Well, its been a hot minute since I’ve updated the blog. Life decided that it had other plans for me over the past 18 months or so.
The good news though, dear reader, is that we are back and I have lots in store for 2026!
So let’s kick things off the right way here. I have some incredible and previously unseen footage of Battlezone cabinets being built at Atari from late summer/early fall 1980.
There’s something endlessly fascinating about watching a classic Atari title come together — not so much the design documents or the marketing materials, but the physical act of building the thing. Battlezone is one of those games where the development story and the cabinet itself are so intertwined that it’s hard to separate the two.
Atari Battlezone sales flyer
Ed Rotberg’s work on the game is well documented: a vector‑driven tank simulation that pushed Atari’s hardware and design philosophy into new territory. Rotberg was able to make a first‑person tank simulation at a time when the hardware barely wanted to cooperate.
Rotberg pushed Atari’s vector technology harder than anyone had before, adapting lessons from earlier games like Lunar Lander and Asteroids but steering them into entirely new territory. He fought for a unique control scheme that felt weighty and deliberate, insisted on a visual style that conveyed depth and motion through nothing but glowing vectors, and worked closely with the industrial design team to ensure the periscope‑style viewfinder wasn’t just a gimmick but an integral part of the experience.
The result was a game that felt impossibly immersive for 1980 — a technical gamble that only came together because Rotberg was willing to challenge both the hardware and the expectations of what an arcade machine could be.
A great shot of the Atari Battlezone production line. Stacked in the foreground there are the periscope viewfinder moulds found on the front of the cabinet..
The cabinet itself, was its own engineering challenge. The distinctive periscope viewfinder wasn’t just a stylistic addition — it was a deliberate attempt to immerse the player in a way raster games of the era simply couldn’t match.
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