Fatal Run for Atari 7800 (1990)

From my personal collection. Fatal Run for Atari 7800 (1990)

Fatal Run is one of my favorite games for the Atari 7800 and also one of its biggest disappointments. Fatal Run should’ve been RoadBlasters. RoadBlasters is a legendary Atari arcade game and done properly would’ve been an incredible addition to the 7800 library.

Atari Games had some amazing arcade games that should’ve made it into our living rooms as 7800 exclusives. RoadBlasters, Tetris, Paperboy, Marble Madness, Pit-Fighter, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom just to name a few. Why wasn’t the 7800 relaunched with Paperboy as the pack-in game and two D-Pad Controllers? Hello?

The 7800 was my first and favorite video game system and became an underdog that I always rooted for. It was developed to be the cutting-edge game system of 1984 designed to bring the arcade experience home. It wound up being the undersupported, underdeveloped NES competitor of 1990. The 7800 would’ve benefitted nicely from an OutRun style driving game, done right with nice graphics and sound. RoadBlasters took OutRun a step further adding “Mad Max” road warfare with missiles, road mines and fuel globes.

Fatal Run is a cool road warfare game but lacks the polished perfection of RoadBlasters. Still, Fatal Run has cool elements like a shop to build up your car, and the best title screen of any game on the system.

When it was new, Fatal Run retailed at twice the cost of regular 7800 games and today is considered one of the more collectible games for the system. It’s worth playing if you can pick one up, but RoadBlasters on Atari Lynx is better.