Warlords is the arcade game Atari released in 1980, a mix of Breakout and its own earlier Quadrapong: up to four players each defend a castle in a corner of the screen, moving a shield to deflect one or more fireballs toward rival castles, until they're destroyed completely. The upright cabinet version supported up to two players with a black-and-white screen reflected over a painted castle background; the cocktail-table version, on the other hand, allowed all four players simultaneously in color.
Its formula of mutual destruction among several players at once, simple but tremendously social, made it one of Atari's great party classics, with echoes still felt today in much more modern shared-screen "battle royale" games.
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