Frostbite

It was the last game he made for the Atari 2600. While critics often compared the game to Frogger and Q*bert, Cartwright said he based it only on Frogger and had not played Q*bert before completing the game. Upon its release, some critics complimented the game's arcade-like action as being a novel twist on Frogger and Q*bert, while others lamented that the game seemed out-of-date with its simple gameplay and was not as visually appealing as other Activision titles. Retro Gamer included the game in their list of the top 25 games for the Atari 2600 in 2008.

• Title — Frostbite • Developer — Activision • Publisher — Activision • Designer — Steve Cartwright • Released — October 1983 • Genre — Action • Modes — Single-player, multiplayer • Platforms — Atari 2600

• Illustration — Frostbite Bailey floating on ice. The gray bar is the base of a new igloo. The goal of Frosbite is to help Frostbite Bailey build igloos by controlling him while jumping across ice floes to collect ice and avoiding falling into the sea. The player must also keep Frostbite clear of hazardous killer clams, snow geese, king crabs, and polar bears. Ice is collected by leaping onto an ice floe that is white, causing it to turn blue, no longer bare ice for Frostbite Bailey to collect. Fish regularly swim by the ice floes and can be collected for 200 bonus points. Each round has a temperature scale acting as an in-game timer. If the timer runs out, the player loses a life. After an igloo is built and entered, the remaining temperature and the number of rounds that have passed give the player bonus points. The player begins with an active playable character and has three lives in reserve. The player can earn extra lives for every 5,000 points. Setting the difficulty switches on the Atari put the game in either Regular mode or Advanced mode. Regular mode starts at level one, while advanced mode starts at level five. The other setting adjusts if the game is a single-player or two-player game. The two-player game has players alternating turns.

Steve Cartwright developed Frostbite for Activision. The game's working title was Iceman. Cartwright joined the company in 1982 and in that year released two games for the system: Barnstorming and Megamania. In 1983, he released three games including Plaque Attack, Seaquest and Frostbite. Darran Jones in Retro Gamer wrote that many people believed the game was based on Q*bert (1982), while Cartwright said he recalled the game being influenced by Frogger (1981) and that he had not played Q*bert until after Frostbite was completed. The game's arctic theme was influenced by the limitations of the Atari 2600 system. Cartwright's initial idea involved jumping over rocks in a lava-filled area, which was abandoned as Cartwright believed that blue and white colors worked better on the system. Cartwright noted difficulty with bringing his ideas to life on the system as well, noting that Frostbite had difficulty with its memory issues and screen timing, which he described as "something that is extremely easy with higher programming languages, but presented real problems when writing code in 6502." One specific issue Cartwright encountered was preventing players from going back and forth between two ice floes by making it so you were unable to continue to add blocks to the igloo until all the ice floes were the same color. Cartwright recalled that Frostbite was one of the games they had to test the most before releasing, noting that "The speed of the game increased to the point where objects moved and wrapped around the screen so fast that they appeared at times to be moving backwards - kind of like those old Westerns where the wagon wheels appears to be turning slowly in the opposite direction."