| COMMERCIAL VAULT |
| by Adam King |
Greetings, gamers. This month I have a special triple feature from the Vault
featuring games from Imagic, the other top third-party company, and the subject
of Alan's "Many Faces Of" spot. Here are the ads for Atlantis, Cosmic Ark, and
Demon Attack. Plus two of these games were made for both the Atari 2600 and
Intellivision, so they're both represented here.
The Atlantis and Demon Attack ads can be found at The Old Computer Dot Com
(www.theoldcomputer.com). The
Cosmic Ark ad can be found at X-Entertainment (www.x-entertainment.com).
For our first ad, we take a look inside the Imagic Design Lan and find an Imagic executive talking with the creator of Atlantis, an alien who was there. As he demonstrates the game, he lays out what happened. After all, he was a survivor, or was he?
EXEC: "So You created Atlantis for Imagic."
ALIEN: "I was at Atlantis. The skies above the underwater city filled with Gorgon attack vessels. Three sentry posts fought desperately, but they were no match, for the Gorgon death rays."
EXEC: "But you're here. I though the Gorgons destroyed everyone at Atlantis."
(Suddenly a death ray appears and vaporizes the executive)
ALIEN: "WE DID! HA! HA! HA!"
Then comes the blurb: "Atlantis by Imagic for Atari and Intellivision systems."
Didn't your ma tell you not to talk to strangers?
"Watch how I-uh, try to save Atlantis."
"Don't look now, but there's a death ray creeping up behind you."
"So long, sucker!"
These cartridges are smokin', in more ways than one.
The lesson here is be careful which aliens you talk to, they may be hiding death
rays.
Cosmic Ark
This ad for Cosmic Ark, the "sequel" to Atlantis. Here we find
two kids who are playing the game and really getting
into it, until their mother brings them down the
Earth.
BOY 1: "TV."
BOY 2: "Check"
BOY 1"Cosmic Ark cartridge."
BOY 2: "Check"
BOY 1: "Power"
BOY 2: "Yeah, power."
ANNOUNCER: "Cosmic Ark is a cartridge for the Atari
Video system."
BOY 2: "Meteors!"
BOY 1: "I got 'em"
ANNOUNCER: "The Cosmic Ark searches out strange creatures on distant planets."
BOY 2: "Beam them up."
"But the deeper the ark travels in space, the tougher it gets."
BOY 2: "We may never get back to Earth!"
MOTHER (offscreen)" "Boys, clean your room"
BOY 1(dejectedly): "We're back"
ANNOUNCER: "Cosmic Ark, by Imagic."
These two are on a mission.
This boy is determined to rustle up some aliens.
Met at work.
Reality can be a harsh mistress.
Enjoy the game, but clean your room first.
Demon Attack
Our last ad takes us to an Imagic
boardroom, where another executive is meeting with several characters, each
representing a different title (a fireman representing
Fire Fighter, a knight representing Dragonfire, and so on). He wants to know
which is the toughest game, and a demon answers with Demon Attack.
A meeting of the Imagic minds.
The demon hammers his point home.
"Dude, one word: mouthwash!"
I know I can say something about this scene.
Don't forget, it's TOUGH!
I'm still wondering about the three handed exec.
Time to sign off now, but I want to run something by all you readers. I'm
considering putting together a compilation CD of all the ads I spotlighted in
past issues, plus many more I haven't gotten to yet. What do you guys think?