Whats the connection between “Jawbreaker” for the 2600 and “Jawbreaker II” for the Atari 800?
“Jawbreaker II” came later, written by someone else. The programmer had never seen the 2600 version of “Jawbreaker,” and so Ken Williams drew a quick sketch to show him what to do, but didn’t explain it very well. This rough sketch had only five horizontal pathways on it, and so that is all that were programmed into the game. The happy faces were then made really big, so that they fit into the large pathways! The open passageways at the edges of each line weren’t drawn in Ken’s sketch, and so they didn’t get included in the game. I considered a blunder like this to be quite funny, but it was also sad because the gameplay did not come out anywhere near what the 2600 version was like. Were there any games you started work on, but never finished? Sadly, there were many of these. Before “Jawbreaker,” I had done versions of the “Starhawk” and “Head-on” arcade games, plus a kind of starbase assault game that was finished, but was lost on a damaged cassette tape before it could be given to th
