Fireball

One of four launch titles released alongside the add-on, and the only of the four to use the Atari's paddle controllers. It used the extra memory in the Supercharger to replace Breakouts rectangular "bat" with an animated juggler across five distinct play modes. Fireball received generally positive reviews but was overshadowed by more complex Starpath titles.

• Title — Fireball • Developer — Arcadia/Starpath • Publisher — Arcadia/Starpath • Designer — Scott Nelson • Platforms — Atari 2600 • Released — August 1982 • Genre — Action • Modes — Single-player, multiplayer • Illustration — Fireball on the Atari 2600

Fireball is similar to Breakout in that the player uses a ball (a fireball, hence the name) to break up walls made of bricks by hitting the bricks with the ball, with the shape of the walls changing as the player progresses. Gameplay differs from Breakout, however, in that rather than just being a bat, the player controls an animated juggler who can catch up to two balls (one in each hand) and throw them upward. It also differs from the traditional Breakout format in that six fireballs may be kept in the air at any one time, and the bricks to be destroyed in each level are arranged in varying shapes and patterns. As with Breakout and Circus Atari, Fireball is controlled with a rotary paddle controller. Switches on the Atari console adjust the difficulty by changing the collision detection around the fireballs. Additional balls can be freed from within blocks, or released onto the screen when the player presses the action button. Scoring is increased by increasing the number of balls in play. If any of the fireballs fall to the bottom of the screen, the juggler is pulled off stage by a vaudeville hook. Five different modes of play are provided, including "Firetrap", "Knock-a-block", "Marching Blocks", "Migrating Blocks", and "Cascade", and as many as six balls may be on-screen at any given time. The game modes can be played single-player, or multiplayer where each person takes turns. Up to four players can compete for a high score. Playing the game required both the Starpath Supercharger and a tape recorder to load it into the Supercharger's memory.

Fireball was one of the four 1982 launch titles for the Starpath Supercharger. Starpath, originally named Arcadia, was founded by former Atari Director of Research Bob Brown and former Atari engineer Craig Nelson. The 1977 Atari VCS game console was limited compared to the consoles and lower-end home computers that were released up to 1982, but it remained the market leader. The Supercharger plugged into the Atari VCS cartridge slot and loaded games from inexpensive cassette tapes (similar to early home computers) into its over 6,000 bytes of random access memory (RAM), a significant jump from the console's internal 128 bytes. Because each Atari game "paints" its graphics onto the screen in sync with the electron beam of a tube television, the low system RAM caused many Atari games to draw graphical elements at half the machine's vertical resolution. Starpath's titles like Fireball were written to use the full resolution of the console. Fireball was coded by Craig Nelson's brother Scott. His follow-up title for Starpath's Supercharger, Sweat, was canceled after the North American video game crash of 1983. Epyx bought out Starpath, and Scott Nelson reworked his second game into Summer Games. All of Starpath's games were coded by individual designers on Apple II home computers. According to fellow Starpath developer Dennis Caswell, they tested games using a "rather crude (but still useful) debugging hardware" as well as downloading games straight from the computers to a Supercharger via audio cable.

• Illustration — Starpath's Supercharger with cable Starpath released their add-on along with several launch titles in fall 1982. Fireball and the other games were released on cassettes that year and into 1983. It was sold on cassette tapes costing roughly 40% the cost of Atari's own contemporary releases. Starpath used the extra space on the cassettes to include non-playable demos of their other games. Starpath collapsed in late 1983 and was acquired by Epyx. Fireball was re-released twice on audio CD-ROM as part of the Stella Gets a New Brain collection. The first release in the late 1990s included all of the Starpath titles. The second release also included all Starpath titles, but also added playable prototypes including the never released Polo developed by Carol Shaw.