Raiders of the Lost Ark (video game)

Raiders of the Lost Ark is a very loose adaptation of the movie for the Atari 2600, written by Howard Scott Warshaw and released by Atari in 1982. Despite all the changes, it's a good, if at times confusing, Action Adventure game.


 * Three Quarters View: Like The Legend of Zelda, a mix of Top Down View, Side View, and front view.
 * Action Adventure
 * Action Bar: With your items.
 * Anti-Frustration Features: Warp points in the temple.
 * Back Tracking
 * Commonplace Rare: The most expensive item, only available in the hard-to-reach Black Market, is... a shovel.
 * Damn You, Muscle Memory!: The game uses both joysticks. One fire button uses an item, and the other drops it. A dropped item either disappears or returns to where you first found it. Confusing the two buttons therefore has disastrous consequences, and happens a lot until you get used to it.
 * Death Is a Slap on The Wrist: Nothing happens.
 * Easter Egg: There is a Yars Revenge hidden in the mesa field. Also, if you get a high enough score, you see "HSW2", meaning Howard Scott Warshaw's second game.
 * An Economy Is You: The marketplaces.
 * Event Flag: When you touch a basket in the marketplace, snakes start slithering down from the top of the screen. Also, in the temple, taking the money makes an item appear.
 * Expy: The inventory and puzzles in this game are kind of an expy of the inventory and puzzles in the Swordquest series.
 * Flip Screen Scrolling
 * Game Over: The start/ending screen, but without the Ark.
 * The Golden Age of Video Games
 * Graphics Induced Super Deformed: Played straight with the merchants in the marketplace; they're just heads. Indy is an inversion; he has a hat and a body, but no head.
 * Guide Dang It: Without the manual, you're screwed.
 * Even with it, you had to jump on a logic train, god help you if you hadn't seen the movie. The headpiece is mentioned NOWHERE in the manual!
 * Instant 180-Degree Turn
 * Inventory Management Puzzle: You can carry up to six items, but you'll need more than that to win.
 * Invisible Monsters: The ground in the marketplace has a bar of a darker color running down the middle of the screen, where the two merchants are. If you touch any of the three baskets, snakes the same color as that bar start coming down from the top of the screen. You can't see them when they are over the bar. This can produce the effect of Indy dying for no apparent reason while trying to buy something.
 * MacGuffin: The Ark.
 * Mook Maker: An endless stream of snakes come down from the top of the first screen.
 * Not the Fall That Kills You: The mesa field and Valley of Poison below.
 * One Bullet At a Time
 * One-Hit-Point Wonder
 * Painfully-Slow Projectile: The pistol.
 * Palette Swap: The merchants in the marketplaces.
 * Press X to Die: The map room is trickier than it looks. The path you walk down is a narrow ledge, with a fall into the Valley of Poison on either side. The key reveals a part of the room where you can walk to the right, and with the headpiece of the Staff of Ra, reveal the Ark's location. However: You can only walk over there with the key. Equipping the headpiece means you are stuck in place; the slightest move will send you plummeting into the valley. You have to re-equip the key to walk back to the path.
 * Puzzle Reset: The temple.
 * Randomly Generated Levels: The Ark is placed randomly in the mesa field.
 * Score Screen: The ending screen.
 * Start Screen
 * Unwinnable: If you're on your last life, accidentally dropping an item can spell your doom, especially in the mesa field.
 * Video Game Lives: Three.
 * Warp Whistle: One of the objects in the Temple.
 * A Winner Is You: The ending screen is the same as the Start Screen, except that the pedestal doesn't lower you all the way to the bottom, but to a distance determined by your score.