Developer: Telesys
Publisher: Telesys
Release Date: October 1982
Telesys was one of the many publishers that showed up during Atari's boom years and then completely disappeared. The Atari 2600 existed for almost 15 years and had a very large library of games, but the majority of them came out between 1981 and 1983. In these years third party publishers were sprouting up everywhere and trying to find a gimmick. Telesys decided they were going to make funny games, and you can tell the games were going to be funny just by the names. See, it looks like the game is called coconuts like the tropical fruit, but there's an extra capital letter so it's actually called CocoNuts. Well, that implies this game is actually about mentally unstable people and not tropical fruit. Now that's funny! And just as a bonus it is also about coconuts. Coconuts are by far the funniest drupes. How could a game with such a wacky name not be a total romp?
Well, the reason for that is because CocoNuts is an Atari 2600 game, and there's just not the processing power for games to be that funny. Oh, people tried, but about the best anyone could do was to make a typical generic blob actually look like something. When Megamania came out it won an award for being the funniest game of the year simply by having the player shoot at telephones and burgers instead of ships. That's about as funny as Atari games could get. Megamania is still a good game though because the developers remembered the gameplay. Fast Eddie was also fun even though its attempts at humor fell a bit flat. Telesys didn't have the talent of Activision or Sirius though, and so CocoNuts ends up being memorable but not particularly playable.
I will admit that it does look funny at firsts. You play as a man wearing both a pith helmet and an umbrella, and the trees look quite nice. The whole object of the game is to avoid coconuts being dropped by a monkey in the trees. If you get hit once you lose your umbrella, if you get hit twice you lose your helmet, and if you get hit a third time it's all over. Atari 2600 has several "avoid the falling objects" games with Kaboom! being most famous. Most of them were twitchy, high-speed paddle games. CocoNuts uses the regular controller and moves much slower. It doesn't even use the button for anything, so the whole game is just moving back and forth. It's easy to tell where the coconuts are going to fall from because they will drop below the monkey, but I still found it challenging.
The very obvious problem with CocoNuts is that it is extremely repetitive, even by Atari standards. The coconuts get faster, and earning points will eventually earn extra lives, but there's never anything else on the screen. For CocoNuts to work it needed to be exciting to make up for the simplicity. In this regard it fails. Dodging coconuts gets old pretty quick. It might look fun and silly when you first turn it on, but it never changes. Even just having the monkey drop bonus points or objects with different speeds would've been a big improvement.
Still, I will admit that I had fun with CocoNuts for a few minutes, so it wasn't a complete loss. I've been reviewing some bad games lately, so it's refreshing having one that goes into the purple okay section. It feels like that hasn't happened in a while. I've ranked some odd Atari games, so it's not even that low on the Atari specific list. Right now, it falls in at #116 on the overall list and 13 out of 20 on the Atari list. If you're a classic game collector you'll probably buy this one for a few dollars because it looks silly, play it for a few minutes, and then put it on the shelf forever. That's the fate that befalls so many Atari games, but there are worse fates for 40-year-old video games. At least it looks good on the shelf.
Atari Quality Percentage 9/20 or 45%
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