CIRCUS CONVOY

Developer/publisher Audacity Games Format Atari 2600 Release 2021

All of us involved in Audacity Games, Garry and Dan Kitchen and myself, want to support the retrogaming players. We go to the retro shows, give talks, and at every show people would come up to us and say, “I’d kill to have a new game made by you. We’d love it!” Every time we said, “Yeah, that could be fun.” Finally we decided we’d do it, but we’d do it right.

We started three years ago in our spare time, creating a company, creating the hardware technology – I mean, we had to make a new cartridge because no one has an injection-moulding tool for that any more. We had to make a new ROM board. And then there were the software tools. You can’t use Photoshop to create sprites for the 2600! We spent years getting all this ready and we didn’t tell a soul.

We knew if Circus Convoy was to be our ‘comeback game’, it had to be really good. We worked on it for a long time and put a lot of effort into making it fun. I was primarily doing the programming and Garry the pixel art. It really came together. I’m probably a better coder now than I was back then and I think the giraffe sprite Garry created is the most attractive sprite ever made for the 2600.

The game could absolutely be made in 1983. The ROM is larger than the ones we used to use back then but that’s because it’s the smallest one we could buy these days. We had the space, so we filled it, and it would have been an expensive cartridge to produce back in the ’80s, but it would absolutely be possible – there’s no hardware acceleration or anything like that. We wanted to make a game that could be compared to any game ever made for the 2600. We set out to make the top five [Atari 2600] games, and we have had a lot of people telling us Circus Convoy is number one already.