well yeah, there's Swordquest: Fireworld, Airworld, Waterworld and Earthworld. Each game had their own prizes to win. The winners of all four of these games would go on to compete for the better prized, this giant sword that had various jewels and made out of gold and silver. All of these prizes ranged up to about $150,000 total. This competition was not a joke.
But sadly, judging from the title, you can tell that what appears to be one of the video game industry's grandest challenge ever, won't have a good ending. You see, the video game crash took place, Atari was bought out by Jack Tramiel, and Airworld was never created. Rumors were stated that Tramiel has the crown, the stone and the sword because when Waterworld came out, which the prize for that game was the crown, the competition stopped. It stopped because the great video game crash took place. And after everything got better, the competition never took place again, nor did anyone try to do anything to resume it. People claims that Tramiel may have sold the remaining prizes somewhere, but there's really no hardcore proof he did anything. These prizes do exist because there were pictures everywhere showing what this competition would be like.
Atari people had a great thing happening to them and sadly, the only thing we have is MLB's win $1,000,000 to pitch a perfect game. The thing is that there's cheats out there now and days to figure out how to do such a thing, but when Atari had this competition, not only did you have no internet, but you actually had to rely on your own for once. It's really sad that video games now and day's really can't have something like this happen again. I'd love to see another competition like this take place where you have to work on your own and such... But I doubt it'll ever happen.
Cheers to you Atari folks. You did have a great era of video gaming.
>'-'<
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