Credited to Arena Graphics and published by U.S. Gold in 1984, Dropzone was Archer Maclean's first commercial work, the product of years spent honing his craft on the Atari 800 in assembly language since 1981. The result: silky horizontal scrolling at a rock-steady frame rate and a sense of speed that the press of the day rewarded with sky-high scores, including a 93% from Computer and Video Games.
The recipe looks straight at Defender: a jetpack, scientists to rescue, and relentless alien waves. But here everything runs faster, tighter, pushed further to the edge. Forty years later, it's still the yardstick against which action on 8-bit Atari machines gets measured.
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