Super Spaceout

I created this for the Shacknews Game Jam V, which has the theme is “Before the NES/FamiCom”.  

I've loved the artwork on old Atari products a ton, but in the case of a lot of Atari 2600 games, wondered what on earth happened between the design of the games' cover art, and development of the game itself.  Adventure's cover had an amazing-looking dragon wandering a beautiful hedge maze; the game had a bunch of giant chunky pixels and a dragon that looked more like a duck.  Basic Math had psychedlic swamp creatures sitting under a rainbow while spacey-looking kids caught giant butterflies in nets; the game had nothing but a plain background with giant chunky numbers of the screen.  Every game was like this.  

In Super Breakout's case, they had a pair of astronauts (or maybe one astronaut) shown under the classic bricks over their heads in space.  Well, what my game's hoping to do is to show what actually happened to that astronaut shown on the cover.  

After working on this for a month, I've come up with an elaborate backstory.  Super Spaceout is an imaginary sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind that stars Arnold Schwarzenegger.  That's all the setup I'm really going to do to prepare you for the game (not that anyone would read this)... lol

You can play the game with a mouse, touch screen, or with a genuine Atari 2600 paddle controller if you have an interface board that turns the input into a gamepad like the one that Jeremy Williams of Tested created - https://github.com/Jerware/xinput2600 .  

The source code to the game is available from my Github page .