Fantastic Voyage

Programmed by David Lubar, it was his second game he made for the Atari 2600 during his tenure at Sirius Software following Worm War I (1982). On its release, reviews in The Video Game Update and Videogaming Illustrated found the gameplay and graphics mediocre, while other reviews in Videogaming Illustrated and Video Games said the game did offer some unique elements and themes to the shoot'em up genre.

• Title — Fantastic Voyage • Developer — Sirius Software Taito (arcade) • Publisher — Fox Video Games Taito (arcade) • Platforms — Atari 2600, Atari 8-bit computers, arcade • Released — Atari 2600December 1982ArcadeApril 1983 • Genre — Scrolling shooter • Modes — Single-player, multiplayer (arcade) • Programmer — David Lubar

• Illustration — Fantastic Voyage on the Atari 2600 Fantastic Voyage is a vertically scrolling shoot'em up game. In the game, the player pilots a miniturized submarine equipped with a laser ray through the bloodstream of a patient with a life-threatening blood clot. The game is played under a time limit displayed on the lower left portion of the screen. Also displayed at the bottom is the patient's heart monitor, indicating the strength of the patient's heartbeat. A number showing the number of patients saved is also displayed. As the player navigates the bloodstream, they must shoot or dodge various objects that cause different gameplay effects. These include enzymes, which, when shot, release healing properties and antibodies, which are released when your craft touches the artery wall and can be destroyed as they sap the patient's strength. Other objects should not be shot, such as blood cells and clotlets, which are indestructible. In the final phase, the player must fire fifteen shots into the blood clot before crashing into it, which is fatal to the patient.

Fantasic Voyage was programmed by David Lubar. After finishing college, Lubar tried a career in writing and got a story accepted at Creative Computing magazine in the late 1970s. On picking up the magazine, he became immersed in computer programming and bought an Apple II in 1978 and began learning assembly language. By 1980, he became an associate editor at Creative Computing. While working for the publication, Lubar continued to program and met with Mark Pelczarski at Penguin Software and contributed code for their program The Complete Graphics System. This led Pelczarski to recommend him to Sirius Software when they asked for programmers to work on Atari 2600 games. Lubar accepted their offer. Sirius at the time had a joint venture with Fox Video Games, a subsidiary of 20th Century Fox which started in April 1982. Their contract included Sirius to develop 12 video games for Fox for the Atari 2600. Part of Fox Video Games' initial plan for game development was to adopt titles from their film catalogue. Fox Video Games president Frank O'Connell explained that brand awareness was key for the company, saying that developing a game yourself that nobody knew anything about had a distributor starting at zero, but having a known television and film properties allowed the company to know their product's audience. Lubar developed his first game for Fox titled Worm War I (1982), which was followed by Fantastic Voyage. Fantastic Voyage is based on the film Fantastic Voyage (1966). Lubar said that with the deal with Fox Video Games, they could develop any of their films to adapt into a game. Lubar said that "being a science fiction nerd, Fantastic Voyage was a no-brainer." Lubar said that 20th Century Fox would sometimes let them watch their films before they came out to see if they wanted to make a game for them. Lubar recalled watching The Entity (1982) and said he passed on adapting it.

Following Fantastic Voyage, Lubar released another film tie-in with Flash Gordon (1983) and original games with SpaceMaster X-7 (1983). Fox Video Games closed the year after Fantastic Voyage was released due to events surrounding the video game crash of 1983. David Lubar summarized the end of Sirius in an interview published in 2015, saying "I'm sorry they went out of business, but it just seemed inevitable, given the way they handled the finances." The United Kingdom-based publisher Quicksilva would obtain the rights for the game adaptations of the Fantastic Voyage film, and renamed their previously released title Blood 'N' Guts as Fantastic Voyage for the ZX Spectrum in the 1980s. Following the closure of Fox Video Games, Lubar went to work for Activision and later for Absolute Entertainment. He first left the video game industry following this, explaining that "they brought in managers and everything went to hell. People that have never played a game, never designed a game, never even managed a project... that struck my "I don't play nice with others' bone." He returned to writing full-time in 1995 and published 50 books by 2022. He returned to programming briefly towards the end of the decade to make a port of Frogger for the Game Boy and produce Frogger 2 for the Game Boy Color.