Venetian blinds? Has any played this

[jmjustin6]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/311752844411

 

Ok so i was doing my daily ebay searching when this popped up. I have never heard of this game before. Even though this is just a box is it worth having in the collection?

 

Does anyone know the background on this game or is this just a homebrew?

Has anyone played this game? I looked up gameplay and you literally just move blinds up and down

[dauber]

It's an Activision prototype. I think it was supposed to just be a demo of some kind of graphical feature. More info:

 

http://atariage.com/software_page.php?SoftwareLabelID=2701

[RickR]

If you have the "Activision Anthology" for any system, you can give this a try.  It's basically a graphics demo.

[fergojisan]

I think it was kind of a joke involved in a lawsuit. I forget who came up with Venetian blinds, maybe Bob Whitehead? It was used in many Atari games (Chess is the one that comes to mind first, perhaps the score in Space Invaders). When the 4 Activision guys left Atari, they were advised not to take anything with them, but the Venetian blinds technique ended up in some of their games (legs in Stampede is what I remember). This may have been after the lawsuit though, I don't think there were any examples before that. It's very subtle in Stampede. When Atari sued Activision, apparently this was going to be brought up, and David Crane made the Venetian blinds Activision demo as a joke because they hadn't actually stolen any trade secrets from Atari.