Developer: Telesys
Publisher: Telesys
Release Date: 1982
(At least it has A+ box art)
Oddly this is the second Atari 2600 game I've written about so far that has the word Cosmic in the title and is about futuristic mass transit. That's not something I would have expected. It's not like the word cosmic automatically implies futuristic space busses. Hopefully the other cosmic Atari games explore some different themes. I think I still have about a half dozen to play. Initially I wrote about Cosmic Commuter, which is a game that I played even before I had my own Atari 2600 and therefore has some nostalgia attached to it. For that reason, Cosmic Creeps will always feel like the copycat. That may be a little bit unfair considering Cosmic Creeps is older, but it's hard to top Activision. Actually, Cosmic Creeps is hard to date exactly, and this is one of the things that makes writing about Atari difficult. Nobody was paying that much attention at the time, and so many game companies were gone without a trace before reviews could even appear. I've looked at several sources and they all seem to give different dates for the release of the Telesys games. They might've been released in one big chunk at the end of 1982, or they could've trickled out into 1983. Cosmic Creeps is probably the third game they released, but the serial number implies that it was the second they started working on. I can say that the first three (CocoNuts, Fast Food, and Cosmic Creeps) are very common while the last three (Ram It, Stargunner, and Demolition Herby) are all fairly rare. I'm guessing their first three games didn't sell as well as they expected so they had to cut back on production for the last three. Games like Cosmic Creeps probably didn't give consumers much hope, either. The credits also imply that Cosmic Creeps wasn't thought of very highly. Don Ruffcorn is credited with designing three Telesys games. The other two games have his full name in the manual. In Cosmic Creeps he is cryptically credited as Donyo. I have a feeling this was an Alan Smithee situation, and he was trying to distance himself from the game. There's no way to know for sure, but after playing Cosmic Creeps I can see why it could be true.
(Putting their name at the bottom of the screen is a good early example of "not the flex you think it is")
Cosmic Creeps is one of those boring Atari games that also doesn't make much sense. If you were to get this game in the wild and try to play it, you would probably die over and over again without accomplishing anything. Of course, you won't feel that accomplished after you have figured out how to play it either, but I'm not going to worry about that too much. I think the developers made it strange to hide the fact that it's very boring to actually play. I call this the Donyo Effect. The game consists of two screens. On the first you have to race from the bottom of the screen to the top while avoiding ambiguous space stuff. Third party games got really random with their graphics sometimes. This part can be tricky because you, the player, are in control. You control when the character pops onto the screen. Be careful because if you push up on the controller you will touch a red barrier and float away forever. It took me a while to figure out that the moving planet on the bottom of the screen determines where the character would pop up. It can still be tricky because sometimes there are tiny bits of red that are easy to miss, and there are also what appear to be comets flying by. However, complete your arduous trek to the spaceship at the top of the screen and you are rewarded with a very appropriate prize: nothing whatsoever. That's right, you earn no points for completing the first half of the game. That is pure laziness during an era where high scores were everything. Would it have been so hard to include a timed bonus or even a preset number of points? Even just an arbitrary 100 points would've been somewhat satisfying. This screen is confusing, overly difficult, and pointless both figuratively and literally.
(Maybe it's called Cosmic Creeps because of the way the aliens slowly creep up the screen)
The second section of the game is where the action is because it actually lets you shoot at something and earn points. It now plays like a stripped-down Space Invaders with a couple of aliens chasing after a child moving up the screen. If the child makes it to the ship without being captured by the alien or taken out by friendly fire, then you get 1500 points. Don't worry though. If you accidentally shoot one of the space children, they are merely "bopped". I'm not sure what that means, but at least the people who wrote the manual cared enough to make sure their video game didn't have you unintentionally murdering children. This part could be fun if there was a bit more to it. The aliens don't do anything except move up the screen, and they are large targets. I had to make myself not shoot at them to see what would happen if they made it to the top. My game was over, but it never happened organically. I just stayed in one spot and shot aliens until time ran out. I must've done something wrong though because the manual says the game continues if you get 5000 points before the sun sets, but I achieved that almost every time I played, and it was still game over. I tried to find a YouTube playthrough but of course they all last about three minutes and don't help much. I know it must be true because the Twin Galaxies high score is over 180,000 points. I don't know if I'm doing something wrong, but I could never get a game to last longer than that single round. I didn't really mind my game ending though, because I couldn't really see it getting much more fun. The manual states that there are never more enemies on the screen, so all they could do is get faster. That's not much of an extra challenge.
So Cosmic Creeps is a dud. The premise isn't terrible, but they took the easiest path in both sections. The first section is completely pointless, and the second is boring. It quickly becomes a game of staying in one spot and shooting a lifeless alien. Space Invaders was already five years old by the time Cosmic Creeps came out, and even the Atari version had a whole screen full of ships that actually shot at the player. Instead of adding to the Space Invaders formula, Cosmic Creeps subtracts almost everything. It's a dull game. In fact, it is so dull that it is going to make apologists happy. It's going into the subset of Atari games that are worse than E.T. It's the third one so far, but it is the first I have ranked that was widely released in the United States. Inca Gold and Birthday Mania are much worse, but I highly doubt anyone in the U.S. had played them in the pre-emulation days. So, fear not E.T. fans. You can at least tell younger generations that Cosmic Creeps was a real game that was worse. For those keeping score at home, it is 152/171 on the overall list and 20/22 on the Atari 2600 specific list. Maybe Telesys should just stick with arcade clones and space shooters. Those are usually successful.
Atari 2600 quality percentage: 9/22 or 40.9%
