Developer: Funvision (probably)
Publisher: Zellers
Release Date: 1983?
You know when I was in Canada a decade ago I had to go to a Zellers. They’re fairly legendary in Atari circles for releasing pirated games with weird cover art. Of course they quit selling them in the early 80s, but I still had to see one of the stores for myself, and I did see some Zellers carts at a local used game store. I also went to Niagra Falls, but who wants to hear about that when I also went to a local department store? For the most part Zellers games are re-releases of more common games with mostly different titles. Keystone Kapers was renamed Busy Police for example. So why am I talking about a group of pirated re-releases on here? Well, there are a few games that weren’t sourced from already released U.S. games. Two of them, Challenge and Time Warp, never received any other NTSC release while a couple others were released elsewhere, but either arrived in the US much later or appear on much rarer carts. Inca Gold is one from the last group. It’s one of the four original games made by Funvision which was an infamous Taiwanese game pirating company. It’s probably where Zellers, and a whole bunch of other obscure companies, sourced their games from. They were certainly prolific, and Inca Gold was released by numerous publishers under many different names. I have no idea what the game was originally supposed to be called, but you’ll also find it under names like Pac-Kong and Spider Kong. You can probably tell by these names that it is a Donkey Kong Clone. It also appeared under the name Spider Maze by the equally dubious Canadian company K-Tel Vision. So this is a game that has gotten around. If you are trying to get a complete NTSC set of unique carts than Inca Gold is the better choice even though it’s still quite expensive. So while not cared about by 99.9% of the world, this game is important for that certain type of collector. Of course it’s one of those games where tracking it down and adding it to you collection is the fun part. I doubt very many people actually want to play it. At least it’s an interesting story.
When I first powered up Inca Gold I thought it was broken, or perhaps a PAL game mistakenly mis-labeled as NTSC. All those blinking objects on the screen couldn’t be right. However, that’s just what the game is supposed to look like. In still photos all seems normal. It looks like your run of the mill Donkey Kong rip-off. There were a ton of those by 1983, and some of them are very good. The main character looks like Mario but more generic while the monster at the top is easily recognized as a Donkey Kong stand-in despite being a giant spider. The gameplay involves jumping and climbing ladders just like the real game. If made well this could be a decent game. Too bad Inca Gold was so poorly put together. I’ve already mentioned the blinking rocks, but it’s the game’s most distinctive feature, and also the most annoying. The blinking rocks are almost nauseating. Atari Pac-Man gets critizism for having flickering ghosts, but in that game they follow predictable paths and cycle through fast enough that it doesn’t distract from the gameplay. In Inca Gold the objects are so large, bright, and spaced out that it’s hard to even tell what’s going on. It looks like a 3D Sega Master System game without the glasses. That’s how disorientating it is. You don’t play Inca Gold for points. You play it to see how long you can go without getting a headache. They also move around seemingly at random and take up so much space that you can usually tell if a level is going to be winnable in the first few seconds. Sometimes they leave big gaps to jump through and sometimes they come right for you. This would still be bad if they were solid. The flickering just emphasizes the low quality.
The problems don’t end there either. For one thing movement is slow and gameplay is tedious. With only three random objects in the sky and one that moves back and forth on the top row there is nothing to do besides climb ladders and jump. It shows off just how brilliant Donkey Kong is. In Donkey Kong the action never lets up. The first level has the famous barrels which constantly come at you following different paths. Because they can come down any ladder and don’t all follow the same path it requires fast reflexes and constant attention. On top of that there is a fireball slowly working its way up to you so you have to hurry. In Inca Gold there is very little action. You’re either going to get hit by a rock or you’re not. Sometimes you have to time your jumps a little, but for the most part the action stays away from you. The jumping is also bad which is unfortunate since there is so much of it. You have to jump right at the edge of a platform to make it safely to the next one, and this can be tricky even after playing for a while. At least you get consolation points if you fall down and die on the higher levels. Scoring brings up another sign of the carelessness that went into Inca Gold. Even though points are only scored on reaching the top or dying they still accumulate fairly quickly. In spite of this the score only has three digits. It only takes a few rounds to roll the score over which is just odd. I know it’s not difficult to keep up with thousands on your own, but it’s just not as satisfying if the score shows 47 instead of 2047. You can’t take a picture of the first score and show it to your friends. I doubt Inca Gold comes up too often in high score challenges, but the three-digit scoring would ruin the experience anyway. Of course playing Inca Gold is hardly an experience worth ruining in the fist place.
This is definitely one of those “worse than ET” games. That seems to always be the metric that bad Atari 2600 games are measured by. Of course Inca Gold had no cultural impact whatsoever, so we’re still waiting for a worse Atari 2600 game that actually mattered. There may be some 60-year-old Canadians out there who played it back in the day, but as far as NTSC games go this one is low down on the list of well-remembered Atari games. On the Atari list it is next-to-last at #15. On the overall list it is all the way down at #119 which is just a little above the complete train wreck section. It’s too minor of a game to be quite that bad so at least it’s saved from the bottom ten. That’s some kind of silver lining, I guess.
Atari 2600 Quality Percentage: 9/16 or 56.25%
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